Have you thought of an idea yet for your online business?  Have you followed the guidelines in the last post to see if it might be profitable?

If you have, good for you!   If you haven’t, you should start there first.

OK, let’s assume that you’ve done your homework and found some promising indications that your business idea is a good and profitable one.

Now before you plunk down money for a domain name, or supplies, or whatever it is you think you need right now, you’ve got more work to do.  I know it’s not fun, but it will be worth it.  I promise.

OK, so you’ve looked online for other sites like the one you want to start, you’ve looked for books, magazines, and magazine articles about your business idea.  You’ve done some searching for keywords to make sure people are looking online for what you intend to offer.

So the next step for your business idea is to do further research.  It won’t take too long – maybe an hour or two – but first you need to learn a few things.

In the world of online business, there is something called affiliate income.  Being an affiliate means that you sign up to sell someone else’s product.  In return, you earn a percentage of the sales price as commission.

For instance, if you sign up to be a Moms Biz Kit affiliate, every time someone you refer signs up to be a member and then pays their monthly subscription fee, you get 50% of the income!  If you sign up just 2 people to Moms Biz Kit, that means your membership is free!

Does that make sense?

An affiliate program is helpful to a lot of people – it lets you make extra money as an affiliate, it adds customers and income for the person with the program, and it lets people who might not have known about the product find out about it.

There are a lot of affiliate programs out there, and you can use a few of them to determine if your business idea is a really good, profitable idea.

For instance, you can go to Clickbank and search for products to promote.  You have to sign up as an affiliate first – it’s free – and then once you sign in, you can search for products.

Once you get ready to actually sell some products, there is a way for you to choose the right ones.  For now, just search to see how many possibilities are available.  This will give you an even clearer idea of whether or not your business idea is a good one.