First Stage: Business Concepts

"Let there be light," goes the biblical phrase. There must be a spark in the mind of the creator for the theme extending from a general idea or from a life-long dream. You must have a ray of hope or confidence that you can succeed. At this point, all that you may have is the initial light of a concept. Of course, even those who failed may have had a vision which means that a vision by itself is not enough if either no action is taken or the proper action is not taken.

At this stage, you would be doing just fine if you possessed the education found here, because you would have formulated a plan of action either on paper or firmly in your mind concerning all the steps. Most people go from this stage right into the monetization stage which is our sixth stage. In other words, setting up the image of your product with a price tag by itself is not going to cut it on the internet unless you spend a bunch of money on TV ads.

You will need to offer valuable information that will capture the imagination of the visitor and will cause the visitor to return to make further use of the information. Your product or service will then link off of the free information without any hard selling or hyping. Finally, your product must be offered at a fair and reasonable price.

The types of products offered on the internet are endless in nature. It can be physical or digital. It can be books, jewelry, homes, cars, eBay type items, etc. On the other hand, it can be purely digital such as downloaded publishings, videos, graphics, etc.

The most cost effective product on the internet is information. Of course, we are not including the immoral business of porn related concepts. Your concept should involve the supply of valuable information. This will be your key to making real money on the internet. At this stage, your concept or your theme should be clear.

I still recall the Edmund Scientific catalog from decades ago. That catalog was addictive. I could not throw it away. I kept going through the pages day after day since I was interested in astronomy. What was it about that catalog that made me return? It was loaded with all types of scientific products and pictures and it certainly was monetized with pricing information. That book was loaded with scientific information that was related to each item. Each item seemed to come alive with all the imaginative and possible uses for it. It was all geared to capture ones imagination, and it worked. That is how a website should be. Simply placing a picture of a telescope on the page with a price is not going to cut it on the internet.

If you want to succeed, your basic concept of your profit machine should be clear and it should be geared to captivate the imagination of your visitors so that they will want to return for more information. It becomes important to offer quality whether it be free or for a fee. When people see that you are not a scam artist, they will trust your fee-based products. then when the buyers see that they actually get more value than what they paid in price, they will return to do further business with you concerning new products.

As a provider of information, you will provide a needed product while focusing on value and gearing your sales copy to make it easier for the visitor to take action.

Remember that your job will always be to provide solutions to your targeted audience.

Your starting concept or theme will remain concrete even though your ultimate objective may be that of a more advanced stage of doing business. In other words, you may start by only doing affiliate marketing with the ultimate objective of eventually selling your own product. There is nothing wrong with doing both operations on the same site if the programs tend to complement each other.

You may not have your own product developed when you first come online. It is perfectly okay to be the middle person by matching buyers with established sellers. This is called affiliate marketing. In this case, your concept would be to promote the best sellers of products that you can find and get paid a generous commission. During this process, you would promote yourself as well as a quality provider of information. Then when you have developed your own product package, you would bring it on your site. At this point, visitors would be more likely to buy your own product. It would then be up to you to decide whether or not to carry affiliated products.