Three Different Types Online Businesses and How to Start?
You can start an online business with a blog or website; a blog is just like a website with a single web page of entry. Basically to sell online, you’ll need to choose a niche and target group to sell to, and then create or find products/services that will meet the needs of targets in your chosen niche, and also create content and ads to promote the products/services you wish to sell in the niche.Blog or Ecommerce website?
A blog helps you start online business immediately, especially if you are on a shoe-string budget, while a e-commerce website gives you more flexibility in promoting your products/services.For online businesses that need ecommerce facilities, a blog may not be sufficient. For example if you’re going to set up a store and set up custom processing/functions with your store, you’ll actually need a website to be able to implement that effectively.
Three Different Types of online busineses
You can sell on the internet as:- Merchant
- Store owner
- Affiliate
A merchant is the product owner, while an affiliate sells for the merchant to earn commissions or fee. A merchant will probably set up his own website with an ecommerce gateway to receive money for orders placed on his site.
A store owner is just like an affiliate except for the fact that, a store owner may also keep inventory or stocks of the merchant’s product. Sometimes store owner will use a drop shipping service. In that case, they don’t have to stock the products. All the shipping will done by the drop ship supplier. In most cases the merchant will be the drop ship supplier.
Affiliates don’t need a shopping cart to accept money, because they redirect the traffic to the merchant and will earn commission from the sales. Affiliate will earn commissions/fees from the following advertising programs:
- cost-per action (CPA),
- cost-per-mille (CPM)
- cost-per-click (CPC)
CPA programs pay affiliates for every sale made through the affiliate or each lead sent to the merchant’s website, while CPM pays per every one thousand views of advertisers’ ads/content and CPC pays for every valid click on advertisers’ ads.
Different advertising material for each business type explained
Whether you are an affiliate, merchant or store owner, you will need to promote your online business using different advertising material to make money.Store owners generally will need an online store where they can keep an inventory of all the items they have in-stock for web visitors. Some might be using a drop ship supplier to fulfil their shipping and packaging needs.
A merchant will create the advertising and content for the promotion of his products. A merchant will even create banner and promotional material for the affiliate and store owners that are selling for him.
The affiliate and the store owner will have to create their own content to promote the products they sell. If there are no advertising material available for a merchant’s products, the affiliate and store owner have to create one for themselves.
Powerful Online Marketing Methods That You Should Know
You can promote your online business on the internet with the following methods:- Article marketing
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media Marketing
- Facebook marketing
- Twitter marketing
- Blog marketing
Unlike SEO, Pay Per Click is where you pay for clicks on your listings in the search engines and the PPC affiliate websites. The most popular one and also the most expensive one is Google Adwords. Google will display your text links in the search engine and his own advertising networks. You can reach millions of visitors immediately.
Social Bookmarking as a viral marketing
You may also use social media marketing such as social shopping sites and social bookmarking to attract more visitors to your website. Social bookmarking is where you bookmark your website content on the social bookmarking sites to share with other readers. It’s an indirect way to promote your products.Additionally, you can help your web visitors to share and vote your website to social bookmarking websites such as digg.com, reddit.com, and stumbleupon.com. You can do this by adding social bookmarking tools to your web page content.
