E-Commerce
Some of the earliest and largest Internet businesses are e-commerce retail websites like Amazon.com and Ebay.com. Much of their success came for the complex (and expensive) programming of their e-commerce software. Today, it is easy and inexpensive to hire a web design company to build and install e-commerce software for selling your products online.
If you are thinking about selling your products online, the first thing to do is start selling on an established e-commerce retailer like Amazon.com or Ebay.com. If all goes well, you can build your own e-commerce website and start selling your own products.
Advertizing
Google is the company that has grown to dominate the online advertizing market, which didn’t exist just a decade ago. Last year online advertizing grew 23%, while traditional paper advertizing contracted. Google is not the only company to create a search engine supported by online ads, there are over 30 major search engines competing in this market.
Search engine providers also support affiliated content networks to stream their online ads to content websites. This allows anyone to easily put ads on their website and get paid on a per-click basis. This is by far the easiest and most common method to make money on the Internet. But, because it is so easy to setup, 99% of Internet startups try to use online ads to fund their business. It takes a lot of clicks before you make any real money, which is why you need to be a major source of information with millions of hits per day, like YouTube or MySpace or CNN. Another way to go is to secure online advertizing contracts directly with big sponsors, but again, you need to be a major player to make this happen.
Sales / Marketing / Brand Building
Today, every business - at the very least - needs a basic brochure website to meet custom expectations. Even if the website only has a few pages it’s like a billboard on the Internet – helping to Market the company and build recognition for its product Brands. The more information you can share with customers – the more value your Brand will have.
Customer Self-Service
Customer service can be a major expense and is difficult to charge for. Customers expect good customer service and without it you will lose repeat customers. The Internet is helping to create a new paradigm shift in customer service, by providing limitless information that is easy to find. Customer no longer need to phone-in to find information. Customers can take advantage of other customers’ questions/answers on forums, frequently-asked-questions, polls, blogs, etc. Managing and sharing collective intelligence enables customers to be self-servicing - which can save your business money by enabling you to reduce your customer service support.
Productivity / Collaboration Tools
Over the last 10 years, e-mail has become the best Internet technology, as everyone in the world now uses the Internet to communicate with e-mail. The wide spread use and success of e-mail to share information has created the need to also share application data to further increase productivity and collaboration. The desire to share application data has also been heightened by the rapid growth in off-shore workers in China and India.
Several of the big software companies are in the middle of a heated battle for this market. Google has created online office applications to compete with Microsoft Office – the most widely used productivity software in the world. While Microsoft has created SharePoint, which is an online website portal designed to share office documents like, Word and Excel with other colleagues.
Education
Online educational training is growing very fast as the cost of education has skyrocketed. Everything from basic computer classes to four-year college degree courses are now online. The next generation of college graduates might not even have to leave home to graduate from the college of their choice.
Businesses that sell informational products (like: market research, securities research, product reviews, compliance information, etc.) are also starting to create ‘Online Universities’ to provide their products online. This has created a whole new sales channel for them to sell their products and make them more accessible.