Build a Home Based Business from scratch selling products online using Drop Shippers.

Additional Marketing and Ideas

By this stage, you will have a good handle on your weekly marketing commitments. Of course, you should always be looking to find other ways to promote your web site and products.

Here is a list of web sites that can help you with gaining more online exposure for your individual products. Froogle is a good start, as it is free, but will require a bit of tedious work.

Some of these sites may or may not apply, and all of them will require you to read through their set up instructions and guidelines, which are beyond the scope of this book. I highly recommend that you do some study on some of these sites.

http://froogle.google.com
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/sell-your-stuff.html
http://www.shop.com/op/a-market-intro
https://merchant.shopping.com/enroll/app?service=page/PartnerWelcome
http://www.buy.com/corp/advertising.asp
http://merchant.shopzilla.com/oa/shopping_search/

You should also look at Ebay. Even though it is an auction site, consider becoming a retailer there as well. Once again, the use of Ebay, is beyond the scope of this book, but a great place to start is here Ebay Auctions or Ebay Machine

Web rings are another option for free traffic. By placing some code on your site, you will become part of a web ring, where all the sites forming the ring are similar or complimentary in nature. See http://dir.webring.com/rw for more information. You can do a search for other web ring sites.

Sponsors and Affiliates will add another angle. Some sites have what are called banner ads, which provide the site owner with revenue. Basically you are charging someone a monthly fee for the privilege of having their banner or ad on your site.

If you have done your homework above, you will have a good list of complimentary sites that you can approach with regards to offering advertising space on your more popular pages.

Setting up affiliates will take some work and require you to find some software etc, but you can offer to pay a percentage of all sales coming from affiliates.

This will require you to look around on the Internet for the right companies to help you set up an affiliate program. This method can be quite costly, especially early on, so do your homework.

Pay Per Click advertising through Google can be a good way to get traffic to your site early on in the process. Visit this page http://www.google.com/ads and read up on Google Adwords.

You will remember I commented on Google Adwords in an early chapter, and it is a good way to get targeted traffic, especially for seasonal products or products that require an intense advertising program for a short period of time.

After setting up an account with Goolge Adwords, have a look at Google Adsense as well. It is extremely easy to set up Goolge Adsense on your site and can be another way to generate some extra income.

 Tasks:

1. Have a look at submitting your products to web sites such as Froogle.
2. Do some research to see if Ebay would be another marketing tool to use.
3. Check out some Web Rings and find a suitable one to join.
4. Offer advertising spots on your site to suitable web businesses.
5. Research the possibility of setting up an affiliate program.
6. Sign up for a Pay Per Click account with Google Adwords, and advertise some of your keywords to get traffic early on. A great program with a free short course is available here Perry Marshall
7. Sign up for a Google Adsense account and earn some extra income.

Resources