How to Sell Products on the Internet

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If you want to sell products from your website, here's a quick overview of what you need and the details will be explained below this list...

1) You need a domain name (anyname.com).

2) You'll need hosting. This is where all your files are stored and where you get support for your website.

3) Next, choose a shopping cart solution like Shopify. Honestly, this is one of the easiest ways to get your store off the ground and I'd highly recommend it over other solutions.

The Details

If you plan on selling a product online, one of the main things you'll want to focus on is learning how to get people to your website.

After all.... No traffic means no sales and definitely no profits.

Setting Up Your Store/Site is The Easy Part

People get so concerned with the technical aspects of building an ecommerce site and how they are going to collect payments, setup their online shopping cart, etc.

These days that's the easy part thanks to tools like WordPress or Shopify.

As I already mentioned, Shopify is becoming more and more of the standard for online stores simply because it's so easy for you to setup. No technical or website building experience is needed.

Building Traffic

What's more important is that you learn how to build traffic.

Selling products with a website is not just about creating your online store and expecting people to stumble upon your site and start shopping.

It doesn't work that way and many people create stores expecting that to happen.

It is absolutely crucial that you understand how to get your website ranked high in Bing, Google and Yahoo and learn how to work social media. This will be vital to your success and people often underestimate the importance of this.

You can also buy traffic with Google AdWords but that can get very expensive. I would honestly not recommend this if you are on a budget and you are new to buying traffic.

Here's an Example of How to Begin

Let's say you knit and you want to sell some of your products online.

Instead of just putting up a store, you may want to consider building a niche site (or blog) that is related to what you are going to sell.

One way to build traffic to your site is to do some keyword research with a premium tool like Long Tail Pro and find out what people search for related to this topic.

You want to "niche down" and choose a very specific topic.

Let's say you like to make scarves and after doing a search for "scarves" in the Google Keyword Planner, you discover that 1300 people search for ruffle scarf per month.

ruffle scarves

The reason I chose ruffle scarf over scarf or scarves is that a broad term like scarf would be too difficult to rank for because of competition.

You could register a domain like AwesomeRuffleScarves.com and build a niche website that has content about scarves.

The reason you want to have a content site in addition to your store is that it can get indexed in Google so you can attract customers.

The search engines don't typically index/rank ecommerce store pages well becaue they don't tend to have a lot of content. So that's why I recommend creating a blog or website that matches the topic of your store in order to help generate leads/customers.

You could also create YouTube videos showing how to wear different scarves and use those videos to promote your store. Or use Instagram to post pictures of scarves you create.

Accepting Credit Cards From Your Store

Accepting credit cards is a must for online commerce. I recommend you use Paypal as your merchant. It's pretty easy to setup and it integrates with Shopify and many other WordPress ecommerce plugins.

With Paypal, you don't have to rent or purchase any equipment because they take the orders for you and then send your revenue directly to your bank account. They take a small percentage of every order you receive.

This is MUCH more convenient than having to apply for a business license, rent out the equipment and handle all the orders yourself. PayPal makes it quick and easy.

Creating and Selling an Information Product

An information product (or infoproduct) is just what the name suggests. It's a product full of information.

These days, many info products come in the form of eBooks -- which stands for "electronic books". This means your customer can download your book right from your web site and read it from their PC.

eBooks are convenient because you don't have to worry about shipping and handling. Once you create it and upload it to your site, it's ready for instant download by your customers.

With this method, you don't have to worry about shipping and handling costs, and your customers are happy because they can download their product as soon as the sale is made.

An infoproduct can also come in the form of plain old information. You don't necessarily have to sell an ebook. If you have the knowledge on a certain subject that you'd like to share, you can still make money with pure content and affiliate programs.

Learn more about creating ebooks here.

So are you ready to begin your site? Take the first step and get your domain.