The key online business models are listed below, though there are many variations of these general approaches. See our in-depth articles for various models in the Internet Biz articles.

Internet Business Models

1. Virtual Store: Sell products through your own eCommerce site that are drop shipped by the manufacturer to your customers.
2. Digital Store: Sell digital products that your customers can download through your own eCommerce site.
3. Affiliate Marketing: Earn income as an affiliate that advertises products for a specific industry or niche and link to merchant sites.
4. Online Auctions: Selling products through an online auction, such as eBay or on your own site.
5. Freelance Services: Sell freelance services online through eLance, Rent-A-Coder and similar outsourcing sites.
6. Technical Provider: Provide technical services, such as web hosting, selling domains or setting up content management systems, like WordPresss.
7. Content Sites: Build an authority content website that earns income by advertising with AdSense or other ad channels.
8. Membership Sites: Build an authority website that provides content unavailable elsewhere and charge a monthly subscription or membership fee.
9. Information Publishing: Write and sell eBooks and Private Label Rights (PLR) articles.
10. Blog Site: Create a blog about a topic in which you have expertise and monetize the blog through advertising.

How a Niche Content Site Works

The concept of a niche content site is to focus on a very narrow topic which can be centered around just about anything. Some content sites are about specific products or services while others center on news or opinion topics. There are also content sites which consist of informative types of training and how-to tutorials.

The platform used for a content site is often as simple as a blog site such as one based on WordPress or it can also be a complete website. The idea is to pack the site with as much content on a single topic as possible to elevate its visibility for search engines.

Making Money from Content

The more visibility the site has, the more advertising opportunities become available for the site owner. Google’s AdSense is one way to generate pay-per-click ad income from your content site. By signing up with the AdSense program, website owners, known as publishers, display ads on their site. Every time a visitor clicks on an ad, the publisher is paid a small amount. This can generate a substantial income only if the site has lots of traffic. If content site is strong enough, the publisher may also be able to sell direct ad spots on their site from other businesses.

Another important and popular way to monetize a content site is by writing eBooks on the site’s topic. These can range from “How to Bathe Your Dog” to “How to Sell Real Estate.” Publishers can write these books themselves or outsource the research and writing to an outsourcing service, like eLance. eBooks can then be sold on the site or through eBook sites like ClickBank and eJunkie.

Finding Your Content Niche

As a content publisher, you may want to select a topic you know well, but it’s important to research the marketability of your content. You can research the popularity of a topic in many ways: through the  AdWords keyword tool, by looking though the books on Amazon and by researching other content sites and blogs online. The idea is to find a unique angle for your content, a unique niche, or to fill a real and urgent need that people have. For example, a site that discusses how to select a retirement community might fill an urgent need. Some example content sites you’ll find on the Internet include:

• Travel to specific regions
• Movies of a specific genre
• Pets of a particular type
• Health, wellness or how to manage a specific condition
• Babies or Children

A content site will do the best when these topics are narrowed to a well defined sub-topic. Consider the pet topic where your content site might be about designer dogs, clothes for cats or having rats as pets. Childrens topics might range from American Sign Language for babies to Learning Toys for Children. The idea is to focus on a niche topic and maximize the amount of content.

The Pros and the Cons

One of the major benefits of a content site is the relative ease and low cost associated with starting, developing and maintaining the site. The difficulty with content sites centers on the constant chase for a niche. It is not unusual in the content business to identify a niche only to have competition crop up shortly infringing on your profit base.

Successful content site owners often have an entire portfolio of sites that can collectively create income which can be cumbersome to manage for some business owners. Obtaining all the necessary content to rise up in the ranks of search engines will also require knowledge and skills to write the content or resources to purchase the content from a freelance writer.

Content sites are a flexible and continuously growing business opportunity. The tools and technology in place to help a business owner select a profitable topic also makes the process a great option. A content site owner will also be able to expand their business profits in several ways including pay per click ads, direct customer advertising and by building an entire portfolio of niche topics.

Be sure to check out our Information Publishing Resources.

An alternative to hiring a freelance writer is private label rights material (PLR). With PLR, the buyer obtains content such as articles, newsletters, eBooks or even reports through a content provider or through an article directory selling the material. In contrast to traditionally written material where all the rights to an article are retained by the original author, a buyer of PLR material modifies the article according to his or her content needs and assumes authorship. Because multiple buyers generally have access to the same articles, it is a much cheaper source of web content for businesses.

PLR Business Opportunities

Herein lies the business opportunity. If you have writing skills and are willing to continually improve these skills, then creating and re-selling PLR material might be the Internet-based business for you. This is a growing market, thanks to the increased and continuous need for web content. A small business owner can use PLR for creating a business in the following ways:
• Create a business out of directly writing and re-selling content.
• Research high demand topics with low availability of material to find niche content that can receive higher dollar values in re-sale.
• Develop and manage a team of content writers who can readily provide material at a customer’s request or can support ongoing article directory entries.

