How To Sell Your Own Product or Service Online

If you want to sell your own product online, you can determine exactly how much it is going to cost you, if anything at all.
 

Many people are selling their own products online and they are doing very well. But you need to plan your marketing strategy very carefully.
 

There are various ways to market your product, such as free classified advertising, ppc (pay per click), affiliate marketing etc.
 

Many people claim that free classified advertising doesn’t work. But I often find people who are enjoying good results from free classified advertising. The secret is that you have to spend time on it. You need to do proper research to see which classified advertising site will work for you. Then you need to place at least three to five adverts every day. You need to have a tracking system in place in order to track your advertisements and see which ones are getting the best results and on which sites.
 

If you are prepared to spend some money, you can use pay per click advertising. Using this method you need to do proper keyword research, where you will pay a certain rate for your adverts based on the keywords of your choice. Every time a potential customer clicks on your advert, you will pay a certain rate. You can budget for the amount you want to spend on your advertising and you can set a limit to the amount you to spend. If you do not want to spend more than $1 000.00 you can set your limit to $1 000.00. The moment you reach that limit, they will stop showing your advert.

The danger with this kind of advertising, is that if you don’t know what you are doing, you might end up spending the $1 000.00, getting the clicks, but not making one sale.

You can also recruit a team of affiliates to sell your product for you. This is a very popular way of marketing. How they market the product is up to them, as long as it is ethical and they are not spamming people. But the choice of using free advertising, paid advertising or even article marketing is left up to them.

You can submit your product to Clickbank and let affiliates find your product through Clickbank.
 

 Another method you can use is to join a company such as Triple Clicks.com and submit your product to them. By doing this you will become an E-Commerce Associate of the company. Their E-Commerce Associate program allows merchants worldwide to offer products and services at the Triple Clicks Store. Thousands of SFI affiliates all over the world are promoting Triple Clicks .com. By joining Strong Future International (SFI) as an affiliate, you automatically get free membership at Triple Clicks .com, and you can treat it as your own online store. This will give you the opportunity to promote thousands of products, but you will also be able to promote your own product with the benefit of a site which already has lots of traffic.   

The importance Of Getting Followers on Twitter

If you are serious about building your business online, you have to consider building relationships. Even though you communicate online, your customers are still real people. Don’t be fooled into thinking that just because you never have to meet face to face with your customer, you don’t need to build relationships. This fact alone actually gives you ample reason to do just that, build relationships. 

The importance of Twitter as a marketing tool is often overlooked.

Many people are focused on Facebook, while Twitter gets overlooked. Don’t get me wrong though, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Facebook.

 However, if you are serious about taking your marketing strategies to a higher level, then it is a good idea to learn how to get more Twitter followers.

Twitter enables you to send a short message to all your followers, so it is a good idea to get as many followers as possible if you want to promote your business. Many people consider it a down side that you are limited to 140 characters when you send a message. Yet it is enough to send a powerful message out to many people.

If you need to communicate with your followers in order to build your relationships, Twitter has the facility where you can send direct messages to specific people.  To have more detailed conversations you can always invite the other person to connect with you on Facebook as well.

Without building relationships and gaining trust from your friends it will be hard to maintain your presence or to market any business online.

There are some excellent free tools available as well, which can assist you in gaining more followers on Twitter. One such tool is ManageFlitter. It is a very useful tool, as it will assist you in your follow and unfollow processes, which will free you to spend more time to interact with your new followers. By entering some keywords related to your interests or your niche, ManageFlitter will do the search for you, finding people you might want to follow. Select the ones you want to follow, and this tool will do the rest.  Are there people you want to unfollow? Instead of searching your own list, just use the “unfollow” function in ManageFlitter which will tell you exactly who is not following you back. Make your final choice about who you want to unfollow, and ManageFlitter will do the rest of the work.

One important rule to remember is not to “spam” your followers with business messages. If that is all people see of you, it will soon be clear that all you are interested in is taking their money. So if you do not really care for people, and are only concerned about doing business, you should rather stick to paid advertising or some offline venture, where you make it clear what your intentions are, and everybody knows what to expect.

When you look for people to follow, it can be helpful to pay attention to the balance between “followers” and “following”. There is nothing wrong when someone is following more people than the amount of followers he has, or the other way around. But when you find someone with thousands of followers and he is following nobody, the chances are slim for that person to follow you back. That defeats the whole purpose of building relationships. If on the other hand, the person is following hundreds or thousands of people, and hardly anybody is following him/her back, it might be that you will receive a lot of spamming from this person.

