Canadian Finance Blog

How To Start An Internet Business From Home

Posted: 28 Oct 2010 02:00 AM PDT

There are two ways you can start an internet business from home to make money online (well, for the sake of this post at least); you can either sell something or you can become an infopreneur… maybe you can even do both.

Selling products

This is the obvious one of course, and there are many different ways to go about selling products online. Selling on eBay is a popular option, the traffic is already ready and waiting to purchase if you can offer the right products – the key to making money on eBay is price, if you know where to find in demand products at steep discounts, you can make a great profit.

An alternative to become an eBay discounter is to become a specialist. The internet is a wonderful place to find hard to get products – niche is big business if you know your market. Try to think of something that you know a lot about, think about what interests you and what products you like to buy.

Some fantastic businesses have been started based around what many people would consider obscure markets, but if you know your market the path less trodden is often the route to riches… or at least a decent few bucks.

Becoming an infopreneur

In the world we live in nowadays, people have information overload. The value of attention is at a premium. Becoming an infopreneur means leverage your personal knowledge and experiences (or hiring someone else’s) to attract the attention, and loyalty of the public.

It really is true that if you can build the traffic, making money is almost trivial… But first you have to figure out how to provide the value that will bring that traffic. Build traffic first and you can make your money however you like: Adsense, eBay affiliate, Amazon… etc.

Putting it all together

The great thing is this: whichever option you choose, you can try the other option too. The two models can work synergisticly together, by attracting traffic with great products and with great content, building communities and managing customer relationships…

So if you start out with a blog for instance, with a solid base of traffic and loyal readers who trust you and want to hear what you have to say, why not set up shop? You probably know your audience pretty well by this point, so you are already perfectly qualified to offer them the right niche products.

Going the other way, how about starting a niche eBay business… you’ll soon get to know your products pretty well, and you’ll learn all of the questions that people have about them. This is the perfect launch pad for an information rich website. You are already building customers, so what better way to build relationships than by offering your customers great advice and helpful content?

What’s the best choice?

So that’s what it all comes down to then. You make money by finding the right products and taking them to where the traffic is, or you can build your own traffic and monetize it later. So try to figure out what you can do best: Find products and serve customers, or build traffic and grow a community, then go make some money.

Author Bio: Mark Johnson writes for The Business Nomad, an entrepreneurs guide to escaping it all.

How To Start An Internet Business From Home originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on October 28, 2010.