Online Business Overview
What is an online business?
People usually do online business in order to generate extra revenue or income. The etymology of “business” refers to the state of being busy, in the context of the individual as well as the community or society. In other words, to be busy is to be doing commercially viable and profitable work.
However, most people fail to achieve this goal. As the saying goes, 9 out of 10 who run a business will fail. So how can we run a successful online business?
The following is a study that I conducted personally at my own expenses on the myth of online business.
Online Business
The basic structure of an online business.
1. Traffics
To own an online business is to own your visitors or in other words, your customers. You need to have a consistent stream of customers who come to your business in order to sustain your business. No customer means no business. It is as simple as that and most of us know it.
Hence, how do you get a consistent stream of visitors to your online business?
-
Search engines (SE)
There are three main search engines which are dominating the world of internet searching: they are Yahoo!, Google and MSN. They will bring you free traffics (visitors) to your online business. However, there are more and more web sites coming out each day than ever before. Thus the number of visitors to your business will be reduced due to the fact that these surfers have more places to go. That is when the SEO (search engine optimizations) comes in.
Some online business owners hire expensive SEO companies to make their web site rank higher in the search engines. And by consequence more surfers will find their business. In my opinion, these SEO techniques can be learned and are doable yourself even if you are alone in your business.
-
Writing articles
Where are the contents from all over the internet come from? The answer is article. People write and publish articles on the internet to share or distribute news, information, knowledge, etc. Everyone can write articles. If you can communicate, you can write articles.
Writing articles has been a good way to generate traffics and will continue to be. A lot of successful online business marketers are doing exactly this to promote their business.
You can start writing articles and submitting them to the major article sites or article directories like ezinearticles.com, isnare.com, articledashboard.com, etc just to name a few.
-
Participating actively in online forums
It exists tons of forums in every topic you can think of on the internet. Most of them are free to join. Join any of them which you are interested in and know somethings about it. Register in the forums even you don’t know much about the subjects because you can always ask questions inside the forums.
But how do you get traffics by participating in forums? Most of the forums allow you to put a signature below each and every of your post in the forums. The more you post in the forums, the more your online business gets exposed to the other members in the forums.
-
Signature in your e-mail
I am sure that anyone who uses internet has at least an e-mail account. Do you send e-mails and receive e-mails every day? Then you should customize your e-mail signature by introducing your online business.
This method works just like the signature you leave in every post you write in the forums. The more you send your e-mails, the more people will get to know your online business.
-
Leaving comments in blogs
Most people surf the internet just to read blogs. They like to know more about other’s opinion on certain thing, etc. And if you have somethings to say, you have the opportunity to leave a comment on the blogs. Some of them allow you to put in you web site address in the comment box. Again, you can promote your business by doing so.
However, be polite and sincere when you leave a message because some bloggers will review their comments and delete those which are nonsense.
-
Buying advertisement
This is by far the most effective way to promote your online business. I divided this section into two parts: online marketing and offline marketing.
a. Online marketing
-Pay-Per-Click
This is the most popular and cost effective way to promote your business online. Some of the big companies which provide ppc (pay-per-click) marketing are Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Miva, Enhance, etc.
-Direct advertising
Buying direct advertisements is buying some ad placement on other popular sites with at least 10,000 page views per month and above. This kind of advertising is no very targeted which means that you place your ad in front of all the surfers or visitors who come to your publisher sites.
b. Offline marketing
Offline marketing has nothing to do with the online world. You buy advertisement directly with your local newspapers, magazines, etc. This kind of marketing has less coverage and cost less.
The other kind of offline marketing is word of mouth type of advertisement. Tell your friends, relatives, family, etc about your business. Let them too spread your business to their own friends. You get the idea.
You can even print some flyers or catalogs and hire some people to distribute them in the town.
2. Incomes
Where do you earn your incomes by running an online business? In this section, I will discuss with you some of the ways to generate revenue online.
-
Affiliate programs
Affiliate programs are the programs provided by some online companies where you can join to promote or bring visitors to their sites. If these visitors end up buying somethings from these sites, you earn commissions in exchange for the customers that you bring to them.
Some examples of affiliate programs that you can find online are ClickBank, commission junction, amazon, etc.
