Being originally from the area I often think of it as the Internet – before the Internet.

Here’s why…

You can get anything you want in NYC, any kind of food or product, it really doesn’t matter there’s not much out there that you can’t find in NYC. It’s only a 12 square mile island so it’s accessibility to everything make it unlike anywhere in the world and that’s a lot like the Internet today.

If you want something you can get it, and there’s people buying it all the time but how do you get a location like the Apple Store on 5th Ave? hmmmm.

How about the first page of Google? – Believe it or not that is not even the hard part.

Think of it in these terms.

You couldn’t take a clothing vendor off 14th Street and sandwich them in between Louis Vuitton and Sax on Fifth, they would fail miserably and it wouldn’t necessarily be because they didn’t have the customer flow but because they didn’t have the proper margins and wouldn’t be able to afford the location.

Just like search engine placement (location), some keywords are just too expensive or require too much effort to fit into your margins.

A great Internet Business Model will have a system with clear cut conversion rates, and substantial margins, so you know exactly how much web traffic you need in order to get the desired return. More popularly known as “return on investment” (ROI).