Top 10 Ways to Generate Online Business Ideas.

1. What you know the best.
It is amazing what we know and we are not aware of that. Think again! You can turn your hobby in profitable business. Are you packed with some knowledge that can help you start online business? Do you have cat and know much about cats? If you do, write blog about Persian Cats. You can generate revenue from contextual ads and affiliate commission. If you know all about fishing and fishing baits build Affiliate store for fishing equipment, it is not complicated.
Don’t worry about the required skills to start online business, you will learn through work.

2. Study Case Studies.
Case studies are great resources not only for gathering business ideas but also have other useful information and resources that will help you to start and run an online business. Easiest way to learn is to see what successful people did, but do not copy paste someone else’s ideas, at least make some changes. Try to be innovative and unique.
Be careful, there are lots of scams or pay to earn case studies. Real and useful cases explain how they did it and which resources they used, the scams talk only about how much money they earned.

3. Check Pulse at E-bay.
E-bay is the biggest e-marketplace. At E-bay Pulse http://pulse.ebay.com/ you can find the best selling products in different categories. Some of his categories and products can light you bulb. It doesn’t mean that you have to start e-bay business you can just get ideas what kind of products are popular and can be sold online.



4. Follow the fastest growing online sectors.
Try to find the fastest growing online business sectors. Internet sales grow 25% each year. Some sectors grow faster than others. Practices say that in a sectors that grow fast it is easier to be successful than it sectors that grow slowly or at an average rate. The reason for that is that there is a future market share that is not conquered jet.
http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/
According to InternetRetailer the fastest growing sectors in 2005 were:
- hardware and home improvement 50%,
- office supplies 45%,
- apparel and accessories 42%,
- books, CDs and DVDs 36%,
- food and drug, up 26%

You can also check and compare search trends for specific keywords at Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends



5. Popular searches as a hint.
The best business principal is to offer products and services that people search for. Maybe you think that you have an excellent product but if nobody is looking for it you wouldn’t make any many.
You can find popular searches at Google Zeitgeist or Wordtracker.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/
http://www.wordtracker.com
If you come up with any business idea you can check the popularity of related keywords (its frequencies) at Overture Tool.
Remember the keywords that are more frequent are not always more attractive.
Other keyword attributes that matter are: relevancy, profitability and competition.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/



6. Find Top Paying keywords.
Different Online businesses have different profitability per 1000 visitors. That means that different keywords have different values. In other words, the businesses that have high profitability rate are ready to pay high price for every visitor (keyword). The prices per click sometimes goes over $50, or even more.
If you build WEB site around those top paying keywords and manage to bring in visitors you will make good profits per visitor with Google AdSense or other contextual ad program.
Other thing you can learn from the top paying keywords is that these categories of online businesses are really profitable and if you have knowledge and resources you should seriously consider to start one. But remember, these keywords are very hard to compete, the competition is ruthless (actually that’s the real reason why the price for a click is so high). Anyway may be you can find a way to fight a successful war and make good profits.
To find new Top Keywords just type “top paying adsense keywords” or “high paying adsense keyword list” in the search engines. There are plenty off free keyword lists out there.


7. Survey the Market Niches.
A market niche is a small portion of a bigger market segment that is not attractive for the big companies that sell mainstream products and hunt large profits. It is the same at internet. There are a lot of small market gaps out there with no or small competition. The marketing niches bring small profits but if you spread your online business portfolio on several of them you can multiply your small portions of profit. So don’t try to sell “business software”, “accounting software” can also be hard to compete but try “custom accounting software” or “small business accounting software” it should be much easer.
(The marketing niches could be identified with the keywords searched by internet users).
Go at Overture http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ type a keyword and you will see a “long tail” of searches (keywords). Those are your marketing niches. There you can find some pretty good business ideas.
You can also check the competition level of your keywords: type in the search box [allintitle:”your keywords”]. The number of results is the number of your real competitors.

8. Browse Affiliate Programs.
It is not complicated to build Affiliate Shop. The affiliate programs have abundance of products from different partners. Sing up as an affiliate and brows through different sellers and products. You can get a lot of inspiration what kind of shop you can build.
Commission Junction is one of the most popular Affiliate Sites and has many different goods. At ClickBank you can find only downloadable products.
Other companies that have affiliate programs are Amazon, AT&T, Barnes & Noble, Chase bank, Delta airlines, Gap, KMart and Walmart

9. Visit forums.
There are a lots of forums about Online Businesses. Find one that fits you and sign up. Read posts and comments, ask questions and visit the sites of the members.

10. Buy Book.
I would say – you don’t need a book. But if you don’t want to do the things above it’s OK, you can by one. Anyway it doesn’t need to be a book strictly about Online Business Ides. Books about Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click Advertising can also give you good ideas. And you will learn other useful staff also.


At the end I just want to say that more creative and innovative you are the chances to make sudden success are bigger. Sometimes even stupid ideas are not so stupid. Who could’ve thought that TheOneMillionDollarWebPage.com would make any money? Or take MyPlace.Com for example, there were similar projects before but they didn’t become popular.

Find Free Tips and Resources for starting your own Internet Business at StartBiz Blog.

Internet Business Forms

There are several types of businesses you can start online. It is difficult to make certain distinction among the Internet business types because sometimes they are interwoven and combined to give the best results. A criterion that can ease the distinction is the main income source of the business.

1. Corporate WEB site. This is not really an online business. Actually it’s WEB presence of a business, created for promotional purposes. Anyway, online presence is useful for almost any offline business and can bring new customers.

If you own offline business and you want to expand sales online, sometimes it would be better to create a corporate WEB site first in order to sense the potential market.

The basic income of a corporate WEB site comes from offline sales initiated from the WEB presence. These sales are very hard to track.

2. WEB Services. WEB services include: e-mail, web hosing, directories, online payment (PayPal), online marketplace (E-bay) and many others. I this category we can also include some services that are prepared by order and could be delivered online like; web design, graphic design, internet marketing, translation, market research etc. Generally the income comes from monthly fees and sales. When the services are free the sites are monetized from the embedded ads.

3. On-line Shop. First requirement to open real e-shop is to have possession of appropriate goods for online sales. You can manufacture these goods or you can by them in bulk or one by one after you sell them (from a drop shipper). Other important issues you have to take care of are; the ordering and payment system, and the delivery of the goods. If you have the knowledge and the resources you could build and manage these system your self, but he easiest way is to cooperate with specialized companies in these areas.

The income in this type of business comes generally from sales.

In this business type you can increase your sales several times by joining Affiliate programs. That way you will make your products available to other WEB sites to sell for a commission.

4. Affiliate Shop. The WEB appearance of an affiliate shop is the same as the appearance of a real On-line shop. The difference is that you sell products you do not possess and you don’t have to take care of the payment and delivery. At the end of the month you receive commission form the sales made. The affiliate shop can be considered as a virtual reselling agent. The sales are electronically tracked with special codes for every affiliate partner.

Affiliation is very easy way to start online business. You can choose to sell whatever you like and you don’t have to make big initial investment.

5. Informational sites. Blogs, forums, online news, e-magazines, online encyclopedias, specialized WEB sites etc, can be treated as informational sites. Generally, the information at internet is free. If you possess specific or hardly accessible information you could also sell it and make good profits. The main income concerning informational sites comes from selling ad space, from referrals and or affiliate sales.

The easiest way to start home business with Informational site is to open a Blog and to embed Ads.

The key for success is simple; you can write about everything you want as long as you attracts visitors that act appropriately (generate income).