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How to Sell Your Product on the Internet

by David Berky

Frequently we at Simple Joe, Inc.(http://www.simplejoe.com) receive email from people who have developed a new software product and would like to sell it on the Internet.

While we would like to help as many people as we can (and ourselves in the process) we have limited resources and sometimes must encourage people to give it a try themselves.

Learning how to sell a product on the Internet can be daunting, but with a few good resources and a few days of work just about anyone can set up a web site that sells their product, and create an Internet marketing strategy.

In this article I would like to focus on how to market your product on the Internet. There are 100s of ways to market your product but in this short article I can only gloss over a few. These are the tried and true methods that we have used to market our products.

But first, a few words on accepting payments on your web site. One of the easiest ways to accept credit cards on your web site (and to deliver software products via email/download) is to use a third-party credit card processing company.

Usually these companies will take a fixed fee and/or percentage of the product price. Some also have monthly fees. Most work by you sending your customer to a special page on their web site or by you sending them a specially formatted URL.

Although sending your customer to their web site is probably the easiest it is also usually the least flexible. Sending a URL is more complex but often allows you more options.

The company Simple Joe uses for credit card processing is SWReg.org (http://www.swreg.org). They have been in business since the CompuServe days of the mid-80's and have international experience in credit card processing. They also charge some of the cheapest rates we have found.

They charge $1/product plus 4%. You would probably pay about 2.5-3%/product if you got your own merchant account (which is a pain) plus merchant accounts usually charge fixed monthly fees of $20-50 in addition to the per/product charges. And when selling lower priced products, the fees can quickly eat up your profits.

We use a simple JavaScript-based order form, which passes a URL to the SWReg.org site, and they handle the transaction. We recently started using their templates (Intermediate Level) to preserve the look of our web site through the order process.

Back to marketing. Like I said, there are 100s of ways you can market your product. Some produce results sooner than others do. One of the fastest ways to produce results is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

The two heavyweights of the PPC market are Google's AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/select/?hl=en) and Overture (http://www.overture.com). There are many other second and third-tier PPC companies, but you may want to get your feet wet with the big boys.

The first step in creating a PPC ad campaign is to determine the keywords you will target for your product. Use Overture's "Search Term Suggestion Tool" (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) to find some keywords that relate to your product and then check out your competition using their View Bids tool (http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/).

Since you don't know your sales conversion ratio you will have to set a maximum bid price. I would try Overture's minimum .10 or even up to .20 or .25 on really popular and specific keywords.

After you use the PPC advertising for a while you can calculate your conversion ratio (the number of visitors to your web site vs. the sales (e.g., monthly: 1000 visitors / 20 sales = 2% conversion ratio).

If your conversion ratio is 2% and you average 1000 visitors you should get 20 sales. If you clear $8/product sale with 20 sales you will have $8 x 20 = $160 to spend on PPC or other advertising (in order to just break even).

This means that you can afford to pay .16 per click maximum for your visitors (1000 / $160). You could probably pay more because not all of your visitors will come from PPC ads (or you could try to pay less and keep some of your profits).

You may want to pay more for terms that are more specific and would probably lead to a sale (keyword: purchase planner software @ .25/click) vs. less specific keywords that may just attract window-shoppers (keyword: planning purchases @ .10/click).

You may also want to write some articles about your product, how it solves people's problems, how it compares to other products, how it has helped you personally, etc. The articles don't have to be literary masterpieces. A friendly heart-felt tone is best.

Submit your articles to article databases (such as http://www.ezine-writer.com/) or get a copy of the article submission software EzineAnnouncer (http://www.ezineannouncer.com).

Make sure your name and product information are either in the article (kind of sales-y) or in a author's bio section at the bottom of the article (limited to 6 lines of 60 character text). See examples of our articles at http://www.simplejoe.com/articles-resources.htm.

You can also partner with other sites that have products or services that are similar to yours but do not directly compete (search on Google for sites related to yours using your keywords). Offer to exchange links (try http://linkpartners.com/) or write a review of their product/service and allow them to post the review on their web site with a link to yours (and your author's bio containing info about your product). Also you can post the review on your web site to add valuable content to your site.

You could also use a service like Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com/) to establish an affiliate program. People who sign up to sell your product then receive a percentage of the sale. You will probably have to make the commission 30%+ to get a lot of people interested.

Then there is the whole world of marketing through search engines and submitting your site. There are a lot of good and free eZines and newsletters about this subject.

The two best methods for search engine marketing are to have good content on your site (like your articles and reviews of other related products) and links from reputable sites pointing to yours.

You can submit your site to the search engines using some services or by hand. But with good links they will find you eventually anyway. And some people speculate that sites that are found rank better than those that are submitted do.

Optimizing your site for search engine submission and rankings is a complex task and it is usually best suited for long term marketing strategies. PPC ads provide the fastest results and are ideal for market testing your sales copy and determining the need and desire for your product.

There is a wealth of information about marketing on the Internet. Spend a few days learning as much as you can and then pick out a few strategies and give them a try.

One of the great advantages of Internet marketing is that you can do it with little or no money. And you can easily record and analyze your results.

© Simple Joe, Inc.

David Berky is president of Simple Joe, Inc. a marketing company that sells simple software under the brand name of Simple Joe. One of Simple Joe's best selling products is Simple Joe's Money Tools - a collection of 14 personal finance and investment calculators. This article may be freely distributed so long as the copyright, author's information and an active link (where possible) are included.

Note: This article may be freely distrubuted and reprinted as long as the author's information and web link are included at the bottom of the article. The web link should be active when the article is reprinted on a web site or in an email. Minor edits and alterations are acceptable so long as they do not distort or change the content of the article. For more information on reprint rights email: reprints@simplejoe.com

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