There are a number of different methods of making money online today.
Each different method is a different business model, and your success at making money from home online comes from using a successful model.
Think of your online business as a funnel.
At the wide side of the funnel you use different methods to attract potential customers to your website or blog.
Once they get to your site you provide them some information and try to create sufficient value and trust so that those potential customers will become buyers of your product or service.
The Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or Pay-Per-Action (PPA) models are simple and easy to implement.
With these online models, you create advertisements with online sites like Google AdWords.
You bid or sometimes pay a fixed price for each click on your ads.
When someone clicks one of your ads they're taken to your website or blog where you deliver to them your sales presentation.
The advantage of either of these models is that they use a very simple and straight-forward path from attracting the potential customer to making a sale.
They can work great for simple market niches in which you're working with commodity products.
For example, a site that sells books can be successful by just getting customers to the site.
Some of the potential customers who get there will buy as long as the site makes it easy to buy.
The disadvantage is that that PPC or PPA advertising can be difficult to cost justify, and you need to determine the value of a customer and the cost to get each customer to be able to decide if the PPC or PPA models will work for your online business.
The objective is to make money from home online obviously, so you need to control your expenses to insure you're getting the desired results.
Another proven online business model is the email marketing model.
With this approach you attract potential customers to your site and then get them to sign up for a newsletter or free ebook by entering their email address and possibly some other information like their name.
With this information you can deliver additional information with a series of emails to each of these potential customers, eventually delivering a sales presentation.
This is a great model, especially if you're working in a market niche that involves complex subjects.
You can demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the subject and an ability to help potential customers solve a problem by delivering quality information.
A series of emails using an autoresponder campaign can easily be used to show that knowledge and build trust with your customers.
Once that trust is established your customers will be more willing to purchase from you.
The challenge with the email marketing model is that you need to get customers to sign up by giving you their email address.
This isn't difficult to do, but it does take some work.
And you need to set up and manage an autoresponder account.
Fortunately, there are a number of good ones available and the basic concepts of setting up an email marketing campaign are easy to understand.
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) model is another popular online business model.
With this model you work to get your website or blog to the top few positions in the search engine result pages (SERPs) by using on-page and off-page techniques that can improve your site's rankings in the search engines.
Those techniques include the use of keywords or search phrases on your site and in the meta data for your site and backlinks from other sites to your site.
When a potential customer searches online for information related to your keyword, they'll see a link to your site on the SERP.
The higher your site appears in the SERP listing, the better the chances of the link being clicked by a potential customer.
The advantage of the SEO model is that you can improve your site's rank with effort over time to get your site recognized as an expert source of information within your market niche.
Once you get to the top of the rankings for a particular search term you'll be rewarded with a steady stream of customers to your site.
The challenge with SEO is that for many it seems to be a black art.
Article marketing, backlinking, content creation, and changes by Google in their algorithms mean that you have to have a solid understanding of what works and what doesn't for your SEO efforts to be effective.
You can always pay for help with SEO for your site, but that can be expensive and it's not without risks.
There are hundreds of sites on the internet that say they're experts at SEO and can improve your site's ranking instantly.
Be extremely careful of such promises.
Many (perhaps most) of them are expert only at separating you from your money, and can't possibly deliver on their promises.
There are a few legitimate SEO companies and tools that can truly help you.
Be sure to investigate thoroughly before If you're making the investment with a correct understanding that it takes times and constant effort to get ranked on the SERPs, then you're likely to be successful with the appropriate action and commitment.
There are other business models in use for online home based businesses.
These are just three of the more common ones.
And you can always combine these or other models to create a customized model for your business.
The keys to any business model are to keep it simple and to be consistent.
Keeping it simple is essential.
You should be able to draw your business model on a piece of paper.
The drawing should show, from start to finish, how to attract potential customers, take them through the sales process, and turn them into paying customers.
Once you've decided on the model you want to use, stick with it.
Any business model, whether it's for a traditional business or an online business, requires consistent effort to get results.