So you have decided you want your own online business. You want the freedom to work from home (or wherever you feel) and you want to be your own boss.
Great!
But what next?
What kind of online business do you want to run?
Where do you start?
What service can you offer?
What can you sell?
Let me start by pointing out a very important fact. Just like making money in the physical world, there are an almost infinite amount of ways to make money online.
You could do anything from filling in online surveys, buying products at auction and selling them on eBay, being an affiliate and selling products for a cut of the profits or developing your own information products and selling them through your website.
The choices available to you can be very overwhelming at times and because of this a lot of people never get past this point.
Having said that unless you take action and act on your dreams you will never earn a penny.
Deciding on what kind of online business you want to run, what kind of products you wish to sell or what kind of service you will offer is something you should settle on before you take any further action.
If you don't mind building your online business over the long term, then you should be able to get results with very little startup capital.
The advantage of building slowly is if you decide that the road you chose to go down is either not very profitable or simply doesn't work at all then changing direction won't represent too much of a financial loss.
Having said that, the purpose of this article is to point out some of the possible pros and cons of each route as a result minimise any risk you take when you make your initial decision.
Probably one of the quickest ways to start an internet business is by selling information products. Information products can be anything that provides your potential customer with detailed and helpful information on any one particular subject.
Millions of people are searching the internet everyday to find more detailed information on subjects they have an interest in. Providing this information to them packaged in a detailed and easy to understand product can be a great way to make a substantial amount of money.
But, I don't have a product...
Where will I find a product to sell? I here you cry!
Don't panic, I'm going to give you a couple of ideas...
Affiliate products
Selling a ready made product that someone else has already taken the time to create can be a very easy and incredibly profitable way to make money.
This is called being an affiliate.
You are simply acting as a salesperson for the product creator. You do this by using your own website and sales material to put the product in front of a targeted list of customers.
The creator of the product then pays you a percentage of the products selling price for each sale you make. The advantage of selling this way is that
You have a quality ready made product to sell from the start.
You have not got the hassle of product creation, overheads or delivery of the product.
All your efforts can be focused on marketing and selling the product you have to offer.
Once you make the sales you just sit back and watch the cash flow.
How Do I Find Affiliate Products For My Online Business?
Probably the easiest and most well known place on the internet to find all of the affiliate products you could ever need is ClickBank.com.
Click bank gives you the facility to sign up for a free account and become an affiliate. There are literally thousands of different products in every niche you could possibly think of. You just simply choose one of these products. You then use your website and start marketing the product to a targeted audience.
Click bank is a great place for the beginner to start. It offers great tutorials on how to get started as well as a fairly in depth 'knowledge base' that covers most of the problems you may need help with. The creators of the product are often on hand to offer help too.
If you don't find the answers you need there you can always head over to the warrior forum. This is a great resource for anyone starting out. The forum is full of hundreds of experienced people willing to pass on their wealth of knowledge.
Once you become an affiliate for your chosen product you then have access to a multitude of graphics and advertising materials to help you with your product marketing.
Crowd Fire is not the only place to look either. Another site worth a look is JVZoo this is also a great place to find affiliate products. When you start to search you will find countless marketers and creators of information products crying out for affiliates to market their products for them.
Information products are incredibly popular on the Internet. As a result of this the potential profits that you can generate are huge. And if you start small, select quality products and choose your niche wisely your customer list will soon grow.
Its not just individuals that do affiliate programs either.
Many of the large, well known companies have affiliate programs you can sign up to. Companies such as eBay, HostGator, Getresponse and Amazon to name but a few.
Although you may not get as higher commission rates they will still pay you a percentage of the sales made from the visitors you send to their site.
Becoming an affiliate and making money without your own product is a great way to get your online business started. Especially when you take into account how quickly you can be up and running. Also with some product developers offering 80% or more commission on each sale it can be a very attractive proposition.
However wouldn't earning 100% of every sale be even more attractive.
Yes, of course it would!
If you seriously want your own online business, you need to consider creating your own product...
Creating your own product
Now at first the prospect of this may scare the living daylights out of you, I know it did me...
After all, What did I know about product creation?
Even if I did know, Who would want to buy a product I'd developed?
What knowledge do I have that people would want to purchase?
But when I actually stopped to think about it for a while, I realised, I had been giving information away free for years.
I was a photographer who was also into health and fitness. Friends and family would often pick my brains on both subjects. They would ask for help and advice and of course I passed on my knowledge freely.
I bet if you stop and think you will also realise that you have a wealth of knowledge inside your head on one subject or another just waiting to be turned into a saleable product.
Maybe it's a hobby that you pursue or a certain subject that you know a lot about. Maybe you do a job where you could pass on your knowledge, tricks of the trade or inside information etc.
The fact is, everything you do, all of your hobbies, your experiences, your job, talents and skills are all potential material for developing your own products.
If you get what you know down in the proper format, this alone could very well be marketed as a useful information product to someone who doesn't have your knowledge or know how.
You start by making a list of your hobbies, your talents, your job or subjects you know a lot about.
Next get on the internet, use Google AdWords or some other keyword tool to see how many people are doing searchers for what you know.
If there is a big enough interest in your particular niche then start to consider creating a product to market to your target audience.
Don't talk yourself out of it by thinking you are not an expert, or that there are far more knowledgeable people on the subject than you.
If you can provide specific information to help someone solve a problem or improve in a particular area then you are in a great position to pass on what you know and help people. In the process they will quite happily pay you for your help and advice
But, how do you create a product?
Don't panic because creating your own products can be as simple as getting your knowledge down on paper and writing your own eBook. If you don't fancy writing then maybe consider recording what you know in audio format. You can even consider breaking it down into short more manageable lessons.
If you are feeling really adventurous then how about creating a series of video lessons. This can be particularly good if your subject matter lends itself to a more visual format such as how to complete a video game etc.
Maybe even consider a combination of all three.
If you don't fancy doing all the work yourself or you would like something a little more professional looking then there are many places online you can use to outsource the work.
My first stop is always fiverr, here you will find thousands of people from all around the world offering all kinds of services for as little as $5.
All you need to do is type out what you need or record your audio. You can then pay someone to transcribe the material. You can even find people who will do the whole thing for you and turn your rough copy into a professional looking eBook, audio lessons or a video.
The point is if you have the knowledge to pass on, even if you don't have the skills to develop a product, you can always outsource that job to someone who does.
All you have to do then is use your online business to target your audience, sell your product and keep 100% of the profits for yourself.
