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Define Your Business

In general the internet facilitate business in the following ways;

1. Supporting an existing bricks-and-mortar business

Any business that doesn't have a supporting website is missing a trick. A well-designed site establishes credibility with your customers and tells them how to get in touch with you.

2. Selling physical goods

Many businesses depend entirely on the internet. Majority of ecommerce is now conducted through companies who have no physical shop front. Imagine how much it will cost you to set up a physical shop. ecommerce technologies have helped cut down the cost of setting up stores for online retailers. There are technologies that can help with stock management, product display and payment processing at a low price.

The choice is yours to choose between having these technologies built into a website or employing services like eBay shops or Amazon Marketplace to sell you products. With the right software, you are a step closer to making your business a success.

Remember: Having the right software with an efficient sales process is not enough. If the product isn't right, the best shop in the world won't succeed!!!

3. Selling services

You might also use the internet to sell your own internet-related skills. For example, if you're a web designer or web developer, you should have a website!!! Your personal website is the first proof of what you can do and what you have done.

4. Selling downloads

Selling downloads is a business built around, ''making money by selling tiny quantities of thousands of items''. Selling of music files, games, ebooks and so on fall into this category. The most exciting thing about this category is that you do not to send any physical goods by courier.

5. Selling online services

There is a huge market for online services. If you find a web application online that can drastically reduce the time and effort you put into completing a task, won't you pay to use it? So start thinking in the line of 'what web application can I develop that can make life easier for people'

6. Selling information

Enroll in almost any internet marketing guru's training course, and one method of making money will be pushed more than any other: INFORMATION PRODUCTS in the forms of PDFs, eBooks, seminars MP3, and video. They can be very quick to get into place, and they can be naturally slotted into Google's search engine so that you know the people visiting your site are actually looking for the information you want to sell.

Having said that, information products have their problems. The most fundamental of these is that web users increasingly expect information to be free. To charge for a product, you need to convince potential customers you can offer information that's not freely available elsewhere and that you are an expert in the relevant field.

However, if you have specialist knowledge that you believe others will pay for then an information business can be easy to set up and highly profitable.

Exercise

Ask yourself the question, 'what category does my business fall into?' Knowing the answer to that will give you clarity about what you want to build and help develop a plan.