written by Jeannie Pitt
author, designer, entrepreneur
Copyright © 2011
Published by Jeannie Pitt at Smashwords
All rights reserved. No part of this material may be sold, duplicated, distributed, used on other websites, incorporated in commercial documents or products, photocopied or used for promotional purposes without written permission from the copyright holder.
Discover a Niche Product and Sell It Online!
You
know there are ways to earn a living online, working from your living
room. You’ve heard the success stories and your gut says ‘I can
do this!’
But after some research, you’ve found that there’s a huge learning curve and you might be left wondering if you have what it takes to make it.
The answer is YES! There are so many ways to earn a living online. You may never go from broke to millions overnight, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who are earning a comfortable monthly income by selling products and information online. You can easily be one of them. It’s not difficult, and these days there are plenty of tools to help you along. The best part… most of what you need is free!
Many of the tasks necessary for online selling can be automated so that you can spend more time doing what you love. Depending on the direction you decide to take, you could set up your online store and sit back as the orders begin to come in. Others will ship your products or your online storefront will automatically deliver your digital goods. Your job can be virtually hands free. All you’d need to do is collect money and make sure your customers are satisfied.
Imagine hanging out at the beach for a weekend and getting paid!
All this is entirely possible and this ebook, Discover a Niche Product and Sell It Online! will show you the way. Inside, I’ll outline how to discover a niche product, how to get it online and how to promote while gaining visitors from all over the world.
I wish you the best of luck with your entrepreneurial endeavors. I’ve been doing this kind of work for almost 15 years and I’ve learned a lot in that time. It is my sincere hope that you will find information contained in this ebook that positively changes your current situation with finances and time. Working from home can provide you with freedom and peace of mind, while adding ample financial support for you and your family. This is my wish for you.
Best Regards,
Jeannie Pitt
Introduction
There are two types of entrepreneurs in the world. There are people who dream up the creative ideas and there are people who know how to implement those ideas. Maybe you’re lucky and you have the skills to do both!
If you’re like the rest of us, you don’t have enough time in a day to dream, learn, implement and profit from everything you’d like to do. Ideas come and go and years down the road you discover that someone else has cashed in on something you thought of 5 years ago.
The internet has changed so many things about the way we do business. We buy differently and we have the opportunity to sell differently. An average person with little education, few skills and minimal computer knowledge can easily earn a comfortable living online. I aim to show you several ways to accomplish this by providing the steps you’ll need to get from A to Z, plus pointing out some very helpful free and low-cost tools and resources to get you going.
In this ebook we’ll cover many points. I hope to provide you the information you’ll need, from start to finish, to get you online and selling products. We’ll discuss the following:
What is a niche product?
How to discover a profitable niche
How to find suppliers for your product
How and where to sell your product
Best ways to accept payments
How to promote your products and website
How to hire people, for minimal cost, to help you make all this happen
This really is an exciting subject. Never before could anyone just decide to start a business and get it going in under a week. Now, this is precisely what I’d like to show you how to do.
Before We Begin
Before we begin, I’d like to point you to a few things that will be vital no matter what niche you choose to sell and how you plan to sell your products.
Sign up for Paypal
If you don’t already have a Paypal account, go and sign up now. Paypal is the most popular way to accept money online and it’s safe and reliable. Paypal is free to join and integrates with most of the top shopping carts. They also provide simple pay and donate buttons for you to integrate into blog sites. Many of the websites that allow you to sell from a personal storefront also require a Paypal account for accepting royalties and paying listing or monthly subscription fees. Paypal is a popular solution and you’ll find that having an account with them is very important for your business.
Sign up for Google Adsense
Google Adsense is also vital to your online business ventures. If you’ll be choosing to sell products using your own website or blog, you’ll have the opportunity to further monetize your pages by posting Google Adsense code. This program is fairly straightforward and a crucial way to earn additional monthly revenue. If you don’t already have a Google Adsense account, go and sign up now. It’s free as well.
Decide on Time vs. Money
Once you have a successful website up and running, hopefully you’ll have an abundance of both time and money. At this point, however, you’ve likely got more of one than the other (though probably not much more!)
If you’ve got more time than money, you might benefit from taking that time to perfect certain areas of your business. You’ll need to spend time researching, learning and tinkering to get the best results. There’s a bit of a learning curve with topics like keyword research, SEO and shopping cart implementation. Taking the time up front to learn about these topics will serve you well in the near future.
If you’ve got a bit more money than time, I suggest you look into hiring freelance personnel to do some of your work for you. There are millions of people online who are building their reputations and will complete any work you need done for a very reasonable price. Check the resources at the end of this book for the best websites to hire a freelancer.
Niche Products: What Are They and How to Find the Profitable Ones
What is a Niche?
