Sell Your Own Products on the Web
These days you can sell almost all products on the Internet. Even bulky and perishable products can be promoted using a Website. People search the net even for local purchases and bulky/perishable products can be promoted locally.
Compact products can be promoted worldwide, and if the product is downloadable, like software or an eBook, it can even be delivered instantly against payment.
Selling Your Product Involves Promoting Your Website
Creating a website describing your product, and providing facilities to order and pay for it, is only the starting point. Far more critical is the task of promoting the website so that people interested in your product becomes aware of your offer. Your website will not come to their attention automatically.
Promoting a website is a time-consuming exercise involving work on several fronts, as outlined below:
- SEO:
Make your website search engine friendly so that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will bring visitors interested in your product. This involves
- Links:
Links pointing to your site from relevant sources not only bring traffic but also increases your search engine visibility. The articles at traffic building resources discuss various ways for building links.
- Ad Campaigns:
Ad campaigns can be PayPerClick ads using tools such as Google AdWords or banner and text ads on other sites against straight payments. Website Ad Brokers will help you find publishers to publish your ads.
- Affiliate Progrms:
Recruit affiliates to promote your products and send visitors to your website. Agencies such as Linkshare can help you find affiliates willing to promote your products, as well as track the clicks/leads/sales that each affiliate brings in and take care of computing commissions due to each affiliate and pay them.
Let us now look at the essential contents of a sales website.
The Sales Website
Product sales websites need certain specific kinds of pages:
- Landing Pages:
A landing page is so called because it is where visitors land from the links, i.e. search engines, other websites, ads and affiliate pages. The landing page should describe the product and also create a desire to buy it. This is done through good sales copy, which we discuss in the next article.
- Shopping Cart or Order Page:
These are pages that help customers place the order for what they want to buy. If there is only a single or few products, an order page will be enough. Where you sell numerous products, you will need an on-line shopping cart to which buyers can add the products they select.
- Payment Processing Page:
This is the checkout page where the buyer can make the payment for the order. There are several options for getting paid that we discuss in the next article.
For a small sales site that sells a single product, all the three pages above can be combined into a single page.
Shipping Arrangements
Don’t forget to look carefully at how you will deliver your product to your customers. Proper arrangements to attend to this key task must be in place before you start promoting your website. Otherwise, you can find yourself in a mess with a lot of angry customers.
Downloadable products can be delivered over the Net by providing the customer an authorized download link. Just make sure that the link is not used for multiple downloads. Physical products can be delivered through couriers such as Fedex.
In the next article, we discuss the pages of a sales website in more detail.
