It’s no secret that starting a business is one of the most likely ways to generate “massive wealth” but unfortunately too many people never get around to forming a business because they think it’s simply too difficult and risky. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

Starting an online business has been one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. It doesn’t cost much, is simple to set up and the potential rewards (i.e. money) are far too great to pass up.

Here are the top five reasons why starting an online business is something that you should seriously consider:

1. There’s very little overhead. For most of us who run small websites - and even for some of us who run larger sites - a majority of our overhead costs come from buying our domain name and having the site hosted. And with the fact that you can get good, reliable hosting starting at $5 to $10 per month, that’s certainly a heck of a lot cheaper than the hundreds or thousands of dollars you’d have to pay to cover the overhead costs for a brick-and-mortar business.
2. Creating a site is easier than ever. Not only is it easier than ever, but it’s also cheaper than ever, thanks to great open source software like Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. Even if you’re unable or unwilling to do the site development on your own, the cost of having someone else do it for you has decreased dramatically.
3. You have easy access to an international market. By having your business online, you can easily reach people all over the world, not just the people that live within a reasonable driving distance to your store. Now your potential customer list has grown from a couple hundred thousand to the several billion people around the world with an internet connection.
4. It’s easy to have multiple streams of income on one site. By having your business online, you can make money from Adsense or other contextual advertising, affiliate programs, direct advertising deals, selling your own products - the list goes on and on. Whereas your revenue streams tied directly to the products or services you sell from your brick-and-mortar business, the ways you can make money online is relatively endless and, most importantly, easy to change around.
5. It’s easy to maintain contact with current and potential customers. All you really have to do to remind people to come back to your site is to send out a quick little email. That’s it. Just slap together a professional looking newsletter, talk about your site, what you’ve updated, what deals you’ve got going on, etc., and then fire it off and wait for people to come back to your site.

Obviously, the list could go on and on - I haven’t even talked about how much fun (yes, despite all of the hard work, this is pretty fun) running your own business is, how you can easily turn a hobby into an income, etc., etc. - but I’ll go ahead and stop here.

Long story short, there really is no reason why you can’t start your own online business, so get moving!