A niche market is an area of business that’s virtually untapped or very small, specialized and profitable. For example, a very small market of people might be looking for an item that’s hard to find. If you can get access to that item or create it yourself, you’re in business! It may seem counter-intuitive to market to a very small group of people, but in reality, this is exactly what you want to try to do. There may be too much competition in larger markets and that means it will be harder for you to get attention to your business and products.
Example: Selling iPhones vs. selling Pinup Girls iPhone cases
We all know that iPhones are extremely popular. You might think that getting into the business of selling iPhones would be perfect. Since so many people are buying them, where could you go wrong?
The Problem
The problem comes with competition. There are so many high-profile businesses out there already selling iPhones that you’d have a very difficult time getting noticed. Unless you have some tactics up your sleeve, your brand new iPhone business would likely never be discovered by the random internet browser.
On the other hand, if you decided to specialize in iPhone cases with pictures of Pinup Girls from the 30s, 40s and 50s, you’d be in a much better position to make sales. There may not be nearly as many people looking for such a thing, but if you’ve specialized in this type of product, your chances of being found are much greater. This results in more traffic and more sales.
Specialize Your Market
Another reason offering Pinup Girls iPhone cases would be much more effective is because it’s specialized. You might have some success selling iPhone cases in general, but customers will be more likely to find you amongst the billions of other websites if your site specializes around one theme. It could be Pinup Girls, military or insects, etc. Maybe only 30 people per month search for an iPhone case with a bumblebee image, but if you’re the one selling it, you’re more likely to bring in that sale.
The example of Pinup Girl iPhone cases is purely for the purpose of demonstrating how to succeed with a niche. There are many untapped markets out there and if you haven’t yet discovered one, now is the time to start brainstorming.
Finding Niche Products
Finding niche products is not always an easy thing. Much of the process takes serious thought, research and discovery. If you’re new-agey, you could even meditate for answers! This may seem as far from business practice as you can get, but the truth is, if niche products and niche markets were easy to uncover, they would no longer be niches. Put a lot of thought into what types of products may be sought after by a very small, niche market. Think outside the box. Do a mind map, try some free association writing, research keywords and pay attention to what people are looking for online. Also keep in mind that you’ll enjoy selling products that interest you personally. Start brainstorming with products that you need or enjoy using in your own life, or centralize your products around an idea that interests you.
The Benefits of Finding Niche Products
Finding niche products to sell to a very small market gives you the opportunity to be the ‘go to’ person or website for that particular product. Especially if the product is spendy, you have a very good chance of cornering this market and earning a great deal of money. If a buyer has limited choices for making a purchase, and your business is one of them, you’ll earn much more money than if you’re selling the same products that can be found in any Wal-mart. Selling blenders won’t get you much attention or profit, but selling products that can help a left-handed golfer better his game might be the ticket!
Ideas for Niche Products
Finding ideas for niche products can be done with keyword research, market research or good old-fashioned gut feelings. If you’re lucky, you’ll find the most profitable niche products and market right off the bat, but generally this won’t be the case. It will take time and persistence to discover products that will earn you substantial profit. You may even need to discover a few niche markets to bring in the big bucks. The successful Internet marketers always say, ‘Find something that works and duplicate it.’
And speaking of the big boys, Mark Ling of Affilorama offers some amazing tools to help you with keyword and market research. In fact, you’ll gain tons of knowledge and information by checking out his free tools and browsing the free forum. This is an invaluable resource if you’re looking for ideas for a profitable niche.
Some Examples of Niche Products
The left-handed golfer scenario is used by many Internet marketers as the example for niche products and niche market. There are thousands of niche products waiting to be discovered and offered by you to your customers. Here are some examples:
Plus Size Shoes – maybe even girl shoes for boys??
Plus Size Maternity Clothes – maternity clothes that are fashionable are hard to find!
Military Items – all kinds of possibilities here for selling to collectors and veterans
Antique items – you can find many niche products in the antique market
Organic and Holistic items – this market is growing fast, but many areas are still virtually untapped (this is where meditation comes in!!)
Finding Suppliers for Your Niche Products
Finding niche products that are readily available might prove to be challenging, but it may not be the hardest part when trying to set up a successful online business. Once you’ve dreamed up, located and discovered a product that you think will make a great niche, you need to be sure that product is readily available. Here are 5 ways to find niche products that are always readily available for your customers.
Make, Craft or Manufacture Niche Products Yourself
If you’re handy, crafty, artistic or creative, you can create your own products for your niche market, and there are a number of ways to sell your own products, too. We’ll discuss those in the next chapter.
Use your natural born talents to draw, paint, sculpt or arrange something that could catch the eye of your visitors. Are you good at graphic design? You could supply your customers with logos or custom Wordpress themes. Are you amazing at wood carving, knitting or mosaic art? Think of everything you’re good at and see if your skills may have value to others.
