EBay and auction sites;
One of the best known of web business models, the principle means of creating income is through online auctioning of goods. Ebay sellers might be private one time sellers, or a hobby seller with regular listings, someone who has committed to an enthusiast niche and has a small permanent ebay store with a loyal clientel, and increasingly there are well known ‘real world’ big businesses who sell their own products through Ebay.
An ebay seller is responsible for a series of distinct actions. Duties include; locating product to sell, listing products to sell, answering customer queries, fending off ebay management, packaging sold goods and taking goods to the Post Office and other delivery services.
Regular Ebay sellers also sometimes use drop shipping. This involves a remote warehouse, independent of the seller, providing a catalog of goods they have in stock. The Ebay seller lists and sells these items and the drop shipping warehouse fulfills and ships any order a seller creates.
Increasingly commercial companies and factories are also cutting out all middle men by selling items direct from the production lines to the end user via ebay.
Advantages of using ebay or other auction sites include having access a world wide network of customers, and a great deal of consumer research provided by Ebay. Additionally a seller’s income has no upper limitations and very large incomes are not only possible but relatively routine.
The primary disadvantage of being an EBay seller is that the tasks can be time consuming, however you are your own boss and can control your schedule.
Other streams of income are possible within ebay. For example; locating buyers in locations other than EBay and connecting them to a product for a fee or percentage, and also income can be made from introducing new clients to EBay.

MLM, Multi Level Marketing or Network Marketing;
Widely known both on and off line, income streams derive mainly from products that are offered to members at wholesale prices that they then sell onwards at retail prices to create a profitable 'home business'. Profits are developed further by introducing more and more new  members to the company in long down lines, all of whom use and sell 'the product'.

MLM's depend heavily on person to person networking. A percentage of all profits flows uphill to founding members, who reap the largest financial rewards. MLM's can extend over the world and can generate large incomes. The advantages are that you are the boss of your own time, and that you’re operating within a well developed sales model that provides plenty of support, and if you’re a people person this will suit you well. Disadvantages include having to be an enthusiastic sales person if you’re not that way inclined.

Adsense by Google;
Google charges people to place their product ads on the internet. A percentage of these fees is paid to web site owners who allow Google to place the ads on their websites. The ads are put in place with a simple piece of HTML code supplied by Google. It is pasted into place on a website and Google programming reads the website for the subject of the material and supplies a string of ads with the same theme as the website. This way visitors interested in snowboarding will finds ads for snowboard products alongside the website articles. The website owner is paid each time someone clicks on the ad. The amount earned can range from a few cents to over a hundred dollars per click in competitive markets such as credit cards and home loans.

A website owner can cleverly fine tune the website to attract maximum paying ads and also to attract maximum shopping visitors to the site. Once set up little maintenance is required. Google pays automatically every month, and websites with a lot of traffic can create an enormous income solely from people clicking on ads, all while you, the site owner, are at the beach in Hawaii.
This type of income can be very hands off once set in place, and a smart website owner might have a number of websites on many subjects.

Adwords by Google;
Google Adwords involves you having a product you want to sell on the internet through advertising with Google. Unlike Adsense which places their ads on your site, Adwords places ads for your product on many topic related websites across the internet. You can choose what country will see these ads, and sometimes what demographic.

Google Adwords supplies an accounting system online where you can monitor and modify your advertising campaigns. The seller's highest priority is paying as little as possible for ads and achieving the maximum sales. To get your advert placed high on the website page where customers will see it more readily is ideal, and Google have in place a bidding system where you compete with others for that spot by offering higher prices per customer click. A number one position on a small website might cost twenty cents per customer click, the same position on a high traffic site might cost one dollar to a hundred dollars per customer click.

At peak times sales can be brisk and the profits high. It is also possible to automate the process so that only a little daily maintenance is required. Large incomes can be created by selling numerous products. Digital products like digitaly formated self help books can be very lucrative and can be set up so that the sale and product delivery all happen automaticley. The caution needed is that advertising can be expensive, and a sound head for figures is necessary to keep fast moving costs under control.

Affiliate selling;
In online terms an affiliate is a person who is marketing someone else's product for a commission. The products are often digital instructional or self help books, but can also be solid products such as pharmaceticals and vitamin supplements. Affiliate selling is a good way for a business to have more sales people working for them, without the overhead of an employment agreement.

As an affiliate seller you usually carry no product, and simply direct buyers to the sellers website. On this website the seller has provided you with either your own web page of products, or a piece of html code that identifies you. When the sale takes place the code identifies you and commissions are sent on a regular basis.

You are entirely your own boss, and can work this full time or part time from your own home. It is not hard to create a business that requires little daily management. How you locate and drive customers to the web site is all up to you. Writing articles about the item you're selling ie vitamins and submitting them to article publishing websites can bring a lot of free customers who are interested in your product.

Cost Per Action or CPC;
A person can place advertisements across the internet to attract a certain type of interested party, ie home insurance. When customers click on the advertisement they are taken to a site where they are asked to enter their email address if they want more information.  As the person paying for the ads and bringing customers you are paid per email address that is gathered. Payment can be a few cents to tens of dollars per email address.

Gathering names and email addresses and more to expand a businesses mailing list is common, can be lucrative, and can be set virtually on automatic. The caution is keeping your advertising costs down and locating interested customers as efficiently as possible.

Direct Sales
In this scenario a website is put online either as a business entire, or as an adjunct to a real bricks and mortar company. These function exactly in the manner of a regular business, selling a product, service or information, the financial transaction takes place online through a secure page at the website, and the website owner arranges for the product to be delivered to the customer.

