Selling Your Own Product

Affiliate programs are a great way of getting started on the internet, and can be very lucrative, but most people will agree that if you want to make some serious money then selling your own products is the way to go. It does involve extra work, but this is often rewarded in terms of far greater profits.

As regards what products you can sell online, it could literally be anything, from mainstream products like watches and clothes, for example, to smaller niche products like cat baskets and car manuals. If you can get good wholesale prices for any particular item or line, then you can potentially make money online. However, remember you have to actively go out there and work hard to get traffic to your site. Many people still make the mistake of designing and publishing a website, and just expect traffic to come naturally. In this respect you are likely to have more success with a smaller niche product because of less competition, and often it is easier to rank higher in the search engines for these smaller niches.

Just like in the offline world, you also must still have a quality product and one which is priced and marketed well, otherwise you ultimately will not succeed. As I mentioned above, selling your own product rather than an affiliate product does involve a lot more work. You have to deal with accepting and handling payments on your site, emailing the customer with an order confirmation, the physical delivery of the products, and any follow-ups such as product returns.

At first this may sound very daunting, but in these days of automation there are many tools that will do most of this work for you. For example, you could put a Paypal button on your site to accept payments, which is pretty straightforward, and you could use an autoresponder to email the customer their order confirmation. These tools are discussed in more detail in the Site Tools section.

If you are delivering physical products through the post, then unfortunately you will still have to deal with delivery and any product returns, which can be very time consuming, particularly if your business takes off. However, you do not necessarily have to sell physical products online. In fact the hottest products to sell online for internet marketers are currently informational products and software, both of which can be delivered directly to customers via email in most cases, and often automatically by an autoresponder.

The major advantage of information products is that once you have a product then any sales you make is almost entirely pure profit. This is because you don't have to worry about buying products, because you just have the one product which you can sell over and over again. Also, your delivery expenses are next to nothing as they are delivered in the majority of cases via email, or from a download page on your site.

So how do you go about getting your own information product or ebook? Well ideally you would want your own unique product that you have researched and written yourself, and therefore no-one else is selling. If you're not a good writer then you could hire someone from a site like Elance to write one for you for a specified price. Alternatively you could buy a product which has resale rights meaning you can sell this product yourself and keep all the profits you generate.

Once you have this product you are free to design and promote a website, often taking the form of a sales letter, and start making some money. Or, if you don't want to create your own website yet, you can of course use Ebay to sell your products. These three points, creating ebooks, selling on Ebay, and selling resale rights products, that I have just touched on briefly, are discussed in more detail elsewhere on this site.