What is the easiest way to start an online business?

Have you ever asked yourself ‘What is the easiest way to start an online business?’

If you’re considering earning money online you may well be stumped by a very real initial hurdle: where to start?

Whether you currently have a ‘day job’ or are looking to earn some money in your spare time, or simply want to improve your standard of living, you’ve probably heard of people who make a full-time living simply by running an internet business.

You may even have been so excited by this idea that you’ve started investigating these claims. If so you’ve almost certainly come to the conclusion that nothing in your life up until now had prepared you for the unique skill of learning online. What’s even worse is that you can’t even seem to find out where to even begin to make a start.

So what is the easiest way to start an online business? (And it is important here to stress that it is a consistent income-earning business we want to build, and not just how to make an occasional $20 for one-off online tasks, such as selling on eBay.)

Let’s start by considering ‘what does a profitable business consist of?’

The answer to this, whether it is for an online or offline business, is that we need something to sell and someone to sell it to.

That’s it, in a nutshell. That’s all there is to it!

If that sounds too simplistic to you then that is simply because you don’t know, yet, what that ‘something’ is that you should be selling and who that ‘someone’ is that you should be selling to.

‘Yes, but surely,’ I hear you object, ‘you also need to advertise, or how will your customers know to buy from you? And how do you know what they really want?’

Of course these are very real considerations. But we are looking at the easiest way to start an online business, and in this easiest of ways we are going to avoid much of the complications that a business normally involves. Let me explain.

Let’s use a simple example from an offline scenario…

Imagine you live in a warm climate, and your friend’s father has an ice cream delivery round. He has recently bought a bigger truck and is looking to add more regular customers to his round. He mentions to you that he will pay $5 for every new customer you can sign up for his business. He even has professionally produced advertising flyers designed to attract new customers, and he can let you have as many as you want.

For a few minutes you think about the work it would take to spend your weekends walking around countless neighbourhoods putting these flyers into letterboxes. Then suddenly you remember another friend of yours who has a large community newspaper round, and you offer to pay him 2c per flyer to put these into letterboxes along with the papers he is delivering anyway. He agrees, and it turns out to be a win-win-win situation.

What we have just described is an analogy for how the online affiliate marketing model works.

As an ‘affiliate marketer’, you are simply the middle man who is connecting potential buyers to a seller. You do not need to create your own product to sell because you are selling a product for someone else. You also do not need to know lots of customers yourself, because you can use the services, for a small fee, of someone who already has an existing relationship with a large number of potential customers.

Frankly speaking, that is why starting out as an affiliate marketer is the easiest way to start an online business.

• You don’t need ‘something’ to sell (the product creator provides that)
• You don’t need ‘someone’ to sell it to (other people already have a list of suitable customers)

All you have to do is connect the dots. And to help you do that I’m happy to prepare an action plan with you…

 Click here to schedule a Strategy Session with me. It’s free!