Selling and distributing written material can be done independently through a writer’s website or offered through an article directory such as EzineArticles. A directory offers content on a wide range of topics. Payment is handled in various ways depending on the site but can be a mix of pay-per-click if the writer has included links to his or her own sites in the articles or it can be as simple as a flat rate per article.

Package Deals

Creating a package of PLR content can help a site owner with obtaining and driving website traffic. Individual articles can help to support email newsletters or web pages, but additional elements such as an eBook can create a cohesive PLR package for business. An eBook is an electronic version of a traditional book but is far cheaper to create and distribute. In terms of PLR, eBooks provide the opportunity to offer comprehensive material on a topic with customized sections for a business owner.

Pros and Cons

PLR can be a great source of material at a reasonable cost for business owners who do not have the knowledge, time or skills to create the content. One of the most difficult aspects of buying and selling PLR is finding high quality material. Many re-sellers are utilizing international sources to provide high volumes of cheap material but this can be at the expense of quality.

PLR articles provide an opportunity for business owners to quickly and inexpensively obtain content that will drive site traffic. Re-selling PLR content is also an opportunity to create a business focused on the development of content material including articles, newsletters and eBooks.

What is Google’s Content Network?

But the Content Network is different. Through the Google content network, you may be able to reach an unmatched amount of market segments, because your ads are not correlated to a search term. Instead, your ads are shown on various information sites, blogs and email newsletters—wherever a site publisher has contracted with Google to display AdWords ads (the program for the publisher is called AdSense). Your Internet business can optimize its advertising budget by understanding and utilizing the opportunities found with the AdWords content network.

Many of the same types of ads created for a typical search campaign can also be used with a content network campaign. There are no additional fees for adding a content campaign with a search network campaign. Google has built in the flexibility to allow advertisers to use both search engine and Content Network campaigns. Most experts in the field recommend keeping your search engine AdWords campaigns and your Content Network campaigns separate, so you can compare results and select the approach that provides the best return on investment for conversions.

Using Managed vs Automatic Placements

When you choose to use the Content Network, you’ll see options for selecting Managed Placements or Automatic Placements. With Managed Placements, you select which content network partners should show your ads, such as a particular blog or information site. This takes some research. Check out potential sites and see if the site is a good fit.

You can bid on a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) basis or keep the bidding structure you have for your search ad campaign. With Automatic Placements, you can opt out of being placed on identified partners and allow Google to select the best ad placement locations. Try both options and see which works best for you.

There are several reasons ad Managed Placements can help to optimize the advertising for a small business including:

• Advertisers can review analytics to determine which sites offer the most business for them and in turn focus their advertising dollars to increase their placements on that site
• An advertiser may know other partnering content network sites that they want to choose for placement, rather than leaving it to Google’s placement process.
• By reviewing the analytics to determine the best areas to target, business owners can optimize their spending by declining to be featured on sites that simply are not generating website traffic.

The key to using managed placements is using the data to help determine the best areas for your advertising spending.

On the other hand, the benefit in using Google’s Automatic Placement process is that it may link your ad to a site you would not have readily considered, which could drive significant traffic to your website. For a new Internet-based business, consider starting with Automatic Placements and trending information over time. Then use Managed Placement to focus on the highest volume sites.

Effectively using Google’s Content Network can generate high levels of visibility that might likely be out of reach for a small business. The ability to customize ads and focus on even the most specific product and market niches also allows business owners the opportunity to maximize their advertising dollars.

Essentially, you are selling advertising space for merchants to place ads on your website. These are ads that are supposed to be relevant to your site’s content pages. Sometimes AdSense does not display the best ads at first, but this situation can usually be fixed quickly. AdSense is popular with bloggers and with information sites. It may not be as good on eCommerce sites, as it could take away from the focus on your products.

AdSense only works as an income stream if the traffic to your site is high. And although it takes a while to build traffic to your site, you can have AdSense in place for when the traffic does increase. Here’s what the technical publisher, O’Reilly says about the likelihood of earning money from Adsense:

If your site gets tons of visitors, and you focus on a narrow topic, there’s a good chance Google will serve up ads that appeal to a lot of people hitting your site. For example, if you run a popular site devoted to mobile gadgetry, you might make enough to buy a new device every few months. If your site gets sporadic traffic, or more important, if it’s not clearly about something, it may be hard for Google to supply highly relevant ads, and you might make enough to cover a box of paper clips every so often.

