Beginners guide to selling online

The Tools You Need

From the Desk of Rob Gui
Affiliate Marketer

So you've decided to take the plunge and try your hand at selling products online.

Internet marketing or affiliate marketing can really be rewarding and profitable if you're able to crack the marketplace and become recognised as an authority in selling products.

In this article we will explore the tools I use daily to successfully sell and promote products online.

My name is Rob Gui and the past five years I have successfully sold products online and being able to enjoy extra income I otherwise would not have been able to have.

Now before we start I just want to explain that I am not a so-called Internet marketing guru, nor do I claim to be a master/guru in affiliate marketing. I'm just a normal guy, based in the UK, who likes to make money where possible selling and promoting products online.

What is an Internet marketer?

Well, before we begin, let's understand what an Internet marketer really is.

An Internet marketer and an affiliate marketer are basically the same thing.

They sell or promote other people's products online looking to make a profit on each product they sell.

They usually do not create products, they merely promote and sell other people's products.

So basically, an affiliate marketer/Internet marketer is a commission paid sales person.

Whose products do we sell?

To be honest an affiliate marketer will sell anybody's products if there is the potential to generate a profit. Obviously it's down to your own ethics the type of products you would be willing to sell and promote and I know of several Internet marketers who make a fantastic return in sales of products some of us would not want to be associated with. I'll leave your imagination to guess what those products are.

So to answer the question "who is products do we sell?" Is as follows.

Imagine you are a person who has created a product you wish to sell online. We call you the "Vendor". Now as a vendor you have the task of trying to market your product on the Internet.

Now to do this will take time and a lot of money to get the coverage you need to sell your product in vast quantities. So to get maximum exposure and to start selling products quickly the vendor will offer his products to affiliate marketers to sell on his/her behalf in return for a percentage of the sale price.

As an example, if the vendor is selling a product for $100 and offering a commission of 60%, we as an affiliate marketers would earn $60 for each product we sell for them. So the vendor makes $40 but he looks upon this as $40 he would not have made without the assistance of an affiliate marketer. So everybody is happy.

Where do we find products to sell?

Well rather than just searching the Internet looking for products to sell, we can use several online directories that list productsm, vendor's would like us to promote.

Directories such as Clickbank and commission junction have thousands of products or waiting for us to promote and sell. Both of these are free to join.

There are obviously others you may wish to explore that these two are potentially them as popular.

Once you are registered with them, it's just a case of searching for products that give good return and have compelling and high converting sales pages.

Once we found a product we wish to promote, we are then given a unique link we use to promote a product. Should a customer use that link to buy the product, we are then automatically given the commission to our Clickbank/commission junction account.

What tools do we need?

When starting out in affiliate marketing you can she get away with no tools at all. You don't even need to have a website to sell and promote products from. You could easily use Google Adwords or some other pay per click program.

Using this type of method can be very effective however you do have to pay for the adverts you create, therefore you need to make sure the adverts you create use good keywords that are likely to give a result every time a potential customer clicks the adverts.

I started off using this method but after time I realised I was actually spending more money in advertising than I was receiving in commission sales. So I chose to create a website/websites to sell and promote products from.

This is a piece of free advice. Use WordPress when creating your website to sell products from. The reason for this is search engines favour blog-based websites over conventional websites. This is because a blog is usually used for social networking and as such search engines realise that the information being added to a blog can change by the minute. To ensure the change in information is available to people searching the Internet, search engines tend to rank those pages quicker than anything else.

WordPress is also very easy to administer and manage and comes with many plug-ins to help increase sales, it does have one major drawback. Using it means you can only use one theme for the entire website.

Now I am not going to go into details here about those drawbacks as I have written other articles that cover the subject.

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How can we market these products?

This is a question a bit like "how long is a piece of string?".

You could easily go and buy an e-book from a so-called guru that would explain the best marketing tactics to use when selling products, but at the end of the day, the best way to market a product is to identify who other potential customers, and find out where those people like to spend their time while on the Internet. For example, consumer forums, specialist forums and article directories, much like this one.

Once we have identified those places we need to contribute by giving information are potential customers will find interesting and will want to know more about.

Don't think that will work? Well I have already proved it works is you are reading this article now.

You were interested in knowing about affiliate marketing and I now have you reading this article.

Now I'm not trying to sell you something, but imagine if I were. I could have created this article to tell you the benefits in a particular product and why I believe you should buy it.

This is just one example, and shows the power of writing articles people would be interested in reading. The article does not have to be a sales page, just merely your own thoughts of how a products benefits have changed the way in which you do something for the best.

Now I'm not saying you create fictitious information, in fact I would never create an article that claims something I didn't have first hand experience or knowledge in. As they say "honesty, is the best policy".

Summary

obviously Internet marketing/affiliate marketing is a massive subject and I could write for hours about marketing tactics but I'm going to leave it here, as this article is not a Bible of how to become successful in marketing online, it's only an article to give you a quick insight into affiliate marketing.

I also hope it has demonstrated just how powerful writing articles can be when selling and promoting products is concerned.

I would like to wish you every success in affiliate marketing and hope you find it as rewarding as I have