Regular readers of this blog already know how to start an eCommerce website with $0 investment and sell practically anything through their website without spending a dime on creating or maintaining the inventory - earning hundreds and thousands of dollars in profits by selling them.
With complete Internet as your target audience and behemoth companies like Amazon or eBay as your source/inventory, you have pretty much everything to offer and earn commissions by selling them. But having so much to offer is really overwhelming and it is certainly difficult to decide what to sell, how to sell, when and to whom you can sell these things.
And this is what you are going to learn now.
Step #1:
First of all, you need to figure out what do you want to sell on your website
You know the basics: sell whatever is in demand and is not available in good quantity (also, make sure that you have a decent level of understanding of the industry you want to sell products from. Or at least, it is expected that you will quickly learn and will be able to give good reviews of the products) So, let's take these things separately: you have two tasks (i) quantify the demand (more is better) and (ii) check your current competition (less is better).
1. Quantify the demand: This is simple. Explore the famous or popular products from Amazon/eBay and create a list of them. Now, separate the items which interests you, as these are the things that you should be able to actively promote and review.
Then go to Google Trends and see if these things are in demand. Please keep in mind, that this trend being shown in Google Trends is relative and not absolute. So, even an upward exponential trend can be a result of increase in searches from 1 to 10 in number (1 -> 3 -> 5 -> 7 -> 10). Just make sure that either the trend is positive or neutral - it shouldn't be a dying/negative trend. Check the graph below for the keyword "Wallets" - it's a neutral trend with some peaks (note down the months when you see the peaks):
2. Check your current competition
Once you have separated the items/categories with positive or neutral trends, now we will check the exact search volume & competition for each of them. For this you need to sign into Google Adwords program (don't worry it is free to use). Under Tools, select Keyword Planner and click on Get search data and trends. Now enter the keyword (Wallets in this case) and submit the request.
Wallets being a very popular search, you can see that the search volume is anywhere between 100K-1 Million (which is really a good range) but Google mentions the competition as Medium. But the term "Medium" is quite vague and you may not understand how much exactly is the competition. To get a more clear picture on this, head over to SEMRush and repeat the drill for the keyword "Wallets". Here it says, there are around 150 Million results for this term in the US market - which is quite a lot as your competitor list. Maybe you can go with a less popular keyword and sell "Dab Rigs" (Google Trends & SEMRush) if smoking interests you as it has just around 450K results & the trend is good too.
Step #2:
To Whom and When to Sell
Suppose you have finalized a product like "Vacuum cleaner" that will be sold through your website. Now, you need to know, when is the demand at it's peak for this product and which part of the world is most interested in buying it.
Google can help you here. Simply head over to Google Trends - it has all the answers for your questions.
From this graph, it is clear that the demand for vacuum cleaners is at it's peak during November and December (may be Christmas cleaning) every year. You not only get to know the perfect time to market your product, but you can also see and target the audience geographically. If you check the Google Trends results page (and limit to the date range when the number of searches were at its maximum like Nov'15 to Jan'16 in this case) - you will see that the demand was highest from these countries - Singapore, Australia, United Kingdom and Malaysia (No - USA is not always the answer :)
Step #3:
How And Where To Promote & Sell
Okay, so we have two questions here: How and Where. And we have at least two answers for both of them. "How" can be answered by "paid" or "organic" traffic and "Where" can be answered by Google (search engines) or Facebook (social media). This gives us a total of 4 different combinations:
i. Free organic traffic from Google or search engines
ii. Free organic traffic from Facebook and other social networking sites
iii. Paid traffic from Google through Google Adwords
iv. Paid traffic from social media marketing
For newbies, I would suggest to invest some time and go for organic routes: both in Google and Facebook. In case of Google, you need to focus on SEO, so pick a product/niche which is less known to public and but at the same time has a good demand in its niche like "Dab Rigs". And in case of Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest try to incorporate attractive images and use content that can get instant attention on user's walls and get more shares and likes.
SEO (Google) does have its own challenges because, with SEO you will have to rank up to the top, defeating the sites like Amazon and eBay etc. to stand out from the crowd. But considering the amount of fraud and unethical ways in paid advertising, for newbies I would always suggest to go with the organic routes irrespective of your chosen platform: Social Media or Search Engines. Organic growth is any day better, more trust worthy and long lasting than paid audience.
Once you start understanding the netizens and get a decent understanding of SEO and social media marketing then you can proceed with paid traffic also. It has it's own benefits and challenges. Since you are paying money, so you will definitely get the traffic. But there's no guarantee on the quality of this traffic which will ultimately cause you a loss of your money, since there won't be any conversions. Initially you might make some mistakes and lose your money if you don't do it properly.
In case of Google Adwords - you need a complete SEO strategy within the Google's advertising platform. And in Facebook, the competition is although much less fierce as compared to Google and your advert will be shown in the user's wall not exactly competing with your competitors advertisements, but there are several fraud accounts and click farms that may spoil your entire campaign eating up all your advertising budget without any conversions. One advantage with Facebook advertising is that your "genuine" paid reach gets converted into organic reach as soon as your paid audience starts liking and sharing your posts. But again, I would suggest you to go with the paid options, only once you get some basic understanding of affiliate marketing and social media marketing for at least a couple of months.
