Submitted by: Patrick Schwerdtfeger

Are you selling your product or service online?

In the last section, we discussed your expertise and how to categorize that information into beginner, intermediate and advanced content. Chapter 25 introduced the Motivating Sales Sequence to help you write effective sales copy for your advanced content products and services.

Regardless of what your advanced content is, you need to have a way of selling it online. You need a way to process the actual transactions. This chapter will look at a few of the options available.

Turns out, there are tons of websites that host products and let you sell them using their shopping cart. These options make it incredibly easy to start making sales on the internet and we ll use this chapter to review a few of them.

Perhaps the best known online platform for making sales online is eBay. Most people know eBay as an auction site where you can make your products available for open bidding, but that s only the beginning.

http://www.ebay.com/

eBay allows its users to create their very own eBay store, featuring all of their products in one place. You can then put certain popular products into the public auction and use them to entice shoppers into your store. Also, eBay owns the widely-used PayPal platform, making it easy to send and receive money securely.

Its worthwhile noting that eBay is one of the highest traffic websites on the internet. It s crawling with literally millions of shoppers all the time. I call that a raging river and it s a great place to put your product in front of a massive buying audience quickly.

There are tons of resources devoted to leveraging the eBay opportunity and I recommend you simply put selling products on eBay into a Google search to get started.

eBay isn t the only place where you can create your own store. Yahoo offers a similar opportunity. The Yahoo Shopping network is a powerful and flexible platform that gives regular people an easy way to sell products on the internet.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/

Of course, one of the largest online retailers is Amazon. Well, as luck would have it, you can sell your products there too! Amazon has a number of seller programs including the Advantage program, making it easy to upload products and sell them to the public.

http://advantage.amazon.com/

Within the Advantage program, Amazon fulfils the orders for you. That means they ship your product to the customer. They also have a second seller platform where you fulfill the orders yourself. With eBay and Yahoo, the product delivery is always left to you.

With eBay and Yahoo, you re the retailer. With Amazon Advantage, you re the wholesaler and Amazon is the retailer. Because of that, the Advantage program takes a much larger cut. They get the first 55% of your product s sales price. But then, whenever you see a reduced price on Amazon, that discount comes out of their share, not yours.

Keep in mind that these programs are changing all the time. New websites are popping up every day and that increased competition improves these arrangements for sellers over time. Check to see what the latest programs offer and use the ones that best suit your situation.

There are dozens of other places where you can sell your products, particularly if the product is digital (like an ebook or an audio file). Zipidee is a great example. On Zipidee, you can upload your digital products and sell them to the public.

http://www.zipidee.com/

The biggest advantage of these platforms is that they all have massive traffic already. That means you can put your product in front of their buyers, and not worry quite as much about generating your own traffic. Driving traffic is usually the hardest part!

Of course, you can also drive traffic to your own website or blog and then link through to these platforms. That means you can include a link on your sales page (with the killer sales copy you wrote in Chapter 25) that points to the website where your visitors can actually purchase the product.

About the Author: Patrick is the author of “Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed” (2011, Wiley) and a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV. Watch his video about

selling products on eBay, Yahoo or Amazon

on YouTube.

Source:

isnare.com

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