The content below is quoted correctly or closely adapted from Internet riches by Scott Fox, published 2006. The information is designed for students who are currently enrolled in the project and have purchased the book. All information is protected by the original publishers copyright. This content is provided in summary form to help students focus on key ideas and highlights from the book.

Introduction.

Online sales are continuing to explode and could reach more than $300 billion is the United States alone by 2010.

The Internet has significantly reduced costs and even eliminated many of the risks of starting your own business. The arrival of e-business has changed the rules of business so dramatically that now is the best time in history for you to take charge of your life and start his own business.

Think about how she Internet has contained the continues to grow, improve, and penetrate your daily life in the years since the dot's bottom crash. Hasn't it made shopping more efficient, teaching in touch with friends easier through e-mail and instant messaging, and probably improve the productivity of the business where you work too?

Many sophisticated technical, marketing, and merchandise services is now available purely on a pay as you go basis.

The Fox book is about empowering you to take control of your life. Properly designed and marketed e-business takes less time than a traditional job, allows you flex time to work when and where you want, and allows you to be your own boss.

The focus of this book is to share with you specific, practical secrets to creating a technical, idea driven e-business, which the average person like you can still replica replicate today.

Chapter 1. The Internet and business revolution.

Starting your own business on the Internet is by far the number one business opportunity currently available to entrepreneurs.

In the online world, for the first time ever, the little guy like you actually has advantages over the big companies.

• Lower costs mean higher profits to you.

• Worldwide customer reach is worse for the Web.

• Enterprise software is available for pennies per day.

If you can reach enough potential customers with a profitable business offer, you can make serious money even if only a very small percentage of them purchased it.

Transaction processing software, drop shipping services. Come on and online advertising had become so effective that distributor middlemen with the local warehouses full of inventory and advertising agency middlemen are often no longer necessary.

Every year it has gotten easier for newcomers to use.

There are thousands of software companies, web design firms, e-commerce companies, web hosting facilities, and other belated corporations competing with each of their to offer easy to use software services designed specifically to help small business owners work online. They make it easy for you to access all the services and technology that you need.

Chapter 2. Starting your own e-business. Can you afford not to?

It's worldwide reach, instant 24/7 communications capability, ease of updating, and low-cost have all converge to create a vast new market opportunities.

Online retail sales will reach $329,000,000,000 by 2010.

Developments include quicker shipping, a faster credit card transaction processing, 24/7 customer service, easier to use software, higher-quality online video, and much more.

the end result of spending just $25 can be a fully functional and professional looking website, complete with credit card transaction processing, technical support, and maintenance, that can reach the entire global Internet audience for your goods and services. It's all the technology is outsourced, you have zero maintenance or technology issues.

e-businesses have evolved in three waves:

1. Wave one. Efficiency-based e-businesses.

2. Wave two. Products based e-businesses.

3. Wave three. Niche-based e-businesses.

Chapter 3. The Internet's first millionaire wave, efficiency.

Efficiency is about starting businesses based on helping people and businesses that do things faster, easier, or in more entertaining ways.

Their defining characteristic is that they carry no inventory themselves. Instead, these e-business is use information about other people's products to create new inefficiencies that create profit for themselves. Examples are Yahoo, eBay, and Expedia.

The traditional way to identify new business opportunities is to find the biggest market, you can, then figure out what it needs that you can sell.

The Internet is the ladder that just keeps going up.

Participating as a publisher and an online affiliate advertising program offers you opportunity. An affiliate advertisement is an online advertisement for a product or service that entrepreneurs publish on their websites in order to collect the commission on every sale of that product or services that they deliver to the advertiser. If you post such advertisements on your website, you are referred to as an affiliate publisher in the lingo of affiliate programs.

Whenever you find a product or service you like, it is worth considering if you would like to become an affiliate publisher for that company.

You can effectively sell other people's goods with zero capital required to invest in any product development or inventory.

You can focus on providing helpful information on complex products.

You can create simple websites that focus on popular but niche products.

The simplest solution is usually the correct one.

B2B means business to business.

You might want to invent or improve the product. Once you have an attractive product, you can make money by selling it yourself retail, selling it to distributors for sale, or licensing. The product to a larger corporation that made to the production and sales for you. Many entrepreneurs manage to do all three.

Because the Internet is so good at reaching and aggregating formerly dispersed audiences, there are now more markets for more specialized products than ever before. The three piece of product development are prototyping, production, and patents.

the Internet offers entrepreneurs a chance to reach more people than ever before, and that as a reason to have confidence in your new products potential. If you find your product, interesting, the chances are that others out there in cyberspace me to.

Please do this exercise and put it in your project.

Take some time to consider your answers to the following questions. Write them out.

What needs can you identify it in your own life that could be fulfilled with better or more specialized products, packaging, materials, or parts?

Are there products that you have customized to serve needs in your own life?

Are there any off-the-shelf products that you regularly modify or rearrange or recombine to improve their efficiency?

Could you market, the technique you use to customize the product, or bark at the modified products themselves?

What is the everyday items in your life that need a redesign or an upgrade?

Can you turn any of these ideas into products?

Keep a typed journal, which you can submit as part of your project. This will give you valuable information for continuing business development. Remember to include all written information in your project submission.

Chapter 5. The Internet's third wave, niches.

Recognize that communities are formed based not only uncommon social interests, but also unshared purchasing interests.

By identifying these communities, large or small, you can target their members as potential customers for appropriately targeted goods and services that address the needs of their specific hobbies, lifestyles, and products, industries, or services.

