This is the second in my series on How to Make Money Online. In the first installment How to Make Money Online with a Virtual Store, I covered how this is probably the FIRST thing you think of when you hear the term “make money online”. Instead of paying rent on a brick and mortar building, one simply sets up a website and begins selling products.
How to Make Money Online as a Virtual Merchant
As I suggested in the last post of this series, renting a warehouse to store inventory is OPTIONAL when it comes to making money online by selling merchandise.
If you’ve got the talent to create an easy to navigate website that gets a lot of traffic, you may choose to become a virtual merchant where charge other retailers monthly fees (or per-transaction fees) for the opportunity to market their products on your site.
In case you didn’t know, this accounts for a full 28% of Amazon.com’s revenues in 2006. However, it’s not just physical merchandise you can move in this manner. There is a 25-person company which charges businesses to post help wanted ads in San Francisco, New York and L.A., and also collects fees for apartment listings in New York City.
In order to get started making money online being a virtual merchant, you’ll need a domain name, hosting and then build website. In addition to, you’ll need above average SEO (search engine optimization) skills to excel in this arena – but the rewards are well worth the investment of time and effort.
If you enjoy the web and understand the basics of SEO such as keywords, backlinks and article marketing – then you may want to consider making money online as a virtual merchant. Essentially you’ll be helping the non-web savvy take advantage of the opportunities available on the web!
