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.

Many people will come across this web site and others like it trying to find ideas for new businesses or income opportunities. There is a massive market in work at home opportunities, internet marketing programmes and seemingly easy ways to make money – online or otherwise!

Take the example of affiliate marketing (using the internet to market products for others and thereby obtaining a commission) – this is frequently touted as being the best way to may your fortune. You can give up your day job and work from home if you diligently follow a program provided by one of the many internet “gurus” who apparently have made $millions from just this.

It always struck me as odd why so many people should give up their lucrative time to become teachers? One or two may have altruistic tendencies but so many…if the internet was so rewarding I would be doing more of the same to make money…not telling others how to do it.

There is no doubt that some do make good money and others see a better way in selling a program “how to..” A friend that I know has been heavily involved in internet marketing for over three years now and I believe that he makes a modest income now – also promoting very real products as a marketeer in addition to earning commissions as a simple affiliate.  I was interested when a couple of years ago he put up for sale all the internet marketing programs that he had subscribed to learning his trade. There was over $30,000 worth of products on offer as a job lot. The photograph showed neat packs of DVDs and manuals for dozens of program he had tried!

If the truth be known, he has settled down now selling a product using internet methods and is earning a good return. The “secret” techniques were no so secret – everybody seemed to know how to get a web site to rank for particular keywords. Yes, there are ways to fine tune this approach, but the basics are easy to pick up – many internet sites provide free advice how to find a valuable key word, build a suitable web site and optimize it for the search engines. At the end of the day it is hard work, research, diligence and application of a sensible approach that will bring results.

Earning super profits needs skill and entrepreneurship, not something everybody can easily do. However, many people seeking a new income opportunity are looking for just that, an easy way to make super profits. Very often they want to replace a boring and hard working day job with easy riches. This is the wrong approach. As was seen with the internet marketing example, you give up one day job for another – albeit one you have chosen so that you can work from home. You can make money from many of the income opportunities you find from browsing, but you need to treat everyone as a proper job or business – putting in the time and very often having to make an investment.

The advice from business opportunity market is to research, research, research. You need to clear the rubbish from the few good ideas out there. When you do this you will distill the different income opportunities to just a few and see that each one, though there may be hundreds or thousands of variations and seemingly different ways of making huge sums of money, will all boil down to a few methods which need to be applied rigorously and sometimes a little creatively to make them work. For example:

• Internet marketing – whatever you are selling your own product or somebody else’s, or pursuing pay per click revenues from Adsense, you must be able to set up a web site and encourage a lot of traffic to visit it. This means understanding the value of keywords, using them to build web sites and learning how to optimise the web site using back linking techniques. These take time, effort and often money. The more organised and slick you work, the better return you make. To make “megabucks” you will employ webmasters, employ content writers, pay for back-links and optimisation. You will be managing an business like any other with staff and other overheads. By now you will be in more expensive offices rather than working from home.
• Import Export – often gets a bad press as being another waste of time income opportunity being sold in the form of a “get rich quick” program. However, international trade is what makes the world go round and most of the global millionaires will be involved in some way or another – whether you are a billionaire arms dealer, an oil trader or import shiploads of containers from China to the USA or Europe. Sourcing products and finding buyers are key shills in the employed marketplace and having a go from a home business is as good a starting point as any. It is not difficult finding products to sell – it requires hard work and skill to get one that will make you a lot of money.

The difficulty in finding a new income opportunity is getting past all the money making hype you will find and understanding the simple ideas behind any business. Then you have to decide whether or not the business will suit you and your skills. If it does you have a lot more focused research to do and then, and only then, you might be in a position to invest some money into the best training program, agency or consultant (or but trade journals, books, memberships etc) to further build up your knowledge of your new business.

There are thousands of ways that you can learn how to make money online. One of easiest ways that I have found is to create niche sites. These are sites that are very informative and educational sites about a product of some sort.

A good start is to consider subjects that you are knowledgeable about, or have an interest in. This means that writing articles on the subject is much easier and results in more informative text. For example you may be very interested in new and emerging technology, and want to write up a site about Motorola Cell Phones. You would get on to Google and do some homework on the best of the best and look for the goods and the bads of this type of phone.

 Then you would put it all in your own words on to your web sites. Setting up web sites without having a detailed knowledge of software or programing language is surprisingly easy.  Here are the outline steps to get a site up and running

1-      You need to buy a domain name and get it hosted by an online company. You can usually buy a domain and get it hosted all from the same site. For example Godaddy.com can do both for you. The process is simple and yourv are led through the steps online. Downloading a WordPress Blog site is also easy and further step by step instructions are provided by your host.

2-      Then you need to add the content to your site. I would do about 5 to 10 posts that are about 400 to 500 words long each. Make them very informative so that when people come to your site they find the answers they are looking for. If you do this then Google will love your site and they will eventually rank you higher in the search engines which will bring you more traffic.

3-      Last I would install Google Adsense on the site. Again this is easy and your WordPress blog site can be quickly updated to do this automatically for you. You can get paid every time a visitor clicks on an advertisement that is on your site. You can be paid anywhere from $.10 to $1.00 or more for every click that you get.

4-      Submitting website to Google. I would submit your site to Google so that it get’s indexed fast. Your Google browser wil direct you to their appropraite web page for this. This will bring visitors to your site faster than if you just let Google find your site on its own.