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The Internet has truly revolutionized the global economy and the way people conduct business. With E-commerce, there are now numerous opportunities of making money anywhere in the world, working at your office, at the comforts of your home or even while you’re asleep!
There are many ways to earn money on online businesses, and some are listed below:
1. E-stores. With the power of the Internet, you can now create your web site (or have someone create it for you) and have your own shopping center and sell goods and services to anyone anywhere in the world. You can have a fully automated system that allows your store to operate on its own, 24 hours a day – this means undertaking sales transactions and generating income even in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping!
There are numerous advantages of having an E-store. You are providing your customers with the ability to shop at their own convenience, no matter what time of day. You can also create an opportunity to ‘reach out’ to your customers through a personalized customer service by asking for their feedback or by setting up an ‘online community’ for them to communicate with you and the other online shoppers.
The challenge here, however, is to ‘steer’ potential customers to your store by having them learn about your website. Intense advertising might solve this problem. Another issue that needs to be addressed is determining the kind of products and/or services to sell. Whether they are books, videos, software, or a skill, the answer here is providing customers with a variety of products while knowing the familiar commodities (those that are selling well) at the same time. There are also a number of conservative people who are hesitant to give sensitive information over the web, especially their credit card numbers, but this can be worked out by resolving the security issues.
2. Marketing. Online advertising is also another way of earning money on the Internet. One way to do this is by joining an affiliate program that enables us to sell a company’s products and earn income from these sales, or earn commissions by enlisting other people to market these products. It is a great way to form business relationships that may prove to be lucrative.
When planning to join an affiliate program, you have to at least bear take the following into consideration:
Believe in the product. You have to believe a product’s sales potential. It would be hard to make a pitch to other people if you yourself would not even want to buy it!
Reasonable pay. Choose a program that will pay you sufficiently and allow you to keep a profit even after deducting your expenses.
No sign-up fee. An affiliate program that charges you a fee or requires you to purchase something first before joining would most likely be an illegitimate one.
This also poses a challenge, specifically on the web site traffic (or the number of visitors to your site). It is important to have a large number of people visiting your web site and to know who they are, because this is what attracts advertisers. One way to do this is to conduct online surveys that requests for the visitor’s personal information. A favorable response can be guaranteed using freebies and other incentives.
3. Subscriptions. This can be done by providing customers access to information for a certain fee – be it a daily or weekly copy of a ‘newspaper’ or a ‘magazine’, or other documents such as thesis or research papers. While a vast amount of topic can be accessed on the Internet for free (using Search Engines), there are still those that are of value that people would be willing to pay for them. There is also the benefit of reduced business costs, because it is less costly to send information over the Internet than to ship them overseas.
No matter what business you decide to pursue on the Internet, there will always be the great potential of making money easily (with considerably less workload), given the best ideas, the right tools, and the proper attitude to go with it. While it is true that there still remains the risk of encountering a possible scam with all the glorified facts and figures (the ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme), the important thing to do is to examine each opportunity thoroughly to know if it really works before putting any of your money on to it.
