This is one of the most hotly contested questions online today. There are a number of different internet business models online today, including the content model, the affiliate model, the single product model, multiple product model, catalog model, list based model, and the sales funnel model.
List building can be incorporated into any of these models, and the models themselves can be mixed and matched to come up with your own unique model. What I will do now is give you a brief description of each of these models, and then give you some ideas on how these models can fit together, and how to choose the best one for your business.
Content Based Web Business Model
The content based web business model is a model that centers its profitability around web based content, or information, and primarily sells advertising on its web site for its monetization. By providing useful content to web users, the web sites build up traffic, and advertisers will generally pay to have their ads show on web sites that have reasonable traffic. Over the past few years search engine pay-per-click companies like Overture and AdWords have made monetizing these web sites more popular, by making the advertising process easy. Rather than individually negotiate contracts with individual advertisers, web site owners can allow the pay-per-click companies to do that for them, and they can simply place the advertisers ad copy on their web sites, and are paid a specified amount by the pay -per-click companies when someone visits, or clicks on, the ad.
This is the one model that is the least compatible with a list building structure, although some web business owners have built lists and sent their list traffic to content pages for the purpose of generating advertising revenue. My guess is that this would be the least – profitable monetization of a list building campaign, because my experience has been that the pay-per-click monetization per visitor is lower than a sales page monetization. Obviously, with the right list and proper targeting of the ads on the content pages, this could probably be improved, but it would certainly not be my first recommendation.
