07.04.07
Starting an Online Business - Part II
I’ve been generating income on the internet for about 10 years now (since 1997). Here’s my path:
- Selling mailing lists on AOL. This was version 3.0 from my Toshiba laptop - 8mb hard drive. I made a few bucks but nothing more.
- Next I transitioned to eBay, which provided a good opportunity to test different products ad make a few thousand dollars. I sold junk from my closet, excel spreadsheet templates, and garage sale items like sandpaper. It was all very manual and took a lot of time, so I eventually put that business on hold. It’s my goal to get back into eBay, but this time with a more automated approach.
- most recently I’ve made some money with blogs and AdSense revenue. It hasn’t been much, but I see the potential. I have one site that through natural search engine optimization (SEO) gets a regular stream of visitors each day. My AdSense Click-Through-Rates are over 20%, which is really good. Unfortunately, the volume of traffic and the topic don’t drive significant income. There are some lessons there, which I’ll discuss in a future post.
Generating revenue online is really a function of a few things:
- Creating awareness & visitor traffic
- Creating familiarity & a value proposition
- Setting the right price to drive quantity sold
I’m working on building this equation out further. For some, it’s all about generating traffic, where value and price are low while quantity is high. In other cases some folks can generate substantial income with lower traffic, but a greater percieved value proposition & higher price. It’s an interesting element of your business to understand - how will you position yourself and your products?
