Creating revenue by selling products online
Your web site is open 24 hours per day, every day and a wonderful opportunity to generate revenue for you. The value of sales made on the Internet is increasing every year and your most able competitors will be seeking to increase their online sales volumes. How profitable will your business be if you can add an extra ten percent to your sales revenue at little incremental cost.
The first challenge for your web site is to publicise the products and services that you offer. When you have established the Internet as a sales channel for your services you can then think of developing an Affiliate programme whereby you can sell your products through partner sites in addition to your own site.
Whilst the products sold to your site visitors could be the ones in your catalogue this is not the only opportunity. Indeed there will be many times when the solution to a visitors current need is not one of the products or services that you offer through your business.
An advantage of operating online is that it facilitates partnership opportunities with other businesses enabling you to offer the right solution at the right time. This can be through direct arrangements to promote partner products or through the publication of contextual based advertising for a commission payment.
In summary there are four main ways in which you can generate revenue on the Internet relating to product sales.
1. Selling your own products and services
The first step. Put your product catalog online with payment and fulfillment functionality and expand your sales channels without employing additional salesmen.
2. Develop an Affiliate program
If you have products and services which are proven online you can join an Affiliate Network and develop an Affiliate programme whereby other businesses can apply to sell your products. If you approve them they introduce customers to you through their web site and you pay commission to them for each sale made.
3. Selling partners products
The reverse of the above is where you join another Affiliate programme and promote a partners products through your site.
4. Offering contextual based advertising
This final option is relatively new and involves you carrying contextual advertising within your site. The search engines have become so sophisticated that Google and Yahoo are able to display adverts within your site which are targeted to the content of the page and hence very relevant to your visitor.
The articles below describe these opportunities in more detail.
