Digital real estate refers to digital assets such as a domain name which would then naturally be linked to a website or blog, which is seemingly a requisite for anyone seeking to run a profitable business online. You simply need a website if you want to run a business online – that’s the popular rhetoric perpetuated, but it’s not necessarily true.
You don’t really need your own website or any other digital real estate in order to run a profitable online operation, but it definitely helps. This rhetoric of requiring digital real estate is often perpetuated by service providers and other online entrepreneurs who have something to sell to you in the like of tools which make up digital real estate. So you might have a web hosting company’s marketing campaign selling you an online business idea which requires you to have a web site, a website to be hosted by them of course.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the truth is you can indeed run an online business with no digital real estate. The question is how do you go about doing so?
Focus on the money-generation factor
There are many examples of online business which are operated without digital assets such as a website and we’ll get into some of those in a minute. What’s important though is the underlying process – the fundamentals of how business takes place in the digital space. If you focus on the money-generation factor then you won’t be caught up in the process of wasting time and money getting all your ducks in a row, so to say – you won’t waste your time and money making sure your website looks good, works properly, etc.
Hosted solutions and income-generation opportunities
A seemingly successful affiliate marketing guru might quite rightfully say to you that if you send traffic directly to a sales offer through your unique affiliate link you’re just making the vendor of that offer rich, this because they are going to make use of a leads-capture mechanism to turn that visitor into a repeat buyer if they can. I say rightfully so because it’s true, but then again such a guru telling you this is probably in themselves trying to sell you something, perhaps a training course which promises to teach you all about something like the topic of affiliate marketing.
Otherwise there’s nothing wrong with doing things this way. After all, if you don’t want to be the one dealing with unhappy customers for whatever reason, refunds, charge-backs, customer care, etc, then you’d probably be happy to earn the 25-75% commission on each sale of a digital product or service you’re marketing as an affiliate, wouldn’t you?
It’s not a bad deal at all and it makes for just one of many examples of how you can run an online business without any digital real estate.
Another example is that of running a digital skills outsourcing operation such as gig-flipping (hiring freelancers on freelancing platforms to complete services which you’d offer on platforms such as Fiverr).