7 Online Business Models

When you make a go at an online business you’re going to have to choose a way to format your website and onlien business so it makes money and supports itself… and hopefully one day – supports you too!

Here are 7 online business models you might choose from, or mix and match from:

1. Ecommerce Website

Setup an online catalog and some sort of shopping cart or button ordering system that meshes with your payment system – PayPal, Google Checkout, whatever you wish. This is basically the online store model. You can create your own site from scratch or have an EBay store, Yahoo store, or other ready-made solution.

One advantage of using the ready-made online store systems is that the website hosting, domain, checkout system and payment ability is built into the system. For as little as $50 per month you can have this tried and true system work for you.

2. Sales Pages

Simply long pages all focused on selling one product or service. These pages can be hundreds of pages long and are almost like online infomercials you’ve seen on TV. These pages pitch the product and show potential customers the benefits of the product, testimonials, offer bonuses, and basically do everything and answer every question about the product or service so the customer purchases.

Sales pages basically incite emotion in the customer, backed up by evidence that purchasing this product will change the customer’s life for the better. Internet marketers use these pages often -but, recently a few of the best have decided they will use a video instead of the long page. For some it’s working – this could be a future trend.

3. Auction Model

You don’t really need a website at all. Use EBay or some other auction site to sell products you have or products you can get for a set price. Auction them on auction sites and test the market. Many entrepreneurs find products they later build a whole website around – leading to another form of online business.

4. Blog

Blogs are relatively easy to get up and running and can provide a soapbox to get your message out. Once you attract enough people on a daily basis you can pitch offers to them or run advertisements on the blog – like Google’s Adsense program or Text Link Ads or something similiar.

WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type are 3 good blog platforms to look into.

5. Service Business Website

Focused on what a person can do for the visitors to the website usually. Basically this site is a large portfolio and advertisement for an individual or group of people that provide a service.

The skills of the people you’re hiring are showcased and backed up by references, portfolios of past work, and testimonials of past customers.

6. Information Website

Information in some niche is given. The site seeks to become the portal for information on the particular niche. About.com has a business model like this. The site is filled with content on specific niches and they monetize the site through ads and selling products as affiliates.

These sites are typically fueled by the search engines and high volumes of niche-specific content shows up well in Google and other search engines.

7. Affiliate Website

As site owner of an affiliate website you’d sign up to be an affiliate at many companies that offer their products on an affiliate sales basis so you can make some commission from the sales you are responsible for sending to the parent company. This works by tracking unique links that come from your site – or your efforts and that arrive at the parent site and turn into sales.

Site owners that use this model are good at marketing and building traffic in many different ways as there is wealth found in numbers usually.

These are 7 of the most common types of business websites. More are being born all the time. Basically the world is coming to grips with how to go about best