Saturday, May 31, 2008

How to sell online?

Learning to sell online is not just about setting up an online store, sourcing for products, designing a professional-looking site or setting up a payment system. Google “How to sell online” and you’ll realize that most of the pages listed within the search results focus on the steps above.

However, the major key to SUCCESS in selling online is not about having the best check-out system, a professionally designed online store or strategic product placement. While these are important, merely setting up a store alone is inadequate for a successful online business. It is a necessity that eventually will need to be looked at, but not a core aspect of selling online.

So, how do you sell online profitably?

1. Identifying a niche product

What sells online? What are people looking for when they shop online? Does everything sell online? Do you know of any product sources for an excellent niche product?

Obviously, you can’t sell everything under the sun and compete head-on with the big players in the market. Instead, if you are able to penetrate a specific niche market with significant demand volume, you are heading off to a good start.

2. Identifying niche keywords

This relates to drawing web traffic to your site. Obviously, before you are able to successfully sell anything, you’ll first need to draw traffic to your site. Traffic from search engines is an essential source. To capture the right audience, you’ll need to find out which keywords your customers are using to search for your products.

You’ll soon realize that there is huge competition from other websites competing for the top 10 spots in the search engine results. This means that you’ll need to optimize niche keywords that has significant searches, but lesser competition, in order for your site to be listed at the top. Visit http://www.what-sells-online.com for more information on search engine optimization tactics.

3. Online advertising

When selling online, you need to get the word out to the masses on the existence of your new website. The fastest way to do this is to use Pay-per-click online advertising tools such as Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing.

The challenge here is that these tools can become double edged swords. Use them carelessly, and you’ll end up spending lots of unnecessary money on the wrong target audience.

Apart from that, with competition on the usage of Google Adwords as a website or product advertising tool, Google has incorporated an ad ranking system for ads displayed. Therefore, the right strategies in using Google Adwords are essential for successful online marketing.

One of the most useful and relevant resource around I've found is the The Adwords’ Winners Playbook. This is worth checking out if you want to learn about tactful Adwords usage for effective advertising, and avoid bursting your marketing budget.

4. Product Sourcing

Another important area learning how to sell online is to find the right product sources. If you are selling digital products, you’ll probably need to try out the product yourself before you can attest to its usefulness. There are many digital products sold online, which evidently turn out to be not what its sales page claims to be.

On the other hand, selling fast moving products such as electronic items or apparel requires regular sourcing of the best prices. As the Internet has become an almost efficient marketplace, consumers are able to research for the best prices quickly and comfortably online. With this, they will only buy a product at the lowest prices.

In this case, beating your competition when selling online would mean being able to source for the lower priced product from your suppliers.

Further Reading

If you’d like more information on how to sell online, check out these references:

http://www.what-sells-online.com
http://www.ebizwebpages.com/how_to_sell_online
http://www.free-ecommerce-information.com/sell-online/20-tips.htm