If you are just thinking about escaping the 9 to 5, you have probably seen lots of discussion about picking your niche.  While there are whole treatises written on the subject I would suggest a couple simple concepts

Build it and they might not come

If you have ever wondered why your local McDonalds or Burger King is where it is, it is because someone did a fair amount of research based on an approved formula.  If an area doesn’t have the right demographics and traffic pattern, you aren’t going to see your favorite fast food restaurant.  People often make the mistake on the internet of simply building a web site with the hope that visitors will simply show up and throw you money.  While there are a few examples of this strategy working, they tend to date from the early days of the WWW.  I actually did this in the early 90s with https://www.1cruise.com .  We had our first customer within 12 hours of going online and it grew steadily for the next several years.  Then the market changed and we changed our model.  We grew to be one of the top sellers of one particular product.  Unfortunately, thanks to the current economy, the main product we were selling completely disappeared at the end of 2008.  For now we are diversifying and keeping the customer list handy in case the economy allows our former specialty to resurface.

Most successful sites involve targeting a specific need.  Once you have found a niche you can use tools like Google’s Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .  This is similar to the traffic research that you might do in the real world if you were trying to find a place for a franchise restaurant.

What are you passionate about?

While finding a niche that people are interested in is clearly a priority, a more important question is are you interested in it?  Just because a million other people find it interesting doesn’t mean you will.  So is your niche something you could work on 10 hours a day, 6 days a week?  A web-based business does not necessarily imply an automatic money producer.  Any business you start is going to take a significant amount of time so make sure it is something you like to do.  If you can match your passion with something people are looking for, and you can make money, you have a winner.

It’s always interesting to see what things people are passionate about.  One unique business idea is  http://www.missedConnections.com .  This is the brainchild of Eliot Sykes and his wife.  Actually, someone else originally had an idea for the domain, so for 8 years it sat in under construction land.  It’s sort of ironic that a website about second chances, is itself the result of a second chance.  According to Eliot “it gives love at first sight a second chance”.  The idea is actually pretty simple.  How many times have you wished you talked to someone, or got a phone number and it didn’t happen?  This site gives people the chance to post those missed connections online and hope that the other person sees the post.  The site is still in the early stages, but with the growth of social networking I think it is well timed.  I think there is also a lot of potential for expansion with I-phone apps and integration with other social networking tools.

For now Eliot is still working his day job as a web developer and continuing to grow the site.  Like many of us, he hopes to some day be able to escape his 9 to 5 job and “be in full control of his day and get to work on projects he believes in!”