There are many alternatives to AdSense, but this one might be the most well-known and well-used pay-per-click network because of Google’s high profile approach to search and advertising.

Learn more about AdSense here: www.google.com/adsense.

Related Article:
Get AdSense To Show The Right Ads

Keeping An Eye On CPM Data

Whether you are running a pay-per-click campaign or a pay-per-impression campaign, your analytics report will most likely show the CPM data. If you’re using AdWords, it’s important to analyze CPM for keywords, ads and ad groups for several reasons.

• Over time, you may discover that advertising by CPM is more cost-effective than advertising by CPC (cost per click). If you can save money and receive the same or better results, then you’ll want to pay by impression if your advertiser provides that option.
• Impressions are the basis for figuring out an ad’s Click Through Rate (CTR), which shows the ad’s success rate. CTR is determined by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. If an ad is has been clicked 30 times and was displayed 60,000 times, divide 30 by 6,000. This comes to .0005 or .05%.
• Knowing how often your ad was delivered will also help you determine how to raise the quality score, which comes from a tight correlation between the keyword and the ad, as well as other factors.

Thinking Beyond CPM Metrics

Remember that the real goal of your online business is to create value and a resulting income stream. Your impression and click through data is just a metric, one indicator you will use to measure the number of conversions occurring on your site.

Whether your goal is for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your blog or purchase your products, be sure to keep your eye on the real goal. Use the data to help you improve your keyword list, your ads and how you group them, your landing pages and copy. Most of all, continue to improve the value you’re providing to visitors.

This is because Aweber has agreements with the largest Internet Service Providers that it will uphold the anti-spam laws. The company insists that your email lists are built from customers who purposefully opt-in and they closely track that no one is sending out spam.

Other AWeber Positives

In addition to getting your emails into the Inbox, AWeber provides lots of startup help through tutorials. When you first start out, it can be a bit overwhelming. You need a signup form on your webiste, an opt-in email and a thank you email. AWeber walks you through these steps with a wizard interface, which is nice. If you still need help (which we did) we were able to find it in the short video tutorials.

The other thing we liked about AWeber is that the help doesn’t stop there. There are free webinars and articles to teach you all about email marketing—the best times to send, how to track your results, whether to use plain text or html, etc.  They also provide great newsletter templates so you don’t have to design your own and administrative information so you can track how many people are reading your emails and clicking through to your site or other offers.

We also like the fact that many of the industry leaders recommend using AWeber and the pricing seems reasonable. We chose the full one-year plan rather than paying monthly, as it’s a way to save some money.

Start Building Your eMail List Now

Every time a potential customer contacts you or visits your site, if you don’t capture their email address by providing them with some type of intriguing offer, such as an email newsletter with important tips or a free download or coupons to their favorite stores, you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to build a relationship. With the opt-in approach that AWeber and similar services use, you can be assured that site visitors want to get your information. This is a great way to get targeted and loyal customers and to build a community.

To be honest, we did not compare AWeber with other services, other than for the pricing. We realize that other services will also suffice, but after hearing so many great recommendations, we decided to go with AWeber and become an affiliate for them too! See the AWeber features for yourself. Or fill out the Free Test Drive form below.

Outsourcing can be the best option for these situations, where an outside source is used to support business needs. Elance.com is an example of a website dedicated to connecting buyers (or business owners) with outsourced service providers.

How it Works

The Internet has created a direct path to high quality resources for small business owners through sites such as Elance.com. Experienced professionals can create Provider profiles detailing their experience and skills while businesses and individuals create Buyer profiles that show information regarding the type of services they are looking for. When a Buyer has a specific job, such as needing website design or articles for a blog, he or she can post the job on Elance and will in turn receive ‘bids’ for the work.

Elance differs from a job board, temporary agency or auction in the following ways:

• Buyers are not required to select the lowest bidder.
• The Buyer is able to have conversations and email exchanges with the Provider to ensure the match will work and then award the business accordingly.
• No official contract is required. The job can change as needed without having to use a temporary work contracting agency to manage the terms.
• Providers can be found easily without developing ads or paying membership fees to post.
• Elance fees for use are flexible based on the Buyer’s need.
• The entire transaction can take place electronically, allowing the Buyer to use experience and skills from people that are geographically located elsewhere.

The idea of relying on an outsourced resource to support a business plan can be difficult for a business owner. By carefully considering some options that can help to more effectively support a small business, outsourcing can generate serious time and money savings for business owners.

