Four alternative Internet Business Models
Everyone thinks it’s easy to make money on the internet - but if it were that easy everyone would be doing it. I have seen figures online that suggest 90% of new internet businesses just don’t survive. Here are some of the internet business models you might follow - not all of them are real businesses but they are certain ways to make money.
Ecommerce internet business model
This is probably the one most people think of. A shop selling something unique. The issue with all websites whether new or mature is you need traffic. The easy ways to rank high on the internet search engines are long gone now so any new site might take six months or more to get natural traffic. That means you need to advertise and that could be expensive. For new people with a limited budget, this might not be a way to go. But if you have time on your hand then I would suggest this model and start right now !
Membership site internet business model
I guess this is the holy grail of internet marketing. A site where people pay you ££ per month to join and be in your merry band. Once you have the customer they will keep paying you month after month and the fact is hardly anyone cancels. The cancellation only really occurs when they change credit card because its expired and then you are unlikely to get them to re-subscribe. So you have a maximum of 3 years to get the cash and rather than having to get new customers every day you have instant ready repeat customers on hand.
Affiliate marketing internet business model
This was also an easy way to make money. Advertise someone else product online and send the visitor who clicked on the adsense ad over to your affiliate site with your affiliate id in the URL. Once someone purchased from the site you sent them to then 50% of the sale came over to you. This was great when no one really knew about promoting other people’s products via adsense and when the adsense clicks were fairly priced. Of course now competition has set in, Google has said that the highest bidder can only send traffic to a certain url (so you have to buy a domain name of your own and send them to a landing page now) and of course people are offering their own bonuses for this also.
There are still niches to look out for - worth a dabble, but just be careful on how much you spend with adwords and monitor everything you do.
Adwords internet business model
This is now probably one of the hardest areas to make any money in if you are new and don’t know what you are doing. Basically this involves developing a massive site (thousands of pages) of articles/ content and placing google adwords on the site. The basis of this is that the site must rank in google or other search engines so that you can get high rankings and tons of traffic. Because you are not going for repeat visitors on these sites - just in/ click and out.
For these sites to work you need a high volume of traffic to your site and carefully tweaked adsense placement. Getting the traffic is the hardest part because Google also knows about article sites and duplicate content. Before there were a lot of “scraper sites” that just took other people’s content and republished as their own. Google starting taking action last year and none of these appear in the SERPs any longer. In fact, not many article sites appear either - which is good, because this makes the user experience a poor one and if that is the case people will turn to other search engines.
SEs such as MSN have a much harder job in combatting spam so you may get joy over there.
So those are four business models that could make you money online. The best way to think about your internet business is like any other business. No other business dominates its sector overnight so why should the internet ones ?
