Do you know that 95% of the people starting out in their
internet businesses fail? In the middle of all the noise and
hype on the internet today, not many people realize that all the
ideas and techniques you can find are useless if you don't first
understand what your business model is or how are you going to
make money on the internet. Even the most remarkable internet
marketing technique will not work if you don't understand how to
apply it to your business.
The 3 most popular business models are:
1) Affiliate Marketing
Perhaps the most popular one out there, affiliate marketing
provides a good start for newbies. Almost anyone can sign-up for
an affiliate program for free and start promoting the chosen
product or service. Commissions start coming in if someone will
buy or participate in the programs promoted. Affiliate marketers
don't carry any risk, since they do not pay for the creation of
the product, they do not handle customer service, they need not
know the innards of internet transactions, like merchant
accounts, autoresponder (what is that?), reciprocal linking,
etc. It's also possible to be an affiliate even without a
website.
Some affiliate marketing programs you may participate in require
little up-front investment. Some are free. It's no surprise
therefore that almost everyone and their neighbor promotes an
affiliate program or another. In fact, if there is a single
reason why the Internet today is so proliferated with ads and
banners, it's because of affiliate programs.
With the millions out there involve in affiliate marketing, only
5% ever make any money and only 1% makes really big money. The
"Super Affiliates," so they are called, do it very differently
from the rest, therefore they earn the big checks.
2) Writing an eBook or other type of information product,
recording an information CD.
This is a great strategy because there are thousands of
possibilities for the type of product that you can create. There
are so many niche markets that you can write about. It could be
a course on Japanese gardens, how to start your own babysitting
business, how to sell your artwork, taking care of your dog's
ears ... there are endless topics and still many that have not
yet been explored by online marketers. You don't have to write
the information yourself, you can get a ghost writer or hire
someone to produce the CD.
EBook authors need to invest more than affiliates do. While
affiliates can get something for nothing, the same is not true
for the eBook type of business. EBook authors need to learn a
lot more than affiliates are required to. They need to spend
some amount of money getting the business up and running.
However, when done right, the payoff in this online business
model is much more rewarding.
These marketers make more money because they have very, very low
production and maintenance costs. Once the product is produced,
it doesn't cost a cent to reproduce thousands of copies.
Start-up costs can be covered by selling just a few copies of
very high-margin eBooks. You can even recruit hordes of
affiliates to do the selling for you.
3) Adsense
This has taken the internet by storm. There are tons of
testimonials from people making outrageous income from adsense.
Adsense is Google's advertising program wherein webmasters
display ads from Google's extensive list of advertisers.
Unobtrusive text-based ads are served in member sites, who then
earn a commission every time someone clicks on the advertisers'
links.
Google Adsense uses a technology to deliver ads that are highly
relevant to the content of a page. Google's engine will scan
through the content of the page to determine its topic, and will
then serve ads that are relevant to the page's content. Running
Google Adsense is quite simple. First build a website full of
content of your desired niche or topic, and then register in
Google's adsense program. Once approved, you then paste a code
in your page, and the ads start appearing immediately after you
upload the changes to your server.
Google is silent on how it shares the revenue per click with
their partners, but how much you will earn per click depends on
the topic and the product being advertised. Products with profit
margins of $10 for the advertiser will most likely give you a
smaller pay per click than a product with a $100 margin.
Similarly, ads with high conversion rates will normally give you
higher payouts than less effective ads, since they can afford to
pay more dollars per click, with a portion of that money going
to you.
These are the top 3 most popular online business models today.
No matter which model you choose, make sure you understand the
basics. Stop buying courses or information not applicable to
your business. Information overload can stop you before you even
get started.
About the author:
Alan Ocab is the CEO of Grandstart, a company dedicated to help
people start profitable internet businesses. Visit his site at
http://www.grandstart.com
