Whether you realize it or not, we all have that creative minded entrepreneur within us. You look around you, and see everything that surrounds you, but do you realize that every object to your left and right were at one point in time created by an entrepreneur?
Combine that stark reality with the ever growing tech industry, and particularly the internet. What is an online entrepreneur? Here is your answer, along with multiple examples and variations of modern online entrepreneurs.
What Is An Online Entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs are what shape our future and solve today's problems. Whether those problems are presented in the form of improving efficiency of a product, service or process, or whether it be in the form of an actual problem causing harm in some shape or form, entrepreneurs are at the forefront of making the world a better place.
According to Google's definition, an entrepreneur is “a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.”
With the internet aged in it's twenties (as of this writing), technology has allowed us to all connect virtually via a simple smartphone in our pocket. This has brought about even new ways for everyday entrepreneurs to run a million dollar business from their smartphone.
Recommended Reading: How To Become An Entrepreneur
Combine the original definition of an entrepreneur with that of the innovation of the internet and technology, and you arrive at what we now know as an online entrepreneur.
To put things simply, anyone seeking to build an online business, make money online, or even market their business online would be classified as an online entrepreneur.
The Most Common Online Entrepreneur Business Models
Making money online comes in many forms. Entrepreneurs have found a few business models to be very effective in growing your business online. The main business models used by online entrepreneurs are:
Most all other online businesses could fall under one of these four online business models in some way or another.
Affiliate Marketing Entrepreneurs
Affiliate marketing is when an online entrepreneur promotes products or services of another company and gets paid a small commission when a sale is made. This does not charge the purchasing customer anymore, it's rather a commission usually stated as a percentage of the purchase price, or a fixed dollar amount, per sale.
This can be done in many different ways. First, the affiliate marketing entrepreneur needs to have an audience to promote the respective affiliate products to. These audiences can be found on social media platforms, blogs and websites, email marketing lists, forums and paid advertising.
The easiest way and most common way to make money affiliate marketing is through a blog or website. By creating a blog focused on a niche market, creating content that attracts your target audience in that niche market, then inserting affiliate links within your website you can attract large amounts of traffic which equates to large amounts of sales.
Recommended Reading: How To Make Money Affiliate Marketing For Beginners
Those that wish to promote products on social media platforms simply insert affiliate links that link to the web page of their promoted product within their social media posts. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are the most common social media platforms for affiliate marketing.
Email marketing is most often combined with having an affiliate marketing website or blog. We will discuss email marketing entrepreneurs in more detail below.
Other ways of promoting affiliate marketing products online are through paid ads with Google or Bing search engines. By paying Google or Bing to list your add that sends visitors to your promoted product, you can target specific keywords that will trigger your ad to be listed as a search result. When clicked on, your visitors will be sent to your affiliate product page and you get paid when a sale is made.
Affiliate marketing can also be done on popular video platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo or Snapchat.
Online Entrepreneur Blogs
As briefly mentioned above, many online entrepreneurs will grow a loyal following in a niche market with their blog. Popular blogs that do this are often found in the fitness industry, making money industry, health and nutrition industries and other similar markets.
If you have a passion for a certain topic to which you also have a unique insight and knowledge about, creating a blog may be a lucrative way for you to make money online.
Recommended Reading: How To Start A Blog To Make Money: The Ultimate Guide
How do bloggers make money? The most common way is through affiliate marketing as we discussed previously. Other ways bloggers make money online is through inserting ads on their website and selling physical or digital products as well.
We discussed that above that you can pay major search engines to place ads that lead to your affiliate products when common search terms are entered. This is playing the part of the advertiser. On the other hand, Google needs a place to post your ads other than search results for common search terms.
This is where popular blogs come into play. By setting up a free Google Adsense account, you can tell Google where and what types of ads you accept for them to post on your website. When your blog visitors click on ads placed within your website, Google pays you on a “per click” basis.
The other most common way bloggers make money online is by creating products of their own and selling them to their readers. This is perhaps the most lucrative way to make money as a blogger, but also the most time-consuming and takes a loyal audience to promote it to.
Ecommerce For Entrepreneurs
Ecommerce is simply having an online storefront via a website that sells physical products. The largest ecommerce store we are all familiar with is Amazon
Online entrepreneurs can make money online through ecommerce through multiple different channels. One of them is by creating an Amazon Seller Central
Did you ever notice that many products on Amazon have multiple sellers with different prices? That's because there are multiple online entrepreneurs selling the same product. Some are able to sell them cheaper than others and some more expensive.
You can also create an ecommerce store online with your own website through ecommerce website builders like Shopify. Shopify makes it easy for people to buy a domain name and organize their online store with pre made website templates.
Recommended Reading: How To Build An Ecommerce Website Successfully
This takes all the difficult work out of the way, allowing you to simply post the product and content online. The rest is up to attracting visitors to your store (via paid ads, blogs, affiliate marketing, etc as we have previously discussed) so you have an audience to sell products to.
An attractive way to build an ecommerce store is through drop shipping. With drop shipping, you never actually own the product you are selling. You simply receive the orders on your website and pass those orders on to your partnered wholesaler.
You can list the product for $25 (for example). When an order for that product comes through, your customer pays $25 for the purchase, and you pass on that order to your wholesaler from which you buy the product for $15. You keep the $10 difference!
This is attractive to online entrepreneurs because you never have to purchase inventory in bulk, and allows you to get started with little to no startup costs.
Email Marketing Entrepreneurs
Email lists are gathered through subscribers to your blog or website, by creating landing pages, and by sending traffic to your email sign up form with paid ads (as discussed above also). The most common way to build your email list is through your website or blog.
Recommended Reading: How To Build A Highly Responsive Email Subscriber List
Within your website you simply insert subscriber forms for visitors to enter their name and email to join your list. You can then create pre made email campaigns with an email autoresponder like ConvertKit, and your new subscribers will be sent a sequence of emails automatically depending on the time that they joined your list.
Why Everyone Should Become An Online Entrepreneur
If you haven't noticed, more and more businesses are shutting down due to the growth of ecommerce stores and the growth of the internet. This opens up a whole new avenue for anyone to make a lot of money online.
Being an online entrepreneur is an economic proof business model. How? Well your market isn't limited to your local economy. It's the 4 billion daily internet users worldwide! Despite what your current economic condition is locally, there is always going to be a buyer or reader somewhere.
Online businesses aren't limited to a regular 9am to 5pm workday schedule, and allow entrepreneurs to literally make money while they sleep!
There are plenty of training programs available to new online entrepreneurs that show you the basics of how to get started making money online. Most programs have a pricey membership fee, but these guys offer 10 free online entrepreneur courses that is free to you for life.
They have a paid membership option that is just a few bucks per month for access to hundreds more training's, and the best part is you can upgrade or downgrade at anytime.
⇒ Learn more about how to become an online entrepreneur with 10 free training's to get started.
Great article on online entrepreneurship! I think anyone that’s interested in earning an income online will benefit from reading your definition of an online entrepreneur and the many avenues through which you can earn income online.
I especially appreciated the time you took to describe how you can make money through each of these avenues.
Thanks for a very thorough and informative article!
Thanks, Tucker!
I am so excited to have found your article.Come to think of it , yes, everything we see around us are created by an entrepreneur.Affiliate Marketing is the way to go, and with Blogging it would make things easier for anyone to be an online entrepreneur.
And its amazing that anyone could make money while sleeping, being an Affiliate marketer.
Agreed!