To get many followers (and quality followers), you must be patient. Nothing good is ever happening overnight anyway. So be patient and build on your relationships. You will gain some good friends; some of those friends will also start developing into customers. This process might take some time, but is very rewarding.

Don't Try To Know It All Before You Start Your Business Online

I don’t know enough.

Many businesses fail even before they have started. People procrastinate because they think they don’t know enough. When is it the right time to start?

Now. Yes, I really do believe the right time will never come if you don’t start now. Irrespective of what you want to do. Whether you want to start with a family, start a business online or whatever you want to do, there will always be a reason to procrastinate. “We have to wait until there is enough money”, or “I don’t know enough yet”. If you are going to wait until you have enough money or until you know enough before you commit to something, you most likely will never start.

I am not saying you should just dive in blindly, go into debt, or recklessly just start your business online without proper planning or thinking it over. To the contrary, that is exactly where you should start. Commit yourself and start planning your business. Determine how much money you are going to need (by the way – this is an important part of what you need to know before you start your business). What skills do you need? If you want to start a business online, do you know your subject? Do you know your way around the internet?  

Knowing enough

Once you started this process, you have committed yourself. You have gained some momentum. So now you realize you don’t know enough about social media, you know even less about blogging…..oh yes, and then there are e-mail lists. How on earth can you start if you don’t know enough yet? When will you know enough to start your business? Never. Yes, never.

The good news is that every successful business man, everybody that is successful in whatever they do, started exactly where you are now. Not knowing anything.

So when do you know enough to start? As soon as you know just enough to take the first step. Then you start learning and gathering enough information to take the next step…. and the next…..and the next, until you start achieving your goals.

There is a saying that says: “the more we learn, the more we realize how little we know”. The bottom line is; you will never know enough. Any business is constantly changing; the internet is constantly changing, so you will never stop learning. Wait until you know enough, and you will never get started.  

Create a Map

As I already mentioned, I do not say that you must just blindly start doing business online without proper planning. No, planning is absolutely essential.

Carefully think about the following: What exactly do you want to do? Why do you want to do it? How will you achieve it (your action plan)? Once you achieved your goal, how will it affect you/your life? Do you have a strong desire to achieve your goal? Are you motivated? Can you persevere?

You need to know; the challenges will come. Achieving your goals are not going to happen in a straight line. Some of your strategies might not work the way you thought it would. There might be delays. If you don’t really have a strong desire, which will motivate you, you won’t necessarily persevere, and you might just give it all up.

Set your goals. Aim high. Dare to dream. Then start creating your plan of action. Break it all up into smaller goals (action steps) which are easy to achieve. This is like creating a map to reach you final destination.

Once you have this in place, take action. Only focus on your next step. If your next step doesn’t give you the desired result, don’t quit, be flexible and change your strategy, as long as it keeps you on track to your ultimate goal.

You Don’t Have To Do It Alone

If it is your goal to make money online, there are different channels you can follow. You can create and market your own product, or you can render a service. Information marketing is often very successful.  You can also join one of the many affiliate programs online, in which case you will market someone else’s product. There are some excellent affiliate programs available. You can join such a program at no cost to you and earn commission when you refer customers to the vendor’s website and a sale is made.

You can also take part in joint ventures, profit sharing programs (such as Google Adsense) etc.

What is important though, especially if you are new to online marketing, is not to be the “Lone Ranger”. It is important for you to interact with people. If possible, have a mentor to guide you along the way.

If I can make a recommendation, it would be to look at a company called Strong Future International (SFI). They give you the opportunity to get involved in a great affiliate program; they also have an online store from where you can generate sales and consider it as your own online store. It gives you the opportunity to create a passive income. Membership to Strong Future International (SFI) is free.

They have an excellent support structure, and you can visit their forum where you can meet fellow online marketers and experts. Discuss your own obstacles and get advice from other experienced marketers. You can also see what problems other people are struggling with and maybe you can offer the solution to their problem.

So how much do you need to know before you start your business? Just enough to take the first step.

You Want To Start An Online Business, So Treat It Like A Business - Part 4

Combining Various Marketing Channels To Get The Best Results

Today we come the final part of our series to discuss your new online business. You can read the first three parts of this discussion here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

It is often recommend to have (or create) multiple streams of income. I totally agree with this. There is a lot of logic behind this principle. This subject is discussed often on the internet and I won't go into the detail here, except for the fact that I strongly support the principle. What I do want to discuss though, is something that I haven't seen any discussions on. It is utilizing various marketing channels in your business to ensure success.

