Business Model 1: Free Portal Website

 A Portal is the ultimate online information site for a particular subject for example pest control portal, gardening portal, sports portal. In recent years many of these business areas have been dominated by companies setting up portals. So to get a share of these markets many companies are looking at Niche markets within these portals for example pest control services, organic gardening, football. These markets could be narrowed down further to a geographical location. I.e. USA.

Everyone likes something for free. The free portal offers masses of free information on its chosen subject, which is free and very useful to everyone that is looking for it. The Free Portal also offers free listings on its website to every company in the target area of the portal we will use the example of organic gardening.

This is how it works, after having built a website (without any special skills) we will cover this area later. You get as much quality content on the site as possible, offer free traffic in the form of a listing to organic gardening product companies, organic gardening service companies etc. A listing comprises of their company details, some text about them, 2 images and a link to the companies website. You can put this info on various pages of your site and all you ask back is a link. It is a good deal for them they have very little to lose.

As your site becomes the ultimate information centre for organic gardening you are starting to attract some interest in your site. Your 500 pages and thousands of search terms are now bringing in serious website traffic (this can realistically take 6 months or more). This is the moment that you can now start earning good money from the site.

You can start offering side banners on each page (not the homepage, do not make your site look cheap or trade low for homepage advertising). As you have traffic stats for each page it is easy to prove how cost effective these will be for customers. You can also now look for as many additional sources of income as possible. These can be in the form of trade partners that is specific relationship deals where you can both benefit. In this example the organic gardening site could set up a special offers section on the website linked from the home page. On all offers sold you get paid a commission. Also you could set up listings for a manufactures directory and charge just for some specialized area

Your newsletter could be another great source of income. If you give something away on your site, such as the top tips to organic gardening E-book for example and collect their email address and first name. You now have a relationship with the customer and so can send them your monthly top tips free (they need an option to unsubscribe on all emails under most anti-spam laws). This Newsletter can then be used to offer backend offers for products and services, which you get a commission on. Be careful to make sure the newsletter reads as an interesting article that happens to mention some good products and not like a sales letter. Another source of income could be to sign up for affiliate programs on related subjects. Be careful in this area as many affiliate programs are simply not that good, pay out low commissions and remember you are directing your website traffic away from your site, so it has a cost to you. Yet another revenue stream can come from selling other peoples E-books that relate to the subject of your website. You can easily set up an account which is free at http://www.clickbank.net . You can then simply find the relevant E-book titles, and set them up very easily in your website, so that your earn a commission. We will show you how to do this later and examples of E-books are given in Resources.

If you are getting good website traffic there are countless trade partner opportunities. Your free Portal gives away quality content which gets you a great deal of traffic, which in turn is a saleable commodity in a number of ways. Be inventive and imaginative, some very wealthy people started with free Portals and continued to give content away free knowing that they can sell much more backend.

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