So you want to be an expand your business through marketing on the internet but you don’t know where to start?

Join the club! Internet marketing is an industry with a huge amount of appeal for all manner of reasons. Once you understand how online marketing works, you can actually set up a simple business model in a matter of days that can generate additional revenue streams as you go about your business.

But the real trick to succeeding in this endeavour and creating a business model that works? That would be to choose the right strategy. There are countless business models available to wannabe entrepreneurs and if you’re keen to become a digital marketer, the key is just to select the business model that best appeals to you and that plays to your specific strengths.

In this 5-minute strategy guide, we’ll go over eight different business models that you can try out for generating cash online. We’ll look at how each business model works and at how to get started and from there you can set about making a choice and earning your millions!

Models for Growing Your Business Online

#1 Creating and Monetizing a Blog

One of the most straightforward and well known internet marketing business models is to create a blog and to start marketing it. There have been countless success stories that started out this way, from Slash Gear, to Smart Passive Income, to The Art of Manliness.

The basic model involved here is simple: you build and audience and then use that influence to sell products of your own or belonging to third parties. The more traffic you get on a regular basis, the more revenue you’ll be able to generate for your own products or the more you’ll be able to charge advertisers to promote their wares on your blog.

The main tool you’ll use to build your website or blog will like be Samex. This streamlines the process of creating a website and actually makes it possible to create your site in just a few clicks and a few minutes. From there, Samex gives you tight control over the look of your blog and its capabilities all using tried and tested code that has helped countless other blogs to earn a small fortune.

The next challenge is to build your audience and the best way to do this is through content marketing. Content marketing means regularly adding blog posts and articles to your site in order to provide value. These should be entertaining, interesting or useful in order to offer that value and they should help you to build trust with your audience and gain subscribers.

Content marketing will also help you to rank higher on Google (Google looks for websites rich in content) and will help you to get your site shared on social media. Eventually, you should get to the point where you’re getting thousands of views daily at which point you can monetize by adding AdSense to your site, by creating and promoting your own products, by selling affiliate products, or by finding paid adverts to display.

#2 Information Products

So what kind of product might you choose to sell from a successful blog? Most commonly, this will likely be an information product and a digital product. That means something that shares information and that can be downloaded without any production costs or delivery costs. Common examples include eBooks, email courses, video courses, PDF ‘reports’ and online seminars.

The great thing about this model is that you make almost 100% on each sale and as long as your product has a clear target audience and a clear ‘value proposition’ you’ll usually find it’s fairly easy to make sales.

Your main asset in this is going to be your ‘sales page’. This is a page on your website dedicated to selling that one product. It should use a straightforward, narrow layout and have lots of buttons linking to your checkout. More importantly, it should utilize persuasive sales copy that encourages people to want to buy. To create your information product you can either build it yourself (which often just means using Microsoft Word) or you can outsource the process using a site like UpWork or Fiverr.

#3 Affiliate Products

The only downside to selling an information product is the risk. You can spend a long time or a lot of money creating the product and then find no one wants it.

Selling an affiliate product however mitigates this risk and is more appealing to some people for a number of reasons. Essentially, becoming an affiliate means that you’re selling a product for commission. This means you’ll be promoting something like an eBook on behalf of a product creator and then getting a cut of the profit. What makes this so appealing though is that your cut will often be 50-75%. That means you can often expect to keep the lion’s share of the profit! Better yet, you can choose a product with a chosen track record of selling well, meaning that you are more guaranteed to make sales. So there’s really zero risk!

In order to sell an affiliate product, you need to join an affiliate network where you’ll be able to browse through products. The most popular options here are JVZoo, Clickbank or Commission Junction. From here, you can apply to sell a product you find and then be given an affiliate link. This is a URL that directs people to where they can buy the product while simultaneously leaving a cookie on their computer to show that you sent them. Thus, whatever they buy will be added to your account.

Your job then is simply to try and get more people to click that link and buy. You can do this through a sales page, through blog posts or even by adding the link to flyers!

