Copyright 2006 Homer Farey

Selling On The Internet

Let us start with the basics.
First decide what you want to sell.
Then decide how you are going to sell it.
Do you have a product of your own to sell?
Or will you be selling another person's product on commission?
Perhaps you will be offering a service.
With a little experience you may decide to develop your own product.
Or maybe purchase one that you can sell and to keep all of the profits.
Perhaps, to gain experience, you would feel better joining an affiliate program?

Whatever you sell, you will need to advertise. 'How?'. There are so many different ways of advertising a product on the internet that a newcomer is quite likely to become confused.

The best thing that I can do is to explain the various systems that I use. Everyone has their own preferences. I have tried most of them and have settled upon the following two:

E-zine adverts. Choose a selection of e-zines that are relevant to your product or service. You then have the choice of which type of advert' to use. If you are a bit short of cash, the free ad's will appeal to you. Use them by all means, free ad's are better than no ad's at all. You should get some sort of response. It will also give you good practice writing the adverts. If you can produce an advert that gets a response in the free section, it will surely get a much better response in the paid advert section.

As soon as you can afford it, I would recommend that you start doing top sponsor adverts on the various e-zines. I have found these to be one of the best ways of promoting your product.

When using e-zine advertising, It is most important that you are extremely selective in the ezines that you use. Just because a particular publication does not have a big readership it does not mean that it is not worth advertising in. It is the quality of the readership that counts not the quantity.

Dont expect to get a lot of trade from one advert in even the best ezine. A one to two percent response is quite normal. From those who respond, you should expect perhaps on a good day, one to four percent of them to make a purchase. You are not going to get rich with just one advert. It will take a lot of adverts in a lot of ezines, but as long as you make even a small profit from each of them, You are in business.

My favorite way of advertising is writing articles for ezines. This is recognized as the most effective method of reaching hundreds of thousands of interested readers.

Your article is placed in a pool where the producers of ezines look for free content for their publications. They only take articles that they feel will be of interest to their readers. They publish it on the condition that they also publish your by-line at the bottom of the article. This by-line tells the reader a little about yourself plus the all important link back to your product or service.

If you write a fairly general article it will be picked up by a wide range of e-zine publishers. This often means that you will continue to get response for a long time after its first publication. But the readership will not be so selective.

Remember, e-zine articles are published at no cost to you, and you can reach an audience of hundreds of thousands who will see your by-line with its link back to you and your product.

If you can compose an article every month aimed at ezines relevant to your website, you can be assured of a steady stream of prospects who are interested in what you have to sell. Once you get the hang of it, you will be composing an article every week. It can become quite addictive.

Remember. Every journey starts with just one step. Take your first step now.

Homer