The Secret To Selling Stuff Online (How To Avoid The Crash And Burn)

There is no secret to selling stuff online. You already know how it works.

You just don’t believe it.

To sell stuff online, you need people looking at your site. The more people look at your site, the more stuff you sell. If you sell to 1% of the people who visit your site and you have 100 people a day see it, then you’ll sell once a day. If you have 10,000 people a day see it, then you’ll sell 100 times a day. Simple, right?

More traffic equals more sales.

How do you get that traffic? Either directly or from referring sites or from search engines. Those are the only ways that someone can get to your site.

1. Directly: They type in your URL because you asked them to, they saw a poster on a bus, or their friend remembered your URL from that craft fair that you attended, and told them about it.

2. Referring sites: Someone else dug your stuff so much that they threw up a link to your site. Maybe they blogged about it. Maybe they put it in their sidebar on their site. Maybe you are listed in a directory of awesome sites. Some site, somewhere on the Internet, posted a link to your site and someone clicked on it.

3. Search engines: Someone searched for a keyword or a phrase. Somehow, the search engines thinks that your page is a good match for that keyword or phrase, so they list your page in the search results. If you are the first one listed, or at least you are towards the top, and the description seems to be what that searcher is looking for, then they click on your link and end up at your page.

How to increase traffic in each way?

1. Direct – Pay for more posters on buses. Hand out your business card on street corners. Not the best use of funds and probably not going to be the greatest amount of traffic.

2. Write cool stuff and ask people to link. Link to other people’s sites. They’ll be compelled to link back. If you have good, solid content, then they might link just because it’s good, solid content. If you have content that makes someone say “Dude! Check this out!”, then people will link to it. Good headlines help. Lists are good. Bottom line is that if you post more content, there’s more chance that people will link to it. Chances are that some of it has to be good, right?

3. Search engines: Ah… This is where you can make things happen. Because we have a pretty good idea how search engines rate pages and sites, we have a fighting chance of making this method work for us.

Since there are books and seminars and web sties offering a huge amount of information on SEO, I’ll just give you the simple, distilled down version.

Internal optimization is when you make your site the best it can be for your keywords. Yes, the first step is to decide on your keywords. Then write pages based on each keyword or phrase. Use keywords in titles and links to other pages. Link to other pages. Make your keyword obvious on the site. When people look at your site, they should think “HUmm…That site is about (insert keyword here).

External optimization is an ongoing struggle to get more links to your site. There are nuances to which links are better or worth more than others, but if you just concentrate on getting links from other sites to your site, that’s all that matters.

How do you get links to your site? Leave comments on other web sites. Go to relevant sites and read their posts, then leave reasonable comments. Each comment should have a link back to your site. Post in forums with a link to your site in your “signature”. Every forum post is then a link back to your site. Write an article and post it in an article directory with a link back to your site.

You could always build a relationship with someone enough to ask for them to exchange links with you or to just link back to you.

You could ask people on your mailing list to link to you. Ask people to sign up to your list and mail them something periodically. If you give them cool stuff, then they will be aware of your posts and perhaps link to something from their own sites.

The take away from all of this is to post in your blog regularly and leave comments. More blog posts equals more content for users to link to and for search engines to point at. More comments equals more links to your site, so search engines give you more authority and higher search ranking.

If you’ve read this far, I’m going to give you the REAL secret to selling stuff online; perseverance.

Most people I’ve talked to about selling stuff online get all excited about it. They post 4 posts in the first week and leave comments on 10 blogs. The second week, it’s a little less. Two months later they’ve spent more time playing Farmville on Facebook than they have reading blogs and leaving comments. Their last post was over a month ago.

They get discouraged and give up. Frustrated and confused, they wander off, not knowing what to do next.

I feel your pain. You are not alone. Please leave me a comment, so I’ll feel good about myself.

The trick is to keep your head down and move forward. No matter how it feels, no matter how frustrated you are, keep moving forward. It will pay off after a while.

To give you the the most simple directions I can, if you want step by step directions, you should write a blog post at least once a week and twice would be better. Keep a schedule. Do it every Sunday and Thursday. No matter what.

Then leave at least 10 comments on blogs each week. This can be done in one big blog sitting or just write two a day. Search http://www.technorati.com/ for your keywords and see who else is talking about them. Read their post and leave a comment. Be cool and related to the topic. (I actually got a comment one time that basically said “I didn’t read your post, but I was wondering if you could help me with my question.”, which, of course, was answered in the post if they had read it.) Don’t be a jerk.

Is that too much to ask? Does that sound like it is doable? 2 posts a week and 10 comments a week. That’s all we ask.

Now, go forth and multiply.