This will save you money, as you should be able to start your online business very low to no capital outlay. You should have immediate access to products or services without having to create or buy them, yet you must be able to treat it as your own product. You should be able to build a network of marketers, duplicating your own efforts, thus maximizing results. And finally, have an independent company that will handle and manage all the orders, shipping and commissions. This will free you to spend your time on productive marketing efforts, and spending time with your team members as and when they need you. 

There is an online company that – to my opinion – combines all the marketing channels we have discussed in this series (See Part3).

If you are looking for a reliable affiliate program with a good support structure, I would recommend that you have a look at SFI (Strong Future International). It is free to register, and you immediately get access to various marketing tools. They also enable you to immediately start earning by means of a point system, where you can earn points for various administrative tasks that you perform on a daily basis. Take part in their forum and get advice from other marketers with regards to marketing strategies.

SFI also provides you the opportunity for network marketing, which allows you to build your own down line of affiliates. By teaching the people in your down line, you can duplicate your own efforts, thus creating a passive income.

You will get free membership to TripleClicks.com which is an online store that you can treat as your own once you register at SFI. TripleClicks.com is currently featuring in excess of 50 000 products. You start by saving money, buying from your own online store. Promote your own online store or promote individual products relating to the niche market of your choice. You will also earn commission on the activities of the personally sponsored affiliates in your down line, as well on people they have sponsored for several levels deep through SFI.

Over and above having access to their forum, getting advice and support from other marketers, you also get access to training and support from the company in various other ways, such as their “Launch Pad” series and internet course. This is all included in their free membership, and it will never be required of you to buy anything. Although buying from your own online store is recommended - seeing that it will save you money - it is optional.

Yes, I am a member of SFI, and if you prefer to register for another affiliate program or networking opportunity, you are more than welcome. But if you are new to the online marketing community, or if you are still looking for a way to get started, I can strongly recommend Strong Future International (SFI).

You Want To Start An Online Business, So Treat It Like A Business - Part 3

It is time for the 3rd part of our 4 part series today. If you missed the first two parts or want to refer back you can do it here:

Part 1

Part 2

Today I want to discuss various marketing channels you can use in your online business.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are very popular on the internet, and are one of the easier ways to get involved in internet marketing.

By taking part in an affiliate program, you can get started with no capital outlay. You don’t need to keep any stock and you don’t have to be involved in shipping any products.

All you do is to make recommendations of products of other vendors, and you refer people to their websites. If any purchases are made, you earn a commission.

There are some great services available online to assist you. They will make life easier for you and keep you safe. These are services such as CLICKBANK and LINKSHARE to name but a few. These services provide centralized locations where you look at various affiliate programs from different vendors, and you can join the ones you prefer.

They provide you with affiliate links and “banner code” to place links and/or banners on your website for the program of your choice. When someone click on one of these links or banners, they will be redirected to the vendor’s website, and if a sale is made, the sale is tracked and you will be paid a commission.

Most of these services provide online reporting, to enable you to monitor your results.

Your Own Product / Online Store

It is also popular to create your own product to market on the internet. By doing this you can then build a team of affiliates to market your product, thus making use of leverage by duplicating your efforts through many people. In this case you can also list your product at the services mentioned under affiliate programs, such as CLICKBANK. This will enable affiliate marketers to register for your specific affiliate program.

Creating and /or running your own online store is another way of creating a great passive income, where people return for repeat business month after month. By doing this, you will not only be able to make money, but you will save lots of money, by just doing things you normally do.   The reason I say this, is that if you need to buy a product for everyday use, or a book you want to read, and you have an affiliate link of either Amazon.com or TripleClicks.com on your website, you would much rather now buy it from your “own store” than from someone else.

Network Marketing

In affiliate marketing you do not have any capital outlay, stock problems etc., but you are only relying on your own marketing efforts.  Creating your own product, you can use the power to leverage the efforts of many people to produce much better results, by recruiting affiliate marketers to market the product for you. Yet you will have to put in the effort to create a quality product in order to create any sales.

When joining a network marketing company online, you shouldn’t have any capital outlay. Yet you won’t be relying on only your own marketing efforts, seeing that you will be building a down line of other marketers as well. By teaching these people, and duplicating your efforts through them, you can also utilize the power to leverage their efforts to your advantage.

Yet, you would not have to create a new product, seeing that you will be marketing the product or the service of the networking company that you joined.  You would also not have to keep inventory, neither deal with shipping of any products, as this will be the responsibility of the company. 

You also should have the back-up and support of your sponsor, seeing that your success will also mean better success to him/her. And ultimately you should be enjoying a good support system from the company, providing training, marketing tools and customer service.

Go to Part 4 here.

You Want To Start An Online Business, So Treat It Like A Business - Part 2

Daily Action To Grow Your Business                         

This is the second of our 4 part series on starting your online business. If you missed the first part, you can can read it here.  

