Find the Right Products to Sell on the Internet! - Stephen Beck

One of the most common questions I am asked is "What do I sell on the internet?"

Well, the answer depends a lot on your personality and HOW you want to sell. In other words, the first question should not be "what sells well on the internet", but "what method of selling am I most comfortable with?"

There are essentially three ways to sell products on the internet. Let’s look at each method and the see the advantages and disadvantages of each.

First Method: Buy Wholesale and Sell Retail

This method is as old as human history. Find a product your niche wants, locate a wholesale source for that product, set up your online home business, advertise the product on your web site and ship the product to your customer.

Advantages:

1. You maintain complete control over the sales and delivery process.

You decide how much to mark up the wholesale price, not someone else. You also have control over when the item is shipped to your customer, not someone else halfway across the country!

2. You can shop around for the best wholesale price.

3. You can recommend your other products when someone purchases your product.

Disadvantages:

1. You will end up shipping packages everyday.

2. You will have to pay upfront for inventory and have a place to store it in your home.

3. Since others will be selling the same thing you are, you must be able to out-market your competition.

Second Method: Recommend Products for a Commission

This is also called affiliate marketing. You recommend someone else’s product using a special hyper-link called an affiliate link. When your visitor clicks on that link, the visitor is taken to the other person’s product page, but a cookie tracks the link to you. If a sale results, you get a commission. There is a lot of affiliate marketing information online.

Commissions can range from 5% of an order for camping gear to 50% of an information product priced at $1500! Affiliate marketing works for physical products, services, ebooks and anything else under the sun.

The key is finding product owners that see the value in sharing a percentage of the sale with those willing to be volunteer sales people for their product. Product owners that see the value of residual income with an online business.

Advantages:

1. You do not have to ship the product - the owner of the product takes care of that. In fact, the owner of the product creates the sales page, collects the money, ships the product and handles the questions and refunds.

2. You do not have to keep the product in inventory

3. Some commissions can be VERY generous.

Disadvantages:

1. If the product owner has an affiliate program, other people will be selling the exact same product. You must out-market other people and even the owner to make significant sales. You can not merely put up a link and forget about it if you want to make sales!

2. You have no control over the price of the product, the effectiveness of the sales page or the delivery of the product.

3. Although most product owners are honest and want to keep their affiliates happy, you have no leverage when it comes to getting paid. You do not control the money.

Third Method: Create your own product.

This is my favorite way to make money every day online! Once you learn to start an online business, creating your own products is a great way to follow your passion AND sell products that no one else is selling!

Advantages:

1. You have complete control over the sales and delivery process. You determine the price for your own product and you can even cut out the delivery costs be creating a downloadable product.

2. You will gain a huge sense of satisfaction, not to mention instant expert status!

3. You can find a need and then meet it. Creating your own product allows you to be very flexible and meet a targeted need in a very specialized niche.

4. There is no competition for your particular product. You are the ONLY ONE selling your products, unless you allow others to sell it for you, but you have complete control.

Disadvantages:

1. You can waste a lot of time and money if you have not researched your niche properly.

2. You must find a daily source of new customers.

3. You must find others to help promote your product.

So there you have it - the three basic methods of selling products on the internet. Hopefully, you can look at the advantages and disadvantages of each and determine which method is right for you. But don’t stop with just one. Incorporate all three methods into your online business and you will have a strong, diverse business that whether any economic storm!

About The Author

Stephen Beck, President of FamilyEbiz.com, is an expert on teaching non-techies to start a business on the internet. For a FREE 75 min. interview on the fastest way to start a family internet business visit: http://www.FamilyEbiz.com.

Get Started, Make Money! It’s Easier Than You Think… - Michael Kay

It's always easier to improve something than to imagine and create it from scratch. There's something about actually seeing it, complete, that affects the human mind, releases tension, and stimulates ideas for improvement.

We've all experienced it.

The cook who invents a new cake and instantly has everyone telling her how it could be better … if she only did this! The engineer who designs and builds a new bridge and has a hundred imitators (all with their own variants) within weeks.

In the world of regular business, this is the role of prototypes. To *show* everyone what can be. In the world of Japanese manufacturing, the concept of *kaizen* (that drove them to world manufacturing dominance) depends on the same phenomenon – invent a process then continually improve it.

