Starting your own online business is not particularly difficult, well the online part of it is not. Depending on what you would like your online business to do will determine the difficulty and amount of time it need.

This is a quick overview of a few online business types you can start.

There are basically 3 types of online business’s that are common and these are:

• Selling physical products
• Selling digital products
• Selling services

If we look at a few of the giants in online business. Facebook sells advertising services, Amazon sells physical products, Netflix sells digital products.

These companies are a lot more complex and diversified than that, that really is an over simplified example, but it should help to understand the differences.

Selling physical products is basically when you have a physical product and you use the internet to sell it, that can be through facebook adverts, email adverts, setting up a website for the product, listing it on classified sites and so on. The approach you take would depend on the product you are trying to sell and how many of them you have.

Selling digital products is selling anything digital, this can be music, programs, graphic designs, photographs, 3d animations, video recordings, sound recordings, anything that you can put a price on and upload to a site for sale, that would be considered a digital product.

Selling services while it can include some of the products in digital products, the idea here is that you would be creating the digital product for a specific client rather than just using something you created once, and it also includes additional services such as data entry, virtual assistant services, researching, social media management, website management and a wide variety of other services that you can provide over the internet and phone.

So what do you need in order to start an online business.

Each category will have its own requirements, and your specific choice may have additional requirements within the category. This is a simple look at the three categories and what you would definitely need to get started in any of them.

I will add additional articles going into depth on each one in the future, so subscribe to our newsletter to be notified when new articles are published.

Selling physical products is primarily based around advertising online. When you have a set of dinner plates for sale there is no additional work required other than finding a buyer.

The variation in this could be if you are manufacturing and offering customizations, then you would need to account for that.

In order to get going selling physical products online you will need a computer or laptop to work on, either photos of the products or a camera to take photos, and an internet connection. That is enough to get going.

Selling digital products is a lot simpler than selling physical products, because with a physical product once a customer purchases the product you still need to deliver it to them or have them come and collect it.

With a digital product you can make the sale and give the customer a link to download the product at their convenience. This great reduces the amount of time you need to put into a sale.

Digital products cover a very wide variety of things that you can sell digitally and this is great as there is a good chance there is something you are particularly interested in that you would be able to package and sell as a digital product.

Selling services online is the biggest category as it is so diverse and caters to so many industries and interests.

Selling services is where you are selling your talents, time, knowledge, experience and interests and where most people find themselves fitting in. If you are interested in writing books for example, well that can be a service if you do it for other people, you would usually be selling the finished product, and that is a digital product. Services are more like assisting with doing the research, proof-reading, data-entry,  and other service type tasks.

This category includes things like blogs, vlogs, podcasts, website design, graphic design, virtual assistant services, online advertising, travel planning, event planning, promotional services and the list can go on an on. It basically includes anything you can do while in front of your computer with minimal requirement to leave.

It is more difficult that selling physical products or digital products, but can also offer more benefits as your supply is decided by you and not your inventory level. If you want to work 2 hours a day, you build your business around that. If you want to work 25 hours a day, that to is entirely up to you.

That is a look at the types of online businesses you can start, we are going to be going into depth in each category and giving you ideas on specific online businesses, their requirements and how to get started in them as we go along.

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