How to Get Started Selling 1 Product Online?

[HalfSwede]

Hello:
I'm hoping someone can fill in my knowledge gap related to the following.

There is a product that I would like to sign up for as an affiliate. The commission is 25%, with the average purchase price probably around $20-$25. So, I'm not going to get rich on this gig, but was thinking it could provide a little pocket change each month to fund some of my other ventures. It is a product that many, many people could use and would want (especially girls/women ages 16-40), but is relatively unknown at this point.

Since I would be selling just 1 product, what would be the best method for selling the product? Through an eBay store, Yahoo store? From Tim's book it sounds like I could have a 1 page web site created and do it that way.

I hope that makes sense. Just trying to figure out where to get started.

Thanks.

[searstower]

Here's a $10,000 tip for you from someone who has actually made money on the web:

Setting up a page or a store is easy. Getting traffic to that page/store is tough. No traffic means no sales, so your 25% commission off of $0 is less than $0.

By the way, lots of people will let you pay them to send traffic to your website, but take it from me, the traffic you pay for is looking to make money, not spend it, so they won't buy anything off of your site. They just skew your conversion ratio!

Lots of affiliates used to use Pay-Per-Click to get traffic to their websites, but nowadays the bids are so high for these that a product with less than a $75 commission per sale puts pro affiliate marketers in the hole all the time.

First figure out how to get good, targeted traffic to a website before you build something that will rot away unseen by anyone but you.

I made my money online by building a content-based website using the CTPM process (Content, then Traffic, then Presell, then Monetize) taught by Sitesell.com and Ken Evoy and it worked. Fair warning though, it's far from easy.

I hope that saves you a few months of wasting time! Good luck,
Rebecca

[read]

Rebecca,

I checked out www.sitesell.com, and I'm interested in what I saw. Can I ask you two questions about it?

1) I'm not afraid of a little work at the beginning, to set up my site and start getting traffic. You mentioned that the site you built is content based, and sitesell suggests this as well. Does this mean that it requires quite a bit of time each week to create and regenerate content? I'd like to create a site that can still help me have a 4-hour work week.

2) Do you know if Sitesell can help generate traffic worldwide, or just in English-speaking countries?


Thanks for the tip. I'm definitely interested in a site like this, that helps with the technological legwork.

[Vagabond]

i think its unrealistic to expect the 4hr work week right off the bat. it might take you 6mo, a year or whatever to get to the point that it becomes automated. the book is really good but does simplify the whole process a bit too much. i read parts of it now and again because there are good tips and its great motivation but its not filled with substance... IMO anyway

im looking developing a product right now and just researching the market size and trying to get start up and monthly operation costs will take days to get rough estimates and a couple weeks to get #'s im comfortable with using.

Its a great goal to have but it will take some work to get there. Unless of course you develop some really good information product you write up in a week and can start selling right away!!

[searstower]

Rebecca,

I checked out www.sitesell.com, and I'm interested in what I saw. Can I ask you two questions about it?

Read,
I answered your PM before I saw that you posted it here too, so I'll copy my answer into this thread in case others find it useful.

"Hi read,
Yes, it does require work at the beginning to generate content. It's possible to outsource the writing of articles, but it's not as easy as it would seem as you need to have a similar style voice on every page of the website to get people to trust you.

The average person who knows nothing about outsourcing, etc, if they picked a good (ie; profitable) topic according to the Brainstormer and it was something that they didn't need to do a ton of research on, I believe that with a consistent 10 hours a week working on the site, within six months they should be able to make $1,000-2,000 dollars income from it. Possibly more if they set up some good referral systems.

I'm not sure if that answers everything or not, but let me know.

As for different countries, my english speaking site about the Grand Canyon (http://www.beckysbackyard-grandcanyon.com) has, this month, gotten traffic from these countries:
US Commercial
Canada
United States
Germany
Italy
Austria
Switzerland
India
Seychelles
Turkey
United Kingdom
Brazil
Czech Republic
Hungary
Indonesia
Romania

Is the website going to be in another language, or just attract people from other countries? If you tell me what you are planning, I can give you a better answer."

Rebecca

[dttvn57]

Hi Rebecca,
Does your site http://www.beckysbackyard-grandcanyon.com receive $1000 - 2000/month from Adsense and/or from affiliates sales?

Thanks

[searstower]

Hi dttvn57,

No, it's not that high yet, though I do get monthly income from AdSense.

To be fair though, I haven't done a darn thing with that website for more than a year so there is much room for improvement.

Rebecca

[KerriK]

Don't know about the English thing, but yes, you do need to spend time on your site every week (most weeks anyway) and it will take quite a bit of work to start out. Just the learning curve is pretty steep. A LOT of listening and watching and learning. You wanna say, "come on, lets just build a website dammit", but there is a method that works and they know what they are talking about.

kerri