Selling physical products online (part 1 of 2)
Most of the time Internet Marketers talk about how to sell products that deal with, well, Internet Marketing. I've been guilty of that, too, although for some time now my focus has been on promoting products that either help you create content or help get you ranked in the search engines.
I thought you might like to hear about how one guy (my brother Ted) runs a successful business online selling real-world physical products: porch swings. And man does he sell some porch swings! Last month alone he sold $42,848.31 in porch swings out of a small shop he has in his back yard.
Find that hard to believe? Here's a link to his May 2009 PayPal statement (he does all his business through PayPal):
Click here to see his PayPal statement for May
That kind of success begs the question: how does he do it!?! Let me start off my answer by telling you what he doesn't do.
No Gurus Involved
First of all (and I may be shooting myself in the foot here), Ted has never read any Internet Marketing courses. He's not invested time or money in any of the flood of material out there by self-proclaimed "gurus." He was seriously turned off by the hype and obviously overblown promises, so he decided to do things for himself.
Really, to sell anything online, you only need to know how to do three things:
- How to find a great product that's in demand to sell.
- How to price your product in order to get it to sell very well.
- How to get traffic to your web site so you can start making sales.
Ted took the time over the last three and a half years to figure out how to accomplish all three of those things very well. Let's talk about each one.
Finding A Great In-Demand Product
For the most part, Ted makes his own porch swings in his backyard shop. When he gets too many orders, he offloads some of those orders to another company in a neighboring town — but he mostly builds them himself.
He's not a trained, professional carpenter. He's just a guy who took up the hobby of woodworking and got really good at it.
So naturally, when it came time for him to find an in-demand product, he leaned toward something he could build himself. He used eBay to determine what products were selling like hot cakes, found one he could build and started selling it himself.
It's hardly a requirement that you manufacture your own product. Although the profit margins are generally higher, there are no doubt plenty of folks in your area who have quality physical products but a dismal web presence. Most "mom and pop shops" have a web site but few get any real traffic. Find these shops and resell their products!
Pricing Your Product
Regular folks who are looking to buy products online are very price conscious — especially in this economy. Ted discovered this early on. So he worked hard to find ways to cut his costs and stay competitive. One of his best tricks allows him to undercut his competition because he's a small business owner and not a "big dog" in the industry.
Being a small business owner has certain advantages in keeping overhead down: fewer employees, lower operating costs, etc. So find ways to keep your price lower than the other guy and you can expect much greater success online.
Getting Traffic to Your Site
Of course, no matter how in-demand your product is, or how low your price is, if you've got no traffic you'll get no sales! So you have to learn how to drive traffic to your site.
Although Ted is now getting most of his traffic from Google (thanks to yours truly–more on how I did that for him coming up in my next blog post), for the first year and a half Ted was doing great without getting hardly any search engine traffic at all! He used pay-per-click almost exclusively.
Ted did not, however, use AdWords to drive traffic to his site. Too expensive, he said. He found alternative sites that he could buy traffic from — again, keeping his costs lower so he could price his products better than the competition.
So if you're looking to sell physical products, try to think outside of the box and find second-tier pay-per-click sites to advertise in.
Coming Next Post: Ranking in Google to Sell Porch Swings
As I said, although Ted did great using pay-per-click traffic to sell his porch swings, most of his traffic comes from Google now. That really helps him cut costs because his traffic is virtually free. My next blog post will talk about the steps I took to get him the rankings in Google he needed to get the razor-targeted traffic that launched his business to the serious six-figure business it's become.
Coming this Monday, June 29th, you'll have the opportunity to get all of the details about how Ted found an in-demand product, how he cuts costs as a small business to price himself better than his competition, as well as what second-tier pay-per-click sites he used to sell his porch swings. Look for more information on that in the next blog post as well as in an upcoming email.
Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
