We had been Discussing various ways you could leverage the Internet as a new channel to conduct business in and you could take a quick look at the previous two posts on the series Evergreen Online Business Ideas Part -1  and Evergreen Online Business Ideas Part 2.

Inching ahead, we shall look at some more ways using which you can start your own business, from the comfort of your own home :

• Affiliate Marketing Business :Contrary to what most people would have told you about affiliate marketing it isn’t as simple as some people would rather like you to believe. It is just as tough as any other job is and would involve a lot more than putting up a website with banners and links and thinking that you can get away with it. It is a full time business and has a lot going into it, a lot more than you can possibly fathom at this stage. While some affiliate programs don’t require you to even own websites, this business would still require you to have one. You can get one here today. You would obviously need to join forces with either shareasale.com, linkshare.com, commission junction and ( or) clickbank and create links pertaining to a few listed merchants who have something to sell which has some kind of relevance to the stuff that you talk about on your website and get awarded in cash usually . Appropriate content has to be input in a timely and consistent manner, which would in turn lead to increasing traffic and hence more opportunities to make money , other than the direct affiliate commissions which should have become your staple income by now.
• Niche Product Sales:There is a possibility of turning your website into a raging, high-traffic pulling virtual market place. If there are already quite a few on the Internet, you might have to think about a niche. Something you might enjoy abd something that has the potential to make profits. If you had loved buying DVDs or Music CDs for yourself, you might probably want to set up a virtual marketplace only in this niche area. Focus, high-volumes, low-cost sourcing and superb customer support would become your ultimate strengths in running your business.
• Community Sites :There has always been a need for being together, as a part of the society for humans. It probably explains the rapid rise of sites like orkut, myspace and facebook. However, they lack any specific agenda - a niche. You could think of a very narrow, focused theme for your community site, something like an online N.G.O, a site only for students, a site only for a specific language, for a game. It is only limited by our imagination and if you had loved it, there are chances that there would be others too. The revenue of course would come from membership fee, advertising and donations( if it is an N.G.O or something that is on for a social cause). You would however have to come up with something good enough to sustain respectable membership base and recurring traffic.

Resources :

Here are a few related reading material I had found while searching the Internet and it had been quite an eye opener for me. Hope you would find them useful too.

1. http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.htm
2. http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw05/papers/refereed/featherstone/paper.html
3. http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/pdf/wp226.pdf
4. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=305717
5. http://www.online-publishers.org/pdf/paid_content_report_030905.pdf

Here’s wishing you all the success there is to be and Do let me know if you have more ideas that you could possibly share with us !:-)

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