Doing Business Online.

Just the mention of the words Doing Business Online turns off lots of bloggers and it is kind of surprising as there are so many of them who wants to make money online. I was also one of the skeptical ones until recently. Of course I read lots of MMO blogs and see how others are making their money online, and most gave me the misconception that all I needed was a blog, try my best to push it to the top and then money will come rolling in. This silly mistake costs me more than 2 years of my miserable blogging life, making many futile attempts to make successful blogs so I can make some money online. Never once in those two years did the idea of doing business online as an alternative to making money online crossed my mind.

There is one advise that I would like to give to those who are starting out in trying to make some money and many might not agree. Don’t read Problogger. Don’t read John Chow. Don’t even read Dosh Dosh. If you really want to make money that is. Other than that, Problogger, Dosh Dosh and all the blogs of this genre are good if you want to have a high quality blog and high quality blogs takes years to build, but of course when you have broken out of the shell, you will be heading for the big time. Having said that, how many of us has the knowledge, the talent, the perseverance and the patience to do that? Certainly not me. Having realized this fact, the only way to make some money fast is to venture into doing business online.

Many years ago, doing business online means getting to know your suppliers or your principles who are willing to let you sell their products or you can manufacture your own products and sell them online. Then it would mean spending thousands of dollars in designing your site and promoting it. There will stock inventories, cost implementation, deliveries, insurance, a team of full time staff and everything that is needed to run a full fledged business. It is capital intensive and not many are willing to take the plunge and many of those who did got burned bad but on the other hand many too made good. This is what I would called the first tier online business. It is a real time business and the businessmen gets to keep all his net profits. Those who survived and did good became giants in their own capacity.

As in the evolution of mankind, online business too evolved and what we have and are interested today is the second tier online business or what many would called affiliate marketing. All that is needed is a site where you can post your affiliate products by those giant first tiers and earn commission on all sales. Everything else is taken care of by the first tiers. Perfect for bloggers and webmasters, this form of online business can be managed by one person with just a simple computer and a Internet connection. There are no overheads other than paying your service provider, your web host and the domain names. It can be done anywhere in the world that has access to the word wide web and it is the best, fastest and the safest way of making some money. In fact many serious and successful affiliate marketers makes tens of thousands each month.

Easy as it might sound though, doing business online via affiliate marketing is by no means so. There are tools to be bought and skills to be learned to make your affiliate sites successful. It is not as though you can start a site, stuff it with products and expect to sell something and this is where what you have learned as blogger comes into play. All your knowledge about SEO and all your knowledge about keyword researching will come to good use when it comes down to doing business online, but then, I am assuming that you have all mastered these things as a blogger. Or have you?