Being low on barrier of entry, online business opens up to a lot of interesting mix of business models to choose from.

There are several key points that characterized the models and here are some of them:

• Owning your own website or none.
• Market own products or other people’s products.
• Market digital(downloadable) or physical products.

Do I Have To Have My Own Website?

To some this is one scary area to go into especially if you’ve never created a website in your whole life. In reality this is not an issue at all since:

• You can be successful in online business without ever having to own a single website. However you’re losing the ability to build your brand.
• If a website is needed, hiring a freelancer for the job is very affordable nowadays.
• There are wizard based tools that can help you create websites even if you know nothing about HTML, FTP etc.
• With a little learning, you can create websites using easy-to-use software tools.

What Do I Sell?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions among the newbies! And it is one tough question to answer since there are so many things to choose from. Basically, you could sell anything under sun :)

• Selling ads space on your website or blog.
• The quickest would be for you to promote other people’s products.
• Acquire products with resell rights and resell them.
• Turn private label right(PLR) products into your own and market them.
• Create & sell your own products.

The list was generally arranged in easy-to-difficult order and by no means is exhaustive. So if you’re just starting out, you may want to begin from the top and move downwards as you become more proficient.

Physical or Digital Product?

This is very much your personal choice but most experts would recommend downloadable(info products or digital) route. Why?

It is one of the most lucrative owing to the fact that:

• There is no need for physical inventory, therefore no capital is tied up.
• Sales process can be easily automated so order fulfillment requires very little to no manual intervention – it goes on auto-pilot.
• Profit margins are typically higher than physical products. Made possible by very low cost needed to reproduce or duplicate informational products.

Now, I am not saying that physical merchandizes are out of the game altogether, no. They too can offer a very good return if done correctly since demands for them are always there.

So do your homework well before jumping on.

Pick Your Strategies

Before embarking on a business model, decide on a strategy of your choice. Here are some of the choices you need to make:

• selling stuff to random visitors.
• build mailing lists.
• build continuity(membership) sites.

This is highly important as your income level will depend a lot on which one you choose or all of them altogether.