A SIX FIGURE INCOME

If you know of any friend who has set up a traditional brick-and-mortar business, you'd know the huge amount of capital that's needed just to get the shop up and running, let alone start turn a profit.

For example, let's say you'd like to start a cozy little restaurant serving delectable Italian food. First, you'd need to find a space to rent. Knowing that a successful F&B outlet usually requires a good location and sizable walk-in customers, you finally decide to settle on a great spot for $20,000 a month in rent. And for good measure, you'd usually have to fork out three months rental in
advance at the beginning - so that's $60,000 already straight out the window.

Next, you'd need to renovate and retrofit your shop space so that it transforms from an empty concrete shell into a cosy Italian restaurant that your diners will love. Plus, you'd have to purchase all the fancy kitchen equipment needed to cook up the gastronomical fare that your diners look forward to. All in, you could end up spending $200,000 - $300,000 just to have you restaurant nicely fitted up (ouch!).

Next, you'd need to purchase all the inventory and ingredients to cook up a storm and you see yourself shelling out $10,000 - $50,000 for inventory alone (especially with the price of wheat and rice these days!).

Finally, you'd need people to help run and manage the restaurant for you (unless you happen to be a multi-tasking superhero). The chef, kitchen hands and service staff need their monthly salaries and you may find yourself paying over $20,000 a month on staff hire alone.

Most businesses don't expect to turn a profit in the first six months of operation. So, you need to budget and set aside some working capital to keep your business going during the early lean months. In the end, it's not surprising that you could end up spending up to half-a-million dollars just to set up a decent restaurant - before you even turn in a profit! Now tell me, how many people actually have half-a-million bucks sitting around?
Let's say that your cozy Italian restaurant actually becomes a small hit and it starts to generate a modest revenue. But at the end of the month, after deducting all the running costs, you discover that you can only afford to pay yourself $3,500 a month in salary (even your chef makes more than you!).

Pretty soon, you start to think that you might have been better off sticking to your old job and leave the entire headache of running a business to someone else.

An Internet business, on the other hand, is entirely different altogether. Let's compare the differences. In place of a brick-and-mortar shop, your website becomes your shop front on the World Wide Web.

Once you have your website created, you will need a domain name and web hosting to get your website "live" on the Internet. This will cost you a paltry US$9 a year and US$7 a month respectively.

And if you're selling digital products online, obviously you don't have to deal with any product inventory or shipping since your customers can simply download their purchases from the Internet. The cost of creating, duplicating and "shipping" your digital product - $0.

As for employees, you can simply skip them because you can use software to help you automate your Internet business. Your website is your 24/7 salesperson promoting your product for you. Your payment processor is working round the clock so you can accept orders at anytime of the day or night. You have software that will help you safely deliver your digital products to your customers.

And you even have software to help you follow up on your leads and customers automatically. Total cost of the basic software you need to automate your Internet business - less than US$15 a month. Ultimately, you can easily have your Internet business be up and running for less than US$1,000.

Because of the extremely low-cost nature of an Internet business,starting one is an extraordinarily low-risk venture. I would think that the vast majority of people would have a thousand bucks to spare if they really wanted to start an online business today. Not only is there a low starting cost, you also have low monthly costs as well. Which means a lot of the revenue you generate is almost pure profit (especially with digital products).

Plus, your Internet business is a truly global business. Your single website is able to receive orders from different people living in different countries all over the world compared to a traditional business where, typically, you can only cater to the
locals in the area.

Now I'm not saying that a traditional business is an obsolete way of making money, far from it. There are many, many ultra-successful, brick-and-mortar stores around the world and they're pretty much here to stay.

The point I want to make is that if you can't afford the high financial risk of starting a traditional business, an Internet business, by comparison, is definitely a highly attractive and profitable way to go.


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