Craigslist, Thrift Stores and Antique Malls for Niche Products
If your niche products are vintage or collectible, you could make it a habit to begin searching your local thrift stores, antique malls and garage sales. Craigslist also has lots of collectible items at reasonable prices. You might even follow suit from the television show Storage Wars and score big from buying abandoned storage units.
Vintage items are often highly collectible, since production of these items has usually been discontinued. Old dolls, metal cars, sports cards and antique glassware are a few areas that come to mind.
Research online to discover the value and popularity of items that you regularly see. A nice profit can be made by reselling older, gently used items. Many people will also buy brand name clothing that is in good condition or rare record albums by once popular artists. The possibilities really are endless.
Join a Dropshipping Service With Access to Niche Products
Dropshipping services provide you with access to suppliers around the world who offer a huge selection of niche products. No matter if you’re looking for certain types of electronics, clothing for babies or pets, fancy shoelaces or custom iPhone cases, there are a number of dropshipping services that can get you instant access to sell these products online. Compare dropshipping services like Salehoo, Doba and Worldwide Brands to start you off. A review of these three dropshipping services will be discussed in the next section.
Contact Manufacturers of Niche Products
You have the option of doing a little more of the dirty work and making direct contact with manufacturers of the niche products you’re interested in selling. In this case, you’d locate the type of product you’d like to sell and contact the company that makes it. Discuss options with them for you to purchase bulk quantities and store in your own space, like a warehouse or storage unit, or ask about dropshipping options. Often companies will entertain the idea of you becoming a reseller for their products, but success with this will depend on a number of things.
Open an Online Consignment Shop for Niche Products
If you’re neither creative, nor business savvy, all is not lost. Design your website to allow other people who already sell certain niche products to list their items on your site. People who design their own craft items or artistic projects are always on the lookout for new avenues to get their names and brands in front of the public. You could specify the types of niche products you’re looking for and get the word out for others to supply your store. Offer them a commission or royalties on sales and you’ll be good to go.
What is Dropshipping?
You’ve heard the success stories and you’ve heard about the scams. You understand that in order to make serious money online, you need a product; something to sell. It’s not always easy to find wholesale products to offer to your customers and that’s where dropshipping comes in.
When you decide to use a dropshipping service, you’ll act as the middleman between the company offering wholesale goods and the customer looking to buy those goods. For this service, you’ll get to keep the profit or markup on each item.
Not only do dropshippers offer millions of products at wholesale prices, but they also agree to ship the products directly to your customers. Your customers will place orders through your website or mailing list or on your eBay store or auctions and you’ll collect the payment. This payment will include any markup that you and your customers deem worthy. You’ll then place the order through your dropshipper for the wholesale cost. The drop shipper sends the order directly to the customer.
The benefits to you when using dropshipping wholesale suppliers are endless:
No inventory – you won’t need to store products in a large warehouse, storage facility or your own living room!
Savings – you’ll likely get better shipping rates than if you toted packages to your local post office, plus you won’t need to hire employees to fill all those orders!
Millions of products – many drop shippers have access to millions of products in hundreds of categories. This means you get to choose which products to sell and you can probably find a dropshipping service that offers just about anything your customers are looking for.
No minimum quantity orders – generally, dropship suppliers understand your need for ordering products in small quantities, since this is the whole purpose of the industry. You can place orders for 1 product at a time, shipped directly to your customers. No minimum quantity orders of hundreds or thousands of the same product.
Online access – you’ll be able to access your accounts 24/7 via the internet. Keep up with order tracking, fulfillment, inventory control and payments right online.
Wholesale pricing – find competitive wholesale rates on millions of products. Keep the profit when you offer products to your customers at retail price.
Using a dropshipping
wholesale supplier can bring you positive cash-flow while saving you
money in other areas of your business. With the ease today of setting
up a website (no
technical skills required
)
you can have an online business in minutes, without the hassle of
inventory on hand. Earn significant monthly income with dropshipping.
Now that you understand a little more about what dropshipping is, you can begin to research which dropshipping suppliers are right for you. The next three sections describe three of the top dropshipping services available now.
Salehoo
Salehoo is an online directory of suppliers and wholesalers that dropship products in every category imaginable. Salehoo provides a community of over 75,000 members who participate in forum discussions and offer advice to you as an online supplier of dropshipped goods.
