Selling Your Own Products Online

If you are researching products to sell at Ebay and/or your online store, it can be difficult to decide.  There are after all millions of products you can sell online.  Whether or not you are successful greatly depends on what you choose to sell.  But something you might not have considered is creating your own products to sell.  That’s right you can create your own products and sell them online and here are a few great ideas to consider:

• Your Knowledge - Put together an ebook about a topic you consider yourself an expert on.  There are many people who have done this and become very wealthy.
• Your Invention - That’s right, invent something and sell it on the internet!  Put up your own store or sell it on Ebay!
• Art - Sell your own art online. If you are a good drawer, painter, or sculpture then sell your own works of art for profit.
• Jewelry - Make your own jewelry and sell it on the internet.  There are many places that offer kits so you can create your own jewelry so why not make some and sell it.
• Woodwork - If you are good with carpentry then make your own turntables, chairs, stools, etc. and sell them online.
• Candles - Make your own candles and sell them.
• Services - Offer your own services on the internet such as SEO, Web Design, Consulting, etc.  It really couldn’t be easier these days.

So there you go, no need to find products to sell when you can sell your own.  Selling your own products online is also very rewarding and exciting.  These are just some ideas I’ve listed but there are many more I’m sure you can think of.  Go ahead and start writing that ebook, sketching portraits, learning web design, etc.  I know you can do it!

Beat The Recession With Ecommerce

Despite reports about a slow and failing economy, ecommerce continues to boom!  That’s right, ecommerce hasn’t been slowed down one bit by the current recession, in fact it continues to grow.  What this means to you the average struggling American is that it’s time to take advantage of the internet and make some money!

At first it may seem like it’s very difficult to make money online, but the truth is anyone can do it.  The internet has evolved over the years and now it couldn’t be easier to open up an online store, sell at auctions, and/or offer your services over the web.  While becoming the next Ebay may be a long shot indeed, making a few hundred extra dollars a month is very feasable, even for the inexperienced.  You’d be surprised at how many successful businesses were started on the internet less than a year ago.

So get yourself on the internet making money.  Read everything you can and find an idea that fits.  It is always best to do something you like and on the web you can do just that.  If you like sports then sell sporting products or start a blog about golf, baseball, tennis, etc.  Do what you love and over time you may just find a second income source that makes the difference during these hard times.  And who knows you may be able to quit that 9 - 5 job before you know it!

Some Great Products To Drop Ship

If you are thinking of selling products online, here are some you will want to check out.  I’ve just did a little research and came up with some products worth looking in to.  Perhaps I’ll save you from putting up another dreaded electronics store!

• Vacuum Sealers
• Snowboards
• Skateboards
• Bowling Balls
• Spas
• Patio Furniture

Some of these products I researched myself a little while back and for the others I know people who are currently very successful selling them.  The key is to find a nice niche with products that have a large enough profit margin so you have room to advertise.

Breaking Even For Profit

Usually when a company is assessing ROI on their advertising campaign they look at the simple figures.  If they spent $1000.00 and profitted twice that much, then they are doing well.  But if they didn’t make their money back or merely broke even, then they consider the campaign unsuccessful.  But is that really all we need to look at?

Many companies underestimate the power of branding on the internet.  One reason they do this is because branding takes time and the dividends don’t always show up until down the road, making it hard to measure.  For example someone purchases a product at your website and then comes back a year later to buy something else.  This won’t show up right away when tallying those numbers.  Or this same person during that year tells a few of her friends about your website and some of them visit your site and purchase your products.  They then come back again and also tell their friends who tell their friends and before you know it you’re the next Yahoo!  Well just don’t hold your breath on that one.

Another benefit of spending your advertising budget to make zero profit is in building a mailing list.  Most ecommerce software these days collects your customer’s phone numbers, address, and email address.  This enables you to offer discounts and special offers to your past customers.  Since these customers already bought from you there is a certain degree of trust established and this makes them more likely to buy from you again.  So in sending out a simple email or coupon in the mail, you can bring some of those customers back to buy again.  While it may have cost you using Google Adwords for example a dollar for the click to pick up a new customer, the email you send that results in additional sales from them may cost you nothing.  And you can do this again and again for months and years to come!

So when assessing your advertising campaign don’t just look at the figures but be sure and consider in the other factors.  If you are breaking even or even losing money, you could very well be on your way!  Can you say Yahoo!

SEO Tip For Dropshippers

When selecting a domain for your dropship store, choose one with your main product name in it.  If you are selling ‘patio furniture’, then try to include this in your domain.  But don’t make your domain too long and clunky, keep it as short and sweet as possible.  For example ‘mypatiofurniture.com’ or ‘patioheaven.com’ make nice domain names but ‘low-cost-patio-furniture-online.com’ does not, yuck!  Remember also the importance of branding and try and come up with a domain that is easy to remember.  The search engines love keywords in the domain and it could make the difference in your SEO campaign!

What Product Should You Dropship?

