I need direction! Think you can advise? (fee, wholesale, sales)

[purposeproduct]

I just started an online business. I keep looking for forums that talk about what people did to get there business moving but I'm not finding it. So if you have ANY ideas on what I can do to be successful in my endeavors, I would appreciate it. Even if you don't have any experience because frankly I don't! Thanks for you feedback.

[joe from dayton]

It would be helpful to know what your business is.

[Mircea]

Originally Posted by purposeproduct

I just started an online business. I keep looking for forums that talk about what people did to get there business moving but I'm not finding it. So if you have ANY ideas on what I can do to be successful in my endeavors, I would appreciate it. Even if you don't have any experience because frankly I don't! Thanks for you feedback.

If you want my feedback, then I would say your business will fail miserably since you posted this in the wrong forum.

Being unable to distinguish between the Business, Finance & Investing sub-forum and the "Survival" sub-form poses an insurmountable obstacle to success.

Advising...

Mircea

[mysticaltyger]

Thank you for using the word "advise" correctly!

[TechGromit]

Originally Posted by purposeproduct

I just started an online business. I keep looking for forums that talk about what people did to get there business moving but I'm not finding it. So if you have ANY ideas on what I can do to be successful in my endeavors, I would appreciate it. Even if you don't have any experience because frankly I don't! Thanks for you feedback.

It would greatly depend on what kind of business your running. Let's take Porn for example, at one time it was possible for anyone to create an website and make a few bucks from selling subscriptions, but the market is so saturated now that it's virtually impossible to start a new business and make enough to even cover web site hosting costs. I guess if you invested millions you could force your way into the market, but I don't know how successful you would be.

Having an idea what kind of business your running, would give a better idea of the advise to provide. Are you selling products? Services? Access to information? Basically your looking for expose for your business. There ways to get your name out there, not all of them successful. Once example would be search engines would look for the number of hits on a keyword and rate your website higher in value (closer to the top of the search list) for the user. This is usually done by adding keywords to your webpages, for example if your selling fish, you would type in Salmon, Cod, Tuna, over and over again as part of your web pages, the search engines would see this, count them and rate your page as a much more likely match for what the user is searching for. The text would be invisible (same color as the background page) so the page wouldn't look like cluttered crap when the user is viewing the page. This of course requires the ability to write your own HTTP code rather than relaying on website hosting services to do it for you.

[Wartrace]

I think you may have "jumped the gun" by opening before you considered SEO marketing and had a plan to drive traffic to your store.

The term "online business" is very vague- Is it a true e-store competing for page ranking on Google or are you selling stuff on E-bay?

First thing I would do if I were you is to research the importance of keywords. I saw a study that indicated the top listing in Google generally receives 42% of the traffic for a specific keyword. The top ten listings receive somewhere in the area of 97% of the traffic while the rest share the remaining 3%. Unless you target a keyword you can push to the front page of Google using SEO you are not likely to be too busy.

The number one mistake people make is deciding what they "want to" sell and build up a business around that. The correct way to approach it is asking yourself "What product do I have a reasonable chance of competing in?" . Proper keyword research will tell you everything you need to know.

I first started thinking about e-commerce three months ago and I am still refining my product ideas. I have a rough idea of what I am going to target but I am digging in deeper. It makes no sense to attempt to sell something if you don't have a chance of making it to page one.

If you are attempting E-Bay you need to take advantage of the incredible amount of information related to selling there. I personally discarded the idea of E-Bay selling due to the 10.5% fee on all sales E-bay charges. I was also turned off by the "price sensitivity" of the E-Bay market. Unless you can buy product at the absolute lowest wholesale pricing you will have difficulty competing against those that DO buy closeout/bulk wholesale.

I think you need to do a lot more research on dedicated e-commerce forms. One word of warning- be very wary about buying "programs" or "systems" that promise you they can make you successful- there are plenty of free resources out there if you are willing to invest the time needed to learn.

[mainebrokerman]

online start ups are all in marketing-the internet offers much free social marketing from facebook, to youtube, to tweeting

Im waiting for someone to write a book called parasite marketing for online businesses, and list everywhere/everything they can do at no cost-and use of "tags" to parasite off the larger websites


also consider-you dont want to be the billionth other seller on the internet-youve got to be different
put a different spin on what yer selling.

for example- I want to sell-I'll pick something very general, and say knives-well what type of knife and why shold someone buy it?

look at all the others that are selling knives to learn from them, then search-thats right search-see where knives pop up in conversations-blogs and forums, for example- hunters like knives- sign up on all the free hunter forums you can find and start selling.
make up youtube videos on the uses of your knives
have a facebook page with your knives all over them
sign on "linked in" and push
create a blog
start tweeting sign up to every chef website you can-chef's, meatcutters, use knives
sell them on ebay,amazon, and anywhere else you can for free-have testimonial videos

[20yrsinBranson]

Originally Posted by mysticaltyger

Thank you for using the word "advise" correctly!

Now if we can just get the "their - there" thing squared away....

20yrsinBranson

[Hemlock140]

People who are successful selling on the internet these days are those that already have a successful business, and use online sales as a away of reaching more people while offering better prices. Just about anything once could want is available from the internet now, so unless you have something really unique and desirable it's going to be hard to compete with all of the many established people that already have great positioning on the search engines.

[NJ Brazen_3133]

Now this is somewhat related to the OP:

Does anyone know how the first few months or years were like for Jeff Bezos trying to sell books online? Did he just buy all the latest titles, and keep them in his house basement, attic etc, while he worked as an exec at another company, and just let his wife handle the orders? How did he know what books were going to sell? Who did he purchase from to get a cheap enough price to make him more competitive than the brick and mortar.

Also sometimes you can choose an audience to cater with a service, instead of choosing a product. Like for example Ebay. Ebay does not sell any particular item, but instead targets the garage sale, flea market, yard sale, junk sale crowd and gives the ability to reach people who cant attend their garage sale, flea market, yard sale, or junk sale. I for one will never understand people who buy junk. I guess there is a whole lot of people who do however.