Top Business Ideas you need to know to succeed online
Internet is booming right now. According to a private study, there are more than a billion people online at a given time. Since Internet never sleeps, it has become a viable business opportunity for small businesses and corporations alike. During the year of 2008, a combined amount of $40 billion was spent and as time passes, it is becoming a well-structured, economy boosting phenomenon.
Small businesses are booming on Internet right now. People have made millions of dollars online selling all kind of products. In fact, more and more people in U.S, U.K, Australia and India are going online to buy all type of products ranging from, needles to cars.
The Web is becoming deeply collaborative, allowing people to work simultaneously on the same tasks at the same time (example is project collaboration application such as BaseCamp). Many of the new success stories are riding on the powers of social networking (think the very popular MySpace.com); while others rely on user-driven content to create useful resources (great example is Wikipedia). The New Web has turned instant messaging into a crude application with the more powerful instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging applications (Skype is a perfect example). It also allows for getting content here and there and mixing-and-matching them into unique content (Technorati puts together blogs and feeds in one easy to search site).
Experts are all abuzz in defining this next stage of the Internet, calling it anywhere from Web 2.0 to Live Web to Next Net. Whatever name this new Web is called, it is important for small online entrepreneurs to catch on and learn how to spot opportunities with the changes. The new Web is full of new business models, and what Business 2.0 magazine calls, “oceans of new opportunity”. All it takes is the ability to see a new way of using the Net to enhance every day living.
Consider the following online business ideas and put on your thinking cap. You might never know which service business ideas would click and make bunch of money for you:
The Content Portal – user generated content
This is a unique small business idea that has the potential to turn into big business. The content portal will be all about users. Since user generated content is hugely on demand. Think of ezinearticles.com, photobucket and youtube. If you can merge all of them together, you got a winner right here. Imagine hundreds and thousands of people upload articles, books, images, pictures, videos and audio pod casts on your site. How many pages will you get from this? Unlimited! So you can put advertisements, Google Adsense on them and earn loads of money instantly.
The monetization opportunities are unlimited. Think about it for a second. You have people producing page upon page of their own content and you are putting advertisements on each one of them; Google Adsense, CPA (Cost per Action) ads, CPM ads, banners from advertisers. All of this can generate a lot of money for you and for your users.
The user generated content is high in demand. People love to post their content online and they need more space for that. You give them what they want and give them advertiser money too. This way, you can earn loads of money yourself by having a share of advertisers’ money.
Niche Specific Business
There are hundreds of thousands of businesses online. Most of them cater to all the people visiting internet. You can start with an idea only specific to a niche. For example, if you want to have an online marketplace for professionals like elance.com or odesk.com, you can make it niche specific like developing a marketplace for airline professionals only or for car mechanics. Human services are the most profitable arena which can provide a lot of growth. If people know they can find a certain professional on a specific marketplace, they’d get there and find one for themselves. People need services and there is a lot of potential in niches. For example, computer repairs is a profitable niche. You can start a marketplace where people can find computer technicians in their area and hire them to do computer repairs. You charge a small percentage of a fee and voila! You have a profitable business to run.
Similarly, you can build a social networking site like facebook or MYspace.com for a specific group of people. For example, they are a lot of people interested in owning a camera or camcorder. You can setup a social networking site for cameras and camcorder enthusiasts where they can chat and network with like-minded people. The possibilities are endless.
Free User services – Networking
Free User services have a lot of potential. Don’t under-estimate the power of free user services. Take an example of twitter.com. Twitter allows people to post blurbs; what they are doing right now and other people can follow them. Imagine having millions of people doing that. You can start a site where people can talk about their businesses and other people will follow them and listen to their ramblings and information they are pouring in their blurbs. This way you get a lot of people visiting your site, hence, millions of monetization opportunities come across and you earn serious money.
Another example of networking is social bookmarking services. Take an example of stumbleupon.com. They earn a million dollars a year by offering specialized services for people who want to put their content across the site and reach million of people.
Important Tip: You give advertisers and marketer what they want (reaching masses) and give masses what they need (new product announcements, things making their life easier) and you have a winner right here.
Another way to offer user services is to create a website where people can ask for help from each other. Take an example of answers.yahoo.com. People will flock to sites like this and you get traffic. You can monetize the traffic in anyway you want once you start getting traffic on your site. It’s all about helping people in a unique way and they oblige you by watching advertisers on the pages which puts money in your pocket. Simple rule, right!
Good article.
See, having a website isn\’t going to help your business at all if it doesn\’t show up extremely high in Google\’s search results. Anytime a person searches for something on Google, Google will return a page with the top ten websites they consider most relevant to the search term. The average person who\’s looking for a carpet cleaner in Kalamazoo, or a wedding photographer in Boise, isn\’t going to dig through pages and pages of Google\’s search results. Furthermore, when someone does a Google search for a local business, if your website isn\’t on that first page of results, the odds are very high that they\’re NOT going to click on your website to see what you have to offer.
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