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So you want to start a business on the Internet?

What kind of business?

Where do you start?

What do you intend to do?

Have you a product that you would like to sell?

Or have you a service to provide?

What experience do you have?

These are just the basic questions you must ask yourself before you even think about starting a business.

The vast majority of web businesses are started by people who have no business experience whatsoever. They are under the impression that all that you have to do is to set up a website, put a couple of adverts in a few ezines, then sit back and wait for the money to start pouring in.

Life is never that easy.

This brings us to the question, "How do you start a business using the Internet?" which can be answered in a number of ways. All of them quite legitimate. Ask a dozen successful internet entrepreneurs how they got started and you will probably get a dozen different answers.

This does not mean that if they were starting from scratch right now that they would follow the same path. They will all have learned from the mistakes that they made on the way up.

I know that I have.

How would they do it now? Remember that the Internet is constantly changing. What worked a couple of years ago is not necessarily the best way to go now.

How would I do it?

To get the money coming in as quickly as possible, building a website would have to wait. The first thing is to have something to sell.

Ideally, something that can be delivered electronically. Something like an instruction book.

There are hundreds of sites that will sell you the rights to one or more of their existing stock of books. You can then sell it as often as you can and keep all of the profits.

How do you sell it?

You need a system that allows your customers to download your book. You will also need a method of collecting the money.

You will then need a method of collecting the email addresses of your customers so that you can make them a further offer at a later date.

If you are new to the internet this willrequire a certain amount of expertise.

There is an alternative way of doing it. Sign up to an affiliate program, the owners of the program will do all that is necessary regarding the downloading and seeing that you get your just rewards. All you have to do is to sell it.

The best affiliate programs come with a lot of backup with hints and tips on how to promote and sell their product.

You must realise that if you don't make money, neither do they.

The downside is that you don't get the full value of the product.

You will be working on a commission basis. Somewhere in the region of fifty percent of the actual price.

Whilst you are getting experience in the selling side of the business you should be studying the other aspects. ie. Downloading, collecting the money and capturing the email addresses.

Don't be too eager to branch out on your own. Walk, don't run.

There are thousands of people who are making more than a good living using nothing more than affiliate programs. They don't do it with just one program. Once they have one up and running, they start another and another.

That is when the website comes into it's own. If you set up all of the programs on a website, you only need one advert to cover all of them.

This saves a lot of hard work, but if you can do it, advertising each one individually will in the long term bring in a much better response.

Think about it. Some of the top business people have little technical knowledge. They let the experts do the ground work and concentrate on the business side of things. They concentrate on what they do best.

Running any business is a learning experience. You must be constantly learning just to stay in business. Learning better ways of doing things.Learning from other peoples mistakes. Trying not to make too many of your own.

Don't let this put you off. Learning can be fun. It's just a state of mind.

I didn't start until I was nearly seventy years of age. I did it. So can you.

Once you start to believe you can do it, You can.

Have a great time. Bob....