There are various internet business models and strategies which you can use to build an online income. When I started to look to the internet as a means to earn an income I looked at several methods.
Internet Business Models And Strategies
I’ll start with the strategy I now use since this seems to me the most obvious starting point. It took me many years to come to the conclusion of this strategy and it was after many failures too. In the main part this is affiliate marketing. However, there are various ways to do affiliate marketing and not all are equal. Affiliate marketing lets anyone sell someone else’s product/s online. By doing so you can earn a commission. For digital products the commission can be up to 50% of the sale price.
Before I get to the actual business model let’s first discuss how we can sell digital products online.
Selling Affiliate Products Online
Anyone can visit a digital product marketplace, open an account and start selling. Clickbank is one such marketplace and the site allows anyone to open an account and start promoting their products. You can earn 50% on the sale price of a digital product by doing this. However, you first have to sell something! You can do this either by building a website or listing an advert. Both methods should bring people to a landing page where you can collect the (potential) customer’s email details. From here you can market products to that potential customer by email.
Why Email Marketing?
Email marketing is the cornerstone of many successful online businesses. The reason is that people buy from people. They don’t buy from a website, especially if the owner of that website is unknown to them. An email marketing campaign is far more effective than a website is at selling simply because you have multiple point of contact When someone lands on your website they maybe have 10 minutes to decide whether to buy from you or not. Once you have their email address you can send emails and build a relationship with this person by offering value and quality content. You then have the potential to sell to someone for weeks, months, years and even decades later.
Other Methods Of Selling Products
Email marketing is the best method of selling online because it lets you control your audience. Without an email list you are relying on your website or an advert to sell products. By collecting your visitors email it gives you more opportunities to sell online. Adverts const money and building up your website content to get ‘free’ visitors to your website takes time.
What Products To Sell Online?
The best question to ask yourself is what products should I sell online? There are various internet business models and strategies which deal exclusively with selling affiliate products. Later in this article we will discuss other models on earning online. For now we are talking about affiliate marketing because it’s the model I decided was the ‘best’ after a lot of trial and error. After dabbling with various products I came to the realisation that digital products were the way to go. This is because you can earn up to 50% commission with digital products. With physical products you usually earn a lot less. You can find digital products on sites like Clickbank.com and you can also join an affiliate program through Amazon.com or Ebay.com.
Why Digital?
So why do sigital products offer such high commissions? Simply because they have very low overheads. With a physical product you have storage and delivery costs to consider. There’s the manufacturing costs too. All this adds up. With digital products you only have to costs involved with their production. After that they are free to send over the internet. There is no storage costs because they can be stored digitally on a computer. The main costs involved with selling digital products are in their advertising. The owner can pass that cost to the affiliate and pay them a high commission rate to encourage them to do the selling.
What Else To Consider
When choosing a digital product to sell you should also think about some important factors. Selling a single product will only make you a single comission. However, by selling a membership product you stand to make monthly commissions on each sale you make. This is a far better business model. With a single commission you effectively pass the customer on to the product owner. The owner can then capitalise on the lifetime value of that customer. But you lose out because you only get paid once. By choosing products which offer membership commissions you get paid over and over again for each individual customer. You can also benefit from choosing products which offer:
- High ticket sales – Larger price tags mean larger commissions
- Back end sales – many affiliate products don’t pay affiliates for these. Choose one which does.
- Built in sales team – Benefit from later sales generated further down the road when one of your referrals upgrades or buys another product closed by a built in sales team.
Internet Business Models and Strategies – How To Sell
Selling digital products can be done through a website or a paid advert. As mentioned already this should be done by sending visitors to a landing page. A landing page gives your visitor only two options: sign up for the free information or leave the page. A website on the other hand gives people far too many options. They can browse around and take a look at your content at their leisure. The key to selling online is in getting your visitors to submit their email for some free information or course. Once you have done this you can automate an email series which gives your subscriber a drip feed of information and access to your products and services.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a remarkable tool with an online business. You can reach a very specific audience which is suitable for your range of products. You can learn how to do this here and access a ready made product range to sell too. With paid advertising you can also scale up a business very quickly. With the right business model (as mentioned earlier) you can offset your advertising expendature more easily.
Other Internet Business Models and Strategies
So what other internet business models and strategies are there? Well here aer a few I have tried over the years:
Ebay
When I started looking to the internet to make money it was with the auction site ebay. I bought items from charity shops and car boot sales and sold them on ebay. You can read my article on this here: how I made money on ebay first starting out.
After my ebay venture I found the site bargainchecker.com and started looking for undervalued items on ebay itself to sell on. Many listings go unfound on ebay simply because they are poorly listed or have spelling mistakes within the title of the listing. Finding these and relisting them can be very lucrative!
It was after finding and purchasing an ebook from ebay that I realised affiliate marketing was the path for me! I was struck by the simplicity of downloading something automatically from the internet. It automated the entire selling process and could easily be scaled. This idea eventually led me to find The SFM.
Trading
I also spent a couple of years learning how to trade currency pairs on the internet. Anyone can learn how to do this but you need a bank in order to trade and you should practice a strategy for at least 6 months with a demo account. It’s not an easy thing and you can lose a lot of money. I eventually abandoned this strategy as it wasn’t working for me! It is something which once you master can give you a living. However, most successful online traders say it takes two years to learn how to do this.
YouTube
There are many internet business models and strategies and one method is by using YouTube. I have used YouTube with some success but some prolific entrepreneurs have capitalised on this method alone. By creating useful and interesting videos you can build a following and either sell affiliate products or make money with Google’s Adsense program. Adsense pays you to put adverts on your videos. You can also use adsense on a website too to make a passive income by people clicking on your adverts. Each time someone clicks on an advert which is on your content Google pays you a small commission. Although this is usually a tiny amount by having thousands of daily visits to your content you can earn a nice passive income with enough of a following.
Drop Shipping
Drop shipping companies can offer another business model which can be worked from a laptop. It is effectively the same or similar model to afiliate marketing except you are sending customers to drop shipping companies rather than affiliate products. With drop shipping you are the middle man. You make a sale but the process of delivering the product and dealing with the customer is dealth with by the drop shipping company.
What other internet business models and strategies can you think of? Please leave a comment below if you have any more or if you found this article helpful.