Benefits of Dropshipping with Salehoo
You can benefit from using the Salehoo dropship directory if you are:
an eBay seller
an online storefront owner
a website owner
an online trader
a traditional retailer
a flea market vendor
a work at home mom or dad
What You’ll Get From Salehoo
One major benefit of selecting Salehoo as your direct link to dropshipping wholesalers and services is that the website not only provides access to thousands of dropshipping suppliers, but it also gives you access to many, many tools for education and training. Here is what you’ll get for joining Salehoo:
Access to a wholesale directory with over 8,000 verified suppliers in more than 100 different countries
Business education and training, including business setup, wholesale product sourcing and eBay selling
Software for market research to analyze eBay niches
A forum where you can learn about the business and discuss dropshipping topics with over 75,000 members
Comprehensive review system for helping you to avoid dropshipping scams and shady wholesale suppliers
Doba
Doba is a service that connects you to hundreds of dropshippers, wholesale suppliers, distributors and manufacturers. You can preview the products available before becoming a member and Doba offers a lowest drop ship price guarantee. The co-founders authored a book from the popular ‘For Dummies’ series called ‘Drop Shipping For Dummies’ and you can read the Doba blog for all the latest news and updates from the site.
Benefits of Doba Dropshipping Membership
You can signup for Doba Dropshipping with a free trial and benefits of joining Doba include the following:
Access to more than 1 million products from a single website
Search suppliers and wholesale products by keyword, category, supplier, brand and price
Order placement and tracking within a single system
Watch lists available to keep track of products you are interested in selling
Automated sales tools with popular sales and social sites like Facebook, eBay and ProStores
Inventory alerts for notification when certain dropshippers are running low on products you are selling
Access to Doba Deals
Access to research tools and monthly educational reports
eCommerce training
Scam and fraud protection
Lowest drop ship price guarantee
Advanced features such as an API for integration into your shopping cart software
Doba’s Free Trial Information
Doba allows you to review their system, website and dropshipping partners with a risk-free 14-day free trial. Get instant access to more than 300 suppliers, more than 8,000 brands and over 1.5 million products. Try out the product search and order tracking system to see if it fits with your business ideals. Access an entire library of free tour libraries and learn about Doba, the dropshipping industry and wholesale supplier business. Check out how Doba came to be one of the first eBay Certified Service Providers and contact the customer service team with any questions you may have.
Worldwide Brands
Worldwide Brands is a dropshipping directory that provides direct access to over 8 million wholesale products, but that’s not all. Not only do they provide detailed information on their company, the philosophy and their top team employees, Wholesale Brands also provides a plethora of dropshipping and wholesale product sourcing education, tips, articles and research tools. If you’re looking to get into dropshipping for your company or business, there is a wealth of training and information provided on the site.
Benefits of Worldwide Brands Dropshipping Membership
Get a free preview of the Worldwide Brands directory and review for yourself the following benefits:
Direct access to over 8 million wholesale products
Access to dropshippers, as well as import and liquidation products
Instant market and product research
Business reports and resources
19 different video courses to jumpstart your business with dropshipping
19 workbooks to assist you in learning the best ways to conduct your eBay or website sales business
Videos teaching you the most effective ways to sell on eBay, Amazon and Yahoo
Advanced product sourcing research
The Whole Sale Profits forum, allowing you to converse with other members who can answer questions, give advice and steer you clear of scams and fraud
Worldwide Brands Free Preview Information
Worldwide brands offers a free preview of their internal system. Here you can conduct wholesale product searches, see updates and company announcements and get access to thousands of hours of video tutorials and article resources. Get help deciding what to sell, starting an online store, buying a domain, securing the right web hosting, search engine optimization for your site, safety and scam prevention, eBay and other auction resources, legal resources and more.
Where and How to Sell Your Niche Products
So you’ve decided on the product and you’ve found the perfect supplier or dropshipper that can fulfill all your needs. Now you’ll want to figure out the best way to sell this product. You have several options:
Create a profile and use online tools to design and sell products
Open a storefront on an existing website
Start your own website
There are advantages and disadvantages to each one of these options. First let’s discuss how to create a profile on an existing website and use online tools to create your own products.
Create Your Own Products Online
There are several online sites that offer tools to design and create your own products and sell them for a royalty. These websites generally provide you with a personal profile page to promote and all the tools necessary to make money with your creative and artistic abilities. If you’re planning to make your own products, one or all of these websites may provide you with a perfect outlet for earning money online.
Zazzle
Zazzle is a platform for the creation and sale of quality custom products. Individuals, professional artists, and even major brands, like Disney and Star Wars, use the Zazzle technology to create and offer billions of unique products for customers worldwide. Zazzle's product base includes t-shirts, business cards, invitations, shoes, iPhone cases, jewelry and so much more.
Using the easy online tools, you can use your own photos and designs to create products that are instantly and accurately visualized on the site and offered in the Zazzle marketplace. When ordered, each product is made on-demand, typically within 24 hours.
