Let’s face it; everyone wants to make money online.
You’re probably reading this article because you’re in the same boat as everyone else. The bills aren’t going to pay itself so earning money online sounds like a great way of making money while sitting in your computer and working from home.
According to online marketing guru Neil Patel, one-third of 2017 estimated that $353.68 billion in sales actually came from the mobile phone, so the opportunity to make money these days is pretty much limitless.
Below are three ways to get started in the lucrative industry of building a mobile online storefront.
1. Create an eBay store
eBay is hands down one of the largest online marketplaces in the world so if you still haven’t heard of it; you must be living under a rock.
According to Statista, eBay currently has over 170 million active users, so it’s a great place to start an online store. You can create an account on eBay for free, but you need to pay extra if you want to set up a store.
One of the advantages of selling on eBay is that there’s instant trust. eBay customers have protection against scams and lousy service so having eBay act as a third-party middle person makes customers feel a lot safer buying from new sellers even if they’ve never heard of them.
eBay also gives you the option to auction which means you can put your products up for auction to get a much higher price. It’s extremely “search engine friendly” which means that there’s a better chance of people finding your listing while searching on Google without you needing to build a website. It has lower fees – Amazon usually charges about 15% per sale while eBay only charges 10% before its fixed-price fees.
The only problem I see with eBay is that since eBay’s has such a huge market, the competition is fierce. Since its system is also built to favor the buyer more than the seller, a dodgy buyer can ruin a seller’s reputation just like that.
2. Create an Amazon account
Amazon is another excellent website to set up a seller account because it has a base of more than 300 million active customer accounts and more than 197 million monthly unique visitors. There are two types of Amazon seller accounts, and that’s “Fulfilled by Amazon” (FBA) and “Fulfilled by Merchant” (FBM). FBM sellers ship directly to customers while FBA sellers ship to Amazon distribution centers, which then sends the products to buyers. FBA sellers tend to get more benefit because Only FBA sellers can list Prime-eligible items and they tend to rank at the top of search results.
One good reason to sell on Amazon is that it’s one of the most trusted e-commerce websites of all time. Just being a seller on Amazon will automatically give you more sales than if you were not in it because Amazon has a customer base that trusts it a lot and are prepared to spend. Amazon is also the best when it comes to upselling which is usually adding an extra product as part of a bundle and cross-selling, which is when you recommend that your customer buy another product that complements their existing purchase.
Another positive thing about Amazon is that it has hundreds and thousands of affiliates who will refer traffic to your online store as long as you are selling items within their niche and the number of goods and services that are offered in Amazon are unrivaled by any other marketplace online.
The big disadvantage I see on Amazon is that if you want your product to sell on Amazon, your product has to rank on Amazon.
If someone is looking for your product on Amazon, if they try to search for your product on Amazon and your product isn’t ranking well, people will never see it. Which means that they’ll never buy it, and your stock will fail to make any money.
You have to look at Amazon and see it as a massive search engine. It’s quite possibly the world’s largest product search engine. Amazon is probably a more effective search engine than Google when it comes to selling physical products on the Internet because according to online guru Neil Patel, Amazon has three times more search volume for products than Google does.
Unfortunately, even if the potential to make money from Amazon is massive, it also follows an algorithm just like Google. This algorithm is what tells Amazon of what products should show up on the first page, second page, third page, etc..
Amazon is a business so it wants to make the most money possible which means that it will increase the rank of products that will provide the highest revenue.
Some of most crucial Amazon ranking factors are Product title and keyword, Sales volume, Quantity and quality of reviews, Image quality and number, Product detail click-through rates, Impressions, Price, Availability, Selection, Seller authority, Inventory, Referral path, Conversion rates and Customer sales history.
So if you want to rank in Amazon, then you need to please its algorithm, so you need to optimize your product listing. So how do you optimize your product listing? Here are a few tips: create the correct product title by making sure your main keyword is contained within it, provide high-resolution photos of your products to entice buyers, create a compelling bullet point description of your product, choose the right price that’s competitive next to other sellers of the same product and collect as many positive reviews as you possibly can.
3. Create an e-commerce website
Although it’s much easier to sell via established online stores like Amazon or E-bay – if an issue arises and these websites decided to remove you and ban you from its platform, then you have to start all over again.
If you have your own website, you’ll have control over everything, but then the downside is that you just need to work twice as hard on getting more traffic to your website.
