Searching to make money online
Dennis
I have longed believed there had to be a way to make money online without being stuck to just selling products on Ebay. I considered making money selling my own products. However, you still have to manage inventory and do packaging and shipping to clients. You are still responsible for dealing with packages that are returned and you are l ultimately responsible for trying to satisfy their needs without receiving negative reviews from sellers on ebay or whichever auction site you decide to market your product. One of my other concerns with auctions sites is someone could be in a bad mood one day and gives you a neutral feed back and could cost you a sale because they were finicky. In order to generate income online I had to figure out a way to sell a product or service without carrying the merchandise on hand if I wanted to stay motivated. I also really did not want to be responsible for incurring a large startup cost purchasing inventory. If you want to be competitive you need to purchase a large inventory to receive a discount if you plant to make any money when you sell. This is a part of what makes Wal-Mart so successful; they purchase in bulk for discount and move the product out the door.
Unfortunately, selling items has always been one of my Achilles heel or has significantly influenced my motivation or lack there of to start my online business. My other reluctance also revolved around one question about how someone can find my website among the millions of millions of websites. How do you market a website? I knew I didn’t want my website found by accident. To be successful I needed the searchers finding my website to be targeted and specific to what I was marketing or selling. This is something that is done offline by advertising and having the best location. The only difference is your prime real-estate and advertising is done online. So, how do you do internet marketing for a product?
It should come as no surprise that prime real-estate plays a pivotal role in success online and off line. If you don’t think this is true you need to look at real life examples. You will always find that where there is a Burger King restaurant their will likely be with in a mile or less a McDonalds and they are always located on a busy street. In order to have a successful online business I need to do online what is successful offline. Most people already know who McDonalds and Burger King is. Yet, they continue to advertise and purchase property in prime or upcoming locations. In starting an online business I asked my self some of the following questions:
1) Is there enough searches being conducted online for my product or service? For example, if my product or service is only being searched for 100 times a month and I do not have enough profit built in I may want to find another service or product to market.
2) Is there a market for my product or service or are people searching and finding someone who offers my product or service that I can easily compete against? If there are no websites already established am I filling a need or maybe the need does not exist.
3) I would also need to figure out a way to collect money online or process credit cards online since people will not there to hand me cash.
4) Is my potential competition offering a similar product, offering it at a reasonable price and can people find them easily online when searching online using the popular search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing ?
As an example if you’re searching for “beer” online you want your website or in a brick and mortar terms your real-estate to be on the first page of the search engine that is being used. Using the term “beer” and using Google as my search engine I searched for beer and there’s 126,000,000 million websites returned in the search engine results pages (SERPS). So, the goal of the advertiser should try to be one of the first pages or links that pops up after the individual enters their search term into the search engine. At this point in time if you plan to be successful online you would need to be on the front page of Google since they own 60% of the search market. Continuing to use the term beer as an example the first listing or website for the term ‘beer” does not currently sell or advertise beer but teaches people how to make beer. The giants like Budweiser and Coors are listed farther down the SERPS.
Although I have little interest in selling products I have found a way to make money using blogs and other websites by selling advertising and this can all be done without purchasing a domain( website) and building something expensive. This is not new and has become popular among the people trying to earn money from blogging through affiliate sales or lead generation. On this site I made $11.27 because someone searched for antique linens and my site provided a portal to ebay through which they purchased the product and Ebay rewarded me by paying me a referral fee. Think if you had hundreds of sites or free websites like blogger, infobarrel or hubpages. You could make a decent amount of income for search engine traffic.
In summary, to earn a living online you need to consider if there is a demand online or if there will be a demand online for your product or service and if there is a website (real-estate) you can buy or take over on the front page of Google, Yahoo or Bing. You also need to change your mindset to the only way to make money is selling physical products. It is possible to make hundreds of dollars and never ship out a product. Is it easy to accomplish this? No, like anything it takes patience commitment and WORK. Future posts will discuss the work involved and how I intend to make money online.
Posted on: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 3 
Making money online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.