Adam Beazley’s Traffic & Promotion Blog

One of the most common questions I am asked is “What do I sell on the internet?”  Well, the answer depends a lot on your personality and HOW you want to sell. In other words, the first question should not be “what sells well on the internet”, but “what method of selling am I most comfortable with?”

One of the most common questions I am asked is “What do I sell on the internet?”

Well, the answer depends a lot on your personality and HOW you want to sell. In other words, the first question should not be “what sells well on the internet”, but “what method of selling am I most comfortable with?”

There are essentially three ways to sell products on the internet. Let’s look at each method and the see the advantages and disadvantages of each.

First Method: Buy Wholesale and Sell Retail

This method is as old as human history. Find a product your niche wants, locate a wholesale source for that product, set up your online home business, advertise the product on your web site and ship the product to your customer.

Advantages:

1. You maintain complete control over the sales and delivery process.

You decide how much to mark up the wholesale price, not someone else. You also have control over when the item is shipped to your customer, not someone else halfway across the country!

2. You can shop around for the best wholesale price.

3. You can recommend your other products when someone purchases your product.

Disadvantages:

1. You will end up shipping packages everyday.

2. You will have to pay upfront for inventory and have a place to store it in your home.

3. Since others will be selling the same thing you are, you must be able to out-market your competition.

Second Method: Recommend Products for a Commission

This is also called affiliate marketing. You recommend someone else’s product using a special hyper-link called an affiliate link. When your visitor clicks on that link, the visitor is taken to the other person’s product page, but a cookie tracks the link to you. If a sale results, you get a commission. There is a lot of affiliate marketing information online.

Commissions can range from 5% of an order for camping gear to 50% of an information product priced at $1500! Affiliate marketing works for physical products, services, ebooks and anything else under the sun.

The key is finding product owners that see the value in sharing a percentage of the sale with those willing to be volunteer sales people for their product. Product owners that see the value of residual income with an online business.

Advantages:

1. You do not have to ship the product - the owner of the product takes care of that. In fact, the owner of the product creates the sales page, collects the money, ships the product and handles the questions and refunds.

2. You do not have to keep the product in inventory

3. Some commissions can be VERY generous.

Disadvantages:

1. If the product owner has an affiliate program, other people will be selling the exact same product. You must out-market other people and even the owner to make significant sales. You can not merely put up a link and forget about it if you want to make sales!

2. You have no control over the price of the product, the effectiveness of the sales page or the delivery of the product.

3. Although most product owners are honest and want to keep their affiliates happy, you have no leverage when it comes to getting paid. You do not control the money.

Third Method: Create your own product.

This is my favorite way to make money every day online! Once you learn to start an online business, creating your own products is a great way to follow your passion AND sell products that no one else is selling!

Advantages:

1. You have complete control over the sales and delivery process. You determine the price for your own product and you can even cut out the delivery costs be creating a downloadable product.

2. You will gain a huge sense of satisfaction, not to mention instant expert status!

3. You can find a need and then meet it. Creating your own product allows you to be very flexible and meet a targeted need in a very specialized niche.

4. There is no competition for your particular product. You are the ONLY ONE selling your products, unless you allow others to sell it for you, but you have complete control.

Disadvantages:

1. You can waste a lot of time and money if you have not researched your niche properly.

2. You must find a daily source of new customers.

3. You must find others to help promote your product.

So there you have it - the three basic methods of selling products on the internet. Hopefully, you can look at the advantages and disadvantages of each and determine which method is right for you. But don’t stop with just one. Incorporate all three methods into your online business and you will have a strong, diverse business that whether any economic storm!

Stephen Beck, President of FamilyEbiz.com, is an expert on teaching non-techies to start a business on the internet. For a FREE 75 min. interview on the fastest way to start a family internet business visit: Latest Home Based Business Ideas

Adam Beazley
Internet Marketing Consultant
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

• Ensuring A Profitable Home Based Business Opportunity
• Mastering Myspace and Web-2.0 Social Networking e-Training
• Announcement for this site

When designing a website to rank high in the search engines it is important that you take into consideration a few different factors. Below are a few of the most common and easily fixed mistakes that I see other marketers making when trying to optimize thier websites.

Use The Correct Tags
Use proper tags for headings, bold text, italic text, and lists – HTML has heading tags, bold tags, italic tags, and ordered and unordered lists for a reason and you should use them. Using CSS you can practically style them however you like, but actually using a heading tag for your headings, and bold tags for important text, will help allow search engines understand what text on a page is a heading or what is more important than the surrounding text. Simply applying a CSS style that makes text larger or bold doesn’t do that.

