The internet is a vast place which resembles the earth a few centuries ago, in the sense that it still remains a somewhat unexplored territory.
Indeed, although there are literally thousands if not millions of players, the fact is that there are a lot of areas of internet business that have not even been looked at by many people, and even those which have been flooded with competitors still offer profit potential for a whole new crowd of online business entrepreneurs.
A common misconception of many people is that nowadays the internet is too competitive and that a newcomer cannot expect to succeed running against the big dogs or more seasoned internet business owners.
This is a conception truly divorced from reality, because as I said before, there are many players right now taking advantage of the various ways to make money online, but even in their presence, there is still too much business to be done and too many niches to be filled.
I personally started doing business with affiliate marketing not that long ago, and it has been this very business model which has allowed me to make a living entirely working over the internet, and believe me, I tried e-tail, surveys, you name it, but it was affiliate marketing which from my -then naive- perspective offered the greater profit potential.
You might think "ok right, but I will bet that you had some previous background, or you simply got lucky and found a niche with low competition", and I would respond to you "none of the above".
First, I am a lawyer, so as you can imagine not computers neither technology were part of my strengths.
On top of that I had very little time available to work on my internet business project, because I was buried in work as an attorney.
However, I started tackling affiliate marketing one step at a time, never minding how much money I was making, because I was aware that results would not come in an instant, that is just the way a business works when you are just starting.
One dilemma I faced was: should I start by attacking what some call "virgin niches" or should I go for popular niches, because as you may have guessed, the first one will have less competition, but on the other hand, it might not have the same number of hungry prospects waiting for your message, whereas the more popular niche will have a whole bus of people competing against you, but on the other side you will have a massive crowd of hungry costumers.
As hard as it seemed at the time, I decided to go for the second option, and what you know? Within a matter of days I started watching my sales take off, because indeed, I suppose there were hundreds or maybe thousands competing against me and probably many of them were making a lot more money than me or maybe not, I do not know, but regardless of that, I was getting results out of my actions.
I managed to do this because I had an edge: I knew what I was doing.
Sounds too simple right?, but as simple as it may sounds, that is just the way it was.
For some time, I simply was not doing things right and I had many holes within the strategies and methods I was using.
I devoted many hours of my time trying to figure out how things worked in this business, an effort that helped me a lot, but it was only until I got the edge of having access to quality educational tools and resources that things started turning around.
The lesson? Starting an internet business requires mainly one thing: know-how, and affiliate marketing is definitely one of the best ways to go if you are short on time, short on cash and yet you want to build a true business with an actual potential for growth.