Today I want to talk about your daily actions. Once you have committed to the success of your online business and you have set your goals, take action on a daily basis. Always know what to do next. Your next step (however small it might be) must bring you closer to your goal.

You will never achieve anything by just thinking about it. You achieve your business goals (or any other goals for that matter) only by doing……by taking action every day.

Your next step can literally be “taking a next step” (which can also be turned into smaller individual goals), or it can be action steps, some of which can be taken on a daily basis.

Here are some ideas of what you can do on a daily basis:

• Add some prospects to your prospect list. 
•  Follow up with recent prospects. 
•   Place advertisements (paid advertisements or free classifieds).
• Set up a tracking system to track results on your advertising. (I can recommend TrafficXcess, Easy Simple Money Maker.com, and ViralTraffic4U – these are all free systems you can use).
• Review your tracking results on your advertising.
• Work on your social media strategy.
• Subscribe to a good internet marketing course.  
• Review some lessons from the course you are following
•  Take part in forum discussions relating to your niche. 
•   Send out a news letter to your prospects and/or customers.
•  Post on your blog.
•  Write one or more articles.
•  Search on Google for articles on how to become a better internet marketer and read them.
•   If you are part of a networking or MLM program, contact your sponsor and let him know what you are doing. Ask for his advice or suggestions.
•  If you have a down line, contact members and find out if you can assist them in any way. (Learn to help others in order to help yourself).
•  Review your goals

It is not to say that you have to do all the above every single day, these are guidelines and examples. You might do some every day; some might be twice per week or even once a week. It all depends on your “game plan”.

Go to Part 3 here.

You Want To Start An Online Business, So Treat It Like A Business - Part 1

A Hobby Or A Business?

So you want to start an online business. Why do you want to do it?...There is so much to discuss about this subject, I decided to publish a series of 4 posts to cover the topic as it is to much for 1 post.

 If you want to start your online business, you need to decide right from the beginning whether you want to just run it as a hobby, or do you plan to build it into a real business. By referring to “real business”, I mean you must be able to earn a full-time income from it.

If you are just looking for a hobby and generating an income is not one of your goals, fine, just have fun with it. But if you want to create a business, then treat it like a business from day one. If you think about starting to treat it like real business as soon as it starts to generate a worthwhile income, you most likely will never get there.

Set your goals, know what you want to achieve, and be serious about it.

If you decide to buy into some franchise, it will literally cost thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Spending all this money, do you think it’s going to work for you if you spend only a few hours a week as and when you feel like it, working on your business? Or maybe you consider not getting any training? Or maybe you would just give it a try for a month or two, and if it doesn’t work, you’ll just quit.

I don’t think so. By investing a lot of money, you’ll make sure you commit yourself to that business. You will try to get all the training you possibly can, and you most definitely will follow any proven guide lines provided by the creator of the franchise. You will also plan properly and prepare yourself, so that you don’t just quit at the first obstacle you encounter.  

So what is different about your online business?

The fact that you can start your online business without a huge capital investment creates a pitfall or stumbling block to many potential entrepreneurs.

I am not saying you shouldn’t invest any money when you start your online business. If you have the capital available and you know what you are doing, you might have your business up and running so much faster.

What I am saying, is that if you don’t know what you are doing, it might be risky spending a lot of money. I am also saying that if you don’t have the money, there’s no need to go into debt and take all kinds of risks. That’s the positive side of an online business.

The danger is that when you don’t spend the money, you don’t take your business serious. When family or friends make bad remarks, or have de-motivating comments, it is easy to quit. People often tend to judge what you do by the amount of money you put into it. If you want to start your online business, don’t allow this to happen.

You will have to invest in your business anyhow. Although you can start your online business with little or even no money, you will have to invest time. Yes, as the saying goes; “the only place where success comes before work, is in the dictionary”. So you have to commit to your business. Treat it as a full-time business. If you still have a full-time job, block out certain times in the week (preferably on a daily basis) to commit to your business.     

Once you treat your online business as a serious business, you put in the effort and commit to its success; it will become a serious, full-time business.

Go to Part 2

Content Is King? Wrong.

If you are involved in any form of online marketing, I am sure you must have heard “content is king!”

So how can anybody deny that? It is a well known fact that whatever you do, whether you post on your own blog, tweet on Twitter or submit articles to article directories, quality content is a must. Providing quality content is one of the best ways to promote any business.

This is all true, and I would have told you the same thing - “content is king” – as I have came to that same conclusion. That is until I recently paid a visit to CopyBlogger, where they discussed one of the pillars of internet marketing: relationships.

