Selling Products Online

Selling Products Online
For very little cost, you can sell a product online that hasn’t been selling well offline. Once it is set up, it takes virtually no work to maintain and monitor. Even if you only get a few sales a month, it is money that you wouldn’t have otherwise!
Let me give an example from my own experience. Back before I took my first business online, I advertised my book, “Secrets of Buying and Building Your Specialty Car on a Small Budget,” in “kit car” magazines (there were only two) for three years, and made a full-time income doing so. After a while, the ad rates jumped too high and the market was getting saturated with my product, (I was the only person writing a book on such a subject) so it just wasn’t worth running the ads anymore.
I put the same book on a simple web page, did a few reciprocal links with related kit car sites, and announced my presence on the two kit car e-mail discussion lists. The result? It still brings in over $1,000 per month automatically. I don’t do anything to maintain it (I haven’t touched it or even paid attention to it in over 2 years), and it still generates $1,000 in profit every month. It’s not much, but I don’t do any real work for it.
It is an old book that was not profitable, and not being advertised anymore offline, but because I put it on the Net, it now earns me $1,000 on autopilot each and every month. It’s not a lot of money, but it is icing on the cake. If you can get a few products like this, you can generate a full-time income very easily.
Be prepared to change your advertising concept a little and adapt it to the Internet. For example, in the kit car business, the customers are what marketers call “picture people.” In magazines, using pictures in your ads increases the cost of the advertising. On the Internet, though, because there is basically unlimited space, you can really take advantage of images. In fact, when I advertise in newsgroups, I let everyone know that there are a ton of pictures on my site. Just having images at your site is a way of getting traffic.
This pitch enticed kit car enthusiasts to come and check my site out. The philosophy is to give the target market what they want.

Marketing Myths

Marketing Myths
Your online marketing battle will include a number of different methods in different areas of the Internet. You may have a web site, use an auto responder, post classified ads, post articles, place banner advertisements, sponsor lists and newsletters, distribute press releases, and much more. Keep in mind, though, that when you are first starting out, it is critical that you focus on one aspect of your marketing campaign at a time and promote it to its fullest extent before moving on to the next.
It is better to slowly become profitable by focusing on one issue at a time, than to barely be profitable because you are attacking all of the issues half-heartedly.
Diversify and spend small amounts on advertising at first. If you use a cautious approach, you will not be wiped out financially if an ad doesn’t generate the sales you were hoping for. Just keep testing ads as your budget allows until you find the one that works best; then you can roll it out and be confident that you are going to make money rather than lose it!
If you have a lot of competition, state that you will honor all of your competitors’ coupons and/or discounts; use “their” advertising to your advantage.
An age-old problem in business is collecting final payment for services rendered. As a business owner, you need to be prepared for “difficult” clients and “mooches” by doing such things as…
1. In your contract or sales agreements, state the interest rates and late fees that will be assessed if payment is not received within 30 days of completion.
2. Write form letters to be used for collecting the balance. There should be three letters in total -- one after the payment is ten days late, another after twenty days, and a third that lets the client know that you’ll be turning their account over to a collection agency (or taking them to small claims court). The third letter should not be sent until 45 days after the payment is late. And of course, never bluff. If you say you will turn it over to a collection agency, do so.
3. The best way to protect yourself is to take payment via credit card. State to your client that you will bill their credit card one third of the total price as an initial down payment, another third just after you have passed the 50% completion point, and the final third on delivery. Or use the two-payment system -- half at the initiation of the job and the remainder upon completion.