If this is embedded in the human character why go against the flow? Yet, newbies to the web do it all the time! They either try to learn all the skills first (taking months and months to come to any income) or they hand over the bulk of the profits to some guy with a pre-packaged opportunity that promises to take away the pain – usually of technology.

Well, it may not suit everyone, but there is a third way.

Pre-packaged AdSense sites

AdSense is the Google advertising program that places those tiny, clickable advertisements on sites all over the web. AdSense is really the other side of the coin from AdWords. AdWords are the ads that appear in the top right of Google sales pages. Well, in AdSense the ads are placed on private sites and Google splits the proceeds with the owner.

AdSense is a well-established way to make a steady – mostly passive – income on the web. The idea is simple: you set up a site, stuff it with content (usually articles), optimize every page to its keywords, introduce it to the search engines and other drivers of traffic and then sit back and collect the checks!

There's a whole crowd of industrious e-book writers churning out instructions on how to do this. The most famous is John Reese, an internet guru's guru, who named these sites ‘virtual real estate'. Snappy!

The problem with VRE's is that the concept became too popular and Google became ticked off with the degradation of its search results from constantly repeated content. They have tried to strangle the concept, but that is frankly impossible. VRE sites are all about content and so is Google! Indeed, the bulk of Google's profits come from this source.

But, enough background. From the newbie point of view, pre-packaged AdSense Sites are a huge learning opportunity. The idea is simple.

You find a package. And install it. For an example of a site in its more or less raw form go to http://www.thememopad.com/adsense . You now publish the site – or a whole slew of them either under different domain names or in sub-directories of one domain. Your web host will tell you how to do that.

You now have a site with income potential and you start classic traffic building. So far, so typical…

But, you don't have to leave it there.

So far we have used some simple techniques – taking a bunch of web pages, uploading them, introducing them to the web site etc. But there are endless things you can do that may leave your site looking totally different in a short time - though it will never stop potentially earning money.

You are using the site as a prototype. Improve the graphics. Add your own content (Google will love you!). Change the layout. Add other providers – for example Yahoo! Publisher Network. Add Affiliate Links. Add all kinds of stuff.

As you play, you learn! In the teaching trade it is called "experiential learning" or "learning by doing", and it's the way the vast bulk of us learn – particularly adults.

The risk associated with this is small. You need a domain, a host, a package, and some web site creation software. Total cost a few hundred dollars, if you buy it all yourself.

But you get a huge amount for it.

A potential money-maker, a search engine optimized site, a learning opportunity and something else… a sense of accomplishment. Remember, the toughest thing in web home business is the loneliness. When you start from scratch you condemn yourself to months of lonely learning and frustration. Learning by doing - when the site is always potentially earning, and eternally *complete* - takes away a huge amount of the pressure and frustration.

AdSense pre-packaged sites make almost perfect learning tools. Try it, there's really nothing to lose and everything to gain!

Copyright (c) 2006 Michael Kay

About The Author

Michael Kay edits the * Insights Letter* and *The Home-Based Business Review*. These are FREE publications stuffed with ideas, access to resources and free gifts. Subscribe now at http://www.HBBResearch.com and get your free gift with the first issue. To find out more about AdSense Sites go to http://www.HBBResearch.com/AdSense_Business_In_A_Box.html

Don't Get Scammed More Than Once - Elaine Currie

How many times have you been scammed? I know that might seem like a strange question but there is a reason for it. I asked how many times you got scammed because, judging by the online advertising around over the last few months, admitting to getting scammed multiple times is the latest Internet marketing trend. The websites all these "I was scammed" people are talking about are work at home/home business opportunities. These "I was scammed" websites are multiplying and the latest ones claim that between 95% and 99% of work at home opportunities are scams.

Work at home/home business opportunity scams do exist (I have even written articles about them previously) but an estimate of 95-99% being scams sounds too high to be genuine. I decided to check out some of the "don't get scammed - work at home/home business opportunities are scams" websites. (Please don't get the idea I'm going to pass myself off as a "researcher" or "investigator", it was just done out of curiosity.)

