Business models such as affiliate marketing and drop shipping allow anyone to set up a website and sell other people’s products. Or, if you have your own products, you can sell them from a website too.

Digital products are particularly good because they can be sold internationally without any postage or handling fees. Digital affiliate products also carry much larger commissions typically than physical products.

The simplest way to sell from a website is to sell other people’s products and services. This is a business model called affiliate marketing. Anyone can benefit from affiliate sales if they learn how to set up a website with affiliate products, and promote it. Here’s how.

How To Set Up A Website To Sell Products

There’s all kinds of platforms which help you set up an eCommerce store. That store can then easily be monetised with affiliate products. You can find affiliate products in a number of places online, but one of the best known affiliate websites is Amazon. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote any number of products from their website.

Here’s a few of the platforms you can easily use for free to set up an online store:

• Weebly – is a free website building platform
• Shopify – lets you tailor make a website and interface with drop shipping companies, digital products or affiliate products you choose
• PayHip – Payhip lets you set up digital products, take payments etc.
• Podia – Similar to Payhip, an eCommerce store builder)

Amazon, though isn’t the best choice for affiliates because their commission levels are so low. Digital products pay far more and the most profitable digital products are those which carry large commissions and a large price, or offer recurring payments. See also the most profitable items to sell on Amazon.

How To Set Up A Website To Sell Products: Traffic

Setting up a monetised website is actually the easiest part of the process of selling online. Drag and drop platforms make this very straight forward and many platforms are completely free to use. Affiliate programs allow you to promote any number of products too from your site. Shipping, handing, customer service and returns are all handled by the product owners. So, as an affiliate or third party referrer, your only job is to send customers through your affiliate links on your website.

Having set up a website and monetised it with products, can you just sit back and wait for the money to roll in? If only this were true! The truth is rather less joyful! Online platforms will sell you this ability before letting you know there’s a huge big catch! That catch is traffic. 

Without visitors your site will sell exactly nothing. So if you only set up your site and put products in it, you won’t get any sales. The most important part of online selling is the finding of customers. To do that you need to send targeted visitors to your website. There’s a couple of main ways to do this:

• Build content and rank your site on Google (and other search engines) for free traffic
• Pay for traffic with an online advertising platform such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc.

How To Set Up A Website To Sell Products: Paid Or Free?

Of course free traffic sounds like a good option when faced with advertising costs. But free traffic costs you in another way – your time. In order to get free traffic from the search engines, you’ll need to create and promote a lot of content on your website. This takes time, and there’s also thousands of other websites competing for a slice of the pie too. There’s over 600 million bloggers on the internet who are all attempting to get free traffic through their blogs!

Another option for free traffic is to create a YouTube channel, or use one of the other social media platforms to upload content to. You can then link your channel to your website.

Paid traffic is fast, but it costs money of course. Once you have a paid marketing campaign which is profitable, you can also scale up very easily by turning up your budget. You can’t do this with organic marketing methods such as blogging or video blogging.

Building A Niche Website For Free Traffic

Another option is to build an information website around your topic to help give yourself an advantage with the search engines. These are known as niche websites and they are typically built around specific keywords to help them rank in the SERPS – search engine results pages. This can be a good place to start if you’re thinking of building a monetised website and want free traffic.

Before you begin, think about the topic you want to build your site in. Ideally choose a topic which you have a passion for, because you’ll need to create a lot of content in it. There’s nothing worse than building a blog on a topic you have no interest in. But if you love your topic, it will be a joy to work on it and this means you’ll be able to create a lot more content more easily.

Once you have identified your blog topic, use Google’s free keyword planner tool to brainstorm keywords in your niche. Zone in one a good keyword to build your site around. Ideally your keyword should have a good monthly search volume and not much competition on Google. Checkout this article “how to build a niche website” for more on this topic.

Paid Traffic – What You Should Know

Depending on the products you have in your digital store, you may choose to opt for a free marketing method (such as blogging) or to use paid advertising, such as Google Adwords. There are of course other ways you can advertise your store, through using social media, building content, SEO (search engine optimisation), link building etc. But the main two are organic or paid. With a paid strategy you need to make sure you are going to be able to recoup your advertising dollars when you make a sale. Otherwise, it can be an expensive exercise!

The cost of running paid advertising can be prohibitive, especially if your products are low valued ones. If, for example, you’re selling Amazon products from your site, you should know you’ll likely only make a small percentage of the sale (usually between 1% and 10%, depending on the products). This could mean that paid marketing is out of the question, unless you choose your products carefully.

With a high ticket offering, such as a digital training course, or a subscription product, you stand to earn more from a sale than a low value physical offering. This might mean paid marketing is more doable. See also the most profitable digital products.

Email Marketing – The “Secret” Key To Online Marketing

Amazon is known to most consumers and a recent study showed that 89% of consumers will likely buy from the site (see this article on Forbes). But this also means they won’t typically buy from a strange website they are unfamiliar with (like yours!).

Very few of your visitors will buy from you on their first visit and most of your visitors will leave without ever returning with customers needing between 6-8 touch points typically before they make a purchase. This means running ads can get very expensive when most of your website visitors don’t buy. Spending heaps of time on creating content can all be for nothing too! But a secret of successful online marketers is to sell their digital products via email. Email marketing is the secret “key” of online eCommerce!

Particularly for digital products, email marketing works. Digital products tend to be less tangible than physical products. So they take a little more understanding before someone will commit to buy. See also best way to sell digital downloads.

Email marketing works because it allows website owners to collect emails of their visitors and follow up with email messages. If you send useful and informative messages, your subscribers are much more likely to open them and respond. With email marketing, the short visit of a few minutes on a website can be dramatically extended to days, weeks and even months and years.

How To Set Up Email Marketing On A Website

Setting up an email marketing campaign is easy. Simply use an autoresponder to paste some code on your website which creates an opt in form. Offer something valuable to your visitors in exchange for their details. When your visitors enter their email, they join a database and you can automate email messages to be sent out. Sell products through your emails.

One of the keys to successful email marketing is to offer huge value in your emails. Rather than just pushing your products, your emails should in themselves give some value. Otherwise, people won’t sign up to your list, or open your emails for very long.

Ultimately email marketing is about building relationships with your subscribers over a long time period than is possible on a website. With an email list of tens or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers, you can see how a single email can make many sales with the right people on your list and the right products to sell. See also most profitable digital products for the best products to choose.

Summary

As you can see, there’s quite a lot to setting up a website to sell products successfully. One of the key elements is getting people to your website. Without traffic, you won’t sell even the best of products. Targeted web traffic is something to consider too. Not all website traffic is equal, and many visitors won’t be looking for the products you have to sell. By understanding who your perfect website visitor is, (or your “customer avatar“), you’re in a much better position to target those kinds of people with your marketing efforts.

Once you learn how to align your products with the right targeted audience, you can build a marketing strategy which works and brings customers in like clockwork. Ultimately selling products on a website can give you a nice passive income, if you put in the work beforehand.

Your first online sale is a massive milestone and deserves celebrating. Each small step towards making online sales is another step towards escaping the need for a job, financial independence and more time and geographical freedom!

If you want to learn more about building an online business from scratch, sign up on this website for the free video series, or join the webinar by clicking on the image below:

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