Those with longer range plans might start an online business, most commonly online businesses are online retail stores or affiliate marketing sites.
The following web business ideas are touched on in this article:
Affiliate-advertising sites are the simplest to set up and operate, just create a site with useful content that attracts visitors and add paid advertisements that match up to to the content of the site. You can rent out space on your web page for banner or text ads, like Google Adsense that pay you a percentage of the revenue, or you can sign up with specific product affiliate programs and strategically place links in articles or reviews, these designed in ad links tend to generate higher click-through rates than classic banner ads. Affiliate programs typically pay 5% to 15% of the sale price of physical products and 35% to 75% of digital download products that have no real distribution cost. Many people throw up affiliate sites that never make a sale, good traffic volume and effective advertising techniques are essential ingredients of a profitable affiliate site. The most common affiliate site that people start with is ClickBank, where anyone can sign up as n affiliate (there are no special qualification). up until recently ClickBank handled only digital download products offering high commissions, often 50% of the sale price. There are nearly 10,000 products offered on ClickBank, that are marked by some 100,000 affiliates. Some affiliates beat out the competition by offering bonuses to visitors who buy through their affiliate link. More than a few affiliate marketers have graduated to create their own ClickBank product.
Many marketers create pages or entire sites expressly for the purpose of acquiring email addresses for mailing lists. Current email marketing regulations require recipients to “opt in” to an email newsletter list. On average, marketers value their lists at $1 per subscriber per month. Those who establish good relationships with their subscribers by providing useful or entertaining information have a receptive audience, often in the thousands who will open and actually read the occasional promotion for a new, high paying affiliate product. Most email marketers use a mail list manager service like Aweber to insure high deliver-ability and legal conformance.
A specialized, high paying form of advertising is Cost Per Action (CPA) offers. Rather than receiving a percentage of sale commission, CPA offers pay for product trial signups, insurance quotations, etc. These offers often pay a finder’s fee higher than the customer’s initial spend. People have gotten rich marketing offers for products that are now officially banned by the FTC or banished by advertising services like Google Adwords. Many successful CPA marketers operate on the fringe, you probably can’t be too squeamish about customers’ credit cards being unexpectedly re-billed, those unsavory ads that come up in surveys and those offering free gift cards are usually CPA offers. High volume advertising media buys are often used in this industry, one can expect to need to float a considerable advertising budget for the month or more it takes for CPA networks payouts. There’s an unavoidable “throw a bunch against the wall and see what sticks” process in identifying offer. One can expect to waste a considerable test budget in the process of discovering winning combinations of offers, advertisement copy, and advertising channels that convert profitable. A good centralized listing of the thousands of available CPA offers is OfferVault, sigh up to gain access to a nice collection of free webinar recordings that cover a spectrum of internet marketing related topics. Due to the high potential of fraudulent faked customers in this arena, one will generally receive a an interview telephone call before being accepted by a CPA network. This is probably not a wise field to begin in, due to the high profit potential, training programs for CPA marketing tend to be priced near the $1000+ range.
The key to marketing sites is getting eyes on the page, traffic may be generated through “free” search engine results or paid advertisement generated traffic, this buying and selling of ads is a form of arbitrage. There are a number of traffic sources, of late web 2.0 social media sites have began to siphon visitors away from the formerly unchallenged kings of traffic, search engines. It was recently announced that Facebook is now getting more visitors than Google. Many of the social sites, including Facebook, mySpace (through partners) and Plenty of Fish offer paid advertising. While search engine advertisements attract focused visitors, seeking specific information, social media advertisements are interrupting the viewer’s activity, a more friendly soft-sell presentation may be more effective in that context. Search engine driven traffic is acquired in a slower process, a site must be populated with content judged important by the search engines, and as importantly must have many links from other sites in order to be judged important and popular in the eyes of the search engines, a great part of the search engine optimization (SEO) process commonly involves acquiring incoming links by means not sanctioned by the search engines, ultimately search engine traffic may be less expensive than paid click visitors, attaining a worthwhile search ranking will not be truly free.
Running an online store is more complicated than an affiliate marketing site, two distinctly different types of products are (1) digital down-loadable products like ebooks, training videos and mp3 music files that require no physical inventory or shipping costs, and (2) physical products that require all the infrastructure of a mail order business, payment processing, wholesale supply relationships, warehouse space and a shipping department. Some of the complexity of setting up a site and attracting visitors can be eliminated by going through an online store service like eBay or Amazon, they take a percentage of your revenue, but can provide a ready made flow of customers. The key to running a profitable store or afiliate site is to know the precisely the value of the average visitor and the cost to attract each visitor to the site. Not all visitors are as likely to buy, tracking visitor conversions to sales all the way back to the ad copy and and placement are essential steps in the process of optimizing your ad campaigns and site design.
Those with special knowledge and teaching skills and ideally an authoritative reputation in the field, can setup a membership site offering training materials and regular live webinars. Membership sites setup with automated monthly billing provide predictable steady revenue.