There are some good anti-scam websites which give warnings about types of work at home scams, how to spot them and where to get help if you do get scammed. The new style "don't get scammed" websites are different. They don't actually offer any help or advice on how to spot and avoid scams. They just issue frightening warnings about the number of work at home/home business opportunity scams, tell us they were scammed numerous times and advise us to join their latest get rich quick program.

Can anyone explain why any sensible person would join a get rich quick program recommended by someone so gullible they have to get totally charred before they realise fire is hot?

Looking at these "don't get scammed" websites was a saddening experience. One ant-scammer says: "I have tried just about anything to try to make money and to be honest with you, I didn't have the brains to get very far". Then he goes on to urge you to buy into his current get rich quick program. You have to admire the guy for admitting he is short on brains but is that enough to make you want to join his get rich quick scheme? Makes me want to reach for my credit cards - and hide them!

Another "don't get scammed" website owner admits he was scammed 37 times in 3 months when he joined 37 get rich quick programs. Then he suggests you join his pick of get rich quick schemes. Three months? Hardly long enough to establish a home business, let alone become successful with it. He doesn't explain whether he joined all 37 get rich quick scams on day one and tried to run them all (obviously impossible) or if he tested them one at a time. If he took the latter course, the average time allowed to each get rich quick scheme would be 2 ½ days (not really long enough to give any program a fair trial).

Yet another "don't get scammed" researcher says he knows all online paid survey companies are scams because his sister joined one once and hadn't made a profit after trying for a month. Then he tells you to join his selected money making programs. One person, one company, one month: hardly a scientific test conditions for a research project.

Another "don't get scammed" website states: "we went out and paid real money for the Internet opportunities that we thought showed promise. Most of the time, we were wrong." Then it lists recommendations for various work at home/money making programs. "Most of the time we were wrong" - would you trust their judgement and join the programs they recommend? - Me neither!

A genuine victim of a scam is in a position to give a detailed warning about the particular scam. However, these people just say "I was scammed", they don't name the scam programs or explain how the scams operate. Their message comes through as "I'm so stupid I was scammed numerous times but still try to make money with get rich quick schemes, you should join my latest one."

Remember: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 37 times…?

About The Author

Elaine Currie

Find safe work at home opportunities at http://www.HuntingVenus.com or visit Elaine Currie at http://www.elainecurrie.com/workathome

Is It Really Possible To Make Money For Free Online? Yes It Is! - Sam Frost

Many people out there struggle to make money online through affiliate schemes and MLM etc. This is a fact, it is something that none of us can deny. It seems that the people who make the most money have plenty of money to advertise through Google Adwords etc. For those of us who cannot afford to promote our websites this way we are left trying to scrape up visitors and convert them into sales. In this article, I am going to teach you why you should swap from affiliate marketing to a new form of money making that is just starting online. The program I am going to tell you about today is called Edownline. By the end of this article you will realise that it is possible to make money online without spending much money and that affiliate advertising is not the only way to make money.

EDownline -

EDownline is a great new website where you earn money for completing offers, viewing websites and refering others. Membership to EDownline is free and it is a great way to earn money online. Currently, EDownline is in pre launch as it needs 20,000 members before it can function properly. However, you can still sign up for free and refer others (if those referals then purchase a platinum membership which costs money you get a commision on this) Refering people is also easy especially as EDownline is currently giving away free gold memberships and standard memberships are also free. Remember, they key to making money for free online is to refer people to websites they do not have to pay for (EDownline meets this profile perfectly) Another great thing about EDownline is the site's payment options. Rather than being sent a check in the post you can get paid through your choice of online payment processors (Paypal, AlertPay, StormPay etc) This means you get your money quicker and you can cash out more easily.

What are the benefits of getting a gold or platinum account?

The benefits of signing up for a gold account (currently free if you sign up before the 20,000 member mark is reached) or a platinum account are massive. Firstly, in both account types you earn far more than standard members for viewing websites etc. The biggest benefit for gold and platinum (especially platinum members) is that you earn extra money for every referral that you make. This means that referring people suddenly becomes a very profitable business because you earn more money. Also, gold and platinum members have access to a download database that includes website submission software, ebooks on increasing your profits and great scripts for your website. If you want to make the most possible on EDownline then you really do need a gold or platinum account, with a platinum account being the best way to make money.

