In the light of the continued discussion of the Dave’s Cool Little Website post, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about potentially bad business models. Dave’s Cool sites is one of the lessons, and another one is Louis Allport’s “99 Minutes To Internet Success” videos, later Reprint Rights Every Month.

1. Dave’s Cool Little Website

Dave’s Cool Little Websites were a hosted website service, that provided a templated combination eBay-Clickbank website. All you needed to do was pay the $97 bucks for a site, and register a domain name to point to their server. Once all this occurred, you had your own website and received 100 percent of the sales revenue. You could also make affiliate income promoting the Cool Little Websites. You should already see the pattern here – your only investment was the one time site purchase. There was no more revenue going to the Dave’s Cool team. If they had a month with no sales, they were eating the cost of hosting and maintaining the sites. After the “hot” factor dies down, sales die down, and so does the money. Bad news for the developer, and it became bad news for the site owners as all the Cool Little Websites were shut down, with no prior notification to the buyers.

2. Reprint Rights Every Month

Louis Allport is one of the internet pioneers in video based infoproducts. His “99 Minutes To Internet Success” video series was (and still is) an incredible series of products, and I think Louis was quite ahead of his time. His Reprint Rights Every Month site was a monthly membership site where you could purchase these with resell rights. I sold many copies of videos from Louis in my day. But there was a problem…

When you purchased the videos, you didn’t actually receive videos. They were EXE’s (and later PDF’s) that linked to the videos hosted by Louis. These packages came with resell rights; once you bought you could resell and keep 100 percent of the money. Louis’ licensing stated that you could NOT resell the videos unless you were a member of Reprint Rights Every Month, but unfortunately that was hard to enforce and his videos spread all over the ‘net like wildfire. The videos became devalued, eventually ending up as the infamous 99 cent eBay auctions. More and more people were getting these videos, and the only income Louis had was the first layer, the Reprint Rights Every Month subscribers. I would hate to see the hosting bills Louis had once the bandwidth vs. income chart went the other way.

So, take these business models into consideration should you plan to pursue any kind of ongoing service or info product. Such a business can prove to be quite lucrative, even the businesses above; but you will want to make sure that your business will continue to provide for you down the road, not just for the short term.