Commerce: Adding Multiple Revenue Streams

The Net not only evolves quickly, but it also quickly evolves those that are on it. Take Yahoo!, for example. Only a short decade ago, it was a simple search engine. Then, it added email, games, investment information, white pages, and other services, and became a portal. In its latest incantation, it has added online store hosting and has evolved into a world-class e-commerce site.

Even e-commerce sites themselves have evolved. Amazon.com sold only books. Now, it's chasing the e-commerce dream, selling movies, CDs, electronics, toys, games, and a variety of other products. And what dream is Amazon.com chasing? Multiple revenue streams, which go beyond simple product sales. Adding many of these streams to your site will leverage your site traffic and generate additional income.

Here are some possibilities for multiple revenue streams:

• Product or service sales income This is the main revenue stream of your Web store. It's what you built your e-business around, and it should be your prime focus. It's the bread and butter of your business and should be your top priority.

• Advertising income When you've built up traffic to your site, you can consider turning some of that traffic into revenue. Advertisers are always looking for ways to get their product or service message out to potential customers. They know that placing ads on websites that cater to shoppers who might buy their products is a wise way to spend their advertising dollars. Banner advertising can generate $5 to $75 CPM (cost per thousand per impression). That means you could earn anywhere from .005¢ to .075¢ each time an advertiser's banner ad appears to your site visitors. It might not sound like much at first, but if thousands and thousands of your site visitors view an ad, the dollars add up fast.

• Referral income Another income source is to refer your shoppers to another company's website. These are the affiliate programs that we discussed earlier. You might consider referring your shoppers to a noncompetitive merchant in exchange for a paid click-through or a percentage of the sale. Income can vary from 5¢ to $1 per click-through, or from 5% to 20% of sales.

If you develop several of these income streams simultaneously, you can grow your site revenue beyond your product or service offers.

There's a bonus attached to building community interactions on your e-commerce site: free refreshed content. And refreshed content attracts both shoppers and the eye of search engines that list you.