Setting up an online business is nothing new, consider the amount of new
sites going live every day and you can be sure more than just a few of them
going to produce some type return on investment. You can increase the odds of a
positive return by selecting from a proven and simple revenue model such as
advertising banners on a
free dating site or using adsense and google on
a free realestate
site or selling a service such
SEO and development. Travel is another huge
online industry that returns commissions to website operators for traffic
referrals that convert to a booking or sale.
Retail has been established online for years now with sites like amazon.com
and the huge auction site ebay one of the biggest sites online. For the new
players to the online world there are many established sites to study and model
your web business on. Many of the hard lessons have already been learned and a
wealth of information is available for those willing to seek it out and benefit
from the experience of others.
Clearly you don't have to have an established business to make money online,
affiliate sales make up a huge percentage of online sales with many companies
becoming specialists in this lucrative field of online enterprise. Typically a
market and a product or service will be identified and the online affiliate will
source traffic
and funnel into their own website as a conduit to the main site. The customer is
tracked along the way via a code and any purchase is tracked and credited to the
affiliate who is in turn paid a pre determined percentage of that sale. It's a
very good system and there are thousands of niche industries now running
affiliate programs for the products and services they offer. In effect there is
something for almost everyone who has aspirations of selling to their online
audience.
Another popular method is paid banner placement on your site, you simply
charge an advertiser for the amount of impressions or click thrus on their
banner placed on your site. Selling impressions in my opinion is the least fair
with banner ads, click thru advertising represents better value for the
advertiser as they only pay when a customer has a genuine interest in the
product or service being advertised. I've been burned on impression advertising
before, the numbers sound impressive but if you have a product such as blue
widgets on a site where people are only looking for bright red widgets then sure
your going to get lots of impressions but not many clicks. The result is the
advertiser is not delivering value to the client and so the client only gets
caught once.
Adsense is googles way of giving back to the people! The adsense program
allows website owners to display google PPC ads on their sites and then pays
then an undisclosed percentage of the going click through price. I've heard of
some big cheques being written by google to their advertisers and some of the
high paying keyword industries can deliver impressive single click prices if you
have the right type of traffic. Examples include finance, medical, hosting, real
estate and travel. Be prepared to forever wonder exactly how much google is
actually making off your traffic if you adopt this model and always consider
going direct to the advertiser if you have enough traffic, you may in fact make
a lot more this way!