Profiting 102


Creating your Profiting Machine

In Profiting 101 we discussed where to begin. How to find your niche. By now you should have a domain name that is clearly focused on what the identity of your niche is. Let's say that you absolutely love widgets! You decided on the domain, iluvwidgets.com. Congratulations, that domain describes your business concept perfectly! Now you need to create your web site, or as I like to call it, your "Profiting Machine." Web site building is an extremely complex subject and major corporations spend literally millions hiring the absolute best to build their websites. Web-sites are built with code called HTML, and of course people can spend their entire lives learning this code and practicing it. For your purposes, this is of course, impractical. There are many tools available to the novice, and usually, if you bought your domain through a good quality company, they will offer hosting and web-building tools for either free, or very cheap. Even if this is not the case there is an abundance of open source applications that will fit the bill perfectly. Drumal and Joomla are two examples of this. Both of these have very helpful and informative forums where you can get support if you have any issues. Take the time to learn, and build a quality site. Aesthetic appeal is almost as important as content, when it comes to connecting to your audience.

The Next Step

By this time you have set up your website, or "Profiting Machine." But now the question remains...how are you going to make money from widgets? Will you sell widgets? Will you provide information about widgets?

This depends on one important factor. Do you already have a widget business? If you already own a widget business then I would assume you have the basic knowledge of business operation. You know how to manage your employees, handle accounting, keep track of inventory, provide customer service, and you probably have a basic understanding of marketing. For you, in this case, going online with your widget store might be fairly easy because you already have inventory and you would only need to create your website, market your new web-store, and handle online payments. Well, ok. Maybe not easy, but certainly more doable than building your original, real-life widget business.

Moving Product

To make things even simpler, it is possible to buy pre-packadged stores that make selling widgets online very easy. Yahoo and Ebay are two examples of this. Yahoo offers a basic store front for $39 monthly. The advantage of this is that Yahoo is such a well established company that associating with them automatically gives you some street cred. There are disadvantages as well, of course. You will be required to pay a certain percentage of your sales to Yahoo in order to run your business. Whether the disadvantages are worth it all comes down to how much of a budget you are working with and how much volume you will sell. If you currently cant afford the software and tools necessary to start up your very own secure online store, this might be a viable option for you. Yahoo also offers higher levels of store options, and again, it all comes down to making decisions based on your current financial situation.

Ebay is another great example of a way to get into the game of selling actual products online. Ebay offers very affordable rates on stores in terms of listing your products and closing your sales. In fact, they are much less than what it would cost you to actually market the same products in an Ebay auction. The drawback though, is that you will have to pay monthly fees for your store. If you plan to do a lot of selling this could be a great option for you, but only if you have a product to sell. Many people do make a living from actual Ebay auctions, but the scope of this topic is outside of this particular article. Click here to find out how this is actually done.

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