Monday, September 29, 2008

Internet Money Making Ideas

The Internet is a vehicle that has been used to enable higher levels of communication between
people, companies and countries throughout the world. It means your online business does not just have to concentrate on local markets – and almost no place is out of reach! If your business has a website, this in itself means it is accessible by the global market, and it is vital
that your business take advantage of this. Internet selling is on the rise. There are many research studies and statistics that support this statement. A study conducted by the Ipsos Reid market research firm in February 2003 concludes that in the year 1999 only 28% of worldwide Internet users purchased a product or service online, whereas this figure rose to 62% in the year
2002 and about 70% in the year 2005. And these numbers continue to climb. Nielsen/Net Ratings supports this finding with its own research. The Internet is a huge marketplace that has attracted businesses with its potential for big-time revenues. Dizzying success stories of ventures started in a basement that grew to become stock market
darlings are constantly celebrated in the media. Small businesses came to the Internet, tentative at first, and then in droves - eager to sell everything from fake jewelry to handcrafted tapestries. You can sell just about anything from soup to nuts, as long as you
have a product that has a market.

What Businesses Are Succeeding on the Net?
After the settling down of the dot-com bubble, sanity checks have brought realistic expectations to the fore. Initially, a backlash was seen, forecasting the doom of the Internet. Finally, merits have made the Internet gain its rightful place. In breakthroughs that show the
promise of ecommerce wasn't all smoke and mirrors, many dot-coms including eBay Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Expedia Inc., FindWhat.com Inc., E-Trade Group Inc., Google Inc. and others have successfully re-defined the landscape of Wall Street.
There is a growing tendency amongst Internet users to pay for valuable content along with quality products and services offered online. Hundreds of paid content and product-oriented websites have already proven this unmistakable trend. The discerning buyer values
her time and is willing to pay for access to quality information and the
convenience of purchasing products and services online.
However, not all products can be sold on the Internet. Some products may be better suited for online sales than others; others simply will not work online. According to an Ernst and Young study, the most popular online purchases are computer related products (40%), books (20%), travel (16%), clothing (10%), recorded music (6%), subscriptions (6%), gifts (5%) and investments (4%). Businesses offering paid services have also prospered
enormously. The top three categories (Business Content/Investment, Entertainment/Lifestyles and Personals/Dating) consistently account for 62% of all paid content revenue. One statistic indicates that 85% of all money spent by U.S. Consumers for online content goes to the
top 50 sites in most categories. The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain, educate and research. It is thus no wonder that nonperishable, information intensive
products - including computers and software, books, travel, consumer electronics, magazine subscriptions - are the most popular online products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based sites to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range of topics, have
been sprouting up all over the Internet. Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and investments have successfully transitioned themselves to the Internet. Unique services such as online driving schools have been prospering too. In fact, many states in the US have already set up online payment sites for Government services. Residents can now get online to pay most of
their bills and other expenses including parking tickets to local courts.
However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give lots of preliminary information that's useful in setting the scene for the closing. But the
actual closing takes place offline - i.e., not on the Internet. Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best on the Internet are those that take advantage of the convenience of the Net. Remember that convenience is the primary reason consumers flock to the Internet in the first place. People can shop at any hour of the day at most sites. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales clerks,
and even avoid pickpockets. Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract online
attention and sell strongly. You would generally not try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus, few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even
diamonds, can and do sell well on the Internet. Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products that can be
shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping costs diminish the price competitiveness of online products and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages some people from buying online more than any other given reason. An Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with credit card information being stolen. As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages as well as disadvantages of selling either products or services online. If you choose to sell a product or service online, you must evaluate your offering to ensure that the total costs of the product or service including shipping are not much higher than what is offered elsewhere. Show Me the Money! With PPC’s, the name of the game is profit. You need to be careful
not to get carried away with the ranking so that your promotion doesn’t cut into your revenues.
This is essential! There’s no point in being top if you’re out of business in a month. You have to figure out what you can afford and keep to it. Base your decision on your visitor-to-sales-ratio (the number of visitors on average that it takes to generate a sale) and your net profit per sale.
So for example, if you get a sale from every tenth visitor, and you net a profit of $20 from each sale, then you can’t pay more than $2 for each click without operating at a loss (unless you have an effective back-end sales campaign setup as discussed earlier). In practice, you
might make one sale for every 100 or so clicks and pay perhaps 15 or 20 cents for each visitor, depending on your market. It’s absolutely crucial for you to know your visitor-to-sales-ratio.
It’s also important to keep that ratio as high as possible, and that means only bidding on relevant keywords. If you pay for visitors who are looking for something completely different than the services you’re offering, you’re just throwing your money away. They aren’t going to
buy, and even at five cents a shot, those wasted nickels soon add up.
On the other hand, because you can pay so little, it is worth bidding on as many relevant keywords as possible. The key is to balance high payments for top keywords with low
payments that bring in less traffic. You should also consider the quality of visitors the site will send you. The more targeted a directory, the better your visitor to sale ratio will be and that might make it worth increasing your bid price. Submitting your site to a PPC is certainly a lot faster than submitting to a search engine or a directory. You must, however, make sure you consider the following:
� The maximum amount you can bid (I can’t stress that enough!)
� The keywords you wish to bid on.
� The titles and descriptions of the site.
That last point is very important for making the most of PPC’s. Just because you don’t have to worry about putting keywords in your title and descriptions to please the search engines, that doesn’t mean relevance isn’t important. On the contrary, relevance still matters. You need to let the user know that your site is exactly what they’re looking for. That means putting the keyword in the title and having a catchy, informative description. Remember, the more good clicks you get, the more money you are likely to make.

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