Started Selling Online Basics
Starting a website to sell a product is just like starting a business.
It requires hard work.
There are no “get rich quick” schemes online that work.
Trust me when I tell you to run from any of those.
The people selling those dreams are getting rich on the backs of the people paying thousands of dollars for these programs and so called “pre-done store” websites.
You are better off hiring a professional web person to help you build and set up your website and products then ever buying into these schemes.
What you need to get started.
- A website/blogsite
- A product
- A payment system
- Build a email list
- Traffic
Website: You will need a website or a blog website to sell your products from.
You can create sales pages on any type of website.
Product:
There are millions of choices for you when it comes to selling online.
You can write your own e-book or guides, as an author you can sell your own books or become an affiliate with many companies, and with companies like Amazon you can sell your books, or any product through them and get a piece of the sale.
You may make clothes or knits, art and crafts, you can offer life coaching, career coaching , sports coaching and a multitude of other products. If you have great information to offer people you can even make money through ads on your website and affiliate products if you get enough traffic to your website.
There is no limit to what you can sell online.
- Paypal-
The most used payment system online right now is Paypal. It is free to set up.
Paypal charges a small fee per transaction. With paypal you can create your sales buttons and an add to cart button. People can pay who not have a paypal account by just using a credit card.
- Google Check Out
Similar to Paypal. You sign up to use the service. Set up is free. They charge a fee per transaction. You add their checkout on your pages, and your customers can use multiple systems if you like, you can offer Paypal and Google checkout.
- 1Shopping Cart- This is one of my favorites for ease of use and also how many extras they offer. You pay a monthly fee plus the fees for the credit card charges.
There are many advantages to going with a professional shopping cart program. 1ShoppingCart offers auto responders, email list management, list set ups,
forms to use on your websites for customer sign ups, such as newsletters or free
reports. They offer you the ability to run your own affiliate program and
many other useful features are included for your monthly fees. These prices
start at around 35.00 a month. One advantage of using a program like this is you
would not need to run your email program in a different place, such as constant
contact or icontact, since 1Shopping Cart comes with that ability build in.
- Other Shopping Cart Programs-
You will need to do your research and decide which program fits your needs the best. To see an overview and review of many of the top shopping cart programs, please visit www.askmepc.com/shoppingcartreviews.html
Building an email list-
An email list is one of the best tools you can use to build your online business. These are people who already have shown an interest in you or your product. These are you customers for future sales..
Statistics show that for every three people on your list you should make at least 1 dollar a month from them. List building allows you to follow up with your subscribers by just sending out an email. You can notify them of important things like sales, price cuts, upcoming events and products. A good email list can turn into a gold mine for you!
There are several options to running an email list program.
Many hosting companies offer the install of a free email list program, called PHPlist.
This program is easy to use and you can do mass mailings using this and set up multiple lists.
There are many paid email marketing services, such as Constant Contact, iContact, and Vertical Response, just to name a few.
Traffic-
If no one finds you online, it will be harder to sell your products!
Driving traffic to your website can certainly be a challenge and a mystery too.
Many people think that having a good website is all you need to get lots of visitors.
If only it were that easy.
Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight.
There are many methods to bring traffic to your website.
I am going to tell you about the free methods I have successfully used to bring traffic to my own websites. Since I am very frugal I always try the free methods first.
4 Free Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website
Article Marketing – It’s completely free and writing articles is easy. You do not have to be a professional writer to do this. You can write an article and submit it to one of many e-zine article services. The article will contain some information about you and your services and a link back to your site on the bottom.
Usually these articles are free for others to use on their sites as long as they keep your information intact. This means other websites will pick up your articles and then be driving traffic to your site.
Forums- I get a great deal of business from a support forum I am active in. I used to only go to this forum for help, but then as I became more proficient using the program I began to help others by answering questions in the forum. People now seek me out for more help with their websites and as a result I have new clients from all over the world that I would of never found me otherwise.
When you join any forum, you have the ability to use what is called a signature file.
This is where you can set up your logo, your name, a little plug for your business and
link this all back to your website. When you leave a comment, you can select “use signature file” and this will show up at the bottom or side of your comments.
The key to using any forum successfully to promote yourself, is to build trust first.
Don’t oversell yourself. Become a regular member who participates in conversations.
Learn the rules of the forums you want to join, hang out there and get a feel for the place. Do not spam forums, and contribute. You can even set up your own forum on any hosting account.
Blogs- There are many blogs and websites that will allow you to sign up and create your own “mini” blog on their site. A great example of this is a writers website called Red Room. This site gets very high traffic and you can join and start writing for free.
Your work will be on the same website with best selling authors. There are many websites like this, that are looking for contributors. You can set up your own ID and you will have a biography about you and links back to your website.
Once you start doing this, you will find people contacting you to “guest” blog on their blogs.
Social Media- You should have a few profiles on some of the top social media sites. For them to be effective you need to use them, and you should have what are called “badges” on your website and blog.
These “badges” are the icons that link the image of the social media site back to your profile. Try to select just a few sites that you actually will use and maintain and don’t overload your website or blog with badges. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress calls this the “Nascar design” with “stickers, and visual clutter.”
If you can just start working on these 4 methods, that will keep you quite busy.
Jack Canfield one of the founders of the Chicken Soup book series, says in his book
“The Success Principal” that everyday you need to follow the “The Rule of Five”.
The Rule of Five is quite simple, do five things everyday that move you towards your goal. Most people I work with find they write down 5 but end up actually doing 3.
These can be things like, an Internet radio interview, leaving a post on a forum, emailing some people for business, offering to speak somewhere on your topic, interview someone on your blog , write an e-zine article. These are just a few ideas.
Just think about that, if you did only 3 things a day to move your business towards your goals, how much could you really get accomplished? There are no overnight successes, most people have worked long and hard and laid the ground work down when success comes their way. There is no reason for you not to get started down that path today.
