Before I take a look at the pros and cons of various different types of new business opportunity in the coming chapters, I have included some information about how you can go about seeking a new venture. Problems arise if you simply launch yourself into Internet search mode – hoping to find inspiration from the web.

You already have some idea for your new income opportunity

Some people have a very good idea of what they want to do. Many others know the sort of new business opportunity idea that they would like to pursue. If you are one of these lucky persons then your task is much simpler – but you still have a lot of work to do. For example, you might know a friend who maintains a blog about his spare time interest – say golf. You know that he earns over $1000 every month from the blog and you would like to do the same with your own interest in high performance road cars.

You have to find out a lot of information before you also have a chance of earning this sort of money. Questions that will need answering will include (but are not limited to):

• How long has the blog site been running?
• How often must new information be added to the site?
• How do you set up a blog site?
• What sort of information would people be interested in?
• How do you get them to visit your site?
• How do you convert visitors to your site into earnings?
• How much competition will there be?

However, you have a good starting point – a new business idea that you can build on and develop. You will also need to establish whether or not you have the time and enthusiasm for this new business opportunity. You may be basing your income aspirations on your friend’s web site but it may be hard to match his success. Even if you do, will the income be enough in five years time, in ten years? Will you want to set up more sites to increase revenue? Will the venture become a general Internet Marketing business?

So you have started to identify variations within your chosen area, and need to build enough knowledge so that you can define your new income opportunity and prepare your business or marketing plan that will tell you whether or not you have a good chance of success.

If you do not have a good idea of your new business opportunity yet

For most of us that are keen to work for ourselves it is more of an overwhelming desire to “go it alone” than a clearly defined business path. We hate going into work every day and yearn to run our own business. At this stage I will say that the information in Chapter 5 should be considered seriously. If you start a consultancy based on your existing skills used in your current career and follow a sensible approach of business planning and research into your market – you have every chance of making a success of your new business. You will probably be basing your own business on a proven framework using tested skills – it will be your motivation and drive that is key to success. This is probably the easiest and quickest route into self employment.

However, you may be tired of your day job – including the field of work that you do. You may be bored and looking for something different to do – a change.

This is where there is a danger of logging onto your computer every evening (or even during the day at your current place of employment when you should be working) and browsing aimlessly for new businees opportunity ideas on the Internet. If you enter keywords into the search engines like “profitable business ideas” or “new business opportunities working from home” you will receive countless hits from people trying to sell you “get rich quick” schemes that will never work.

There are a few schemes and programs amongst the marketing hype and scams that do work – but even these do not work as well as described.

There are even fewer sites that will provide you with interesting and valuable information and which are not obviously trying to sell you anything. Even when you visit this site you are currently on I am hoping that you will click on an advertisement to earn a few cents for Business Opportunity Market!

So what is the best approach to discovering a new business opportunity idea that will interest you? I would suggest not starting with the Internet is the best approach. Leave the Internet until you have some subject areas that you have considered, know a little bit about, and now need to research in depth.

For example, I found out about Internet Marketing through a contact in my daily work. He informed me that he had given up his normal marketing job within industry to pursue a property development career. When this did not work out due to a depressed property market, he decided to set up an Internet Marketing business. He told me about it, showed me some of his web sites and gave me a “Search Engine Optimization – How to guide” that he had written after a lot of research and wasted expenditure. It sounded interesting so I also bought a book about Affiliate Marketing from my local bookstore.

Now I was getting to the stage where I knew that $billions are paid out every year to web sites that include adverts for companies involved in the massive and growing online industry. I also knew that it was very easy to waste a lot of money on programs that showed you how to make millions from this area. But I was in the process of building up knowledge and enthusiasm for a possible foray into Internet Marketing – and I hadn’t even browsed the subject on the Internet yet. However, now I was ready to do so and I was ready for all the very well written money grabbing ventures that came out top of my searches!

In this manual you will find information that tells you how to set up a blog site, how to “monetize” it so that visitors will earn you money, how to increase your traffic to your site so that your revenue will go up and how to develop such a business so that it will start to almost work on its own (an often used term is “auto pilot” – this does not work per se, but it is possible to remove yourself from the coal face to become a “hands off” manager of such a business). However, you will also learn that substantial work is required building traffic and maintaining such a blog – you could start spending your whole working life developing a business that paid you at most $12,000 a year!

So you need a starting point – such as the blogging idea. Once you find out more about it you can determine the best way to develop the idea in a way that suits you. Starting points include the various different businesses found within the next few chapters in this manual. You must use them as starting points and accept that it is up to you to delve deeper and create a detailed profile of any idea that interests you.

Research methods for new business ideas

• Reading the newspaper
• Watching the news
• Browsing through business directories
• Spend time in your local library
• Browse the business section of your bookstore
• Talking to business owners

A great starting point for your new business venture

As with the golf or fast car blogs mentioned above, look at your own interests. Whatever business type that you choose, if it has anything at all to do with your current passions you will find it all the easier to develop. Imagine writing a blog about something that you were not interested in!

