You want to sell a product online? Here's some free advice.

The majority of sites that sell products are not resounding successes. The reason is that site owners often think they can just put a site online, forget about it, and customers will come running with their pocketbooks open.

Consider the following questions:

Is there a market for your product?
Can you target that market?
Can you write sales-driven copy or afford someone who can?
What will make your site special?

The success of any site that sells a product is based in large part on active promotion (and for a site that sells lots of products, active maintenance). You will have to advertise in every appropriate venue you can think of. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time, if not money.

A standard strategy that successful sites that sell products use is that they offer a freebie in exchange for the user's name and email address. Say your site sells window insulation. The freebie can be something like a one-page information sheet --"5 FREE and easy ways to insulate your windows". Then once you have the user's email address, you send them an email once a week containing some useful information relevant to your site and their needs PLUS an offer to buy your product. Studies show that it takes up to 7 contacts with a prospect before they decide to buy from you. So a single visit to your site isn't going to cut it. You need to get their email address somehow so that you can continue reminding them of your presence. Selling products online is work intensive.

Some third-party products will be useful to you. If your product is information (an ebook, for example), you should get something to protect the information product itself so that people can't copy it and pass it on to their friends. If your product is very specialized, this might not be so much of an issue. Copy protection techniques costs $50 or much more, depending on how fancy you want to get with it.

Another third-party product that will be useful is some sort of internet marketing automation. This way, when someone gives you their email address in exchange for the freebie, the automation kicks in and sends that person a new email once a week (or once a month, whatever). This saves you from having to send follow-up emails manually. You just write five or so different emails (ie "5 weekly lessons on window insulation techniques") and then the automation takes it from there. These automation services can be custom-built for several hundred dollars up to a few thousand dollars or subscribed to for about $30 a month.

And then there's the matter of writing the text for the site and the marketing emails. The words will make all the difference as to whether the product sells. Copy writing fees typically run from several hundred to a few thousand for your site's text plus your email marketing text. This is in addition to the cost of building your site. There's software out there that claims to do this for you for about $40, but the end result can looks canned and certainly won't be written in your "voice".

What makes your site different from your competitors? And in a crowded field, how will you stand out? Is it that you're cheaper? That's one way to stand out, though not as profitable. Is it that your site is a recognized authority on a topic, and you just happen to sell a product that speaks to that topic? This method can be very effective, but as you can imagine, it'll take a lot of time to write enough articles to become an "authority", and then to get lots of other people to link to you.

So there you have it. Take all the above and factor in the cost of building a website, hosting it, and marketing it in the long term. Making the site successful in the long term will probably take large amounts of either your time or someone else's (at an hourly rate) for ongoing promotion, content creation, and copy-testing. And that's not to mention buying search engine keywords and all the other search engine optimization techniques.

It might only be a small site, but it will still be a major, ongoing undertaking if you want it to be successful. However, like any business undertaking, the rewards for hard work may eventually be worth the initial struggle. A happy thought, eh?

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