In part one I talked about making money by selling other people's stuff, now lets talk about making money by selling your stuff.
Selling Your Stuff
To sell your own things, you can:
* Sell them exclusively on your own site
* Sell your things to vendors at a discount, so they can sell them on their site for the normal price
* Create your own affiliate program
You will need a shopping cart program to allows others to pay for your items, tell you who has ordered what and where to send it. There are many companies to choose from, what you need to do is see if they offer the services you need, and what they charge. Some places also have restrictions on what you can sell.
The companies I've use with a lot of success are:
* PayPal.com - Very inexpensive and easy to use.
* CCNow.com - Easy to use, they do charge a higher fee and you can only sell products, not services.
* Ibill.com - They have some linitations on what you can charge a client.
Some other companies include:
* Yahoo -
www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant - They offer 3 differnet packages, charge a monthly fee and take a percentage of each sale.
* 1Shopping Cart.com - They charge a monthly fee.
You can also open a merchant account for your business, but there are a lot of fees you have to pay for this, including:
* Monthly fees
* Fees per transaction
* Rental fee if you want a credit card machine
* Other fees may apply too
If you want to offer your own affiliate program, you will need to use the services of companies that provide affiliate software. Take a look here:
* clickXchange.com - You can join or create an affiliate program here.
* Commission Junction (
http://www.cj.com/), that charges an initial set-up fee and then 20% of the commission you pay your affiliates.
* My Affiliate Program (
www.wilsonweb.com/afd/myaffiliateprogram.htm)
* Ultimate Affiliate Program (
www.wilsonweb.com/afd/groundbreak.htm) - They offer an affiliate program, membership management and more.
* E-Commerce Research Room (
www.wilsonweb.com/cat/cat.cfm?page=1&subcat=em_Associate) - This page has a lot of information on affiliate programs.
There are some things that I do to sell my products, and to get other people to sell my things. I don't like to sell, so I get others to sell for me without hiring them. So the following gives people an incentive to sell for me, and it gives customers an incentive to buy.
* 10% finders fee - Refer a client to me and you get 10% of my fee. Since it's not uncommon for me to charge $1,500 to $2,000 for a website, people are happy to say, "Use Jeff" and get a check for $150 to $200. Now that's easy money.
* 10% discount to nonprofits - Nonprofits like discounts (okay, so everyone likes discounts) and I like to help nonprofits, so it's a win-win situation.
* 30-day money back guarantee - This give clients a good feeling of security, which makes them more likely to buy. Besides, if you sell a good product or service, you will get very few requests for refunds.
What To Sell
If you do decide to sell your own stuff the question is, "What do you sell?"
Actually, the possibilities are endless. On my site I sell many things, such as:
* Ebooks
* Reports
* Website design
* Website evaluation
What can you sell? Any product or service you have to offer, or other peoples' products, including:
* E-books and merchandise
* Advertising in your newsletter or on your website - You should charge $.007 for a prime ad, $.006 for a standard ad and $.005 for a basic ad per visitor or subscriber. Multiply the number of unique visitors to the page you're selling the ad on by the ad rate (or the number of subscribers to your monthly newsletter per month. If your newsletter comes out biweekly, then multiply your subscribers by 2.15, or times 4.3 if weekly.) So if you have 1,000 visitors to a page, and someone pays $.007 per ad, then the total is $7.00 per month.
* Banner and other ads on your site
* Website templates, graphics and fonts that you create
* Sell things on e-bay and show more details on your site and use it as a source of info for your specialty
This information will give you a good springboard for making money on your website, now let your imagination run free and come up with some great money making ideas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
http://www.CreativeCauldron.com Jeff Colburn is a website designer and writer. His goal is to make the process of creating or updating your website easy and simple for you, while creating a website that meets all your needs and expectations. Jeff can also create all of the copy for your website.
Copyright 2004 Jeff Colburn