Finding What You Need Virtually

The variety of skills and areas that can be outsourced through Elance include the following:

• Writing skills- tap into an extensive pool of writing resources for press releases, blog posts, product descriptions, marketing content, ad development and article writing.
• Business skills- find a consultant that can help to build a web-based media campaign.
• Administrative- the perfect go-to person can work virtually to support.
• Legal support- find someone to develop the legal language necessary for everything from supplier contracts to privacy agreements.
• Software- reach a variety of software support resources who can build a website from scratch or help to develop an existing site.
• Graphic artists- find an artist to make your logo or even web graphics more professional.

Potential Pitfalls
Finding the right person in a virtual world does have its drawbacks. The working relationship does not always have the level of communication that Buyers and Providers prefer. It can also be hard to keep consistent work available for an outsourced resource which can impact the ability of the Provider to remain available for long term support.

Tips for a Great Experience
To create a highly efficient and creative working relationship with outsourced resources, follow these tips:

• Before hiring, think through the project carefully. Identify exactly what you want.
• Be very specific in your requirements when you post the job.
• Review the Provider’s feedback and portfolio carefully.
• Notice the Provider’s country of origin, if you care about finding someone in your region of the world.
• Establish detailed terms of business expectations by putting all your requests and requirements in writing.
• When possible, provide examples of what you are looking for.
• Make many milestones (eLance has a Milestones calendar) so that you can review progress frequently. This way, things can’t go off track when you are just starting to know your provider.

It’s an amazing feeling to know that someone else is contributing to your small business goals, freeing your time to do some of the higher level tasks. You can poke around the Elance.com website and see for yourself.

Keyword Research is an important part of SEO—search engine optimization. This involves researching search terms that people enter into search engines. The main goal of keyword research is to find the best words that can be aimed towards your target audience, and therefore, to improve your web site’s rank in search engines. This article will provide useful information on the basics of keyword research.

The first step of keyword research is to decide what market you’re aiming for. Brainstorm, and make a list of keywords that you think might be popular among your target audience. After you have done this, you should think of other related keywords. The more specific you can get to the searched keywords, the better your site will be in reaching your audience.

The second step in keyword research is to do a more refined search. Use a keyword research tool, either paid or free. Keyword research tools will provide you with significant analytical information in a quick and easy way. There are several tools that can show you how much activity your keywords are getting. They can also give you other ideas of words you may not have thought of. Look for keywords that are common in the search behavior of your target group and organize them by popularity. Pay close attention to the way the search terms are phrased. Try different combinations of words as well. This may seem trivial, but it’s very crucial in keyword selection. Also, avoid using generic words, because they are very difficult to rank for. The more specific you can get, the better.

Once you begin narrowing down to the keywords you want to use, sit down and write them all out. Also, write down the analytics – the number of searches, conversion rates, etc. Look over your list, and think about which ones could be best used for your individual sites. Make sure to choose keywords that are popular among your audience, but have a lower amount of competition. The more competition you have that are aiming towards the same keyword, the less likely your site is to become successful. Your site will have a hard time ranking, and therefore, will have a difficult time making money. You want to have the best keywords, that drive the most traffic to your site.

There are so many keywords that have yet to be targeted. Now get out there and get started on your keyword research!

Justin is an SEO expert and runs a site about search engine optimization where he discusses topics like Long Tail Keywords. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Justin_Briggs.

First, Access the AdWords Keyword Tool

To show up higher in search results, try to focus your website’s content on the keywords for which you want to rank high in the search engine results. People generally search using phrases, so even though the term keyword still predominates, think in terms of key phrases. Start your keyword research by signing up for a Google AdWords account, which gives you access to their AdWords tool, even if you don’t create ad campaigns. The tool is on the Tools tab.

The Relevance Factor

When you are starting out with keyword research, start with a core keyword or phrase that is most relevant and important to your business. The core keyword should also be relevant to your targeted audience. You don’t want to bring traffic to your site that isn’t interested in your products or services. And your core keyword should have a healthy volume of searches each month. With your core keyword selected, you can refine your search for related keywords that will bring traffic to a specific page.

Long Tail Keywords

If your site is new and if you have few sites linking to your site, you may need to focus on “long tail” keywords rather than the most searched terms. Long tail keywords

are more specific and represent a narrower or more refined search. Rather than going after the popular keyword “guitar,” the long tail keyword might be a specific make and model of guitar. You have a much greater chance of cornering a narrow market than competing for highly searched terms against very popular sites. Some experts thing that if you’re able to corner several narrow markets, it can eventually lead to a reasonable cumulative increase in traffic.

Aligning Content and Keywords

When you have decided on your keyword(s) for a particular article or web page, include the words in the article title’s <h1> tag, and a few logical places in the text, such as in the middle of the page and in your conclusion. You should write naturally, avoid using the keywords too many times, and do not let the keywords overpower your thinking process and flow. In other words, write for the reader. Then go back and rework or tweak your article for the keywords.