No matter what business you are in, the way to go about marketing your business online is the same.

Your business is all set up. Everything looks wonderful and you are envisioning great success. Everyday you check to see if you’ve sold something but everyday you check your disappointment soars a little higher. Nobody is buying!

This is where marketing your business comes into play. A major mistake people make when setting up their business online is not learning how to properly market it the same goes for taking your offline business online. If people can’t find your store then they most certainly can not buy what you are selling.

1. Find out if you are getting visitor’s and if you are, find out where they are coming from.

The first thing you need to do when marketing your online store is to set up Google Analytics. Google Analytic is a traffic analyzer.

First head over to Google analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for a new account. It will walk you through the sign-up process and putting your website on.

For Business’s With A Website – If you have your own website then you will need to get the tracking code and install it on every page on your website. Copy and Paste the code into html on the bottom of every page you have done.

For Craft Stores Online Using Etsy – If you are using Etsy then you need to get your publishers ID. It will be the profile id 01234567. After you log into your Etsy account and click on web analytics. You will put your profile id in there.

For Selling On eBay – eBay keeps track of how many visitor’s you have going to your listings already.

Why are we doing this?

This will allow us to see just how many people are looking at our products. There is no sense getting upset that you are not selling anything and feeling like your business is a failure if you are only getting a handful of people a day looking.

If you opened a bricks and mortar store and only twenty people came in a day, you would be sunk. The same goes for online.

It will also tell you where your visitor’s are coming from. Are they coming from Google? If so what are they typing in to find your store? How long are they staying and looking at your products? These are all very important questions you should be able to answer. Having the answers to these questions will help you when you are building your store up from being a hobby to being a real business.

2. Getting Visitor’s (Customers)

You have basically 2 options when it comes to getting visitor’s to your store. You can either pay someone to do it for you or you can learn how to do it yourself.

If you would rather pay someone then be prepared to spend a lot of money. Basically what they will do is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your store for you and for each keyword (what people type into Google, Yahoo, etc to find your store) be prepared to spend upwards of $1000.

Now I have always been a big fan of learning how to do something for myself and even if I wasn’t at those prices I would have been.

The other option is to learn how to SEO your store yourself. This is not going to be a quick, over the next five days you will be an SEO expert type thing. It will take patience and learning but within a few months you are going to have a darn good idea of what you are doing.

There are two methods to use when you are learning to get traffic to your business.

The first is a paid method called PPC. What that is is those little ads you see on the side of Google. Every time someone clicks on one of those ads the owner of that ad pays money to Google. The advantage of using PPC to get visitors is that it is quick. Your ad is displayed on the first page of Google and no work is required from you to get it there. The disadvantage of course, is that you will always have to pay to get your visitor’s.

The next method is called Article Marketing. Basically what that is is you write articles that link back to your business. This is somewhat like a popularity contest in Google’s eyes. The more links you have pointing to your store the more popular Google thinks your business is and in turn the higher your business will list on Google. The advantage of Article Marketing to improve your stores SEO is that it is free to write and submit articles. The disadvantage is that it will take some time and work to get your store listed on the first page of Google.

One of the major advantages of having your business online is that you are able to market it for relatively little or no money. That is simply not possible to do if you have a brick and mortar store.

You have many options if you would like to learn how to market your own store.

There are a zillion books available to buy and so on. The problem with buying a book (in my opinion) is that you will have to buy a lot of them to get the whole picture of what you need to do to get a lot of visitor’s to your business. By the way, it’s my opinion because that is what I did. I never found one that included everything I needed to know. They all seemed to be missing important pieces. I’m not saying that there are no good, all encompassing books available just that *I* never found one.

What I would recommend is if you want to learn how to market your own business is to become a member of Power3 Marketing.

The Power3Marketing course will teach you step-by-step how to market for local businesses. Your craft business is your local business and if you market it the way they show you in the Power3Marketing course even the sky will not be the limit for your business.

There are three reasons I recommend P3 Marketing.

1. All of the information you need to learn is in one place. If you decide to go out and buy a book (and then another one) on how to market your store you will see why I consider this priceless.

2. It is a lot cheaper ( *I* like that) to become a member of the Power3Marketing course to learn how to market your store then it would be to by books on the subject because everything you need is in front of you without having to buy anything else. In fact, the basic level is free and their is some very good information to get you started right away.  If you are anything like me then you think free is good.

3. They have a forum (with the platinum level) with people lots of people who have learned the same marketing strategies that you are going to learn. The more you ask the quicker you will learn how to market your online business.

Click here to visit the Power3Marketing website

There are actually a few different ways to make handmade soap. They range from very easy to more advanced.

