Internet Business Ideas for every taste
All right: You probably heard about that book “The 4 hour workweek”. You probably liked the sound of that title a lot, right? Imagine that: 4 hours of work every week, and then just do whatever you like besides. Maybe you dream of loosing your dayjob, eh? Don’t like the boss, the pay, the hours, the commute? Can’t say I blame you. Or maybe you’ve just discovered you don’t need to work for someone else to make it in your line of business. Maybe you finally feel confident and experienced enough to start out for yourself, doing software-engineering, financial advisory, management coaching, website building or something else entirely? Bypass the record companies and sell the music you wrote and recorded – directly to your fans? Open your online store for vintage Julio Iglesias t-shirts?

Once you discover that there is such a thing as making a living off the internet,  it seems everybody is doing it. I’m not necessarily talking about big companies here; it could easily be one-man/woman operations. Take a look at some of the ways to make money:

  • Sell one or more products from an online store. Could be physical or software.
  • Offer your services, whatever they may be. Consulting, teaching, testing…
  • Offer an online tool for…calculating stuff, doing funny stuff with people’s holiday pictures, etc – and get people to pay for it.
  • Provide free information on some subject and get paid for visitors clicking on ads.
  • Pre-sell a product sold by someone else – and get a commission for every sale.
  • Erm…play poker online, some people make a living that way.

This is just what I could come up with here and now, but I’ve seen lots more internet business ideas out there. So how exactly do you go about starting an internet business? Well, you might want to begin by figuring out what you want to be doing.

- If you are already a professional in a field of work, why not stick to that and go solo with it? So many people today have jobs that only really require a computer and a phone – and a bit of expertise. No need to spend 4 hours every day in your car, just to go and do that work in some fancy office building,  when you could do it anywhere – even in your home.

- Always wanted to own a store, but down have the down-payment for an actual, physical shop? Set up an online store – secure credit card processing and everything – and keep your inventory stowed in the garage. Not only do you save some cash initially, you also get to work whenever you want to! Have to go to the dentist in the middle of the afternoon? No problem – the boss always says ok, because the boss is YOU. While you are getting your teeth drilled, the orders are ticking in on your email. All you have to do is ship them out and update your inventory list.

- Have a lot knowledge to share with the world, but can’t find a publisher to help spread the goodness in a book? Do it yourself – it’s called self publishing, and is really very simple: Write your book, submit it to a selfpublishing company and start selling books! No editor telling you what you can or can not write – or telling you to take your manuscript and leave. It doesn’t even have to be a real book either; many writers now publish only ebooks (in PDF format or other). The reader pays for the book and downloads it. Simple as that. And since publishing costs are basically nil, you can sell your ebooks for less than a paper book and still make more per book than you would otherwise.

- Offering a service of a non-physical character is a perfect thing to do online. An internet service business can be run from your home. You could sit in your bed all day with your laptop, and make a living. An example: Let’s say you work – or want to work – as a numerologist. You set up a website offering your numerology service, and to get a little marketing buzz going, you put an online numerology calculator on your site – just to get people’s attention.

Marketing your internet business
That reminds me of a crucial point to cover when we talk about starting an internet business: Marketing! Nothing is more important when starting an internet business – even more than with a physical business. The problem is – if you’re not marketing yourself on the web, you are effectively invisible! There is no storefront on Main Street to draw in whoever happens to pass by. Marketing is essential. Without it, your business is not a business – it’s just a hobby. So how do you market your internet business?

  1. Contact a marketing agency and pay them to do it.
  2. Do it yourself.

Number 1 is simple enough. Do a search for it, or get someone to recommend you a company. Then talk to them about your business, set an initial budget and you’re off. If you have a decent budget to  spend on marketing and you expect to be making money online with your business in the near future,  then this is the simplest, easiest way to go. The great advantage of it, is that you can concentrate on running your business right away – do what you do best, so to speak.

Number 2 is interesting if you do not have much of a budget. You see, the great thing about online marketing is that anyone can do it. It doesn’t take a lot of money to do it – in fact, it can be done for free, except of course for the hours you put into it. If you have an email account or use any of the many social websites out there (Myspace, Facebook, etc) or social bookmarking sites (too numerous to mention), then you already have the channels you need to spread the message about your new business. Tell your friends – and maybe they will tell their friends. And don’t forget to make more friends – especially try to target people whom you think might be interested in your service or product. I mean, don’t spend too much time trying to sell accounting software to a 14-year old, you know?

SEO and SEM
If you choose to do the marketing yourself, you will soon become familiar with the acronym SEO, which stands for search engine optimization – and SEM – search engine marketing. To be seen on the web, you need to get found by people who search for what you offer. To get found, you need to be visible to the search engines – these being mainly Google and to a lesser degree Yahoo and Bing. Since Google is by far the largest and most used search engine, most people concentrate on that when doing seo/sem. The trick to seo is knowing a bit of how Google works, what it likes in a website and what it doesn’t like. Like? Yes, Google’s search algorithm (the way it is programmed) discriminates a lot when deciding what shows up in the search results for a given search term. Generally, Google wants to present the user with the sites most relevant to the search term, and that relevancy is determined by  looking at a number of factors. Some of those factors are publicly known, because Google wants to influence the way websites are built and what they contain, while other factors are secret and known only to Google. Without getting in to deeply with seo, I can say that basically what Google wants you to do, is present valuable content to your users. Whether it is sales copy for a product or a service you sell, or free information monetized with on-page ads; it should have some value to those who view it – especially if the webmaster wants her site in Google’s index. The great thing about seo is that if you know what you are doing with it, you can bring tons of search traffic to your site  for next to nothing – except time. The bad thing is…well, that it takes time away from your core business. Unless of course you pay someone else to do it.

Ok, this was quite a mouthful to start with – a lot of different topics covered only briefly, but all relevant if you want to start an internet business. In future posts I will try to go more in-depth with as many of these topics as I can, and give you some information of value, no matter what type of business you are considering. In the meantime, sit down with a piece of paper and make a first sketch for an internet business plan.

Later…

Christian.