The internet is the biggest marketplace ever known to man! Fortunes have been made by selling things in this fantastic and ever growing marketplace. There are billions of people using the web every day. So one of the biggest questions is, How to sell online? I will tell you from personal experience that there are many different ways to sell stuff on the internet and we will explore them here.

The first thing to consider!

What do you want to sell? Are you going to be selling something you already are in business with or will it be a whole new venture? Either way you will have to have a website. That is first and foremost. If you can afford it you can have one built for you or you can build it yourself. If you are like me I wanted total control so I built my own. I didn’t know how to code or anything so I searched around for ways to do this. There are things called “builders”, platforms where simple guys can put together a site in no time. It all depends on what you are doing. Whether you have a physical product or you’re going to sell somebody else’s. You can search for a supplier locally or there are dropshippers so you don”t have to carry inventory and there is affiliate marketing where you can market other peoples stuff. Dropshippers let you market their products for a profit then you send them the the order and they ship it. This works out ok because you get paid first from the customer then pay the dropshipper. Affiliate Marketing is a little more attractive because you promote a link to someone else’s products or store and get a commission, someone else handles the orders and everything. No matter how you do it you need that website! Check out how you can build a website in 30 seconds. I wrote a short article on affiliate marketing, see it here. You can also look at my Getting Started Page.

Marketing your website!

This where you really need some training and support. There are many ways to market on the internet. The most popular and cheapest is getting your page ranked on the search engines like Google and Bing and there are a lot of smaller search engines also. This is called organic searching. It is also one of the hardest! The ways to get ranked are constantly changing and you need to pay attention to SEO (search engine optimization). In the early days of the net you had to do all this yourself or pay big bucks. Nowadays there are automated ways to help. You can also leverage the social sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram and many more. This takes time and is another whole learning experience.Then there are ways you can pay to market. PPC (pay per click) those are the ads you see on Google and Facebook and such. There’s free and paid classified ads. You can create an email list and promote your site and products. You can monetize your site with Google Adsense by allowing google to put other peoples ads on your site. Personally I think it’s counter productive because they put relevant links in the ads which means your competitors and you only make money when someone clicks on an ad. So you not only have the chance of losing the sale, you may only make pennies. It works if you aren’t really selling anything and have massive traffic.There have been some millionaires made on You tube that have millions of followers. Mentioning you tube that is another technique, Video Marketing. There are Ebay stores you can create and Amazon stores. Traffic exchanges where you can get leads and lead generating programs. You can’t just build the website and hope someone finds you, you need to market it somehow.

Training and support!

The two most important things you need on your journey into the vast marketplace called the internet. You can search for the training on each aspect of what your doing, building your site and how you decide to market it. When looking around please keep in mind, “BUYER BEWARE”. The internet is a big place and there are a lot of shady characters out there. Sometimes the training is outdated, and old rehashed material. So researching and looking for reviews is monumental. Take the name of the training or support group and type it into the browser address bar with the word scam at the end and you will find reviews of it. You still must be careful because there are bogus reviews just trying to sell stuff. Try googling the author the same way! I found a place (after 17 yrs on the net) that has great training on website building, marketing, 1 on 1 mentoring, a community full of like minded individuals from all walks of life all in one place. The best part is they will let you try it for free! I wrote a review about it after trying it out and you can read that by clicking here.

My story about my experience on the net!

My first time out I paid big bucks for a mentor and a site that hosted my website and they said would provide training and support. They suggested that I have my own physical product and would teach me how to market it. So I set out building my website. I found a local supplier of a product that I liked and they agreed to sell to me at a reasonable price. I researched the products online and found that I could compete in that niche pretty good. Even with the builder it took me months to complete the site because I had to add all the products manually, create pictures, descriptions and price them. There was 300 products with 3 to 5 variations of each one. It was so tedious but I was going to persevere because of the cash I had invested. Long story short it didn’t turn out well. I ended up doing everything once I got it going. When orders came in I had to go get the product, package it for shipment and then ship it all the while doing my own accounting. It got to be crazy. I spent seven years and thousands of hours and dollars and was still in the red. I got frustrated and cut my losses, closed down. Then I wasted more time and money on a couple different MLM type businesses and learned my lesson there. I just couldn’t get into having to recruit other people and that seemed like the only way to make it in that industry. So on the search I went again. I tried surveys and pay to view ads sites, you name it I tried it. I was’t a happy camper. I was living on disability checks just making it by and was tired of listening to get rich quick schemes and watching other people making it. Then I came across Wealthy Affiliate, tried it out and have been on an exciting journey. I learned along the way that money isn’t the end all to everything. There is a great reward in helping other people and I found thousands of people there willing to help me on my journey. If you haven’t done so yet, read my review on Wealthy Affiliate.

Leave me a reply by clicking on the replies or shoot me an email at [email protected]

Thanks for stopping by

‘Dennis (read about me)