I’m going to tell you one simple tip about choosing a product to dropship that may make the difference for you.  Sell high end niche products with a profit margin that leaves you plenty of room to advertise!  This way you can start selling immediately with PPC Advertising.  In other words you don’t want to sell something for $9.95 when it may cost you that or more to get a customer.  You want a product you can sell for $295.00 that brings in a profit of $95.00.  Now you have room to advertise and if you spend $25 to get that new customer, so what, you’ve still made $70.00!  The key to finding success dropshipping online is in selling higher end niche merchandise.  I keep mentioning snowboards on this blog as they are a perfect example of the type of product you want to drop ship.  There is a big enough profit margin that will both leave you room to advertise and make a nice profit.  Don’t waste your time on the perfect store that sells every little thing you can think of, go high end niche and cash in.  Afterall, you’re dropshipping and there is no need to carry any inventory, so go for the gold!

Go Niche When Selling Drop Ship Products

Many of us when we think of selling drop ship products online picture that ultimate electronics store.  Selling tv’s, cameras, and dvd’s is quite a glamarous idea and surely will bring in the profits!  But the truth is everyone and their brother and even sister now has an online electronics store.  There are literally thousands of them and trying to compete with everyone and their brother and sister too is not so easy!

Go niche!  Yes when selling online it is better to focus on a niche as opposed to selling very general type products.  The trick is in finding products that many people are looking to buy but not everyone is selling.  You can do a simple search on google for example and look at the amount of sites selling a particular product.  For example right now on Google when I type in “electronics” in quotes I get 487,000,000 results!  That is an awful lot of webpages to be competing with.  But when I type in “snowboards” I get 5,960,000 results!  Do you see the difference?

So now that we’ve determined it would be easier to drop ship snowboards online than electronics, let’s look at how many people are looking to buy snowboards.  Let’s head on over to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ and see how many people are searching for “snowboards” online.  When I do the search using Word Trackers cool keyword tool it tells me that 460 searches were done for “snowboards” as opposed to over 2,000 for “electronics”.  So about 5 times the amount of searches were done for “electronics” than ”snowboards”.  But the amount of webpages for “electronics” outnumber “snowboards” by over 90 to 1!  Those numbers tell us that going niche in this case is the way to go.  You can do this drill to your hearts content and find that perfect niche product to sell.  Since you can drop ship about any product you can think of, hours of good research can bring in the dividends.  Don’t rush into selling online, do the homework and it could pay off big!

Starting An Online Store & SEO

Anyone these days can start an online store, but not anyone can be successful selling their products on the internet.  Many people are excited to put up an online store but then find it very difficult to get any traffic.  The very nature of the usual online store people start makes it very difficult to optimize for the search engines.  While it’s true you can try PPC, not everyone can make a profit from the increasingly higher PPC bids.  So that really leaves SEO as the best shot someone has at doing well selling products online.

SEO is very difficult for online stores because they often have little real content and product descriptions are often all there is for the search engines to spider.  Creating more detailed product titles and descriptions is of course smart and will help, but it only goes so far.    The other problem is quality inbound links are essential to getting your site ranked high on the search engines and nobody ever cares to link to Suzy’s Candle Shop.  This got me thinking of an idea for those who want to start an online store.  This really isn’t my idea as I’ve seen others implement this before, but instead of just opening up an online store, first create a content based site about the main products you will sell.  For example if you were planning on selling snowboards online, then first create a site all about snowboards.  Create the online guide to snowboarding and write articles about everything you can think of related to snowboarding such as top snowboarder bios, top places to snowboard, a news section or blog about the latest in snowboarding, etc.  Now optimize your “Guide to Snowboarding” site and work on building steady traffic.  Once you get a steady stream of traffic coming in, now open up your store!

Once your store is open be sure and include links from your content pages to your online catalog.  For example at the bottom of an article about a particular popular snowboarding champion, you can have a link to purchase the brand of snowboard they use.  Blend the two sites together and create the ultimate online store/guide to snowboarding site.  When doing this it is best to focus on niche products as opposed to the type of store that sells many different unrelated products.  Try it and please send me an email if you find success!

Finding Drop Ship Suppliers

Finding true drop ship suppliers can be a difficult task.  To start many of the directories both on and off the web are filled with outdated lists and spam and are a complete waste of money and time.  Many other dropship companies claim to be true drop ship wholesale suppliers and even offer automated stores where you can start selling their products instantly.  But when you do some further investigation into their pricing you often find you are paying retail and above and this makes it very difficult to make money in the drop ship business.

We have found a true dropshipper expert in Worldwide Brands, their legitimate drop ship directory has been on the web for a long time and they know their stuff when it comes to dropshipping.  They have compiled over many years a completely up to date list of wholesale and drop ship suppliers that sell over millions of products.  They offer access to this online directory with easy to use search facilities and simple contact forms so you can instantly connect with the supplier.  If you are looking to sell products on your online store or at Ebay, Yahoo auctions and the like, Worldwide Brands has the drop ship and wholesale supplier list you want to access.