Now, in the old days before the internet, people often had an income – or had a business – which sometimes was called a profession. And in a profession, if you’re a professional, generally there is an hourly rate for that thing that you do, and you’re exchanging time for money.

That means there’s a ceiling on the amount of money you could ever earn in that profession. And the ceiling is basically the hourly rate for the industry multiplied by the number of hours that you’re willing to work per week. That’s the most you can earn doing that thing.

So we’re conditioned as youngsters to get these skills and follow this study and become a professional. But actually, we’re being taught to have a ceiling on the amount of money that we can earn. The only way to not have a ceiling is to have a scalable business.

Another kind of traditional business model, which doesn’t scale is having a shop because if you had a retail premises, then the most amount of money you can make is basically governed by the number of people that walk past the shop.

So the most you can hope for is that every single person that walks past your shop comes in and buys something.

But that’s not reality, is it?

And there are only a finite number of people that walk past your shop. If you want to grow bigger, you need another shop. And yet another shop takes money, it takes staff, it take stock… that’s hard to grow that sort of business.

Then there’s a constraint on the size of the shop, and the footfall. So if you want to grow, you’ve just got open more and more shops.

Or you might have had a traditional business in the manufacturing industry. Then you’ve got a constraint, which is normally based on the size of the building that you’ve got and the equipment that you’ve got. You’ve only got the capacity to make a certain number of things, whichever it is that you make.

And if you want to scale up, you’re probably going to need capital; you’re going to need a loan from the bank. Because you’re going to need to invest in equipment, you’re going to need to invest in new premises, and that’s going to cost a lot of money.

So for these reasons, these old pre-internet business models are very limited because they not scalable and there are ceilings on the amount of money that you’re going to earn in those businesses. And there are constraints that you need access to capital.

Compare that with the new economy, the new digital economy business models.

eBooks:

You could create a book or an E book. That’s what I call an infinitely scalable business model.

Because if you write an eBook and you start selling it, your work is all done up front. It’s a week or two to write it up front and then every copy that you sell is 100% profit. You don’t need to do any additional work because it’s infinitely scalable. It doesn’t matter if you sell 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000… your work was done up front and after that, it’s just autopilot. It’s free money. It scales infinitely.

Online Courses:

The next one is online courses and these are basically an eBook on steroids.

An online course is generally digital information teaching you about something. It’s often done in the format of a video.

So an online course really is a set of training videos on a subject. There might be some sort of online testing or an exam, but that’s an online course. But the great thing is, it is infinitely scalable. Because once you’ve created one, then for every person that you sell an online course to, you don’t have to do any work.

Basically, the system could just give them a user ID and a password. Then they log in, they watch the videos, they study the course… and you make money. It’s a 100% profit margin business.

And we’ve got students in the UK that have literally made millions and millions from that.

Physical Products:

Another business model is physical products.

Now, in the old days, if you were selling physical products, then there were constraints. And the constraints were those mentioned above.

If you had a shop, obviously, there’s only a certain number of people coming past the shop who could buy a product. So the constraint is the number of people walking past the shop.

But in this online world now, you put your shop on the virtual High Street. And that means instead of a few hundred people a day being able to see your shop, there’s over 3 billion people that can see your shop!

Because that’s how many people are on the internet and it’s still going up. We’re only a bit over half the population of the planet. They’re still going up quite significantly.

So imagine having a retail business where half of the world can become your customers instantly at the click of a mouse.

Resell Rights:

Then there’s Resell Rights. That’s a business model where you take a product that someone else has created. And what you do is you purchase a license to sell that product.

So it could be an online course – you could find someone’s created an online course, let’s say a cookery course, and you pay them a license fee of a few hundred dollars. That license gives you the rights to sell copies of that online course and you keep 100% of the money.

Often your breakeven point is if you sell five or 10 copies of the course that covers your upfront fee.

After that, guess what?

You’re on 100% profit margin on every unit sold.

Affiliate Marketing:

Now Affiliate Marketing – that’s where you promote other people’s products and services for a commission. These days, just about every retailer has an affiliate referral program.

Most businesses have some sort of referral program where if you send traffic to their website and someone buys, they will pay you a commission (a referral fee).

In this internet age, we’ve got this business world where you can reach half of the population in the world rising, three and a half billion people, and you’ve got several hundred million (if not billions!) of products that you could sell, as well.

So you’ve got an almost infinite number of products, an infinite number of potential customers, and guess what?

You don’t have to worry about warehouses or any of that stuff because if you provide Amazon stuff for example, Amazon’s never going to run out of warehouses. They will store the goods for you. They’ll ship the goods straight to a customer and if they run a bit low on warehouses, Amazon is one of the biggest capitalized companies in the world. They’re never going to run out of warehousing.

Teach Others:

 The last business model here, in this new economy, is actually learning about this stuff to teach other people how to do it. To help business owners in this new economy.

So, now you know the most profitable things that you can sell on the internet. The only thing holding you back now is deciding which one to start with. (HINT: Start with ANY of these.)