Understanding the online business landscape

Understanding the online business landscape involves a number of things. They are the following:

Online business Models - What are the ways in which someone can make money online?

I read a very interesting article on online business models. From this I short-listed a few methods of doing business that I think are most relevant to my needs. Given that I have a limited budget, and limited knowledge of how internet businesses really work, I have decided to focus on two types of internet business. They are the affiliate page, and the virtual marketplace.

For the affiliate model, I plan to use this blog as the starting point, and hopefully move on from there. So some links on this page will eventually contain affiliate marketing links. At the time of writing this post, there are no affiliate links embedded on this page.

The other business that I would like to incorporate into my research is the virtual marketplace. I will at some point subscribe to www.dropshipaccess.com, and list a few items off their catalog on eBay, gumtree, and as many auction sites as I possible can.  Dropship Access is a business that has a relationship with a bunch of suppliers. You can use the traffic generated from your site to send orders directly to suppliers. These orders will then be dispatched directly to your customers. There is hence no need to carry stock. This eliminates a lot of the costs, and therefore risks of a virtual storefront. 


In the meantime, I have purchased an amazon store front for the niche "Tablet PC's". Have a look at Tablet PC's Online. I acquired it from a website called buywebsites.co. It cost $695 less a 20% discount.


The obvious downside to this kind of business is that there are very low barriers to entry. This means that the competition is extremely high. I am wondering if it is in fact possible to carve out a niche that is profitable. Is there really space in the market for another website that sells things you can simply get from amazon?

Both of these two strategies will be included under the case study page.

Traffic - How do you manage/stimulate relevant internet traffic?

Traffic can, broadly speaking, come from 3 places. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, Search engines, or links from other places.

PPC is setup through a search engine, such as google, and you pay for a click to your website. This can be quite expensive if you aren't converting those clicks into revenue. For the purpose of this blog, I will not be using PPC. At least not until the dropship portion of my pages is set up.

Search Engine Traffic requires Search Engine Optimization. More on this at a later stage.

Links from other places is a place where I can concentrate. One needs to write material and articles,a nd post them in bulletin boards, forums, social media, etc with a link back to the originating page.

Search Engine Optimizations - How do you get your webpage ranking highly in a search engine?




Domains - How do you register/host domains?

Assessing the health of a website - What reports/statistics can be used to judge the health of a website?

I'm still researching this area, but for now I have found a few useful resources. Take a look at www.ispionage.com, and www.alexa.com.