Start My Own Online Business

Determining what type of Online Business Model to pursue

When you are developing your strategy and online business plan, it is very similar to starting your own brick and mortar business. You have to know what you are going to sell to your customers.  With online marketing you have the same choices that you do with traditional retail businesses, namely, you can either sell goods and/or services.  However, when starting your own online business, there are a couple of different ways that you can accomplish this. There are also a few different ways to market your products and services also. We will look at them near the end of this section.

But, unlike traditional retail, where you have to keep a physical  inventory on site, or you may have to employ people to provide the service, Internet based businesses are different. Let me explain. When you are looking at an online business, the inventory kept, and, the service that may be provided are located, not in some warehouse down the street, but in cyberspace, on a server somewhere. This is what has revolutionized the digital business industry. Production, storage, and employee overhead is next to nothing relatively speaking. This is what makes starting an online business attractive to most people.

Now, when you are considering your online business model, the question you need to ask yourself is this: “Am I going to sell my own products, or, am I going to sell someone else’s product?” You could do either, but many entrepreneurs start out selling other people’s products and services and get paid a percentage of the total sale. This is called Affiliate Marketing.

They do this for a couple of different reasons. The first is because there is no time or effort invested in creating the product. This allows people who are still working a 9-5 job to continue with their life while setting up an online business in their spare time. Another reason that people chose to start their online business as an affiliate is because its dead simple to research a product or service and market it to people on the internet.

Most all major retailers will offer affiliate programs. What this does is open up the options of what you can sell or promote to anyone on the web. If you happen to like something from Macy’s, you can market that. Or, if you happen to like Netflix or some other digital entertainment service, you can market that. The possibilities are almost next to endless.

Then again, some people prefer to keep a greater percentage of the profit and they market their own personal digital goods or services. While this business model has the potential of being extremely lucrative, there is one drawback. That drawback is that in order to sell your own product or service, you will need an investment in production time and/or the equipment and software to produce the product or service. To create a good quality product will also require that you have the knowlegde and the experience to produce it. Unfortunately, many people just starting out online have limited technical and financial resources to devote to developing their own product right off. This is another reason that affiliate marketing is so appealing to many who already have web based businesses.

Once you have decided on what product or service you are going to market or sell, you have to consider how you are going to market it to get it in front of people’s eyes. There are many different marketing strategies you can use online.  In fact, too many to go into in this little report. However, I will list the major ways that you could use to draw attention to your business.

The following are several popular marketing methods:
1) Pay-Per Click (PPC). When people use this phrase, they are generally talking about Google’s Adwords Program although there are other PPC marketing programs in use.
2) BUM or Article marketing. This is done by writing 4-500 word articles and submitting them to article directory sites with your affiliate links embedded in the article body.
3) Email marketing. You generally have to build a list of the email addresses of your business leads and then sending your advertizements and product information to them via email.

This list is by no means exhaustive and since the growth rate of online business is growing exponentially, there are many other ways that motivated marketers are exploring and developing to open up new markets all the time.

Direct marketing or website marketing?

One of the biggest industries online is the affiliate marketing industry.

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