Friday, May 15, 2009

Online business: How to thrive during a recession

By Ina Hikmatullah

There are reports on it every day. The recession seems to be getting deeper, and even though there may be hope in the future, one thing definitely seems to ring true: Its going to get worse before it gets better.

Using the Web as the foundation for your business means almost no startup costs. Once you have hosting and a domain name, youve already covered all the necessary expenses of building your presence online. Compare that to the complications of owning or renting a building. Plus, doing all your business from a building makes you geographically limited. Put your business on the Internet, and its accessible to everyone. Everyone is a pretty big demographic to target, isnt it? It means more chances to make more sales, and more sales means what?.... Exactly!, more money. Give yourself a gold star.

Of course, sending products all over the globe will give your online business its own share of problems. After all, that means that you have to contend with the hassle of keeping track of your own inventory, shipping the product, dealing with refunds and damage, etc. Thats not fun, and fortunately, its not the only way to make money online. (Theres a new way to hustle the Internet everyday, let me tell you.)

The smartest online business in the modern world is, and probably will be for some time, the creation and sale of eBooks. By writing an informative book, converting it to PDF format, and then putting it on your website for download, you essentially are creating a product that isnt even physical " the user pays for the privilege of downloading, and goes ahead and receives the product immediately. It really cant get too much better than that. After the initial effort of writing and compiling your eBook, you can leave the effort finding customers to affiliates, which I will touch on in a bit.

Some of the hottest commodities in online business right now are distributed electronically. Things like programs, site memberships, and perhaps most famously, downloadable PDF files or eBooks absolutely run the online marketplace. If you are selling information right now, or writing an informative book on a subject, forget about publishers. Forget about royalties, forget about everything that has thus far made writing a book an obstacle. Once your book is written and for sale on the internet, you can get people to promote your product for you, called affiliate marketers. They only make their money, a percentage, only after a sale, so essentially they only make money when you do. It doesnt get much more risk-free than that.

Theres websites like Elance.com or Guru.com that really tear down any knowledge-based barrier to entry that you can think of. If you think that you can sell a certain type of eBook to a certain type of market, you can find someone (usually for less than $400) to make that eBook real. Because the product is ghostwritten, you can even say that you wrote it if you want to. (Sometimes writers demand rights to the product, but thats beyond the scope of this piece.)

Finally, one other kind of online business that Im going to mention is creating informative websites. If there is a subject that you are knowledgeable about, publishing a site, or more popularly, a blog, on the subject, developing a loyal reader base, and then being paid to run advertisements can be a rewarding way of earning extra income on autopilot. This recession may really be an online business opportunity.

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