What are the most lucrative online businesses? When I started looking to the internet several years ago, I simply wanted to earn some extra cash. I didn’t realise the potential of the internet back then and I started out by buying things on the cheap and selling them on ebay. I later discovered a tactic to find cheap items on ebay itself and sell them on at profit. Here’s the article I wrote explaining the method I used: how to start a profitable ebay business.
Most Lucrative Online Businesses
But the method is flawed for a simple reason: you can’t scale it. Your time is factored into the model. The most lucrative online businesses are scalable. This is one major factor in finding the most lucrative online businesses. They must be scalable because unless you can ‘scale up’ a business, it will always be limited by the hours in the day and your ability to repeat profitable activities.
A Scalable Business Model
The internet allows anyone to scale a business using paid advertising and content creation. Of course a local business will always be limited by the amount of people willing to travel to it. A global business, however, has the ability to appeal to a worldwide audience. Therefore, the second prerequisite is the ability to reach a global audience. The internet allows you to scale up a business model. But, only to a global audience if you have the ability to sell globally. For many businesses this means added expense. Posting goods abroad adds an extra cost.
Digital Products vs Drop Shipping
Digital products can be sold anywhere around the globe and are incredibly cheap to deliver. A simple downloaded product can be bought instantly from the internet and delivered at near zero cost. Some of the most lucrative online businesses deal in digital products.
Digital products don’t have the same limitations as physcial products. Even in the case of drop shipping businesses, which offer the ability to create a scalable income from a laptop, shipping costs are involved. With digital products there are no shipping costs or storage costs. This makes an internet based business very affordable for most people. With a ‘bricks and mortar’ business there are many more costs involved. With an internet business all you need is the right training and the right products.
Automation – The Most Lucrative Online Businesses
Both drop shipping and digital products allow a certain amount of automation. Simply send visitors to a website to sell products. Scale up with paid advertising online to reach a global audience. Automation therefore is the third major factor in determining which are the most lucrative online businesses.
A certain amount of automation can enable a business to be scalable. With people in the ‘loop’ there is always limitation. By selling digital products over the internet to a global audience, you can automate the process entirely and scale up with paid advertising. Products are delivered or accessed over the internet and payment is taken through secure online platforms.
The Most Lucrative Business Model
Digital products come in all shapes and sizes from small ebooks to seminars overseas. Selling an ebook is far different to selling high ticket seminars and franchise opportunities. But which business models have all of these principles in place, and which model is the most lucrative?
Let’s recap some of the features of the most lucrative business models:
- They must be scalable
- They must be global – able to easily reach a global audience
- They can be bought instantly from the internet and delivered cheaply
- They must have a large amount of automation built in
So, selling a simple digital product would seem to be a lucrative business model given these criteria. Not really! Selling anything online takes time and money. If you’re going to start selling, wouldn’t you like to know that your business model is going to work?
I started out selling affiliate products several years ago. What I didn’t realise was that I should have concentrated on certain products. The products I sold only had one point of sale. I didn’t make anything from my customer after that. I wsas simply referring customers to businesses for a one time fee.
Lifetime Value Of A Customer
Most businesses have repeat customers. That’s their ‘bread and butter’ income in many cases. The same is true of an internet based business selling digital products. Why should it be any different? With the right business model you can not only sell globally, scale and automate, but you can also take advantage of the lifetime value of a customer. You can do this by choosing the right digital products to promote online.
Digital products which continue to pay you commissions again and again might include:
- Memberships – Online membership products let you earn for the lifetime of a customer
- High Ticket items – Let you earn more for each sale
- Up-sells – Having a range of increasingly higher valued items to sell to your existing customers.
- Built in sales team – lets you concentrate on automation and scaling, while someone else does the selling.
To learn more and get started with a business model like this click here for a free video series.
How Do You Build A Business Like This?
Building a scalable internet business takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. However, it can be done relatively quickly if you go about it in a certain way. This course will show you the fastest possible way to do it but how you go about it will depend on your circumstances. Paid advertising is the fastest way to grow an internet business. You can use paid advertising to promote a ready made affiliate website which you can build very quickly. Or you simply send website traffic to landing pages which are already done for you. See done for you internet business.
With a done for you sales funnel you can simply start advertising and test and measure your advertising campaigns. This is known as direct response marketing and it is perfect for new businesses. I cover more detail in my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.
Direct response marketing lets you start an advertising campaign for a small daily amount within your budget. Send website traffic to offers and landing pages to collect subscribers. Email your subscribers with your products and information they may find useful. A you test and measure your adverts you can ‘tweek’ them to get the most out of them. As your profits increase you can start to scale your advertising campaigns.
Affiliate marketers are known to spend thousands every day on their marketing. However, they don’t start from here. They start from a small budget and only increase it when they see regular profits from their advertising. Learn more and get started here.Â
