The beginning 

All businesses, online and offline, work on the same principles. If you get these right, you have a sustainable business.

• Get customers through the door


• Make them an offer


• Swap your product for their money

These three elements are like to legs of a stool. If any one of the three is missing, you end up with a wonky stool.

There's no point in having thousands of customers if you don't have anything to sell to them.

It's no good having a great product and tons of customers if you make the offer in a way that doesn't get people to buy.

You can have thousands of customers and a terrific offer, but if you're selling a shoddy product, you'll ultimately fail.

Every website on the Internet is selling something. Even if it's just exchanging your time for the opportunity to plant some ideas.

Alright. How do we go about building a terrific Internet business?

One way to start is affiliate marketing. There are a number of people who have become extremely rich just by marketing other people's products. Some of the advantages of affiliate marketing are these:

1. You don't need to create your own product. You'll be helping to sell someone else's product.



2. Once you've selected the right product to market, you can concentrate on building traffic (getting customers) and pre-selling (making an offer).



3. You don't need any employees. You might find it useful to look at outsourcing once you're making some money, but to start out, one person can do the work.



4. You don't need any sales stock. Since you're not selling physical products, there's no need for inventory or shipping. The merchant takes care of that.



5. You don't have to worry about customer service. The merchant has to take care of that. The worst that can happen is that a disgruntled customer might complain that you recommended a product that he didn't like.



6. You don't have to deal with customers money at all. That means you need no credit card merchant account, shopping cart or any of that stuff.



7. Affiliate marketing is relatively low risk. If a particular product doesn't sell, you simply switch your recommendation to something else instead.



8. You can do it from anywhere in the world. Affiliate marketing is a truly portable business. All you need is a laptop and an Internet connection.
   

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Share Your Simple Internet Business Experiences 

Junyuan Great lens there with very good information on how to start an online business. This is definitely a 5-star lens for me. Great stuff! You may want to check out my lens on Jumpstart Internet Marketing, where I reveal 5 simple steps for anyone to start making their first dollar online without spending a single cent. You may also want to consider adding your lens to my Internet Marketing directory to get more traffic to your lens. Cheers! ;) Posted June 04, 2008