With business opportunity abound on the Internet, more and more people are looking to start an online home based business of their own. Lured by the ease and low cost of doing online business, they hope to either supplement or totally replace their offline incomes. Unfortunately, many Internet startups fail within 5 years as they cannot generate sufficient profits to sustain their operations. These virtual business owners have neither the profit generating skills nor knowledge to do so. In this article I'll will explore 3 strategies you as an online startup owner can adopt to increase the profits of your virtual business and thus boost its chance of survival.

Out of the many ways to generate income, developing and hosting a virtual community requires minimum content input from the business owner. Look for example at MySpace or YouTube. The contents of these sites are all provided by the communities. You instead concentrate on the supporting frameworks and structures to facilitate the interaction amongst the members. With a massive community, you can then improve your profits by selling advertising space or earning pay-per-click income and so on. Another good way to profit from the captive audience is to encourage them to subscribe to your online newsletter.

Offering your prospects and customers a free subscription to your newsletter will help you achieve higher volumes of sales. A prospect normally needs to be contacted 5-7 times regularly before making the first purchase. The email newsletter serves as a convenient and low cost solution to keeping in touch with the prospects. It is also an avenue to remind existing customers to replenish their supplies of regular purchases or to promote new products to them. You should not communicate solely through newsletter though and should explore other means as well.

Your customers are sophisticated and comfortable with handling and receiving information from a wide variety of channels. Email is the easiest and the most wide reaching means as everyone online has at least one email account, with many having two or three or even more. Blogs and RSS feeds are two other common communication channels to reach the buyers. Rising in popularity are audio and visual communication as evidenced by the many podcast and video blogging everywhere. Different buyers prefer to acquire product information through different communication means. Presenting the same information in different formats also enhances the product experience of the buyers. It makes sense, therefore, to use as many of the communication channels as you can to reach existing customers and gain some new ones.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of strategies to raise the profits of your online business for its survival. Nonetheless, adopting these straightforward ideas of hosting a community, starting a newsletter, and communicating in various channels, either together or individually, will help improve the bottom line of your Internet startup. After you become familiar with these strategies, you can explore other ways to expand and increase your online business profits. Eventually, you will succeed in living off entirely from your online incomes.

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