Other revenue streams
Besides subscription sales and one-off sales, you can earn from affiliate income and commissions on cross selling to your members. If there are products and other services that are great for your member community vendors of those products and services will welcome the opportunity to leverage this relationship. You can earn commission on such sales.
You can also charge your members additional fees for special services or personalized coaching or extra privileges. Besides, you can offer them your own books, training material, videos and the like through your site. Some trainers also offer workshops and boot camps for advanced level training and these can be promoted with your members.
Scaling up and growing your business
As discussed earlier, one of the advantages of an online business is being able to scale up your website quickly and easily. Scaling up is essential for any business, more so for a website. Your softwares and databases should be such that they have the ability to handle a large customer database, even if you start very small. Your business model should be very flexible to accommodate customers’ needs while scaling up.
Raising finance or venture investments
Approaching Venture Capitalists or banks is the traditional way to raise finance for your website. However, there are certain factors to be considered before you go to a bank or a VC.
Many people telephone an investment officer of a venture capital company and try to set up an appointment so they can explain their financial needs and the potential of their company. Most venture capitalists will resist such visits until after they have received the business proposal. Without the proposal, or at least a summary proposal, the venture capitalist has no idea of the details of the business. If you do meet he is not prepared to ask intelligent questions.
The business proposal is similar to the business plan, except that it is shorter and contains fewer details. A business proposal is much like any other proposal in that it proposes something to someone. In this case, it suggests how the venture capitalist and you can both make money. It is an abbreviated business plan with an emphasis on showing an outsider how the company will succeed.
Raising venture finance for an Internet business has become quite difficult after the recent crash. However, scores of ventures are still getting early stage investment from venture capitalists. The paid content model will generally be regarded a solid and stable business model and it should be possible to raise venture capital for good business ideas and well executed plans.
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