How to Start a Successful Internet Business

Starting a successful internet business can take two main forms: Selling physical goods, or; Selling digital goods.

Selling physical goods is easily accomplished by using either: In the simplest example, a PayPal payment button on the product's web page, or: A fully functional e-commerce website.

In the first example, all you need to do is create an account at PayPal and go to the button designer, where you enter product details such as, title, description, price and so on. PayPal will then create the html for you to embed into your web page. That's it.

In the second example, the fully functional e-commerce website, I recommend using osCommerce, which is free and open source. It is often shipped as a free of charge extra by some hosting companies. I recommend you take this path. Doing so will enable you to click the button and build a shop in moments. You will be given a shop front URL and a shop counter URL, where you configure your store and add products etc. Of course you can still use your PayPal email address for payment, but additionally, its possible to build an entire shop, do the graphics and add terms and conditions pages and get the site running in less than an hour. Adding your products will take extra. The best part is that you don't need to stock any products, you can sell using a drop-shipping supplier, all using other people's money. Yes that's right, every item you sell, less the trade invoice value is profit and most suppliers will give you 30 day payment terms too.

As far as income is concerned, well I have three e-commerce sites, all in carefully selected niche markets: The first shop has been live for 2 years, the second 1 year and the third about 3 months, I dont use cost per click (CPC) advertising as this just attracts ?tire kickers? and costs money. In fact instead of each visitor costing me $1, each visitor brings me $1. Between them the income is in the region of $1800 per month. I make between 30 - 50% on this figure, so clearly another few shops and my mortgage is paid for. I stock no products, all orders are full filled by the supplier, (drop-shipping).

In addition to e-commerce shops selling physical goods, I sell ?digital products? using sales page and a PayPal payment button as before, but encrypted with a redirect URL to send customers to my thankyou page after payment. Here a customer can download the digital product in a secure download area or sign up to a membership site. Your product, an e-book or membership website access can be filled with great advice, and each supplier recommend within is linked using an affiliate link. This brings you even more income (a back-end income) after you have sold your product.

The income from digital products are not affected by the costs of manufacture, each file is copied when downloaded, so your profits (less hosting fees) are close to 100%. Sales can be significantly higher when using an affiliate program and marketing the site and affiliate program to super affiliates (those having email lists of in excess of 50,000). These individuals will market your product to their lists, creating (at a conversion rate of 2.5% for a $97 product) in the region of potentially $120,000.00 from a single email campaign.