Now, once you have figured out these basic questions: WHAT, HOW, WHEN, TO WHOM - then you are ready to market your blog and start earning.
With complete Internet as your target audience and behemoth companies like Amazon or eBay as your source/inventory, you have pretty much everything to offer and earn commissions by selling them. But having so much to offer is really overwhelming and it is certainly difficult to decide what to sell, how to sell, when and to whom you can sell these things.
And this is what you are going to learn now.
Step #1:
First of all, you need to figure out what do you want to sell on your website
You know the basics: sell whatever is in demand and is not available in good quantity (also, make sure that you have a decent level of understanding of the industry you want to sell products from. Or at least, it is expected that you will quickly learn and will be able to give good reviews of the products) So, let's take these things separately: you have two tasks (i) quantify the demand (more is better) and (ii) check your current competition (less is better).
1. Quantify the demand: This is simple. Explore the famous or popular products from Amazon/eBay and create a list of them. Now, separate the items which interests you, as these are the things that you should be able to actively promote and review.
Then go to Google Trends and see if these things are in demand. Please keep in mind, that this trend being shown in Google Trends is relative and not absolute. So, even an upward exponential trend can be a result of increase in searches from 1 to 10 in number (1 -> 3 -> 5 -> 7 -> 10). Just make sure that either the trend is positive or neutral - it shouldn't be a dying/negative trend. Check the graph below for the keyword "Wallets" - it's a neutral trend with some peaks (note down the months when you see the peaks):
2. Check your current competition
Once you have separated the items/categories with positive or neutral trends, now we will check the exact search volume & competition for each of them. For this you need to sign into Google Adwords program (don't worry it is free to use). Under Tools, select Keyword Planner and click on Get search data and trends. Now enter the keyword (Wallets in this case) and submit the request.
Step #2:
To Whom and When to Sell
Suppose you have finalized a product like "Vacuum cleaner" that will be sold through your website. Now, you need to know, when is the demand at it's peak for this product and which part of the world is most interested in buying it.
Google can help you here. Simply head over to Google Trends - it has all the answers for your questions.
From this graph, it is clear that the demand for vacuum cleaners is at it's peak during November and December (may be Christmas cleaning) every year. You not only get to know the perfect time to market your product, but you can also see and target the audience geographically. If you check the Google Trends results page (and limit to the date range when the number of searches were at its maximum like Nov'15 to Jan'16 in this case) - you will see that the demand was highest from these countries - Singapore, Australia, United Kingdom and Malaysia (No - USA is not always the answer :)
Step #3:
How And Where To Promote & Sell
Okay, so we have two questions here: How and Where. And we have at least two answers for both of them. "How" can be answered by "paid" or "organic" traffic and "Where" can be answered by Google (search engines) or Facebook (social media). This gives us a total of 4 different combinations:
i. Free organic traffic from Google or search engines
ii. Free organic traffic from Facebook and other social networking sites
iii. Paid traffic from Google through Google Adwords
iv. Paid traffic from social media marketing
For newbies, I would suggest to invest some time and go for organic routes: both in Google and Facebook. In case of Google, you need to focus on SEO, so pick a product/niche which is less known to public and but at the same time has a good demand in its niche like "Dab Rigs". And in case of Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest try to incorporate attractive images and use content that can get instant attention on user's walls and get more shares and likes.
SEO (Google) does have its own challenges because, with SEO you will have to rank up to the top, defeating the sites like Amazon and eBay etc. to stand out from the crowd. But considering the amount of fraud and unethical ways in paid advertising, for newbies I would always suggest to go with the organic routes irrespective of your chosen platform: Social Media or Search Engines. Organic growth is any day better, more trust worthy and long lasting than paid audience.
Once you start understanding the netizens and get a decent understanding of SEO and social media marketing then you can proceed with paid traffic also. It has it's own benefits and challenges. Since you are paying money, so you will definitely get the traffic. But there's no guarantee on the quality of this traffic which will ultimately cause you a loss of your money, since there won't be any conversions. Initially you might make some mistakes and lose your money if you don't do it properly.
In case of Google Adwords - you need a complete SEO strategy within the Google's advertising platform. And in Facebook, the competition is although much less fierce as compared to Google and your advert will be shown in the user's wall not exactly competing with your competitors advertisements, but there are several fraud accounts and click farms that may spoil your entire campaign eating up all your advertising budget without any conversions. One advantage with Facebook advertising is that your "genuine" paid reach gets converted into organic reach as soon as your paid audience starts liking and sharing your posts. But again, I would suggest you to go with the paid options, only once you get some basic understanding of affiliate marketing and social media marketing for at least a couple of months.
Now, once you have figured out these basic questions: WHAT, HOW, WHEN, TO WHOM - then you are ready to market your blog and start earning.