So how much can you earn off EDownline?

This depends, for those of you who will just take offers and view websites then you can earn between $5-100 depending on how much time you spend on EDownline. However, the real money is in refering people to EDownline so you can earn even more money. By doing this you can earn good money and also it is easy to refer people as a standard account is free (gold accounts are free at the moment as well) EDownline are adding an additional service that they claim will make you large amounts of money but this service is yet to begin until 2007 so keep a look our for that.

If you would like to know more about EDownline then please visit my "EDownline Information Page" at http://emoney.110mb.com/edownline.htm

If you would like to sign up to EDownline for free then please visit http://emoney.110mb.com/edownlinesignup.html (remember, if you sign up before the 20,000 member mark you get a free gold account, a $50 value)

I hope after reading this article you have realised that it is possible to make money online for free. I hope that you have also realised that there are alternatives to the often difficult business of affiliate marketing.

IMPORTANT - You may redistribute this article as you see fit, you may even charge for it. However, you MUST retain the links featured in this article and the information box below.

About The Author

This article was written by Sam Frost, the administrator of e-Money. If you would like to find out about the best scam-free ways to make money online for free then please visit http://emoney.110mb.com

Easy Ways To Make Extra Cash Online - Lydia Quinn

There are numerous simple and easy ways to make some extra cash online. This article will give you some ideas.

Surveys

One of the best ways to earn some extra cash online is by taking surveys. There are many companies that need consumer opinions on a wide range of topics, and many of them will pay you money or with points you can redeem for cash or prizes. It's easy and free to signup and the more surveys you take, the more money and prizes you will get. It just takes a small investment of your time.

Writing

If you have decent writing skills, there are many publishers and content distributors who need content for their websites. Two such sites are AssociatedContent.com and Helium.com, they will pay you for each article you write. You don't have to be a fantastic writer either, just have a good grasp of English and be able to write something of interest on a given topic.

Blogging

Blogging is fun and easy and, again, you don't need great writing skills. You just need to be able to communicate your thoughts and ideas well. You can get your own customizable blog by getting a domain and hosting package that includes the Fantastico module. This module allows you to install the blogging software, WordPress, with 1 simple click. It's super fast and easy and you'll be blogging in no time. Once you have some visitors, you can add Adsense ads or affiliate ads to leverage your visitors and make money from them. Remember, the more interesting your topic, the more people will be interested, and the more readers you get, the more money you will make from your advertising. Blogs can be about anything, what do you have a passion for? What is your interest? Blog about it!

Affiliate Marketing

Many online companies have affiliate programs. Amazon.com, for instance, has a great affiliate program that allows you to sign up and get a customized URL to any page or area of their site. Then you can send this URL to your friends and family and encourage them to buy gifts from Amazon.com. With every purchase from your affiliate link, you get a commission! There are thousands of other affiliate programs out there, in addition to Amazon's program.

Sell Your Extra Stuff

We all have extra stuff laying around our houses or garages. Why not get rid of it and make some money too? Get your stuff and take a picture, write a description and put it up on eBay. You may find that something you thought that wasn't worth anything, is actually worth something!

Contests, Sweepstakes and Instant Win Games

Everyday there are new contests, sweepstakes and instant win games launching. If you are vigilant and spend an hour or a few a day entering contests and playing these games, you will win something eventually. Playing these games and contests is often fun anyway, so why not take a chance? Check out sweeps.ws for a great list of contests, sweepstakes and instant win games.

Free Lottos

You know how you go to the convenience store every week and spend a few bucks on lottery tickets? Well, there are also online lotteries where you can get tickets and win cash prizes. The difference is, these lotteries are free! Yes, free! You can find a list of free lottos at sweeps.ws.

Online Casinos

There are hundreds of different online casinos on the web. I bet you thought that you needed money to play at them and win? Well, you were wrong. You can signup for free poker tournaments that have cash prizes. There are also slot, roulette and blackjack tournaments that you can play that have real money prizes. All for free! Check out freerolls.net and gambling.com for listings.

There you go, 8 fun and easy ideas to make some extra cash online!

About The Author

Lydia Quinn writes for PaidSurvey24.com, a free and comprehensive paid survey directory list. Visit us at: http://www.paidsurvey24.com