There are a number of good platforms to build your website on such as WooCommerce which is a great e-commerce platform for WordPress, but I highly recommend Shopify – it’s perfect to host an e-commerce site because you don’t need coding skills to create a Shopify site.
Shopify has pretty much everything you need to set up your online store such as hosting, a web domain, payment gateways, etc.. just about all of the things you’ll require. It’s the most credible of its kind and has been used by a number of entrepreneurs to make thousands or even millions almost entirely passively. Here are five tips that are going to actually help you make money from Shopify.
– Make a decent offer. If you want more people to buy your product then you need to provide a better offer. A little discount or an extra item wouldn’t hurt because it’ll put you ahead of other sellers out there.
– You need to find a product that has a decent profit margin for you to make money from because realistically, it will take a while before you start earning consistently. Therefore, earning a dollar or two per product may not be worth your time. Unless you have money to burn, then I suggest really looking into your pricing.
– Capture your customer’s emails. Realistically, people won’t really buy anything yet if it’s the first time for them to visit your website so it’s essential for you to capture their emails so that later on you can encourage them to revisit your site. The most effective way of obtaining people’s emails is to offer something that appears to be expensive but is actually cheap. Once you’ve captured their emails, send them a reminder once in a while that your website still exists. Try not to make your email look like an advertisement – make it look like you just want to let them know you’re still around and try to strike a conversation with them to get an idea of what they need.
Now if you want to make serious money from your online store, below are six killer ways to do it:
Use Google Analytics to get to know your customers
Setting up an online store without a way to track down your progress is a set up for failure. Google Analytics is the best place to start if you’re looking into understanding your customers because it can provide you with very detailed information about your audience and it’s free.
Get active in online forums
Most online marketers would know that backlinks are one of the most significant foundations of SEO. The more links you have from reputable sites, the more Google favors your website because these inbound links tell Google that you’re an authority site.
One of the best ways to get backlinks is to start participating in forums. Two of the most reputable online forums are Quora and Reddit. Quora, similar to Yahoo Answers is a question-and-answer forum known for giving out expert answers to various questions.
Reddit is one of the most popular forums out there and is an excellent traffic driver for various websites. Just be careful with Reddit though because it has a crowd that’s relatively hard to please. If you want to participate in these online forums, try to comment on topics related to your industry and try not to directly advertise your business. Instead, focus on providing information that can be useful for the audience so you can build authority and then they would be more inclined to visit your website.
Create a blog
If you want to generate traffic and leads to your website, then the best thing to do is start a blog that is related to your niche. A site that has a blog will always get more eyeballs than a website without one because blogs are always lingering online just waiting for their customers to find them. The more you blog, the more traffic you’ll drive to your website. But you need to keep in mind that your blog posts need to be of value otherwise nobody would read it.
Get active on social media
Most businesses use social media marketing to boost their business because they know for a fact that everyone is on social media, so you need to use it to your advantage.
However, not all businesses with a social media strategy will have the same positive results. Some companies will thrive while some won’t. It all boils down to three words: social media engagement. If your business can’t get its audience to engage on social media, then you’ll be missing out big time.
Keep in mind that you don’t want to seem like a pesky and pushy salesperson online. If you want to improve engagement on social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest, you need to start a conversation with your audience and get to know them on a personal level. You also need to post consistently, but in saying that you need to create quality posts rather than focusing on releasing a number of posts and hoping for some kind of positive result. You also need to understand what sort of content your audience responds to; you need to pick the right time to post your content and engage with your audience by responding to comments and likes.
Create a YouTube channel
For those who don’t know, Google owns YouTube which is a guarantee that it’s going to appear in search results. Video marketing has become a crucial part of digital marketing because almost 50% of Internet users look for videos related to their purchases before visiting an actual store. Big companies are always trying to find new ways to use YouTube to boost their brand because they know for a fact what it can do for their business. Keep in mind that there’s also the option of using YouTube live-streaming functionality that is similar to Facebook Live.
Establish an email list
Email is still one of the most popular marketing communication methods because every person on your email list receives an email the same way that they would receive a physical mail. Most people check their email several times a day, and it’s also a cheap yet well-documented way of reaching someone. Online services such as MailChimp and Constant Contact are two one of the most popular options so if you want to create an email list then you need to look at these two.
In Conclusion
Following these tips doesn’t guarantee success, but then everything in life is a risk right?
However, if you put in the time and build it all the right way, it’ll all work out so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work the first time – keep trying and testing and eventually, you’ll find success.