B250 Week 3

This week in B250 we discussed the drop ship method and the affiliate method for our trio of entrepreneurs. The affiliate method was most preferred but I do think that the drop ship would be more involved and produce a higher return. With the affiliate method, they would mostly be advertising for another company and product. It’s not really very involved, however, I do think that it would be a good starting point in getting a business going. Once their website is going they can start adding their own products and grow it from being an affiliate method to more of a merchant method. From the articles, it seems that they would prefer to grow a business and not just live off advertising someone else’s stuff. There isn’t much of a return from an affiliate site either, so in order to make money they would need to grow the site.

This has made me think more about what I want to do for a site. I am definitely leaning towards the affiliate method. There isn’t much time left in my day right now to get deeply involved with a project and this seems like I can get it going and it will run itself with minimum time from me. There wouldn’t be any packaging or inventory, it’s just connecting customers with the product. The only downside is that there isn’t much for profits from it. Even that isn’t really a problem because I can always grow it later when I do have time.

B250

I have yet another class that I am supposed to blog about. There doesn't appear to be a word count range that I need to fill, so I guess I just get to write about my insights into the week's lesson in however many words it takes.
This class is B250, which is another business class. Except instead of just learning about creating a business, we actually will be starting one online. (Very Intimidating). There doesn't really seem to be one set way of starting. Some say that you should pick a business model and then a product, but I think it would be easier to pick the product and then the model that will best fit my needs and what I want it to do. There are different types of business models. They seem to overlap some, but I'm leaning towards the merchant model for my own or the affiliate model or community model. The merchant model is appealing because it can be the online part of a "brick and mortar" business. I prefer that my business not be completely online. It can be the online front to a real business.
The rest of the week has been discussing possible business ideas for a pretend guy. I have to admit that I don't actually understand how to read all of the number, but I am trying. I can walk through the assignments but I'm not sure that I'm interpreting the numbers correctly. I thought that I was, but then I was reading posts from the discussion board and now I'm a bit confused. Hopefully as the discussion continues things will become clearer.
Just keep swimming.