Another kind of affiliate programs is the mlm (multi-level-marketing) or networking. It needs you to bring in another affiliates like you to join the program in order to build your downline. Some of these programs need you to pay for a certain price to participate. The more people you bring into the business the more money you make. Some examples of these companies are SFI, Mach 90 and Juvio, etc.
-
Publishing ads (third party advertisements)
If you have a web site, especially a popular one which attracts a few thousands of visitors per month, you can consider publishing third-party ads on your web site provided by some of the big names like Google, Yahoo!, etc. The revenue you generated by publishing ads can be huge enough that you can stop your job. Don’t worry if you are just planning to start an online business or you don’t have a web site yet. You can always learn anything you want as long as you are motivated. Here, you will be guided.
Some examples of the companies which allow you to publish third-party ads are Google Adsense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, etc.
You can also sell advertisement at your web site directly to your visitors. There are tons of ways to make money online. The sky is your limit.
-
E-commerce
If you have a store or business offline, you can move it to online by opening a web store. The advantage of owning a web store is that it is a lot cheaper. No monthy rental fees, etc. You only pay for the web hosting subscription to your web hosting provider. To open a web store, you have a few options. One of them is Prostores.
Ebay is another way to sell your items online. You can join it for free.
However, if you don’t have anything to sell now, you can consider finding some wholesalers. You buy products from them at wholesale prices and sell those items at retail prices and earn a decent revenue by doing this.
Another option to take into account about selling online is that you can join some companies which provide dropshipping for the products that you sell right directly to your customer door. These companies can even print your company name on the items so that your customers don’t know your source of products. The advantage of dropshipping is that you have no inventory to keep. So you can save place and money.
WorldWideBrands, SaleHoo, etc are the companies which provide you with a list of wholesale companies and dropship companies that you can contact and trust.
3. Virtual Real Estate (VRE)
When you own your business which means your business can run by itself and generate a good consistent extra stream of incomes for you, it becomes your VRE (virtual real estate). The VRE can be your web sites, domain names, your products (whether they are info/digital products or physical products), your opt-in lists, etc.
-
Web sites
Once your web site exists and online for long enough, it gains in popularity. If you put a lot of effort in building a high quality web site with real and unique contents, it will attracts many visitors. This kind of visitors will continue to bring in income for you.
-
Domain names
An expired popular domain name can bring in a lot of free traffics. That’s why there are many people or companies rush in to buy and own the domain name. Sometimes a domain name can be sold for millions dollars. If you happen to owning this highly popular domain names, you have choice to keep them or sell them for a decent money.
-
Products
You can develop your own products. Do you have particular interest and knowledge about somethings that you like doing? You can write an e-book and sell it. The e-book that you write is an info product or in other words a digital product. This kind of products does not need high investments on your part.
You can also build a software that can give solutions to a particular problem. You don’t need to be a programmer to develop a software. There are lots of freelancers and programmers who are waiting for you on the internet. You can find them on web sites like RentACoder, elance.com, etc.
-
Services/memberships
You can start your own membership site that charge your members a monthly fees or the like. Some membership site ideas are you provide services to your members like computer repairing support, web hosting service, etc.
-
Opt-in lists
How many times have you heard the sentence “The money is in the list.”? Yes, your list can worth a lot of money to you. You can start to build your list once you have your own web site. Visitors who come to your site can sign up to your list. Once you have your list, you can start sending out newsletters, courses, recommendations, your products, your affiliate links, etc to your visitors.
Online Business Model
Now that you know all the basic on how an online business works. I want to introduce to you a proven, tested, most popular online business model that most of the online self-create millionaires utilize to generate several automated passive income sources.
Graphical representation
Online Business model
This is just one of the many possibilities of business models that you can run for yourself. From the diagram above, you get your traffics from search engines or Adwords to your VRE, in this case, your web site. When those visitors are on your site, they can either click on the adsense ads, go to your affiliate programs or opt-in to your list. Either ways, you can make your money.
The other possibility is you send your visitors directly to your affiliate programs by using Adwords. These two methods have been proven time and again by those successful online marketers. Nevertheless, to do it correctly you need further instructions and learning to get it works for you.
Conclusion
The information I provided here is the most basic in the form of online business. There are still lots of areas or fields that I did not cover in this writing. Each sector that I introduced needs further study and each of them deserves some books to fully describe it.
However, I hope you have learned a lot from this especially if you are just starting up to build your own online business. I wish this information will be useful to you and may god bless you.
