In order to generate income online  I needed to figure out a way to sell a product or service without carrying the merchandise on hand if I wanted to stay motivated to make money online during my free time.  I also really did not want to be responsible for incurring a large startup costs for purchasing inventory. If you want to be competitive you need to purchase a large inventory to receive a discount if you plan to make any money when you sell. This is one of the reasons why Wal-Mart so successful; they purchase in bulk for discount and move the product out the door. They also have one of the best distributions systems

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 google and Yahoo searchers to find my website and they need to be targeted and specific searches to what I was marketing or selling. This is something that is also done offline by advertising not to include finding the best location.  The only difference is your prime real-estate and advertising is done online. So, how do you do compete 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 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 you have to ask yourself 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 into the product 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? If not maybe the need does not exist.

3) I  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 or Bing ?

As an example if you’re searching for “beer” online you want your website or to use 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 (search engine results pages).

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 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 without ever processing payments or shipping products.

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 mind set 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. You can make money online by selling affiliate products or advertising.. still .. no payment processing or product shipping.