Take a look at the Zazzle Marketplace and you will find a zillion products for sale, and the option to create a zillion more! If you are a professional artist, or amateur designer, or even just someone 13 or older who has a super funny saying for a bumper sticker, this is your site!
It's really easy to create a free account, upload images or create text to display on one of hundreds of products that Zazzle offers. Make money online by promoting these products with Zazzle's promotion tools such as URL, referral links, embedded flash windows, code for blogs and even an integrated online store for your own website.
With their extensive help system, and Zazzle University, if you're serious about making money online, you'll be able to pull it off with the help of the Zazzle site. You can earn royalties off your own products, plus commissions on referrals to yours and others' products. Get creative, download free graphic design software, or start writing down snippets of humor. Create postage from royalty free images, photos from your own collection or sell other people's creations for a commission.
Click here to check out Zazzle
Cafepress
Cafepress is fairly similar in concept to Zazzle as described above. They offer easy-to-use online tools and the opportunity to create your own online storefront for sales. The product line contains some additional products not available on Zazzle, but it doesn’t hurt to promote your own creations on both sites, simultaneously.
While Zazzle is free, Cafepress offers free and upgrade memberships. Upgrade your membership with Cafepress to receive added benefit of deeper customization, custom templates for your shop and section and storefront controls.
Click here to check out Cafepress
Sell Art, Photos, Music and More
If you can create it, there’s likely already an established website that provides the opportunity to sell it. Websites abound for selling stock photography, music, art, articles and more.
Click for an extensive list of where to sell your creations
Open a Storefront
You can easily open a storefront to sell your products online. Many websites provide space and tools that can get your store online in a matter of minutes. If you have no experience or interest in designing your own site, and you’ve chosen not to use storefronts offered by a dropshipping service, this may be the perfect solution.
Popular choices for an online storefront include eBay stores, Etsy and the Amazon Webstore. Both eBay and Amazon charge monthly fees for access to their creation tools and both have a good reputation with flooding traffic to their sellers. Etsy is also very popular, but caters to a specialized niche.
eBay Stores
An eBay storefront would be best suited for someone who’s already familiar with how eBay operates, or plans to use the eBay auction site to market. By choosing an eBay store, you’ll get lower listing fees and several online tools to improve your store. Reporting features and cross-promotional advertising tactics will help to drive traffic and sales.
Amazon Webstore
Amazon offers a Webstore for listing and selling your niche products. In just minutes you can list products in up to 25 categories inside a sleek and professional design. Payment processing is handled directly through Amazon and many online tools are available to assist you in driving traffic and making sales.
Etsy
Etsy is an online marketplace for all things handmade. If you plan to make your own products or sell supplies to others who enjoy handicrafts, this is the place for you. Low listing fees and high traffic make Etsy an excellent place to build a shop.
Start Your Own Website
Volumes of ebooks have already been written on this subject and to cover this topic in detail would surely bore you to tears. For the purposes of this book, I’ll be brief, but point you toward valuable resources that can help you along if this is the choice you decide to make.
Benefits of Creating Your Own Website
Having your own website to advertise and sell your online products is by far the best choice to make. Online storefronts have limitations that may not affect how you do business right now, but would likely become a problem in the future. If your business becomes very successful, which I’m sure is the plan from the start, expansion of your online identity might be difficult and costly if your site resides under the umbrella of a bigger brand name.
Creating your own website has a much bigger learning curve than following easy online tools, but the benefits are much greater. Additionally, there are many tools available to help you easily create a website. In the past, you might have needed coding and design experience, plus special software. Nowadays, special tools are available for simple website creation. Here are some benefits to having your own website with your own domain name:
More control
More flexibility
Freedom of choice
Expansion opportunities
Option to monetize your pages
Advertising revenue possibilities
What You’ll Need
In order to create your own website all you’ll need is a domain name and some space on the web, called hosting. Domain names cost about $6 to $12 per year and hosting depends on how much space you’ll need, but will likely cost you between $3 and $12 per month.
I’ll discuss a great way to get fantastic and inexpensive hosting service in the next section. Once you’ve secured this, you’ll need to decide whether you want to host a blog and which shopping cart, if any, you’ll need to implement.
A Wordpress blog is very easy to use and Google seems to give a bit of special preference to sites that use Wordpress. You can sell products on this blog using Paypal and other payment options, plus Wordpress is very easy to customize. This setup would be ideal if you plan to sell your own creations or products from a very specialized niche. Having this type of product on a blog would allow you to write articles about each product and add promotional materials to really personalize your sales.
Paypal
Speaking of Paypal, this online payment solution will be vital to any decision you make. No matter how you design your website or which shopping cart you prefer, you’ll want to take advantage of the possibilities that Paypal offers. Your buyers can easily pay you via their existing Paypal accounts, or they can pay using a credit card, even if they don’t have a Paypal account.
