The Truth On How To Make Money Online

By Melanie Mendelson ©2011 All Rights Reserved

If you are new to online marketing, it can be very confusing. When you search for ways to make money online, you'll find millions of pages, most of them full of outrageous empty promises.

In reality, there is no free lunch when it comes to making money online. Marketing online has to make business sense, just like real-world offline business.

Making money online always boils down to one of the following 4 business models:

Online Business Model #1: Selling Products

The most obvious online business model is selling products. You have a product to sell, customers go to your website and place an order for your product. You then deliver your product to the customer.

The products can be physical (such as clothes, toys, artwork, books, CDs) and digital (such as downloadable software, MP3s and e-books). Physical products are shipped to the customer, and digital products are downloaded by customers to their computers.

Online Business Model #2: Selling Services

Many types of services can be done through the Internet, without face-to-face interaction. As the technology becomes more advanced, there are more and more things that can be done online.

Here are some examples of services that can be done over the computer: web design, graphic design, web hosting, programming, training, consulting, writing, data entry, transcription.

Online Business Model #3: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers don't own any products or services for sale. Instead, they refer potential customers to other companies' products or services. If those referrals make a purchase, the affiliate marketer gets a commission.

Being an affiliate is the same as being a commission-based sales person in the offline world.

Online Business Model #4: Selling Advertising

This business model works in the same way as advertising in paper-based magazines and newspapers - if your website has readers, you can sell advertising space.

Advertising is how the "free websites" make money. If a website is full of free information and is not selling anything, chances are the owners are making money from advertisements.

As you can see, there is nothing "magic" about the Internet - it is just a medium of doing business. You make money by either selling something or by being the middleman in the sales transaction. Before you get involved with any online business opportunity, always make sure that it passes your "common sense" test.