For example, if you are a keen fisherman/woman you could start a business in a number of ways:

• Open a fishing tackle store
• Start an online fishing tackle store
• Start an eBay online fishing tackle store
• Write a blog about fishing tackle
• Write a blog about where to fish
• Start an online fishing holiday company
• Manufacture specialist fishing tackle
• Import fishing tackle or act as an “agent”
• Specialise in fishing clothing

There are always lots of different ways to start a business surrounding a specific subject area or business idea. It is great if you can find the idea first – then research ways of setting a business up around it. However, it is also possible to develop business opportunities the other way round. For example, you might be attracted to the idea of importing goods and selling via online auctions. This is a proven business method that has made many people into millionaires – it has also reaped very meagre rewards for others – as usual it is the way the business is developed and the effort put into business planning that is the key to success. Choice of items to buy and sell are also critical and selecting your subject area can be quite difficult.

The question of how to earn big money through an Internet business opportunity is probably the most asked by people searching the web! It is no wonder that there are thousands of programs being advertised that promise you big money earnings for the cost of a few $100s subscription. When I began to get interested in Internet Marketing a contact of mine offered all the training courses that he head purchased for sale at a discounted price of $20,000!

This does seem a little extreme but I can assure you that there are many affiliate marketing training courses that cost $1000s each and will give you plenty of information how to earn big money from the Internet – the trouble is that contrary to what they might promise, making money is never going to be easy. It will require hard work, some investment and it will take time.

A business plan for earning a lot of money from the Internet for one person working full time could look something like this:

Year 1 – Total earnings $200 – Total Investment $1000

Year 2 – Total earnings $3600 – Total Investment $2000

Year 3 – Total earnings $48,000 – Total investment $12,000

If you consider the fact that to work full time you are giving up your salary this Internet business plan does not look very attractive! The first two years would appear to be almost impossible to get through for most people without losing enthusiasm. Even the third year does not appear to be attractive if you are currently earning a decent wage.

However, if you look at year 4, assuming that you are following a program of 250 separate keywords being targeted that you have estimated are worth at least $50 each per month:

Year 4 – Total earnings $150,000 – Total investment $24,000

Now things are beginning to look a little more rosy. However, most people will not want to wait four years to be earning at this sort of level – but many will be happy to participate part time to earn a reasonable second income? Or, look at it another way, how could you speed up the process of getting to the Year 4 figures, without hefty investment in web site creation and search engine optimisation?

I know the theory of a number of different ways to earn big money on the Internet – but do not have the time to put the ideas into practice on a full time basis. To date I have been working at a business idea very much part time for two years and am somewhat short of the Year 2 target at the moment. Therefore I am looking at the best way to grow an income of around $100 each month into $1000 within the next 12 months – but only working part time. This will be done by exploiting the work that I have already put in – which of course has a value but has not been utilised fully yet.

For example I have 80 key words that have a potential earning capacity of $7,000 per month for one web site alone. I have only targetted 30 of these keywords so far and on average have only created around 10% of the backlinks for each one. Therefore, I will post 50 articles for the additional keywords – one per week, to my site over the coming year. Then each article will require separate articles posting to respectable directories around the Internet with backlinks to my site – to be undertaken regularly over the coming year.

What is the earnings potential?

Well if I do 5 articles a week for each of the new articles, taking about a half day of my time, I believe that my monthly income will rise to at least $1000. If I do 50 articles giving 50 back links to each article on my site – every month taking probably most of my time (unless I subcontract the article writing at a cost of say $1000 per month), then I am confident my earnings would increase to between $3000 and $5000 per month – possibly as far as the $7000 estimate. If I see the potential rising I will target my other sites some more, and introduce others – everybody needs some encouragement I suppose. I know that there are many people out there squeezing in 20-30 hours every week that are seeing their earnings slowly grow into $1000s per month.

Why do most people fail?

Writing an article to post on the Internet to obtain a back link may only take you a half hour. The trouble is that you will not visibly notice any return for your effort. Any return that you do get, will impact your earnings several months down the line. Most people need to see results straight away.

So you can earn big money from the Internet – you need to invest time to learn how – time to work at your sites – and money to increase the pace at which you reap returns. Personally I think that the subject area is fascinating, and will continue to promote my sites slowly – hopefully adding valuable content from time to time that will assist with the rankings no end and provide an interesting forum for surfers. If a sideline income develops more rapidly than it has done so far (and I believe it will) – so much the better.

One of the strong messages that is coming out of the posts on this web site which aims to review all forms of business opportunities is that there are many possibilities available but choosing a good one can be quite difficult. This applies especially to Internet business opportunities. Because these are by their nature Internet based, finding a suitable internet business opportunity will require a great deal of surfing on the web!

