1. Sell your own products

Selling your own products offers the biggest profit margin, because you have control over your products and can therefore control how much profit is made on each sale. Experiment with pricing to establish which price range works best. Furthermore, you can offer a more personalised service because customers often enjoy the absence of the middleman and value dealing directly with the "shop owner".

2. Drop ship products

Shipping and receiving, warehouse space organisation and inventory tracking is not for everyone, and if these logistics do not suit your lifestyle drop shipping might be a good option for you. Drop shipping enables you to sell quality, brandname products on your website for an excellent profit, while the drop shipper is responsible for fulfilling the order. The drop shipper warehouses the stock, packs the orders and delivers to your customers. Just he sure to deal with a shipper who has a good reputation and whom you can trust to follow through on your orders.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Establishing yourself as an affiliate marketer is one of the lower risk ways to generate a profit online. As an affiliate marketer you promote another company's products or services on your website in order to earn a percentage of each sale. As an affiliate or promotion partner you earn commission whenever a customer purchases a product or service that is attributable to your recommendation. For example, if you are promoting Nike trainers on your website and a customer decides to purchase from your site, you will get commission for that sale but do not have any further interaction with the customer. It is simply your job to promote and get people to purchase. To advertise and promote you could have a banner on your website that links to the affiliate program's website (where the actual products are on sale), you could publish an article about the products in a newsletter or you could set-up a "ghost" website which appears to be selling products - you offer the information and details of the product but when the customer actually pays for the product they go to the main website; you are tracked as the "promoter" and receive commission on the sale.

4. Sell your own services

From dentists to restaurant owners, online legal consultants to mechanics - there is profit to be made from selling a service online. It is reasonably easy to start selling a service online, but your revenue potential is somewhat limited because you can only provide as much service as your time allows. Someone selling physical products can store and ship them when required, whereas selling a service is basically selling "you"! This means that you will have to pay more personal attention to visitors to your website in order to establish credibility, and you will have to convince your visitors of the value to them in allowing YOU to perform the service.

5. Sell Ad space on your website

If your website has enough traffic, and the traffic or users are highly targeted, it will almost certainly be possible for you to sell advertising on your site. This could be in the form of banners at the top or sides of your site, or blocks within the content of your site. In South Africa we have not yet established an online culture which means there are few websites for web-savvy companies to advertise on - this should definitely be seen as an opportunity. While advertising income might not be enough as a sole source of income, it is a lucrative profit stream.

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