You are working on getting your online business off the ground and part of that is putting together your business plan. While every business plan shares some common ground, an online business is unique and therefore may look somewhat different from a business plan for a traditional business.

Your business plan will spend some time on discussing what your revenue sources will be and this also presents a unique opportunity, because an online business in addition to earning money from selling products or services has other opportunities to generate revenue and if these are applicable to your business it’s important that you make sure to cover them in your business plan.

Let’s look at some of the additional sources of revenue that you can add to your online revenues.

#1 Pay Per Click Advertising From Google AdSense
Pay per click advertising is a common source of income from Google AdSense. Many online businesses take advantage of this additional income, and if you are going to be using AdSense as part of your income base for your online business, you are going to want to include this source in your business plan and you’ll want to have some actual calculations to base your projections on. Make sure to thoroughly explain this source of income because few have an understanding of these types of income work.

For example, you might show the breakdown that if your page views per day are 4,000 and the effective CPM is $28.75 you would create an annual revenue of $42,000. It’s important for you to find the relevant average CPM for your industry/product.

#2 Amazon.com Affiliate Program
In addition to your products and services, you might decide to sell products from the Amazon site as an affiliate, which means you will sell relevant products from the Amazon site on your website and be paid a commission for doing so. It’s a good way to supplement your income, but if you are going to use this method, you will also need to define and explain this revenue in your business plan.

#3 Affiliate Programs
There are many affiliate programs that offer generous commission as high as 10% and with 30 day cookies. Commissions do vary. You will need to decide what affiliates you will participate with, then do a forecast of how many units you believe you can sell and include that number in your projected revenue.

Your business plan needs to include all revenue sources that you anticipate so that your investors can have a ‘real’ picture of what your income stream looks like.