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Niche Markets
One of the secrets for small businesses of any type is to find groups of people who have a particular interest or need, and provide goods and services to them. This is a niche. Chosing your niche(s) is a first vital step and there is a separate section on this subject. Read about niche markets now, or come back to it later.
Products
A product can be anything you sell at a profit: items, information, services, software, .... anything. There are four areas that beginners can look at.
- Selling. Sell a product that you already have or can create for sale
- Reselling. Buy something and resell it at a profit
- Affiliation. Become an affiliate and sell someone else's products for a percentage of the sale price.
- Advertisements. Sell advertising space on your website and get paid every time a visitor clicks through to the seller.
In practice, you can (and usually should) combine some or all of these to give your business different income streams. Once you have set up your own business, you may find that you want to add different products, or even, as many online marketers do, run a new business that may link and complement your first, or be completely separate from it.
You may already have your own business or have a product in mind and you are just looking for ways to promote and sell them on the internet. That's fine. Almost all the marketing techniques you will learn here can be applied to a non-internet business to give it an additional selling or advertising dimension. You can also consider adding other products to your range using any of the techniques we teach.
If you don't have a product, you can create one, and it could be anything. For example, if you have an interest in dogs (you may notice I come back to the theme of dogs from time to time in this course!) you could make fancy dog collars, take appealling photographs of dogs, write informative reports on dogs, create an online course like this one on dog care, sell individual advice on behavioural problems, and so on.
If your products are physical ones, you'll need to think about material and production costs, storage, packaging, postage, etc. They will involve time and effort and only some of the processes in the sales can be automated. They're well worthwhile pursuing, but you must think of these non-web aspects of your business.
For the above reasons, most small business men and women chose to sell web-based products that can be downloaded automatically and don't need a physical dimension to the sales process. Alternatively, if you want to offer physical products, you can chose to promote affiliate sales through your business, and leave the shipping, stocktaking and other problems to the seller (see affiliate programs).
If your business sells just one item, then all your efforts should go into driving your customers to the one place they can buy the item: a single internet page or whatever. You then create multiple streams of customers, but all heading in one direction. If your business offers a range of products, you can choose to sell them through a shopfront, showing a range of products for your customers to choose from, or treat them as separate items and direct the customer to the product you know they want.
Shops and stores can be set up within your own site, and it's easy to do these days (see my section on Websites), or as a hosted store on one of the large sites such as eBay. I don't cover eBay in detail on this course, but there are some great ebooks about eBay marketing. If your business is to be based in eBay you should also use online marketing to drive customers there, rather than just rely on people who are already logged on to eBay. You can also do the reverse, use eBay sales to complement your online business. See Traffic.
- Reselling - see the separate section on Reselling
- Affiliation - see separate section on making money from Affiliate Programs
- Advertisments - see the separate section on Adsense (the most popular scheme) for how to make money from hosting adverts.
The answers to 'How do I sell my products?' and 'How do I attract customers?' are given in the rest of this course, particularly in Websites, Traffic, and Lists.
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