How Your Website is like a Business

Your website is like a business in many ways, which can be an enjoyable extended metaphor if you’re into that kind of thing. One aspect of your website is more specifically like a bank. Banks set standards to determine to whom they will lend. They decide how easy or challenging their requirements are to meet, which defines the amount of risk that the banks take in lending, and thus the chance that they will end up lending to someone who ends up unable to pay. Similarly, you with your website set requirements for affiliation, hosting, etc. If your requirements are too easy to meet, you run a higher risk of ending up with bad affiliates who do not keep in contact, never link you back or only link back to you on one page, or something else that tends to define a bad affiliate. However, if your requirements are too difficult to meet, you run the risk of not finding very many affiliates, just as banks might have trouble finding people to lend to if their requirements are too high.

Any business in a market economy experiences competition as it attempts to gain customers and make profit. Similarly, throughout the community of websites to which you belong, there is competition between websites to gain the most visitors. Although this is not always apparent and this drive to gain visitors is often for personal satisfaction, this competition is evident in SOTM contests, referral contests, etc. The efforts made to win these competitions lead to your website being like a business in another way: advertising. In a business’s quest to increase profit, it advertises itself through other companies’ advertising services. Identically, you with your website have the option to advertise on others’ websites, and sometimes these websites ask for monetary compensation, which resembles a real transaction between a business and its advertiser. In addition, your website, if it offers resources, follows the laws of supply and demand, just as businesses do. Once again, your quest to gain visitors causes you to supply the resources that you believe your visitors demand. However, as your site likely supplies resources for free, supply and demand should always be at equilibrium, meaning both are perfectly satisfied, since there is no change in price to initiate a move along the supply/demand curve.

Additionally, the quality of the resources supplied by your site is extremely important, just as the quality of a business’s products is important to the amount of business they receive.

Your website can be connected to many more theories of economics in terms of how it and you behave like a business and a business owner, but that can get complicated and might go over your head, so this article stops here.