#4 CPA Networks

Joining a CPA network is a little like joining an affiliate network but with a slight difference. The basic idea is that you publish ads on your website and then get paid when someone clicks on those ads and goes on to take an action. Taking an action could mean buying a product, or it could mean signing up to a mailing list or joining a membership site.

Either way, you get paid only once they have been converted, which means that the advertisers can afford to pay you much more. At the same time though, this removes much of the hassle involved in affiliate marketing because you can simply publish the ads without having to directly communicate with the advertisers.

Big CPA networks include MaxBounty, Clickbooth, Peerfly among others. The hard part is often getting accepted into the network. The best way to do this is to ensure that you have a great website that you can show them and to consider calling to speak to someone in person.

#5 Subscription Websites

How about making money from your website directly and without the need for a product? This is actually possible if you look into adding a paywall to your site and subscribers’ area. This might mean that your readers can get more detailed information, or it might mean they gain access to your community via a forum.

Either way, you should aim to make your subscribers feel exclusive and like VIPs. Now the quality of your blog posts will become more important than ever too as this is what’s going to serve as the free example of what you’ll be offering if they sign up.

#6 Software

If you’d rather sell something a bit more original and interesting then another type of digital product is software. Software has the distinct advantage over eBooks that it can’t be found free elsewhere online and that it provides a tangible service or outcome.

There are many different types of software you can create and sell. Perhaps the simplest and most straightforward option is to create a mobile app such as an Android or iOS app. This will likely still mean outsourcing to a developer but if you keep the concept simple you should find this isn’t too expensive or too long a process.

Another type of software you can create though is the ‘SaaS’ model. This essentially means that you’ll be creating a website that provides a specific service or that acts as a tool and then charging for membership. This is something that sites like Feedly and Evernote do well.

Creating a SaaS model though can be quite difficult. That’s because you need to build not only the site but also the underlying code to handle the data and this all needs to be transferred between the server and the users’ computers. In turn, that means you’re going to need a ‘full stack developer’ who understands multiple types of code and who has experience working with servers and server operating systems. This is potentially a highly lucrative business model but it is perhaps not something that’s suitable for your first online business model!

#7 eBay

If all this is sounding rather confusing and alien to you though, then perhaps you’d be better off using a more traditional business model selling a physical product.

eBay is perfect for this and provides multiple different options for earning money and creating your business. Any product you can think of, you can sell on eBay and that means that you can turn any hobby or craft into a lucrative side business.

Enjoy painting? Making jewelry? Sculpting? Creating furniture? Any of these skills can be used to create things you sell on eBay and this can be very rewarding. You should also look into Etsy.

If you don’t have a marketable skill? Another option in this case is to sell products you’ve bought at a profit. Normally, this means you’ll be buying products wholesale (in bulk) and then selling them individually at 100% mark-up. Order a batch of items that have a broad appeal and then sell them at a profit. From there, you can then reinvest your profit into a larger order and so on to scale your business and your profits.

#8 Drop Shipping

Finally, we have drop shipping – which many people consider the ‘perfect business model’.
The basic idea behind drop shipping is to sell products directly for the manufacturers or wholesalers and then to pass on the delivery details. That means you don’t need to worry about order fulfillment or manufacturing but most drop shipping services are ‘private label’ meaning that your customers will never know that you’re not stocking the items yourself.

This is a perfect system because you get to act like a regular online ecommerce store but you don’t have to worry about the fiddly bits. The hard part is just finding manufacturers and wholesalers that are willing to offer this service. The answer is just to search long and hard and not to be afraid to occasionally pick up the phone!

Conclusion

In our incubator learning program, we’ll go into each of these models in much more detail to show you all the tools and strategies you need to succeed. This little overview though should show you how many different options there are for earning money online. One of them is sure to appeal to you, so it’s just a matter of finding which one and capitalizing on it!

And once you’ve done that, the question is how you’re going to scale by taking on additional business models or repeating your winning formula. The sky is the limit and there’s nothing stopping you from scaling as far as you can imagine!