And it dawned on me, content isn’t king, relationships are king. Yes, content is extremely important and is also one of your pillars for internet marketing, but without relationships, it will lose much of its power.

I am always emphasizing the importance of building relationships, and after my visit to CopyBlogger I realized this: You can have a list of thousands of people, and with quality content you can achieve success (whatever methods you are using – email, blogging, newsletter, etc.). But imagine if you have a strong relationship with your following. If you have the trust of the people following you, you communicate regularly and you pay attention to what their needs are and what they want, whenever you put any content out there, they are going to read it.

I have often subscribed to lists when it seems to be a good option, just to be disappointed or even forget about the membership later on. You never read the emails, and eventually just cancel your subscription as they just fill up your inbox.

The Money Is In The List

Yes, this is true. You do need prospects, which you need to turn into customers. Without these, you won’t be able to conduct any business. But building your list without building relationships is like building a house without a proper foundation. You will have to work so much harder on building your list, because as you add people to your list you will just be replacing people who are unsubscribing. And even of those who stay on your list, there will be many who don’t really pay attention to you, because of a weak relationship.

Quality content will be the only tool to use. And if you start slipping, nobody will warn you. You will just start losing people (and income). Having good relationships however, chances are good that you will immediately realize when you are missing the point, as people communicate with you and you can pick up warning signals.

Two Way Communication

First of all, two way communication is not only essential, but will also be a good indicator of the level of your relationships. 

Your customers / followers should be able to indicate to you what their needs are and what information they need. But you should also realize that a one way relationship is actually no relationship at all. It’s exploitation.  You must conduct yourself in a professional manner from the beginning.

You must make it clear from the beginning that you are running a business and you will be offering products for sale or you will be rendering a service or whatever it is you intend to do.

Everybody needs to know that you will expect to receive cash value in return, but they need to feel safe in the sense of knowing that they will receive more in terms of use value from you. This should provide a good balance for relationship building, seeing that it is win-win situation to everybody.   

To summarize: Content is a very important pillar of your business, but relationships are king.

So You Want To Get Started On Twitter

If you are serious about building your business, you enjoy interacting with your customers and building relationships; get started on Twitter.

You will start by creating your profile. Creating your profile on Twitter is easy, and much simpler than on Facebook.

One of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing your account name. If you want to use Twitter for personal use, or brand yourself to promote a service, you can use your own name. When promoting a specific brand or organization, try to stick as close as possible to the name of whatever you are promoting.

After completing your profile, write a short bio in 160 characters or less. Keep it simple and easy to understand.

Finally upload a small image of yourself, or if you want to promote your business you can use your company logo. It will be much easier to connect with people if they can see a picture of a real person, or even a logo of a company. This way they can relate to you, or they can associate you with a product or company.

You should now be ready to start tweeting. I know I have mentioned this already in other posts as well, but don’t “spam” people with advertisements alone. As on any website or blog, you need to post quality content. 

Post something that will be of value to your followers. This doesn’t mean you can never promote your business, but use your discretion to determine a good ratio for your business tweets. A good ratio that is often recommended is +/- one out of every ten tweets.

Once you start tweeting quality content, people will start following you. See what these people are talking about, and if you share interests with them, follow them back.

You can also start finding people on your own to follow. You can use a free tool - such as ManageFlitter – to assist you in this process. By entering names or some keywords that indicates your interest, this tool will search and find people based on your keywords. Choose who you want to follow and ManageFlitter will do the rest  

Try to follow the rule of following people who will follow you back. There is no sense in following people who doesn’t follow you back. It is like talking to a brick wall. It is a one way conversation. ManageFlitter is very helpful in this process as well, filtering and showing you exactly who is not following you, saving you the time to always check who is following you back. Just select the people you want to unfollow and once again, ManageFlitter will do the rest. I find this to be great tool. There are more automated functions available as well if you want to upgrade, but these are optional.

Sticking to the rule of following people who follow you back doesn’t mean you will have to communicate with every single person who follows you on a daily basis. After a while this will be impossible anyway. But during the process you will start to communicate with some people. You will have more communication with some people than with others, but that is how you start building personal relationships.

Even people you don’t necessarily communicate with everyday will still follow you, and you will support each other. They will actually look at what you are tweeting, and when you tweet about your business, or you post a link, they might just click on it to learn more about what you have to offer.

Because you are limited to 140 characters in your tweets, many people are using URL shorteners to turn a long web address into a short one. Popular services are: TinyURL.com, AdF.ly and bitly.

Twitter is a great tool for building a solid foundation for your business when used correctly.