Internet companies are not limited by geography. This means that you can reach customers worldwide more cheaply than ever before possible.

The definition of a community is simply a group of people who share a common interest.

Virtual communities are a major trend that you should get behind because each online community can be viewed as a new markets. If you can understand the deeds or interests of such groups of people, you can sell them goods or services that meet those needs.

You tend draw upon your own hobbies and interests to create your own profitable e-business net. The wide reach of the Internet means that almost all niche interest is sure to be shared by others online.

Using today's software and the marketing tools, you can inexpensively run a business yourself from home, keeping overhead low and profitability high while pursuing your own interests and developing social and business relationships with others who share them.

E-business entrepreneurs like you should realize that hundreds of millions and soon to be billions of people online at worldwide have all brought their real-world interests and needs with him to the Internet.

Every online store or e-mail newsletter has its own community, even if the owners of that website had not realized it.

Smart businesses are nurturing these audiences to increase their customer loyalty. The easiest way is to offer the online community, the ability to offer feedback. This is why you see more and more message boards, e-mail newsletters, live chat support, and online polls on the websites you visit. These businesses recognize the power of interactivity to create community. The community is fact and turned reinforces the audience's loyalty to that brand and customers purchasing activity.

See http://www.ivillage.com/

http://www.bathboats.com/

http://www.cafepress.com/

Café press is one of Joan's favorites. It provides free online storefronts so that entrepreneurs like you can take advantage of completely outsourced manufacturing, fulfillment, and customer service of logo branded apparel and promotional items. Café press offers print on demand publishing services also. Unlike traditional printers or merchandise producers, you can order small quantities or even just one of each item you create at an affordable price, because Café press doesn't manufacture them and tell you place your order. Café press makes its money by providing you with the merchandise and website services at a comfortable margin that covers all of its costs.

Café press encourages you to use its system to open an online store to sell your own customized goods. A basic store limited to a few items is free. It is an easy, fun, and very inexpensive way to get started in e-commerce.

PROJECT JOURNAL. As part of your project, set up a Café press store front now as part of your work. Print the page and include it in your projects a mission.

Here are easy and profitable niche product strategies you can use with Café press.

1. Launch your own line of clothing or other merchandise.

2. Use Café press as a test environment for your product line or e-business.

3. Use the service to start a side business that can add additional revenue to your existing website business or current job.

4. Launch a promotional clothing or merchandise line to promote an existing real-world business.

See http://www.internetmillionairesecrets.com/

See http://www.thetshirtnexus.com/

The key to niche publishing is finding or creating a specialized information or entertainment content attractive to your audience. If you have the content, then you can make money by selling advertisements to companies that want to reach your niche audience.

Niche content can be exploited in many ways online to meet the information needs of the target market, including the following.

Publishing and information rich e-mail newsletter such as Digital media wire http://www.dmwmedia.com/

Building a compelling website such as http://www.bookslut.com/

Publishing a blog like http://www.mobiletracker.net/

combining elements of all of these approaches with your own creativity to create new business models for niche content.

Blogs are great, but they are just a means to an end in your establishment of a successful e-business. If you have a message you want to get out or a topic that you want to cover regularly, becoming a blogger may be your road to e-business success. Look past the buzzword to focus instead on how your content can best yield to your target market first. If starting a blog is the best way to reach them, go for it.

The increasing numbers of people online looking for entertainment, information, or distraction represents an opportunity for you to tap their attention to build an interactive community.

1. How to profit from an online community.

2. Identify a target group with shared off-line interests.

3. Provide them with a place to meet and interact online.

4. Offer local branded merchandise that they can purchase and where to show their affiliation.

5. Develop enough exclusive content that you can charge a monthly subscription fee for access to the community.

Check out these websites.

http://www.billoreilly.com/

http://www.cooksillustrated.com/

http://scoobymods.com/

Selecting a niche.

1. Are you a believable expert in the field?

2. Can you offer a product or service that members of that edge will pay for?

PROJECT JOURNAL. Write the answer to these questions in your project journal.

1. Have you developed any professional expertise from your work?

2. Are you particularly good at anything?

3. What are your hobbies?

4. Do any of your hobbies involve skills that may be of interest to others?

5. What hobbies did you use to enjoy that you have dropped over the years?

6. Are there any topics or subjects that you are deeply enthusiastic about?

7. What is unique about your talent, your friends, or the way you live?

8. Is there anything unique about your upbringing or family project history that may be marketable?

9. Are there regional or local specialties from your neighborhood that are right for sharing with the world?

10. Do you have special access to any unique goods, services, celebrities or information?

11. Are other people interested in the topics you identified in the first questions?

12. This is there anything unique about the audience you want to address that makes them an attractive potential market for you?

13. Would this audience the local, regional, national, or foreign? Wealthy, poor, online, unwired, educated, less educated, religious, not religious, urban, rural, professional, blue-collar, old, young?

14. Are you aware of any online businesses that are already addressing this opportunity? Could you add something to present the goods, services, or information in an entertaining way that differentiates you from competitors?

If you were going to pursue a business based on these niches, what would your initial product or service be? Review the answers to these questions. From the ideas you have listed, choose the five niche interest areas that you think may be the best business potential. Pick five areas where you know, the most or have the best idea of how your business would be different from potential competitors. Try to force yourself to find five. It is usually the hard work of thinking of the last few that will stimulate your brain's creativity to produce the best ideas. Add your latest thoughts on these topics to your journal. Be sure to submit this information as part of your project.