Introduction to making money online – Part 2

To whom you should sell?

After deciding what to sell, you should find the customer. Target the customers based on the product. For example if you are selling a weight loss product, you should target customers who are interested in slimming products. I know the next question that you have in your mind now. How to find customer to market your product? To understand this you need to do a research on patterns of customers searching for the product on the net. Taking the above example, customers searching for a slimming product would do a search using search engines like Google, yahoo etc., post their queries on forums, search the directory listing and sometimes search for articles. You should visit these pages and advertise your product. The next section explains on how to sell your product using different techniques.

How To Sell you product?

There are plenty of creative ways that you can start marketing your products to potential customers. Most of the methods listed below are more commonly used for selling information products online, but can be adapted to selling physical products also.

Generating the traffic

Using traffic exchange sites is a great way to begin sending floods of visitors to your online store or web site. The visitors would see your website to understand your product or business. If people don't know about your business, then how do you expect to make any money from it? Though this method brings tons of visitors to you web site, the conversion rate of the visitors to customers is very less. The massive hits that you generate would help in getting better ranking in the search engine. If you want to participate for free, then expect to spend lots of time looking at other participant's web sites to earn credits that go towards getting visitors to your own site. An alternative is to pay for traffic if this is in your budget. Please visit my blog Free Advertising Resources to find more traffic exchange resources.

Getting into forums

Forums have long been an incredible source for information. Use a basic search engine and find the right forum that discusses the subject matter that pertains to the products you are intending to sell.

Blog it!

Set up a product review section that describes your personal opinions on those products listed, and if you like them, be sure to add an affiliate link to them.

The Affiliate Method

Be sure that you read all information available on any affiliate program beforehand. Time is an extremely valuable commodity when doing business online, and you can't afford to waste it on crappy products or programs that bring you zilch results.

Using trial or stripped down versions

This is known as up selling. Using this tactic you offer a product to your customers, they purchase it, and then they are given the choice on upgrading. The stripped down version of the product can be given as a free gift. The customer will experience the product and found useful would buy the upgrade. There are plenty of products created out there that use this method to earn more profits.

The Back-End Method

What it does is gives you the power to pull in more profits after you have made the initial sale to your customers by providing you with specific links enabling the reader of the product to buy other related products.

The Membership Method

Creating your own membership site is a very profitable business. If you're more inclined to offer a place that is specifically for downloading products like those of the information or eBook nature, then a file hosting system like TradeBit may be the way for you to go.

The "Recycle" Method

Recycling old products for profit is not a new idea. When you are offering an unused or used product in your possession for sale, you are recycling it. So it is with information products too. When you sell a resalable information product, you can sell it as many times as you are able to, and can profit with back-end affiliate links or add a free sign up form for your mailing list, generating new leads and more profits over and over again. Now, when an information reseller has products that are a bit older, they will take these and package them up.

The Viral Method

Just what is a "viral" product? You create your own unique product on whatever topic you decide on, add lots of good information and affiliate links inside it, and then give it away. So you'll still generate profits or mailing list sign ups even though you're giving this specific product away.

Email Address Buying

This method is expensive in general. You could use this method if the price is cheap. You get this for free using safelists. But safelists are comprised of others trying to sell their products to each other. It doesn't work. Most of the time, if not all the time, your email ad will go unnoticed and deleted on site. But it creates lots of traffic.

Time-Wasters

Money rotator programs don't work. You've got to put those things on the back burner to be successful at selling products online.

Using Search Engine Optimization

SEO is one of the best techniques to pull visitors to your site. To talk about SEO, I need to write another 5 part article and I don't have plans to write in the near future. Searching for SEO in Google would give you lots of resources.

To conclude, selling products online can be an exciting and profitable business. I wish you all the very best that the internet has to offer and if you need help, use the comment and I would be glad to help you.