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Starting an
Internet Business: An Overview
By Vernon
Sandel
So
you would like to make money on the internet? There are a lot of web
sites out there advertising “easy money” schemes. but beware of the
hype. Most of the easy money schemes are outright scams. The easy money
died with the dot com bust in the early 2000’s. That is not to say you
can’t make money on the internet, thousands are doing so every day. But
they have to
work
at it. You can do the same, but it will require both learning and
effort.
There are only three basic ways to monetize the internet:
1. Sell a product or service.
2. Advertise someone else’s product or service.
3. Get paid to view
advertisements.
Within these two basic methods there are hundreds of variations. Only a
few will be discussed here.
Sell
a Product or Service
If
you have a product or service of your own, then selling on the internet
is not much different from a physical store. The advantages are that you
don’t have much of the overhead of a physical store and you have a much
larger potential market or customer base. First you will have to produce
an appealing web site that will convert “lookers” into buyers, then you
must drive targeted traffic to your web site. Since most online shoppers
use search engines to find what they are looking for, it would be nice
to be on the first or possibly the second page of a search under
keywords that describe your product. However competition is fierce to
place near the top of the results for a given search term.
The uniqueness of your product or service, called a “niche”, can
greatly reduce competition such that it becomes much easier to rank high
on the search engines. Examples of unique products that have made a
fortune for their originators are the woman who in the first year of
operation sold over $100,000 of tumbleweed online by advertising “have a
piece of the old west”, and the internet guru that got his start with
potato guns. Find a niche that appeals to people and you are on your way
to a successful business on the web.
If your market is local rather than national, this greatly reduces the
competition. It is relatively easy to rank high on a local search. More
and more people are using local search on the internet rather than using
the phone book to find their products and services. To do a local
search, you add a location to the keywords you are searching: e.g.
chiropractors in Lansing. Every brick and mortar store should have a web
site to compete in this electronic age. A new search engine that
specializes in local search:
www.searchbigdaddy.com. Presently in the formative stage, this
search engine and may become a major player in local search.
It costs nothing to join and you get a free top search engine position
on the keyword you choose. Check it out. They also have
business opportunities associated with the search engine (scroll down)
Of course you don’t have to make your own product as long as you have a
reliable supply at reasonable prices. There are suppliers that will drop
ship your products to your customers so that you don’t have to deal with
inventory, shipping, or returns. Some companies will even set you up
with a web site already populated with products ready to sell. The
problem with this situation is that the products are usually widely
available and competition for the top spots on the search engines is
fierce. The individual can hardly compete with the big companies for the
most popular search keywords. By optimizing your web site for keywords
that are more specific and less commonly searched you may be able to cut
the competition and rank well for those keywords.
Getting traffic to your web site is the main hurdle to selling on the
internet, and this will require the greatest effort particularly in
starting out. Ranking high on the search engines requires writing or
finding good content for your web site and getting other web sites to
link (point) to your web site. You can also advertise in the sponsored
sections of the search pages (e.g. Google Adwords and Yahoo Search
Marketing). You bid a maximum amount you will pay each time someone
clicks on your ad and is sent to your web site. This is called
pay-per-click advertising. To be successful with the pay-per-click
advertising requires time consuming testing of keywords, bid prices, and
advertising content. Be careful, it is easy to spend more than you make.
Advertising
Other Peoples Products
Advertising of other peoples products generally takes three forms:
1. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Pay-Per-Play
In addition to the search page pay-per-click ads, the search engines put
relevant ads on web sites, and pay a portion of their pay-per-click
revenue to the web site owner each time an ad is clicked. Google’s
program for this is called
Adsense. Besides the search engines, other
companies have gotten into the business such as
www.bidvertiser.com and
www.obeus.com. If you
have any kind of a web site at all, it costs nothing to sign up to allow
these ads to be published. It is a great way to get extra income from
your web site even if it is a blog. Free
software is available that will allow you to make web sites that are
optimized for adsense.
Affiliate marketing works quite differently. Many companies have
affiliate programs that allow you to put their advertisements on your
web site. When an ad is clicked, the customer is taken to the
advertisers web site and your identifying name or number is sent to the
advertiser. If the customer buys something you get a commission. If not,
the advertiser pays nothing. The advertiser places a “cookie”, a small
text file on the customer’s computer with your identity and a date so
that if the customer buys something within a limited time period you get
paid. Companies love affiliate marketing because it costs them nothing
until a sale is made.
Most companies establish their affiliate programs through a third party
that keeps track of the sales and actually pays you, the publisher. In
this way the advertising company is kept honest. There are many of these
tracking companies, two of the main ones are Commission Junction and
ClickBank. A search in Google under “affiliate programs” will bring up a
host of these companies.
One area of affiliate marketing that pays commissions of up to 75% of
sales price is the digital products market, which includes ebooks,
computer software, computer games, movies, etc.
ClickBank is the major
player in this area with more than 10,000 items that you can promote. It
costs nothing to register and begin promoting their products. One of the
best ways to promote these products is through email advertising, blogs
and in the content pages of your web site. If
you are serious about making money on the internet, check out the free
ebook Income 4 Beginners. It
describes a business plan whereby you put your "buy it now" button on
the author's website and collect 100% of the price of the product.
It sounds crazy, but it is actually is true, legitimate, and has the
author's blessing. Take a look, it costs you nothing.
The third method of advertising other companies products is Pay-Per-Play. This is a brand new program that uses 5 second voice
ads whenever someone visits your web site. You get paid for every
visit to your web site. Unlike Pay-Per-Click, no action on the
part of your visitors is needed to get paid. When you join the
program you are given a short snippet of code which you put on as many
pages of your web site as you wish. You then get paid for each
page visited that has the code. For further information
Click Here.
Get Paid to Read Advertisements (PTR)
The spam laws prohibit advertisers from sending emails advertising their
products unless you sign up to allow those emails. To
access new potential customers by email they now have to pay to get
people to read their email advertisements. This has spawned the "pay to
read" (PTR) industry. All you need is access to a computer
(even at a library) and a free email address. It works like this: advertisers pay a PTR
company a fee to find people willing to read their email advertisements.
The PTR company recruits people willing to accept and read email
advertisements for a small fee. Signup for the programs is free.
In the email is a hyperlink to the advertiser's web site which you must
click. When the web site comes up, wait 30 seconds and get paid
(if the company is honest). The pay is discouragingly low,
something like 0.02-0.05 per email, but like multilevel companies you
can recruit others to join so that you form a down line of people
several layers deep. You profit from their clicks as well as your
own. Apparently there is a way to make good money in this
business. A web site that offers training and a system (for a
price) that people have raved about in testimonials can be
accessed here. | 