As the population becomes more comfortable doing business online a website is a crucial addition to a regular business. If one has a passion for something in particular, ie hand crafted bird cages, then starting a business like this that is fully engaging can be most rewarding.

Like real world businesses all internet businesses can be built and sold as going concerns and there are websites dedicated to selling them for top dollar. You can even buy into a small web business if it appeals to you not to build from scratch, and build it into a much larger business, and then sell it again. Your choices on the internet are as wide as any business in the 'bricks and mortar' world.

Avoiding predatory websites

A- When purchasing a product online and you are seeing the landing or squeeze page, try to locate any 'contact us' information. If you cannot find any 'contact us' information there or in the web pages, you can be sure that there's no way to ask for your money back, or for help. Avoid doing business with any company with no contact information.

B- When paying, be alert to a landing or squeeze page that says thay they accept clickbank or paypal, but when you are further in the payment process somehow you are not on official pages of either of those companies. You are being either the victim of an outright fraud, or the company wants control of any refund process, or they have been banned from using Clickbank or PayPal.

C- Many products on google searches have headlines that announce person or plan XXXX is a scam, a has been etc. These are not real reviews, only advertising, ignore them.

D- In reading complaints filed with consumer organizations avoid a company that has changed interstate USA addresses constantly, they are probably avoiding the law.

E- Be wary of recently registered companies with Les Vegas, Nevada addresses. Consumer protection laws there are few. Many businesses moved to Nevada for this reason, to avoid being sued.

F- Be very wary of companies that have numerous requests for refunds, its an indicator either the product is not adequate, or the advertising has been misleading and the product is not what you expect.

G-Needless to say, also look for companies that have refused to refund a number  of clients when asked to. It's just bad business and can happen for many reasons, none good for you.

H- Be wary of reviews listed on the internet. Many of them have been composed to promote a blog or website and often come from well meaning people promoting their own business, they are not objective.

I- In reading reviews look for the factual descriptions of what the business does and how it does it, try to decide if the type of internet business will suit you  and be objective about  the writers enthusiasm.

J- Try to buy products with good backing. A product listed with Clickbank is good for you because they will often accept a genuine reason for refund. It is also out of the sellers hands, if his porche needs more gas its not your problem.

K- If you see several of these points combined in or around one business or website, that should be all you need to stay away. Good businesses simply don't accumulate multiple complaints of these types.

If like me you like cruising EBay for a hour or more at a time be cautioned that it is under constant virus attack, from both keystroke counters trying to get your sign on passwords/ email address/personnel info etc and also from other programs trying to get your email to build email marketing lists.
 
Once your account is invaded expect your sales and purchases listings to be scrambled, as well as subject to false listings and false cancellations.

Often you will also discover a 'certificate' appearing when you move to open a site, and it will warn you some site security certificate is out of date and do you want to proceed? This is a clear warning you are being visited by a virus.
It will also leave Ebay and appear when you go to open other sites.
Don't follow the instruction/query to '...proceed?", stop what you're doing and solve the virus issue first.

The virus/es can/will also go straight to any ebay connected sites, ie PayPal and Esnipe, and you do not want them in your Paypal account stealing funds.

These viruses are persistent, and resistant to some anti virus programs. They react to extended periods of activity and home in like sharks on a scent.

The solution is to surf ebay but not while signed in to your account.
If you see items that have your interest, write down their item number and make a list. Later, sign back on properly, but don't surf around, simply go to the items and save them to your watch list, the idea is not to create too much attention getting activity.

If you do get invaded, delete any affected sites from your bookmarks/favorites list, then thoroughly put anti virus programs to work, and remember to use a good defrag program when finished.
You can re-save the sites to bookmarks when the virus is gone.
Until the virus is cleared do not use other sensitive sites such as for banking or credit cards as there is a risk the virus is waiting to learn those sign on passwords and user names too.

Also remember to change the user name and password on every directly affected account before using them again, especially with Paypal, and secondarily EBay.

 Design a complicated password, the hassle of using it is more than offset by the trouble you'll avoid.


A scam to watch for;

Fake traffic sites are flourishing, they have come into existence because soft ware was developed for personnal use to generate fake traffic to improve a websites SEO ranking. These click generators have since been taken on by scammers who have discovered how desperate people are for traffic, and how few are able to know fake traffic from actual traffic.

How to recognize fake traffic;
- You might buy 50,000 visitors but your site counter registers few if any visitors.

- You might buy 50,000 visitors but instead of generating 50 sales at a very conservative one per thousand ratio, you generate zero sales.

- You pay a one time fee of $20-$40 for continuing traffic. Real traffic sites charge monthly for continuing traffic

- Each time you visit the traffic site to log in the URL at the top changes even though the page stays the same. This is someone hiding their tracks and whereabouts.

- Any site with no contact information should be ignored completely. How are you going to request a refund of there's no one to write to or phone?

- If you pay by paypal and the url at the top of the page is no longer paypal but the page looks like paypal, you're on a fake page. Anyone doing this is up to no good.

 Another Scam

Pay to read emails exist as a legitimate business. They pay low amounts for a person to read emails, as little as 5 and 10 cents per email.

However new 'pay to read' email sites that claim to pay 10 to 50 dollars and more per mail are rife. They withhold funds until high goals are set but when the member requests their $250,00 or $500,00 there is no further communication.

They are free to join but if you want to upgrade for a variety of options you'll pay a membership fee of $20 to $100.

These sites take money from you by accumulating large numbers of membership fees and by selling banner advertising space to unsuspecting web owners who are impressed with their high traffic numbers.

They often use Paypal as a payment method. You'll discover in the paypal receipt after paying that the payment went to an individual in China, or east European countries, not to a registered company name.