In order to highlight the difficulties in choosing a feasible and profitable business opportunity an experiment was conducted using the Google search engine to analyze the top 5 results when the search terms ‘Internet business opportunities’ is targeted. Each of these results was assessed for their potential and conclusions formed as to how well a business, developed from each of the sites, would perform.  The exercise was carried out on Google.co.uk and then repeated for Google.com in order to be able to compare UK and USA targeted web sites. The results were somewhat surprising!

UK #1 Number one ranked site

This site was an e commerce site selling business packages that allowed you to quickly set up a website selling drop-ship sourced goods. For only £19.95 (limited time offer as usual) you could be up and running in half an hour selling anything from adult items and lingerie to beauty products and gadgets. The web site templates that were said to be search engine friendly were very professional looking and the site was well presented. The only criticism of this site was that though I believed the business plan would work – no mention was made of the effort, commitment and expense that would be required to raise the web sites sufficiently in the search engine rankings that they would start to attract traffic and therefore business for you.

UK #2 Number two ranked site

This was a information site monetised with Google AdSense together with a massive number of affiliate links. No doubt this was a site written by somebody who had got to grips with many of the ins and outs of Internet marketing and was putting much of the theory into practice to make him or herself some money. A good site to get ideas from but not one that was selling you an Internet business opportunity.

Many of the affiliate links were with the sorts of web site that spring up every time you research the likes of Making Money, Internet Business Opportunities or Working From Home. They are web sites configured to fit every bodies computer resolution and so appear as a column in the center of your screen. The scroll bar at the right indicates that you have a long way to read, to learn of all the one-time-only bonuses you will receive, before you will ultimately reach the inevitable ‘click here to buy’ button. On this site you are being offered e books.

UK #3 Number three ranked site

This was a drop ship broker offering wide ranging services that included ready to use business plans in a similar way to number #1 ranking site above. Drop shipping is one of the viable business opportunities on the web if you are able to put together a well managed operation. Of course there are many web sites that purport to tell you how to do it and even set up “turn key” operations – as number #1 and #3 sites above do – the trick is to research the provider, not the method. Alternatively this is one business where it is possible to carry out research (not only on the Internet but you can find hard copy books about drop shipping methods) and start your business from scratch yourself.

UK #4 & #5 Number four and five ranking

Both of these sites were business broking sites offering a wide variety of both conventional and existing established businesses for sale. If you have money to invest, this may be the route to take. You will of course need to carry out serious due diligence on any business opportunity bought as a going concern for a substantial sum of money.

Moving along to Internet Business Opportunities in the United States, the following top five sites were examined:

USA #1 Number 0ne ranking

This was a simple AdSense site (Google sponsored advertisements) together with various affiliate links. It was a typical affiliate ‘landing page’ with links for business opportunities such as ‘Make Easy Money on Autopilot’ and ‘Make Money at Home Affiliate Marketing’.

USA #2 Number two ranking

This was a general job search website and the page link was to an article discussing the scams to be found on the Internet – saying that the various money making businesses were ‘dot cons’.

USA #3 Number three ranking

This appeared to be a useful Internet business opportunity research site similar in many respects to the UK #2 site. The author clearly knew a lot about Internet search engine optimisation and provided a ideas for businesses to start. Her site was ‘monetised’ with AdSense and affiliate links that would earn her an income from her traffic.

USA #4 Fourth ranked site

This was a general article site with AdSense and affiliate links. It was discussing Internet businesses generally.

USA #5 Number five ranked site

As with the UK #4 and #5 ranked sites, the USA number five site was an Internet business broking site offering thousands of established web sites for sale. If you can do your research well and find a reputable broker that will sell you a site that already has a stream of traffic in an area that you would be interested in exploiting further, this can be a way to speed up your business start-up time.

Conclusions

Having looked critically at five sites from the UK and five from the USA using the same search terms of: internet business opportunities, it appears that the quality and credibility of the sites is surprisingly very high. Although one of the sites was clearly a landing page for quick earnings for the owners, others offered a lot of information to the researcher or bone-fide business opportunities for sale.

The drop shipping opportunity is worth further research. This is a way to sell a tangible product without the expense of keeping stock yourself. You sell goods for the stock holder, and take a commission when you make a sale through your web site. The order is processed and dispatched by the drop shipper along with taking the payments and forwarding your share to you. Although it is relatively risk free, there may be an element of dealing with customer queries and complaints to manage – and the key to success will be to ensure that your own web site ranks well with the search engines for appropriate terms – otherwise you will make no sales at all!

The main point to take away from this research is that many Internet business opportunities available from the web are feasible and capable of making profits for you – some may make a lot. However, they will only work if you are able to move your web site to the top few searches when people are looking for the products or services you are selling. many of the ‘businesses in a box’ do not labor this point and the art of web site optimization, search engine optimization and winning profitable levels of Internet traffic takes further investment in both time and money. You must factor it into any business idea you are considering.