The easy method:

The easy method of making handmade soap is the heat and pour method. What this is is exactly like how it sounds. You take regular bar soap and heat it up and pour it into molds.

Why would anyone do this?

There are a few reasons.

1.This method is very good to use if you are on a time limit. For example, if a holiday is coming up or it is someones birthday and you want to give them some handmade soap this is the way you want to do it.

2. You can still add the extras that you want to the soap without the hassle or danger of making real soap.

3. Your making soap with children. Lye can be very dangerous because it can severely burn you so if you are planning on making soap with kids then this is definitely the way you would want to go.

Is there a special method for making homemade heat and pour soap?

What you do is take a bar of soap, preferably a plain white non-fragrance soap, and cut it up into slivers. On a double boiler (or a pot with a bowl place over it) melt the slivers of soap.

After it is melted you can add fragrance of your choice, coloring if you want it, and basically anything else you would like to put in the soap. Stir it all together, making sure you only stir in one direction.

Once it is stirred up how you would like it, pour the melted soap into molds and let set. The soap will be a softer set when it is done then it was before you started.

What else would you put in the soap besides fragrance and coloring?

Lots of things like Jojoba beads, ground oatmeal, ground almonds, specks of vanilla, flower petals, poppy seeds, fruit seeds (like strawberries and blueberry), apricot meal, loofah slices, and basically anything that you can think of!

A harder method of making handmade soap:

A harder method of making handmade soap is to do cold process soap making. What that is is basically making your soap from scratch using lye. You can make some wonderful soap once you learn how to do cold process soap making.

I’m not going to get into great detail about how to do it here because I have step-by-step instructions elsewhere on SellCraftsOnline.org.

If you are interested in learning how to make cold process soap here is the link to the step-by-step instructions – http://sellcraftsonline.org/soap-making/making-cold-process-soap

The hardest method of making handmade soap:

The hardest process for making handmade soap is using the hot process soap making method. It is not recommended that you try this process unless you have a good understanding of the cold process soap making.

What this process is is that you make a cold process soap but you add heat to it. This makes the soap process much quicker and the soap also sets within a week instead of 3-4 weeks like when doing the cold process method.

If you are looking for a comprehensive guide on making handmade soap I would recommend you check out Soap Making Fun: Your Visual Guide to the Cold Process. It’s a video that walks you through the cold process soap making method. Perfect for the visual learner.

Click here to visit the Soap Making Fun: Your Visual Guide to the Cold Process website.

If you can think of it chances are good it will sell online. Basically what it come down to is what you want to sell and where you would like to sell it and the three ways to sell online.

What Are The Ways To Make Extra Money Online By Selling?

1. Make your own handmade product to sell online.

2. Get products at a reduced cost to sell them on Ebay.

3. Recommend other peoples products and get a commission off of the products if someone buys them – Affiliate Marketing

Click here to learn about affiliate marketing

Where To Sell Online

If you are looking to sell real items that are not handmade a good place to look at selling them is Ebay. The reason for this is because they allow you to list most anything you would like to sell online.

Now if you are looking to sell something handmade online your best bet would be to set up an account with Etsy because Etsy is designed with crafters in mind.

There are a few general rules you need to follow in order to sell online.

1. You have to have competitive prices. It will do you no good to try to sell something online if your customer can go to another website or listing and find the same thing you are selling for cheaper.

Do your research on what you are selling and save yourself the headache and disappointment of not selling anything.

2. You need to make sure you have a lot of good pictures of your product (if you are selling real products). Your pictures are what your customer see to determine if what your selling is what they want to buy.

3. You need to market your store or listing on the Internet. Marketing your store at Etsy or listings at Ebay is going to be how people find what you are selling. Without proper marketing you are going to get shuffled together with everyone else’s stores and listings.

Click Here To Learn About Marketing Your Store

Where To Get Stuff To Sell Online

There are many place where you can get things to sell online.

If you are making your own crafts then this is something you do not have to worry about however if you are planning on selling things that are not handmade it can be a bit trickier.

In order to make a profit selling online you have to buy the product you are selling at a cheaper price then regular people would buy it at. There are way to do it but it will take some work and research.

I have a friend who is a powerseller on Ebay and what she sells is baby clothes. When she started out she would go to the thrift store and find the baby clothes that looked brand new and were hot selling brands. She would take them home, clean them up, iron them and them list as gently used. She would also find really good deals on new clothing.

The more she sold the more she had to invest and before long she was able to go to regular stores and dig through their clearanced out clothes they had put away in storage because she bought in bulk. There is real power in that.

For the most part though people who sell online at Ebay are able to do so because they buy their products to sell at wholesalers.

Click Here To Learn More About Buying Wholesale

Click Here To Learn More About Affiliate Marketing