Matt Coddington

The closest you can ever get to predicting the future is by coming up with an educated guess. Even then, at the end of the day, it’s just a guess.

This time of year is exciting for me. It’s draft time. Soon I’ll find out whether or not the Cowboys will finally fix their weak secondary or if the Panthers will finally get a decent complement to Steve Smith. But I digress.

With draft time comes the mock draft. The mock draft is as far from an exact science as you can be, but then again so is online business. Predicting the draft is tough, and so is predicting the next big online earning avenue or niche. Here’s why.

Writers try to take in so many factors when coming up with a mock draft to make it as accurate as possible. They look at overall performance, year-over-year improvements, combine numbers, and personality. They take this all over the place data and try to quantify it and put a value on each player.

Analyzing a new online business is similar. Rarely you’ll find specific data that will tell you exactly what you will earn with each site you produce. Sure you can take certain data - competition, total searches (estimated traffic from those searches), growth trend, available monetization methods, etc. But at the end of the day, it’s an educated guess.

Even the pros make big mistakes with their draft picks (*cough* Leaf *cough*). But that doesn’t stop them. They do the best they can with the information available.

They make the call on draft day and wait for results. If they’re good they continue - if they’re bad they cut it and move on.

Food for thought.