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Internet Franchise Opportunities

Internet franchises have become very popular in the last few years as companies have learned to harness to massive potential the Internet has to offer. The range on offer is massive and varies from internet dating franchises through to web design franchises and local directory franchise opportunities.

Although there are many established internet business franchises which offer fantastic opportunities, steps must be taken to ensure the franchise validity of many as a habit of creating "franchises in a box" seems to have become prevalent in this industry, creating internet franchise opportunities which are made to franchise from the start without running the business as a profitable and standalone business in it's own right.

There are several online tools which can help you learn a little more about this history and website traffic of such sites and using these you can quickly establish whether the internet franchise opportunity you are looking at is one which is likely to live up to it's claims.  Using the following will substantially increase your awareness of the company you are looking at

Whois - using this you can establish when the domain name was registered / created and learn how long the internet based franchise has been operating under their domain name.  to use this tool simply enter the domain name you want to research into the whois box and look at the creation date of the domain.

Alexa - Alexa offers some statistic tools to grade how much website traffic a site generates.  Although not perfect it can give you a good idea and is very simple to you.  Like with the whois tool, enter the domain name (www.example.com) into the alexa checker and it will give you a rank.  Alexa ranks websites on how popular they are.  If the rank was given as 1 then this would be the most popular site in the internet, rank 1 million would be the 1 millionth most popular site on the internet.  Ideally you would be hoping to see a rank of under 1 million this could mean the site was gaining anywhere from 150-500 website visitors per day.  if the alexa rank is above 5 million then you can pretty much say it does not gain more than a handful of website visitors.  Quite simple, if they are running an online business which utilises website traffic as it's selling medium then a site with loittle traffic will not be pulling in many sales.

Google Pagerank - Like alexa and whois, enter the domain name (www.example.com) into the pagerank checking field and it will give you a number from 0-10.  10 is for the most popular of sites and 0 for the least of newer sites.  Obviously the higher the number you get the better.  Our site is currently PR5 which is very good for our industry however so long as you see PR2 or above for the site you are researching then that is fine.  0 or 1 and it is obvious they are either very new or cannot market themselves.

With these 3 tools in hand you can get a quick glance into the companies history and current standings.  although I would not base my decision on these alone they are helpful in weeding the bad from the good, do remember though that the company may be fairly new but have a great opportunity and as such further research needs to be done.

Not all Internet based franchises are about creating website traffic.  Where as a dating franchise obviously needs members and search engine hits, a web design based internet franchise opportunity might be about selling website to local businesses, as such not much website traffic is needed.  So when using the alexa tools to determine a rough estimate of a websites traffic do be aware that not all sites need to be traffic heavy.

Like all franchises, internet franchise opportunities need to be researched well and with the right research you can have a fantastic home based internet franchise opportunity to support yourself and your family for years to come.