How would you like to own a store where you could sell just about any product with potentially little or no inventory, that could be visited by anyone in the world, and had much less overhead than the standard brick and mortar shops you see on the street? Amazon, Zappos and the other giants of Internet retailing figured out long ago that people like shopping online and are willing to commit part of their discretionary spending doing so. Online retailers maintain elaborate websites and carry massive inventories to lure their customers and have done it with great success. These types of online stores don't exactly fit into the scenario outlined in the first sentence above and any individual that is contemplating on competing with the Amazons and Zappos of the world is probably not going to succeed. This does not mean that you should not try online marketing. It just means that you are going to have to go about it a little differently.
There are three things that are required to successfully market products online.
1. You must have products that people are going to want to buy. The three most popular ways to get products are to produce them yourself, buy them (wholesale or from a garage or estate sales), or to affiliate yourself with one or more online wholesalers or retailers. Your product could also be a service such as providing book editing, filling out tax forms, transcribing documents, and others.
2. You need a system to advertise and track your sales. The system you use could be your own or someone else's. Arguably, the most popular is the online auction site, Ebay. Here everything is done for you except the process of listing and shipping your items. If you have the skills or know someone that does, you could put together your own website, list your products and buy your own domain and hosting services. This can get expensive, has a learning curve, and requires a lot of work to design and maintain your web page(s). There are other methods, but they are beyond the scope of this post.
3. You need to get traffic (viewers) to your website or product. This is not an issue if you are using Amazon or Ebay to list your products as they have an ever expanding audience. If you have your own website, then you are going to have to figure out for yourself how to get people to see your products. There are a lot of ways to do this. Some work great while others won't work at all.
Obviously, the above is just a brief description of what is required to sell products online. Future posts will include specific strategies on how to get products, set up or join a system, and how to get traffic to your products.
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