What does this mean? It means that it’s not exactly necessary, at least from the beginning, to sign up and be approved for a separate merchant account. A full-blown merchant account may be more suitable down the road when you begin raking in thousands of dollars per month, but in the beginning, Paypal is probably your best choice.
If you don’t yet have a Paypal account, click here to sign up. Paypal is useful for selling on ebay, selling through Etsy, selling via a Wordpress blog or selling via your own site using most of the popular shopping carts. They offer easy forms for creating and setting up payment buttons for a blog, and they also offer full integration into many of today’s top shopping cart systems.
Shopping Carts
In order to sell a variety of products from your website, you’ll need a shopping cart. Many hosting companies provide shopping cart systems as part of their hosting packages, including the packages discussed in the next section. Zen Cart is my favorite, but it does require a bit of a learning curve. There are excellent support forums online for help with setting up and implementing Zen Cart and other open-source shopping cart solutions.
AmeriCommerce
If you’re looking for a way to avoid digging around inside backend code to customize your shopping cart experience, you may prefer a shopping cart system that’s made to be easy to use. To avoid the headaches that may come with setting up Zen Cart, however, you’ll be responsible for a monthly fee with shopping carts like AmeriCommerce. It’s a matter of choice whether you prefer a free cart with a learning curve, or whether you just want to pay for something easy. If the latter is your choice, AmeriCommerce is excellent.
Keep in mind that your fee with a hosted shopping cart service like AmeriCommerce includes the web hosting. You’ll still be responsible for picking up your own domain name, but your space on the web is included. This may lead to some limitations, as expansion will likely require additional monthly fees.
The best way to decide on whether you’d like more control or less hassle is to check out shopping cart reviews online. Often times existing customers will leave comments and their own reviews of different products. Since this is your business and you’re serious about making a profit online, you’ll want to be sure your decision is a good one.
Control Over Your Own Site
When you create your own website from scratch, you’ll pay less money upfront but put in a bit more time. This is still an awesome solution, however, due to the templates and free software available to be installed on your space. Having control over your own site, shopping cart and ad space is of significant benefit. Let’s talk about your options for starting up your own site.
Hosting
I have had my hosting account with the same company for over a decade. With all the hosting and webspace options out there, it’s hard to know who to trust and what to expect. I got lucky from the beginning and have enjoyed my experience with The Design Shoppe. Recently, I have partnered with this company, giving me the ability to offer hosting directly to you for an excellent price.
As always, there are many options out there for you and I suggest you research these options fully before making a final decision. If you would like reliable monthly hosting for your website, plus options for shopping cart and blog installation, feel free to include this hosting option in your research comparison.
To see the options I provide for starting your own website, click here. You can start with a basic or standard hosting plan and also opt for installation of Wordpress or Zen Cart on your site. I also offer the option for purchasing a domain name.
You may also want to include the following companies in your comparison research:
Installation
Once you’ve secured your domain name and hosting, you’ll want to install the platform you’ve chosen to use for selling your products. Inside your hosting account, you should have access to a control panel with options to install different types of free or open-source software. The best hosting companies offer a program called Fantastico, which usually includes several types of free installations, including Wordpress, Zen Cart and others.
Usually with just the click of a button or two, your website will accept the install of whichever platform you’ve chosen, and you can then begin to customize your site. In the old days you’d have to design your site page by page. These quick install, open-source software solutions have made it very convenient to start up a website quickly with many options to customize.
What’s Next?
All you’ll have left to do at this point is customize your site and add your products. Completion of this step depends upon which direction you’ve decided to go. If you have any questions, usually a simple Google search will provide you with great answers. There are a few other software programs that will be vital if you plan to customize your website yourself.
Filezilla – a free FTP program for uploading custom themes and plugins
Emerald Editor – a free text editor program for viewing and making changes to code
GIMP – a free image manipulation software (similar to Photoshop)
Mission Complete? Not Yet!
So you’ve gotten your website up and running, products are ready, payment buttons are waiting. Now, you must find a way to get customers to notice your site amidst the sea of millions of competitors. There are many ways to do this and I’ll discuss those that have been most effective for me.
Hire Someone Else
Before we get into the details of all the ways to promote your own website and brand, let me first say that if you’ve got a bit of extra money, it will be much easier and more effective to hire people to do the work that you a) don’t want to do or b) aren’t any good at.
In fact, for very low cost you can hire freelancers to do most of the work in setting up your site, including logo work, installation of Wordpress or shopping carts, customized theme integration, article marketing and SEO (search engine optimization).
