Five Internet Business Opportunities

there are always internet business opportunities that you can buy into. Most are either cheap pre-packaged websites that you can buy for a few hundred dollars or fully developed websites that can costs tens of thousands of dollars. The problem with the "cheapies" is that they are just a site. I can put a new website up in less than six hours, complete with a dozen pages. But it won't necessarily produce any income at all.

Buying a developed site at least assures you that you'll have money coming in from the start. But there is no guarantee that it will keep coming in. In fact, it's possible that the seller was paying for much of the traffic and not making a profit to start with.

So with those two unexciting options out of the way, what other internet business opportunities are there? Here are some that will require some work on your part (real businesses actually do require real work), but will not cost much to start.

Sell Things You Buy

You might think that you need some serious cash to get started selling things online, but not necessarily. It costs you nothing to open an account at Ebay. A bit of research about what things sell for there and you could just spend a hundred dollars rummage sale shopping for items you can triple your money on. Build the business from your profits.

Sell Things You Don't Own

There are a number of companies that will drop ship items for you. That means you sell them on your website and collect the money, then forward the order and the wholesale price to the manufacturer, and they ship it to your customer. You never have to deal with packaging and shipping, and customers can even send returns back to their address.

Writing Service

You can get paid to post on some blogs. Search "pay for post" or "paid to post" in a search engine to find those that are available now. I tried this once and was paid $8 after I submitted a four-paragraph opinion piece that took fifteen minutes to write and submit. I wouldn't bother again for those wages, but it's nice to know what's available just in case.

You also can bid on writing projects at sites like Elance.com. If you go look right now, you'll see that some of the people are making a decent living just writing for others. The problem with this type of business is that you are limited in what you make by how many hours you can work. that's why I prefer the next internet business opportunity.

Informational Website Business

My wife and I make websites with great information on a variety of topics. We promote them with my articles that I distribute through article directories. The income is from advertising, affiliate products and ebooks that I sell. What I like about this model is that even though we work hard, when we stop working to go visit family overseas for a few weeks, the money keeps coming in day and night. For more about our business, read my ebook, You Can make Money Writing.

Buy and Sell Domain Names

There a couple different ways people make money buying and selling domain names. They all start with buying decent names - often ones that have expired and just become available. Some people go for the more expensive names that they hope to sell at auctions for thousands more than they paid. This can mean a fair amount of speculation and holding some names for years.

Others buy decent expired names for the cost of registering them ($10 or so), and then quickly auction them off on Ebay or through other means. The idea here is to turn over a lot of names for a profit of perhaps $20 to $200 each. If you do it right you'll lose money on a few but average a decent profit overall.

One of the more interesting internet business opportunities is to buy a domain and develop it for sale. You should have a template and a formula that you follow for this. For example, for each domain you buy you might put up a site with a dozen pages, submit it to a few hundred search engines and directories (there are services that do this for you for as little as $40). Then you sell this "website" for a couple hundred dollars, saving the buyer the trouble of starting from scratch.