10 Day eBiz Series: Helping You find Financial Independence, Day 2, Choosing A Product To Sell
This is the Second in a series of 10
small articles that will help you find Financial
Independence by understanding what REAL
EBiz is all about!
Day 2 will teach you about how to Choosing A Product To Sell
====================================
BONUS: During these 10 Days to EBiz Independence,
the first 50 people who Register for my Personal
EBiz Workshop and Mentoring Program for July
get an extra $50 off. Once those 50 Seats are gone,
so is the discount!
====================================
So, here’s Day 1: Why your EBiz Needs to be Legal
Choosing A Product To Sell
Choosing what to sell online is most often seen as the most
dificult thing you’ll do in your business. People agonize over
this choice for week, months, and sometimes even years! (The
longest I’ve ever seen someone take to choose something to sell
was 3 years!)
This doesn’t have to be that difficult, but people who are new
to retail sales tend to make it difficult because they think they
have to choose the absolute perfect product the very first time.
You don’t have to do that. If a product is being manufactured on a
continuing basis, it’s selling. That means it can be sold.
In other words, if somebody’s making it for a long period of time,
that means people are buying it. THAT means you can sell it.
Here are 5 basic rules for deciding what you can sell online:
1. If you can, sell something you know about. A hobby, a pastime,
something you have career experience with, something you’re good at,
etc.
If you can’t sell something you’re familiar with, GET familiar with
whatever you DO choose to sell. Learn about the product. Buy it.
Work with it. Play with it. Read about it. Social Marketing is a
big part of your online marketing. The more you know about what you
sell, the better your Social Marketing wil be.
2. Stay away from saturated markets. There are some badly saturated
markets out there, and there’s little point in beating your head
against a brick wall when you could simply choose one of the many other
markets that are NOT saturated. Here are the 5 WORST markets to sell in:
(a) Electronics. This market has been oversaturated for years.
(b) Jewelry. Another heavily saturated market, and also a market that
there is a HUGE amount of counterfeit activity in. Counterfeit refers
to lots of people selling cheap copies of designer brand jewelry at
extremely low prices that you can’t compete with when selling the
real thing.
(c) Clothing. This includes shoes, handbags, etc. This market is also
filled with counterfeit products that you can’t compete against on price.
There are also lots of returns in this market due to size issues. People
buy the sizes they THINK they are, and when the clothing doesn’t fit, you
spend a tremendous amount of time handling returns.
(d) vitamins/Supplements. This market has been largely taken over by MLMs
(Multi-Level-Marketing) schemes. MLMs make money for the ones who RUN
the MLMs, not for the people who participate in them.
(e) Gifts. Anything associated with the word “Gift” becomes hard to sell
online. This one is unique in that it’s the word “gift” that causes the
problem. That one keyword is probably the most overused keyword on the
search engines, and using it simply gets you lost in the crowd. So, if you
must sell Gift Baskets, for example, don’t CALL them Gift Baskets. Call
them “Birthday Baskets”, or “Welcome Home Baskets”…anything but the word
“Gift”!
3. Keep the Economy in mind. During a recessive economy like this one,
people are generally saving more and spending less, so expensive products, or
“luxury market” products are not a good idea. Your products’ retail price
range should be somewhere between $40 and $250 in an economy like this. As the
economy continues to recover, that range will widen, but for now it’s important
to sell to peoples’ spending patterns.
4. Watch your shipping weight. Don’t sell anything that weighs more than 70
pounds. That’s the limit for UPS, FedEx, and USPS. Anything over that limit means
you have to use “Motor Freight”. Motor Freight means that the product is
delivered by one of those big trucks by an independent shipping carrier.
The prooblem with Motor Freight is that shipping charges change on a weekly basis
depending on energy (gas) costs. You could sell a product on a Thursday, and
by the time it leaves your supplier’s warehouse on Monday the shipping price
could be $30 higher, for example. Do you want to try to explain that to your
customer? Nope.
5. Always think of a Marketing Hook whenever you think of a product. This is
critical. It’s Marketing that sells products, not the products theselves. If you
want to sell GPS units, for example, sell Marine GPS Units and make your site
all about boating with a GPS. Or sell Personal GPS and make your site and marketing
all about hiking and camping with a GPS. Or sell the more rugged Auto GPS Units
and make your site about 4-wheeling off road with GPS. Every time you think of
a product, always try to think of how and why people use them, and develop a
single Marketing Hook to concentrate your web site and Social marketing on.
OKAY, those are 5 quick tips to help you decide what to sell. We go into much
greater detail in my Workshop and Mentoring Program, but this’ll get you started
down the right road. 
)
We’ve covered the basics of getting legal. There are
of course other issues that you’ll come up against in
your own business, which is just one of the many
reasons I offer my Personal EBiz Workshop and
Mentoring program.
Remember, during the next 10 Days, I’m discounting
the Program by an additional $50 for the first 50 people
who Register for July!
Hope this helps…
Chris Malta
www.ChrisMalta.com
888-8ChrisM
==========================
chrismalta.com/workshops
