5 Things You Must Do if You Want to Sell on the Web

5 Things You Must Do If You Want To Sell On The Web
by Darrell Duane

Imagine you are sitting at your computer looking at income statistics for the past week. Your web site is running well, and is producing impressive amounts of income. Incredible? Impossible? Not at all! Even if you have never had a web site, you can create one of your own which produces regular income for you. This article gives you an overview of how to do this, starting from scratch with no internet presence at all. Read on, and rejoice! Thousands of ordinary people have already done this, and so can you.

1. select a product or service

The first step is to decide on a product or a service you can sell on the internet.

Products can be anything that you sell from a manufacturer who will drop ship sold items to your customers.

Alternatively, you can buy bulk lots (or manufacture them yourself) which you break down to individual items to be sold. Whenever an item sells you package and ship it from your place of business.

In addition, products can be digital information which you sell as e-Books or e-Zines. You can write them yourself, commission others to write them, or sell such products for others on a commission or affiliate basis.

A service is any labor intensive function you might wish to perform for others. The classic service is consulting. You might also write for others, or paint, or design special items (such as web pages). There is a wide range of possible services, such as saving failed web sites, or doing genealogical searches for people in foreign countries (you would search in your native language, which the customer might not understand).

2. The second step is to acquire a web service and a domain name

There are literally thousands of web service (i.e. Host Service) providers. You can look through the rest of my web site for recommendations.

I won't provide any here, but will note that it is important to your future business health to start with a good Host Service.

Don't sign up for an expensive service. You can get the best for around $30 per month, and good ones for even less.

Domain names only cost about $10 per year, or possibly even less, so cost is not the object. However, you should take the time to find a good primary Registrar to register your domain name. Again, take a look at the rest of my site for some recommendations.

3. The third step is creating your web site

At the start you will need to decide on your technical approach. You can, for example, use "canned" templates, to which you add your own special content.

This works, but the downside is a loss of individuality.

Alternatively, you can buy Front Page, Dreamweaver, or other software and create your own coded web site.

It is not much more difficult than creating text in Microsoft Word, for example.

You may want to add graphic content including logos, pictures and artwork. You will need some more software to do this.

Less is better on the Web, because graphics can slow down the loading of your pages on other computers.

The viewer can just walk away if things don't happen quickly enough.

If you are doing products, you may be able to find a source of "canned" product pictures and descriptive text. This could be a real timesaver if you have many different items to sell.

4. The fourth step is acquiring traffic

So far, each step has been vital to a successful web site. This step, if anything, is doubly so. Without visitors, your web site is like a stone boat waiting to sink.

Think of your web site as a big boat siting in the middle of the Atlantic with a cargo of Cuban cigars. But you can't radio anybody because in Web life sending unsolicited e-mails is spamming. This can cost you your web service privileges, if not much worse problems.

There are at least four approaches to acquiring web traffic.

The first is to write great articles and send them to e-zines and other publishers. The thinking is their readers will see your article(s) and come to your site.

The second is to submit your site to various search engines, hoping they will accept and catalog your site, so people searching on your keywords will be notified of your address and details.

The third way is to do non-web publicity/advertising. It would be neat to have the top ten newspapers in the country do an article on your web site.

The fourth way is to trade references with other similar sites. Then, their visitors will see your address, and your visitors will see the other site(s) addresses.

5. The final step is completing a sale

There are two basic ways to close the sale. One is to put a credit card service and possibly a shopping cart on your site.

The other is to have someone else handle the sale. This is done most often by becoming an affiliate of another seller. You then forward the customer, and receive a commission.

You can also drive traffic to your site by setting up an affiliate program in which you do the selling, and then pay commissions to other affiliates.

At this point, we have covered the main steps to creating your own web site. The overall concept is pretty simple. The details are also pretty simple, but there are a lot of them. So you can do these things yourself. Just plan to spend a bit of time getting things set up. A working site can continue to generate revenue for years, because there is always a steady stream of new visitors who have never seen your site before. Please visit our site, and get more information regarding How to Sell on the Internet, including references to some of the best providers in the business.

Darrell Duane, P.E. (Ret.) The author is a retired computer/communications systems engineer who has followed (and used) the internet since the early days when it was just a series of papers. MyOakton.com is one of the new breed of Internet-based organizations, of the kind which is privately owned, managed, and financed, and which deal in information. MyOakton.com provides helpful information on How to Sell on the Internet, and related material:

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This is a "Shareware" Article (what's that? read on...) This article is shareware. Give this article away for free on your site, or include it as part of any paid package as long as the entire article is left intact including this notice. Copyright © 2005 Darrell Duane.