Selling physical products online (part 1 of 2)
June 23, 2009
Most of the time Internet Marketers talk about how to sell products that deal with, well, Internet Marketing. I've been guilty of that, too, although for some time now my focus has been on promoting products that either help you create content or help get you ranked in the search engines.
I thought you might like to hear about how one guy (my brother Ted) runs a successful business online selling real-world physical products: porch swings. And man does he sell some porch swings! Last month alone he sold $42,848.31 in porch swings out of a small shop he has in his back yard.
Find that hard to believe? Here's a link to his May 2009 PayPal statement (he does all his business through PayPal):
Click here to see his PayPal statement for May
That kind of success begs the question: how does he do it!?! Let me start off my answer by telling you what he doesn't do.
No Gurus Involved
First of all (and I may be shooting myself in the foot here), Ted has never read any Internet Marketing courses. He's not invested time or money in any of the flood of material out there by self-proclaimed "gurus." He was seriously turned off by the hype and obviously overblown promises, so he decided to do things for himself.
Really, to sell anything online, you only need to know how to do three things:
- How to find a great product that's in demand to sell.
- How to price your product in order to get it to sell very well.
- How to get traffic to your web site so you can start making sales.
Ted took the time over the last three and a half years to figure out how to accomplish all three of those things very well. Let's talk about each one.
Finding A Great In-Demand Product
For the most part, Ted makes his own porch swings in his backyard shop. When he gets too many orders, he offloads some of those orders to another company in a neighboring town — but he mostly builds them himself.
He's not a trained, professional carpenter. He's just a guy who took up the hobby of woodworking and got really good at it.
So naturally, when it came time for him to find an in-demand product, he leaned toward something he could build himself. He used eBay to determine what products were selling like hot cakes, found one he could build and started selling it himself.
It's hardly a requirement that you manufacture your own product. Although the profit margins are generally higher, there are no doubt plenty of folks in your area who have quality physical products but a dismal web presence. Most "mom and pop shops" have a web site but few get any real traffic. Find these shops and resell their products!
Pricing Your Product
Regular folks who are looking to buy products online are very price conscious — especially in this economy. Ted discovered this early on. So he worked hard to find ways to cut his costs and stay competitive. One of his best tricks allows him to undercut his competition because he's a small business owner and not a "big dog" in the industry.
Being a small business owner has certain advantages in keeping overhead down: fewer employees, lower operating costs, etc. So find ways to keep your price lower than the other guy and you can expect much greater success online.
Getting Traffic to Your Site
Of course, no matter how in-demand your product is, or how low your price is, if you've got no traffic you'll get no sales! So you have to learn how to drive traffic to your site.
Although Ted is now getting most of his traffic from Google (thanks to yours truly–more on how I did that for him coming up in my next blog post), for the first year and a half Ted was doing great without getting hardly any search engine traffic at all! He used pay-per-click almost exclusively.
Ted did not, however, use AdWords to drive traffic to his site. Too expensive, he said. He found alternative sites that he could buy traffic from — again, keeping his costs lower so he could price his products better than the competition.
So if you're looking to sell physical products, try to think outside of the box and find second-tier pay-per-click sites to advertise in.
Coming Next Post: Ranking in Google to Sell Porch Swings
As I said, although Ted did great using pay-per-click traffic to sell his porch swings, most of his traffic comes from Google now. That really helps him cut costs because his traffic is virtually free. My next blog post will talk about the steps I took to get him the rankings in Google he needed to get the razor-targeted traffic that launched his business to the serious six-figure business it's become.
Coming this Monday, June 29th, you'll have the opportunity to get all of the details about how Ted found an in-demand product, how he cuts costs as a small business to price himself better than his competition, as well as what second-tier pay-per-click sites he used to sell his porch swings. Look for more information on that in the next blog post as well as in an upcoming email.
Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
|
Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
Results of my Twitter traffic experiment.
May 5, 2009
Last week I started using Twitter, and was immediately hooked. Twitter is a great way to keep in closer contact with your list members, to grow your list of contacts, and to build traffic.
I decided to test just how much traffic I could build through Twitter, and so performed an experiment: I offered a free gift to everyone who "retweeted" (reposted) a specific tweet (Twitter message). I started this experiment on April 29th. The results were quite impressive, with hundreds of people reposting the tweet.
The biggest accomplishment of this experiment was the quick growth of my Twitter followers (people who are notified when I post new tweets). I started the experiment with 590 followers. As of today I have over 1,200. That's a growth of more than 600 followers in just 7 days.
The tweet that I had people retweeting had a link in it that has generated (as of my writing this) 4,766 click-throughs to my blog post about OffTo.net, my free link cloaking service. Not bad at all!
Thanks to those click-throughs, I grew my OffTo.net user base by more than 150 users (each user is an opt-in into a mailing list as well). That's another great benefit.
There were some unanticipated benefits as well. Because I was readily accessible and answering people's questions via a public tweet or a private message at Twitter, I generated some sales of some of my products. I also picked up some affiliates who made more sales of my products. I also got some great advice from a registered Nutrtionalist who was kind enough to answer my questions to her.
All in all, I'd call my Twitter traffic experiment quite successful. Because of it's success, I have decided to continue answering questions posted to me via a tweet directed publicly to @jonathanleger — so feel free to hop over to Twitter and ask me any Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization or general business questions you might have.
Please post your thoughts in a comment below.
|
Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
Why you NEED to use OffTo.net to cloak your affiliate links.
April 15, 2009
The other day I made a couple of minor changes to my free affiliate link cloaking service (OffTo.net). I hadn't looked at the site in quite some time, since it was running smooth and I had no reason to "pop the hood", so to speak.
But since I was making a few changes, I decided to take a peak at my web stats to see how it was doing.
To say I was floored is the understatement of the year!
The site has cloaked over 4,500 new links in the last 30 days, and has delivered 9,616,267 raw clicks in the last year and a half. It's averaging 200,000-300,000 unique visitors per month, and has built my email list by more than 4,600 opted-in users.
That's all great, but how does it help you? I'm getting to that part.
You see, more than 20,000 of those visitors each month are coming from Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. At first I was scratching my head about this, asking myself why on earth the site was getting so much love from the search engines (not that I was complaining, mind you!)
So I started taking a look at the keywords the site was ranking for, and it only astounded me even more. Only about 10% of that traffic was coming from keywords relating to the name of the site — people just looking for OffTo.
MOST of the traffic was coming from keywords ranging everywhere from "free tee shirts" to "hypoglycemia diet".
That's when it hit me — the thing about OffTo that should motivate you to use it when cloaking all of your links.
You see, ol' OffTo has racked up a HUGE number of links to its pages (76,259 according to Yahoo! Site Explorer). That massive number of in-bound links has given OffTo a lot of authority in Google's eyes, and so its pages are ranking very well for the
keywords the engines are finding on those pages.
It's the same kind of effect that causes the pages of Wikipedia to rank for so many different keywords. Tons of links means the pages will rank for just about anything.
How does this benefit you?
In case it's not clear yet, this benefits YOU because when you cloak your links using OffTo, your cloaked links will often end up ranking for the keywords on the cloaked page (especially if you choose a link name that has your keywords in it). That means EXTRA traffic from the search engines, for free!
In order to benefit from this extra traffic, you want to be sure the "Hide links to affiliate program on landing page" box is checked when you create the cloaked link, since that's what causes the page to get cached and ranked in the engines.
So the next time you need to use a link cloaker, I strongly recommend you do yourself a favor and get some f.ree traffic by using OffTo.net.
Here's the link:
|
Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
-
Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
-
