Deciding which online business model is right for you, is one of the most important decisions an entrepreneur needs to make. Instead of blindly following advice by choosing the business model which has the most potential of making a profit, you should know exactly what each one involves and if you are interested in starting such a business.
Here are currently the top 3 most common online business models.
1. Advertisement
This involves the business owner creating a website with good content on a particular niche. You need to have a lot of content written for the website and need to rank well in the search engines for targeted keywords. So detailed keyword research is needed.
The advertisement business model involves selling advertisement space on your websites. You could have spaces for banners and text ads. People are willing to pay you for putting their ads on your website because you have a lot of targeted visitors.
If you have a website on digital photography that gets a lot of traffic, other business that sells to the digital photography market would be willing to pay for advertisement space on your website.
You can create a lot of websites in different niches for the purpose of selling advertisement. The key is to regularly provide good content and get the web pages ranked in the search engines. This is also the most difficult part.
There are some authority sites which are making well over $10,000 monthly profit in selling advertisement using just one website. However, it does take time to set up such websites and establish a good reputation.
2. Affiliate Marketing
The next type of online business model is affiliate marketing. For this you need to set up websites and collect email leads based on a particular niche.
So if you’re in the parenting industry, you would create many website offering parenting advice with links to products which you’re an affiliate of.
The benefit of such a model is that you don’t need to create a product of your own. You leverage the efforts of other product creators and make money by selling their products.
With affiliate marketing you need to build a very targeted list and know how to sell since the majority of your profits comes from recommending other people’s products to your subscribers.
There are many people making a good living online with affiliate marketing. You need to have the expertise of writing good sales copy, a huge targeted subscriber list and continuously keeping a look out for new affiliate products to sell.
3. Information Products Business
This is the most profitable online business model out of the 3. Many affiliate marketers will also adopt this model and start creating their own products to increase their profits. A lot of the times, entrepreneurs are involved in both these businesses.
An information products business involves you creating ebooks or physical products, or online videos of your own. They are called information products because you are selling professional information to your market.
The main benefits of an information products business are:
- you can have affiliates selling on your behalf. More profits for you.
- you will be seen as an authority if your products are good.
- higher profit margins
- easier to build business relationships with other people
With such a business model, you can also recommend affiliate products to your customers and subscribers. It is much easier for you to sell because people will trust you more since you’re a business owner with his own products.
Out of the 3 business models, the information products business is the most profitable one and has the most potential of growing into a million dollar business. You can create as many information products as you want. If you are interested in such a model, I would advise you to read more information on how to start an information products business.
Download the report How To Build An Information Products Business at create information products. For videos and articles on marketing your business online, visit http://www.eliteghostwriters.com/blog – Alan Cheng, CEO of Elite Ghostwriters.
RTV Episode 2 – 2 November 2009
