If your wanting to get involved with making money online then one of the best ways to get in the game is to start your own online store. Here I will run through the many benefits to having your own online store and then take you through the best ways to get started. The way I recommend allows you to get started with virtually no investment and doesn’t require you to ever own any products or do any of the tough work like shipping the products or dealing with refunds.

An online store has many advantages over many other businesses you can choose to start. The first being the ease of setting up your virtual store. Today there are many platforms that allow you to get on online store up and running within 24 hours. This is due to the fact that you no longer need to do the tricky work of writing pages of html, rather these platforms such as WordPress allow you to choose the look of your website and then simply type your content directly into the website builder. WordPress will take care of all the technical stuff freeing up your time to work on the marketing of your online store.

With your online store you're not restricted to doing business within your local area the same way physical stores do. This opens up your market drastically and enables you to do business on a national or even international scale. With an online store you are also always open 24/7/365 selling products while you are asleep. If you don’t turn up to work one day you are still in business.

An online store means you can focus your efforts on a small niche and still be able to make considerable profits. A physical store selling solely a product like cuff links would never be able to turn a profit however with your online store the market size enables a business plan like this to be very feasible and potentially very profitable.

To start an online store requires a tiny investment, especially following the way I advise you to take and that is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other peoples products and receiving a commission when someone make a purchase through your online store. This concept certainly isn’t new and most of the large retailers like Amazon and Walmart have affiliate programs that allow you to sell any of the products that they sell on their own websites. Selling physical products through an affiliate program is an awesome way to make money online however a more lucrative way to make money is by selling digital products which offers higher commissions and can be sold globally.

Most of my websites are setup to sell educational Ebooks. Finding digital products to sell is very easy as networks like Clickbank and Commission Junction have a huge range of available products that you can promote on your online store no matter what niche you’re involved in. Like I said the investment in starting an online store is very small. All you will need to do is create a simple website using a free platform like WordPress, get it hosted for peanuts and then upload products from any of the above programs I have mentioned.

With a bit of marketing help and content creation you will begin getting traffic to your website that will lead to customers. Your own online store is a brilliant way to start making money with the internet and all the better still when you don’t have to worry about the headaches of owning and shipping the goods yourself.