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

So I woke up one day and decided I was going to start selling on eBay.  Why not?  Lots of people sell on eBay and make good money at it.  I like to buy from eBay so I know what I look for in a listing, how I like it set up, guarantees, even shipping.

Sounds easy enough, right?

Get a product, list it, then sell it to make a profit.

But I had no idea as to what sells on eBay and I honestly did not know where to get the products once I learned what did sell.

I started doing some research online and let me tell you.  That is like beating your head against a brick wall repeatedly.

Painful but gets you no where.

People sell on eBay all of the time so how come no one tells you where to get your ideas from and how to actually get things cheap enough that you can actually sell it cheaper then they can get it else where and still make money on it?

Have you started to beat your head against the wall yet?

Hopefully not!

I would like to help you avoid some of the frustration that I went through when trying to find what sells on eBay.

There is actually a really simple way to discover what sells on eBay.

It’s called eBay pulse.  When you log into eBay do a search on something and then scroll down to the bottom till you see a link called eBay pulse. This will tell you what the ten most popular things that are selling on eBay are.  It also lets you sort by category.

It really does help you find what sells on eBay right now.

When I was just starting to sell on eBay I was talking to a good friend of mine who is a powerseller selling baby clothes.

I asked her how she got started selling on eBay and how she managed to sell so much.  She basically said she learned from other power sellers from a program called Sky High Auctions.

I have to admit that I checked it out.  How could I not when she said that it was the best investment she had made to learn how to sell on eBay.

I was really impressed with all of the information that I got on how to be a power seller on eBay and there is no way I would have found out all of the little tricks they use by myself.  Well I might of  eventually but it would have taken a long time and chances are I would have been thoroughly frustrated and given up before I did.

So I got the information I needed on how to be a powerseller on eBay and I learned how to see what sells on eBay and there was only one thing missing – Where to get the hot selling items on eBay to be a power seller with.

Back to my good ole friend (what are friends for, right).  She said she did a combination of things.

1. She would by namebrand baby clothes either on clearance and hold them till the next season or go to the thrift store and find name brand clothes that still had the tags on them and hold them till the next season.

2. She used a wholesale drop shipper. She had one in particular that she really liked called SaleHoo.  She said SaleHoo was the best out there because all of the wholesale drop shippers were tested by real people and you got real reviews on them before you used them.

She said that that was invaluable because if you have ever tried drop shippers then you know that they are not always honest or reliable. That makes for a major headache.

I did go over and check it out but at this point I was getting a little bit nervous.  I didn’t have a ton of money I could spend but at the same time I’m sure she didn’t either when she first started selling on eBay and what is the point of asking for help if you are not going to accept the help.  Especially since it is not every day that you can get help from someone that is excellent at what you want to do.

So I took the plunge and signed up with Salehoo and holy cow!  There were drop shippers for anything I could want to sell and she was right, there were honest reviews from people who already used them so I knew which ones to use and which ones to avoid.  It was really great too because some of them had no minimum amount you have to buy.

That means that I could by one or two of something to test out one eBay to see how in demand they were (no breaking the bank to see if I was going to lose my shirt or not).

It was really awesome of my friend to share what made her successful on eBay with me and I hope I have been able to help you out like she did me.

Here are the links to the programs she used and showed me to use so you can check them out if you would like:

Sky High Auctions

Salehoo

What Is Affiliate Marketing? Click Here To Learn

If you are looking to make more money or eventually be able to quit the job you have then this is a great way to do it. Affiliate marketing takes work but after you learn what you are doing it is one of the few business around that you can really run on auto pilot.

Learn Affiliate Marketing – Things To Avoid

The are some things to avoid when you are learning affiliate marketing. One of the biggest things to avoid is buying everything in sight thinking this is the program that is going to make you rich. I know, I’ve been there and I have wasted a lot of money on a lot of junk programs.

If they promise you the world in the next…days, stay away. That is not how it works. You are building a business and that takes time.

Stop looking for the magic bullet that is going to make you rich overnight. It does not exist.

Also do not believe the screen shots you see of a Guru’s income. Those things are simple to fake and even if they are real, they don’t tell you how much they spent to make that money. If they are using things like PPC to get their sales then chances are they spent a lot of money to get what’s in their account so it’s not all profit.

If I have to spend $20 to make a $25 commission I’ve really only made five dollars. Now if I keep multiplying that will I be making good money? Absolutely, however if I show you a screen shot that says I made $10,000 dollars today that would be very far from the truth even though my account shows that much.

The point is screen shots do not amount to very much so don’t believe them.

The Best Place To Learn Affiliate Marketing

If you would like to learn affiliate marketing I would highly recommend that you check out Affiloblueprint.

Why?

Affiloblueprint is basically a one stop shop for learning how to build your successful affiliate business. What I mean by that is, inside the Affiloblueprint course you will find all of the learning materials and tools you will need to learn and succeed at affiliate marketing.

It is by far the best training resource I have found for affiliate marketing.

Click here to visit the Affiloblueprint 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