I once read an article by a very popular Internet marketer and he suggested that if you don’t have any extra money to hire people to help you out, work a few hours extra at your job or get a part time job doing something you know how to do. Use that extra money to hire people, rather than spend hours and hours trying to figure it out yourself. You could have a website up and running very quickly, as opposed to taking a year to figure out how to DIY. This was very good advice to me. A bit of money up front could mean lots of sales much more quickly.
That said, there are a couple of excellent and very popular sites that you can use to hire freelancers to do your work. You’ll put out a job listing and experienced freelancers will come and bid on that job. You can view profiles and converse with freelancers to see which one you feel could best serve you. Once the bid is accepted, the work is completed to your satisfaction and the freelancer will then be paid.
Freelancer Websites
Freelancer is a global outsourcing solution and freelance jobs website. Here you can find freelance coders, writers, programmers, designers, marketers and more. You can also outsource projects and save a lot of money in the process. Getting the best web design, professional programming, custom writing or affordable marketing has never been easier!
Donanza is the best way for freelancers, students, moms, hobbyists, or anyone who wants to make more money working from home to search across thousands of sites and find paying jobs and contests that fit their skills and interests. This is great for you, because you need people who need work. This keeps costs down while skilled professionals can get the word out about their work and build a great reputation doing what they love.
At Elance you can hire great people by posting your job. For only $10, you get unlimited job postings. You can review proposals, as candidates will start submitting proposals within hours, telling you what they can do and how much it will cost. Compare profiles, experience, ratings, credentials and portfolios to select the best fit for you.
Do It Yourself Marketing and Promotion
If you’re still convinced that this is a project you intend to take on yourself, know that the more time and energy you spend doing the following, the better results you will get. You’ll need to promote your website in several different ways, most of them free, and keep up with fresh content and incentives for people to buy.
Marketing a website takes some time, but if you do a good job, the search engines will list your site in a good position and people will begin to shop at your store. Implement ways for customers to share your site with their friends, such as Facebook like buttons and Google +1 images and this will help you a great deal a well.
SEO
One of the most important subjects that you’ll need to spend some time on is Search Engine Optimization. This is an ever-changing field, but is the most important thing to take into consideration if you ever want Google, Yahoo, Bing and others to notice your website.
The subject of SEO is much too broad for this ebook, so I will be supplying you with links to check out for information on how to incorporate this into your site. Optimizing your pages for search engines doesn’t take much time, but there are several key points that must be honored to keep the search engines happy.
SEOBook is one of my favorite sites for training, community forums and free tools for learning, building and keeping up to date with SEO. My favorite tool is their Keyword Tool, which shows you how many people search daily for a particular term. This is one of the best ways to begin figuring out which keywords might bring you some profit. You can then take advantage of these keywords in your site’s meta data, inside articles and on your pages. Effective placement of keywords can take you a long way.
Article Marketing
It’s important for you to have several good articles on each of your most important keywords. If you’re not a writer, check the Freelance section or resources at the end of this book to see suggestions on hiring someone to write for you. Often you can get decent articles for $3 each and up, and this may spare you quite a bit of headache, if English wasn’t your best subject. You’ll want these articles to post to your website, your blog, if you have one, and to several major article marketing sites around the web.
The purpose behind article marketing is that search engines like to see information that is helpful to the user or customer. When you customer lands on your page to buy something, it’s nice to have detailed descriptions, overview information and how-to instructions, if they apply. Search engines also like to see this, and your page could be rated higher if solid and helpful information is present.
Another way to get traffic to your site is to post how-to or informational articles to some of the top article sites. Ezine Articles is a great one that comes to mind. On this site, you can post your article and create a resource box pointing to your website. Keep in mind that the article must be of high quality and can’t be a copy of anything you already have posted to the web, including your own website. This ensures that readers who stumble across your article are seeing this information for the first time. If they like what they read, they just might click through and visit your site.
There are hundreds of places online to post articles, but be careful about where you choose to do so. Incoming links from shady websites won’t help your cause. Choose the top and most trusted article base sites for posting your work.
If you don’t already have a Twitter account, click here to join. Twitter is a very popular microblog where people go to find out the latest from their friends and about their favorite subjects. As long as you stay away from spam, your posts will gain some attention and people will begin to follow you. The more followers you get, the more people will wonder what you’re up to and come by to see. Search engines are also paying more and more attention to what’s going on at Twitter when creating their result listings. Twitter will be an important place for you to send frequent updates on new products, sales promotions or links to your newly posted articles.
Get Twitter Friends
Obviously, getting people to follow you on Twitter can take some time. One of the best ways to get followers on Twitter is to seek out people with like interests, or people who you think might be interested in what you’re selling. Without being pushy, follow them first and there’s a good chance they will follow you back. Don’t try to sell yourself. Instead be genuine and you’ll have a better chance of people paying attention to what you say.