Put CSS and JavaScript in external files
Nearly every site nowadays uses CSS and JavaScript for something. While both are great for enhancing user experience, neither will help your search engine ranking if left on your page. One of the factors that search engines consider when ranking your site is the percentage of code relevant to the search term. CSS and JavaScript can take up hundreds of lines of code, minimizing the importance of your text and in turn hurting your ranking. By putting them in separate files and simply including them in your page by reference, you can reduce hundreds of lines down to one and increase the amount of code in the file that is relevant content.

Optimize your images
Search engine spiders can’t read text within an image. Adding ALT text to your image tag helps, but ideally you should remove all wording from the image and style it using CSS, adding the remaining portion of the image as a background image to the text. Here is a side-by-side comparison of two images that look the same in your browser, but much different to a search engine spider.

Minimize the use of tables in layouts
The debate about whether or not tables should be used in site design has been going on for years and there’s no end in site. I fall somewhere in the middle – there are certain circumstances (like organizing tabular data) where I think tables still make the most sense, but I also appreciate the SEO benefits of using CSS layouts. CSS layouts drastically reduce the amount of code in your site that isn’t content that the user sees. Just like moving CSS and JavaScript to an external file, the less on-page code that isn’t content, the better. Check out search engine friendly layouts for some free example layouts.

Validate your site
A site doesn’t have to be perfectly coded to rank high in the search engines (there are many, many other factors), but valid HTML will help ensure that search engines and browsers alike will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator or install this handy Firefox extension. Validating generally identifies areas of code that are redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

Conclusion
There are many factors that go into search engine optimization (aka. SEO), however they all start at the same place and that is the basic design and setup of the website. Of course the content on each page is the most important element of SEO but don’t let small web design mistakes ruin your good content.

Adam Beazley
Internet Marketing Consultant
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

• How To Make Sure That Your Websites Are Fully Crawlable By The Search Engines
• About Me
• Get Reciprocal Links FAST

Hello again,

I know a lot of people are wondering about how they can start a blog. Now the average person will go to blogger and open up a free account which is great but you are forced to promote the blogger site which is of course owned by Google.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to give away my hard earned traffic to Google. I would rather have my own blog that I can monetize to earn an income. And for those of you who are now seeing eye to eye with me, I have a treat for you.

I basically created a how-to video which will show you step by step, how to setup, upload and host your own wordpress blog. The only requirements you need in order to do this is you will need your own host and an ftp program. (I use Core FTP)

Well, without further a due, here is the link:
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com/videos/Wordpress-Install.swf.html

I hope you enjoy,

Adam Beazley

• Blogging For Business
• Domain Forwarding & Nameservers Video Exlpenation
• Blog Marketing w/ Trackbacks

Getting visitors to come to your Internet site is the crux of the success of your home business online marketing promotion. You can build the greatest home business Internet site but if its marketing and promotion doesn’t bring users to the site it’s useless. Once those visitors are coming to your site your tracking software can let you know which pages they view and for how long and what brings them to the site and what page they are on when they exit the site. All this information helps you improve your site and the online sales process for your home business Internet marketing and promotion.

Your online marketing and promotion plan for your Internet home business should include the following goals:

* To get instant low cost traffic to your site so that these users can let you know if your Web sales copy works, if the order form is right, if the navigation is easy and if the opt-in e-mail offer is productive.
* To test whether the sales process you have set up online does the optimal job of converting your home Internet business’ Web traffic into the greatest number of sales.
* To bring the greatest number of consumers to your Web site in the least amount of time.
* And to assure that putting your Web traffic marketing and promotion campaign on autopilot successfully grows your Internet home business.

When it comes to testing your Internet site prior to home business online marketing promotion a lot of entrepreneurs don’t know how to test and what to test. The basics that you need to look at are the ordering process, the sales copy, the opt-in e-mail offer and the navigation of the site. The ordering process must be designed with the assumption that the consumer who buys from you has never done so online before. Make it so easy to navigate that the Web novice won’t give up in frustration.

When looking at the sales copy on your site you want to pay close attention to how captivating your headlines are, how clear and influential the benefits are spelled out, that the guarantee is prominent and clear and that there is a strong call to action.

The opt-in offer must be prominent and just about mouth-watering. The point of testing this is to make sure that you’re getting the contact information from that consumer. You know can lure them to your site time and time again until they say otherwise.

The most important thing to look at when testing your site’s navigation is to make sure that someone who wants to buy your product or service online can do it in two easy clicks. More than that and you start to lose the interest of this instant-gratification audience – especially if your market is under 35 years of age.

Adam Beazley
The “Online Marketing Guru”
http://www.Plug-In-Home-Business.com

• Copywriting With Google’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tool
• Usefull Web Tools For Online Marketers
• Youtube traffic generator: Tubeinator

« Previous entries Next entries »