There are many different ways to make money on the internet. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the fastest and easiest way to ensure your success is to replicate a model that’s already proven to make money. Here are five business models for making money online.
The Informational Website
The informational website is based on giving away free information. Its primary source of income is AdSense, advertising and affiliate product sales.
For example, if you were to start a small website on fishing, put up 50 articles about various fishing tips and techniques and populated it with AdSense ads, you’d very likely get decent traffic as well as make a decent amount of money.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you’re making money by selling other people’s products. Instead of having to create a product, a detailed website, setup billing and handle customer service, all you need to do is bring in traffic.
Once you get the traffic to their website, their job is to make the sale. Once the sale is made, you get a percentage of the sale price. For physical products, the commission is usually between 5% and 20%. For digital products, the commission is usually between 50% and 75%.
eCommerce Stores
Another way to make money online is to actually sell products from an eCommerce store. Here, you would actually own a web store where customers would place orders and then ship them a physical product.
At first you might start out by having a dropshipping relationship with manufacturers so you don’t have to warehouse your own products. Then, as you become more successful you’ll want to start housing some of your own products to reduce your per item costs.
Infoproduct Marketing
Infoproduct marketing is when you’re selling products that teach people how to do things. These products can be anything from “How to Choose a Chiropractor” to “How to Get a Babysitting Job” to “How to Increase Your Miles Per Gallon.”
The possibilities are endless. You need three primary skills to succeed in information marketing:
1) The ability to bring traffic to your website.
2) The ability to create good content in a specific area.
3) The ability to convince people online that your infoproduct is a good investment that will help them solve their problem.
Once you have these three skills, you’ll be able to produce many profitable infoproduct websites.
The Made for Acquisition Model
If you’re looking to build something larger than a website that’s making a few thousand dollars a month, then you’re looking at building a real company that’s meant for acquisitions or IPOs.
These are companies like LinkExchange (acquired for $250 million,) Facebook (valued at over a billion.)
The trick to building such a company is to find a market need to serve and to serve that need. In the process, you’ll generally have to learn how to raise capital from Venture Capitalists and angel investors.
Before trying to build such a business, it’s usually a good idea to build at least a couple smaller successful online bsuiensses using the models above.
There you have it – five different online business models with a proven history of success. Just pick the one that sounds most actionable to you now and get started today!
Glennette Goodbread, Owner
Premium Web Design and Hosting