There are also a few places that can help you get Twitter followers a little more quickly. Keep in mind that Twitter doesn’t want you to go out and follow 20,000 people on your first day. That defeats the purpose of their mission. But for our mission, you’ll want to get many relevant followers, as quickly as possible.
One fun tool to help you do this is Twiends. You can get ‘seeds’ by following others on Twiends and your seeds can be used to get followers for yourself. It’s a neat concept if you’re interested in gaining a good base of followers very quickly.
Social Oomph
Social Oomph was once called TweetLater and this website has a range of excellent and necessary tools to help you with your social network accounts. Using their service, you can schedule Tweets, track keywords, shorten your URLs and automatically follow people who follow you.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another tool that’s invaluable for organizing and keeping track of Twitter, Facebook and other social media posts. Set up all your Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and track analytics, view streams, schedule messages and more.
Twitter Directories
There are also a number of Twitter directories where you can list your profile and gain additional followers. You can sign up for as many of these as you like and people will begin to find and follow you. Click here for a list of the best Twitter directories.
Facebook has become the ultimate go-to place for so many people, for so many reasons. Not only do people post the most mundane of status updates, but they can share gifts with friends, play games, share links, post videos and upload photo albums. It’s the #1 social site and will likely stay that way for a while.
Like with any other marketing technique, you won’t be able to get on Facebook and begin talking about what you’re selling, hoping for people to rush over to your store. No one likes to be sold. If you don’t already have a Facebook account, your best bet would be to create one and begin looking for old school and work friends that you haven’t seen in years. This is the fun part that might get you going in a whole different direction. Using Facebook in this way can be very entertaining, but that’s not how we want to use it for business.
Facebook Pages
In order to take advantage of what Facebook can do for your business, you’ll want to create a Facebook page. A Facebook page is a lot like your own profile page except it’s not tied directly to you personally, and you can customize it with links, videos and photos of your products. As people ‘like’ your page, they will begin to see your updates on their wall and their friends can come by and ‘like’ your page as well.
Much like with Twitter, it’s going to take something special to get people to begin visiting and liking your Facebook page. If you can get creative and think of a gimmick, you’ve got it made. Even your best friends on Facebook are not likely to be supportive enough to repost your links. It’s just the way people are.
Tips for Facebook Pages
Create the page - Whenever I get ready to create a new page on Facebook, I always have to Google the link. It seems that for me, it’s not easy to figure out how to create a page. Click here to get started.
Set up your wall, info and photos – make sure to include the link to your website, some great photos of products and fill out all the information that may get people interested in who you are and what you’re offering.
Upload pictures – for whatever reason, people respond well to great pictures. It’s important to have pictures of your best work uploaded into your Facebook page photo album. This will give your potential customers a good idea of what they can expect by clicking through to your site.
Set up a reveal tabs – A reveal tab displays a message prompting the user to like your page before he or she can see what’s inside. If you’ve got something really great waiting on the other side, convince users who land on your page to click the like button for access. For a complete explanation of how to set this up, click here.
PPC
If you want to run with the big boys, you could get into using Pay Per Click as a method for getting traffic to your site. There are many people who have learned how to successfully use this method, but this subject goes beyond my expertise.
If you’d like to learn how to use Pay Per Click advertising, I suggest you check out the Affilorama website and begin at the free forums. They have entire sections dedicated to learning and implementing this method of advertising.
Afterword
There are many ways to go about making money online and I have covered a general overview of the ways that work for me. I’m not a millionaire, but I do make a comfortable living online. This living provides me with the opportunity to watch my son grow up, take time to walk on the beach, and relax when the mood strikes me. I love getting ‘mailbox money’ and knowing that I’ve created my own job and pay my own bills.
I love helping people to succeed and I’d love to help you! If you have any questions or are confused about something, I’d like to do my best to clear it up and point you in the best direction for you.
Please feel free to email me at ibloomdrop@gmail.com and I’ll do my best to help you along on the online road to success.
All the best!
Jeannie Pitt
Resources
As promised, here is a list of the best resources for starting and succeeding at your own online business.
Dropshipping Services
Internet Marketing and SEO Training
Online Storefront Setups
Create and Sell Products Online
CafePress
Directory – Where to Sell Your Stuff Online
Shopping Cart Software
ZenCart – installation provided by the author, Google ‘Zen Cart’ for more info
Web Hosting
Hosting Solutions by the author
Merchant Accounts
Hire a Freelancer
Other
Google Adsense – monetizing pages
Filezilla – FTP upload software
Emerald Editor – Text editing software
GIMP – photo manipulation software
Conduit – add and monetize a toolbar for your visitors to download
Article Marketing
Social Marketing
Tube Toolbox – Get YouTube Friends Fast
Contest Burner – run a viral contest on your website