Easiest And Quickest Way To Be An Online Shopkeeper
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Easiest and Quickest Way to Be an Online Shopkeeper
Have you caught the bug to be your own boss, or simply want to supplement your income? Be an online shopkeeper and you can earn your way out of debt. I have used CafePress as a template for the following tutorial, but there are hundreds of sites that have similar programs with different topics. As an introduction, CafePress is a turnkey business where you can customize your own t-shirts (upload your own art) and sell them through a site that you design and they host. This is done without the need to warehouse the product or pay an exorbitant fee. They print on-demand for different things, and aren’t limited at tees per se. You simply make money based on commissions of sales, and the hard stuff is taken care of for you. Disclaimer: I am not in any way associated or affiliated with CafePress.
Step One: Design
Step Two: Upload to CarePress
Step Three: Choose From Their Product Lines
Easy enough? Here are some tactics you should keep in mind in order to be profitable:
Use graphic design and editing tools to make high-resolution images. You don’t want to have low quality products, you won’t stay in business.
There are thousands of products to choose from, including PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro. The good news is that there hare free tutorials available everywhere on the web for these programs. Corel is another heavy-hitter that is available. Or you can save some money with a program called GIMP, since it is free software available online. It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and runs on various operating systems and offers multiple languages.
Upgrade to premium. Self-explanatory, but very quickly, the basic and free shops offer very little by way of flexibility. Sure, you can get started on a free site, but of course the premium shops offer more than one choice of each product. There is limitless availability of products, customization and marketing aids. Get started on the basic level to try things out and earn some income that you can invest in the upgrade. Make that a goal.
SEO descriptions work for you. The search engines use keyword searches to rank sites and pages. At the minimum, you should check out Google’s keyword tool for the products you are offering, and find a niche keyword that you can rank for. I use a tool called Micro Niche Finder, which may be of service to you in your quest to be an online shopkeeper. If you try to rank for a saturated keyword, you won’t rank very high, if ever. Check out MNF or similar tools, which will tell you if a keyword is competitive. A hint would be if there are over 10,000 searches per month for a particular keyword, you’ll have difficulty ranking. For further help, before you get started, check out CafePress’s tutorial on SEO (search engine optimization).
Make use of the affiliate program. Your commissions are 20% as an affiliate, so check out the information they have available on how to get started as an affiliate. You won’t be disappointed you did.
Organize your site well! You don’t want a mish-mash, cluttered look that doesn’t make sense. Organize your site by product, consider making a site for each type of product, and use the custom shop templates to maintain an organized site that works well and makes sense to your customers.
Other sites that offer this type of click-and-sell format are Etsy (if you have handcrafted goods to sell), Amazon and eBay (their traffic is your benefit, but watch the fee structure!), and Giftamax which is similar to CAFE PRESS. One thing to watch out for is monthly fees and hidden fees, and if you decide to do this on your own, you can. The disadvantage is the initial investment and the fact that you need so many pieces of software it can be daunting. The pre-made sites are a great place to be an online shopkeeper, as they do that hard work for you. If you want to do your own thing from scratch, I’d recommend you check out CafePress and http://ShopkeeperUSA.com or similar sites, save up some development money (about $5-6,000), and then give it a go. I wouldn’t recommend that you try this on your own up front, however, as generating traffic to a new site is a job in itself. Good luck!
Dan Marx provides creative business services for startups on how to start a business on the Internet and make money. Did you find this article helpful? You can find out a lot more by going to http://DM-Creative.com where you find ideas, products and services geared toward making money online with an ecommerce Web Store.?
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