Selling physical products online (part 2 of 2)

June 25, 2009

Two days ago I posted the first part of this two-part series on how to sell physical products online. The first post dealt with finding an in-demand product, pricing it correctly and getting traffic using second-tier pay-per-click sites.

This second post deals with getting traffic from search engines (primarily Google) instead of pay-per-click sites. As I mentioned in the first part, Ted now gets almost all of his traffic from Google instead of pay-per-click (PPC) sites. That's because it's far cheaper to generate traffic from search engines than it is to pay for traffic using PPC. Getting started using PPC is great if you have the budget for it and your conversion rate is good enough to turn a profit, but the more traffic you can get from search engines the higher your profit margins will be.

Here's what I did to start generating razor-targeted traffic from the search engines for Ted's porch swing business:

Do The Keyword Research

Before doing anything else, you should always research your target keywords. You need to find out what the best terms would be to rank for. To accomplish this I use Google's AdWords Keyword Tool to find out what people are looking for and how much traffic I can generate.

I also check out the competition to see how hard I'm going to have to work to get the site ranked for the keywords I think will be best. This basically involves seeing how well linked the competition is, which tells me about how many links I'm going to need to rank well.

Setup A Feeder Blog

Rather than try to rank Ted's porch swings site directly, I chose to setup a Wordpress blog on a new domain, rank that site and use it to pass traffic over to Ted's site. There are a few reasons for this:

Ted's not a search engine guy, so his site wasn't really built for getting ranked well in the search engines.
As I said in the first part of this series, Ted was doing great without getting any traffic from the search engines. He's not a search engine guy, and he was doing fine without the search engines, so his site isn't well optimized for search engines. It is, however, very well optimized to get people to buy!
Having a site that recommends another site is a great way to increase conversion rates.
Good affiliate marketers have been using recommendations to increase conversion rates for years. If you write an article that praises a site and product you don't personally own, that recommendation provides a level of legitimacy that product owners can't generate themselves. It's like a testimonial, and increases conversion rates significantly.

I chose Wordpress for my feeder site because blogs are fantastically easy to rank due to the fact that each time a post is made it "pings" a variety of sites that automatically index your blog's content. That means you immediately get a bunch of free links back to your blog, which gets each new page indexed fast and improves your overall link popularity (and thus your ability to rank well in the search engines).

Use The Right Wordpress Plugins

I like to use the All-In-One SEO Pack for Wordpress, because it lets me give the blog a more search-engine-friendly title and meta description, as well as allows me to disable the indexing of categories and archives. I don't like the categories or archives getting indexed because I don't want Google to rank anything but the permalinked blog post pages. I don't want folks landing on the category pages and having to click again to get to the full article — I want them sent straight to the articles.

I also use the WP-Sticky plugin for Wordpress, which allows you to select a post that will always be on the home page of the blog. That way I can optimize the home page content for my chosen keywords.

Fill The Blog With On-Theme Content

Once the blog was up I seeded it with a bunch of EzineArticles.com articles related to porch swings. That way the site is chock-full of content that is very specifically related to my target keywords. I wrote a post targeting my chosen keywords and then made it the "sticky" post that is always shown on the home page. That post strongly recommends my brother's porch swings and links to the site in the end.

In addition to the recommendation and the link, I also put up an attention-grabbing banner ad for my brother's site. As of today this combination is generating a better than 50% click-through rate. So one out of two people who visit the feeder site are continuing on to Ted's site. That's like getting a 50% click-through rate for AdSense ads. How cool is that?

The result is a lot more sales for Ted. Ted's conversion rate is about 5% (yes, 5% on physical products ranging in price from $60 - $260 dollars), so his site is obviously setup to get visitors to buy. Combine that great site setup with the razor-targeted traffic from the search engines and you get a super-successful real-world business selling physical products.

Get Links to the Blog

The final step was to start getting links to the blog. I always get links from a variety of sources (3 sources in particular). All the link sources are absolutely necessary to the successful ranking of the blog. I can't emphasize that enough. The search engines want to see a variety of links from a variety of sources.

The result is that the blog ranks #2 for its primary keywords in Google, #5 in Yahoo and #2 in Bing (formerly MSN Live).

Since achieving those rankings I've also begun to work on ranking the site for an even tougher set of keywords that gets about fourteen times as much traffic (according to Google's keyword tool). As of today, the site ranks #10 in Google and Bing for those keywords (I've got a bit more work to do before it makes it into Yahoo for those terms). I expect it to be in the top 5 in a few weeks.

Exact Instructions Coming Monday

What I've given you here is an overview of how I set things up. But there are some very detailed things I do to assess keyword competition (and the value of a set of keywords for conversion purposes), as well as the linking methods that I use which are not stated here.

However, this Monday (June 29th) you'll have an opportunity to get all of the details of how I go about researching keywords and ranking sites in the search engines (including my sources for getting the all-important links), as well as the exact methods my brother uses to find in-demand products, price them right and get cheap traffic from second-tier pay-per-click engines to start generating profits immediately. Look for an email from me about that on Monday.

Until then, please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Traffic, Search Engine Optimization, Blog | 92 Comments

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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.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Traffic, Internet Marketing, Blog | 84 Comments

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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.

Posted by Jonathan Leger | Filed Under Traffic, Blog | 100 Comments

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