Now you still have the issue that your prices can’t be much lower than other sites because you have a middleman that is stopping you from getting the lowest prices. There are plenty of other people out there who are indeed selling the products, but they are going about it in a way that is put together to really promote their site and knowledge, and network their selves online. Services like twitter, digg, facebook, myspace (not as much anymore because the followers have moved on to bigger and better services), and stumbleupon will make it possible for your site to get exposure. The best part about these services is that they do not cost you any monetary value. They will however cost you time. Time, and constancy needs to be part of your efforts with these services. The average person who spreads an article or story can really only get 5 or 6 views at the most if they do not have much presence online when they use some of the affor mentioned services to publicize their site. The more people you connect to, the more that number of views will go up each time a story is shared. It’s a simple equation, and as you start to use the services you will see how people achieve this. URL shorteners have really helped these types of startups out as well. You’ll start to see that the more connections and introductions you have maken on the social services the more your site exposure will increase.

Now with a following you can begin to promote the types of products that are going for a similar price elsewhere. People will have a relationship built with you and will feel more comfortable with purchasing from you. Having an eye catching site really helps matters along. This is a nice segway to option 3 from above, about promoting yourself online. This will not be the easiest way to make money initially, and really the only thing you can do at first is try to work out advertising deals or use services like Google AdSense or BidVertiser and at least get paid for the traffic that you do have (once your venue is established). If you’re promoting yourself and your thoughts on an industry or topic – a blog is probably all you need to accomplish this. Again here are many free options that will allow you to do this. Anyone who has been successful with this will tell you that using WordPress will offer you the most flexibility and help you distinguish your blog from the millions of others. Back to options 1 and 2 from above, using a blog to help promote your store online or products will be very helpful in driving purchases. It is important to remember that your messages must be consistent, and done tastefully in a way that people will actually want to trust you. After all, they will probably never meet you face to face.

There are going to be additions to this article with details on each section in the future, but for now feel free to post any questions for comments or make additional suggestions for people. This is meant to be a resource for people who are cloudy on the pieces of the pie that make up an online source of revenue.

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