Starting a Home Business: Step 3

by Ken Leonard Jr

Published on this site: April 7th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

The last two parts of this series took you through creating your home business and setting up your professional internet marketing tools. Now it's time to figure out what to sell and how to sell it online.

(In case you missed it, you can read Step 2 here...) http://kenleonardjr.com/step2

Before you decide on a product to sell online, figure out which kind of home business you want to create. Some people make a living selling digital or print infoproducts on the internet, much like the ones you've seen on TV informercials late at night. Others deal in hard goods like you would purchase from your local retail store. Some people promote business opportunities through network marketing programs.

Promoting a home business opportunity usually involves selling or consuming a product or service while you are actively recruiting new reps to do the same thing. The big advantage to network programs is that the marketing system is designed to be simple and easy to duplicate for a newcomer to home business. The downside of many network marketing programs lies in the product or service that the opportunity is based on.

Some programs don't seem to have a product at all. The reps are just selling the opportunity itself. If you look hard enough, you will find one of the few network programs that have a quality product that you can profit from with direct sales. This type of company is always your best choice when considering a home business opportunity. A perfect example of such a company and network program can be found here: http://ffsi.eliteteamfreedom.com

Marketing infoproducts on the internet is another option to consider for your home business. Many people want specific information from the internet and are willing to pay for it. Infoproduct entrepreneurs create their own in house products as well as selling other companies' products as an affiliate partner. In the age of multimedia and computers, this type of product can be sold in many different forms, from downloadable digital ebooks and reports, print books and manuals, to audio courses on CD and video courses on DVD. Overhead costs for an infoproduct business can be very low, which makes it so appealing.

Another option for your home business would be to deal in hard goods sold on the internet. Many people make a good living selling physical products on internet auction sites like eBay. Others sell products on websites at retail price that they have purchased from a wholesaler or importer. You can have a small warehouse or use a spare bedroom to store inventory that you ship yourself, or you can use a drop shipper.

Drop shipping eliminates the need to keep a physical inventory. The drop shipper will process and ship an order for you after a sale is made. The packaging even looks like it came directly from your company. A useful resource for finding drop shippers that deal with many different kinds of products can be found here:
http://dropship.for-your-biz.com

Once you are sure of the marketing method your business will operate with it's time to find a product to sell that will be in demand and profitable. If you already know what kind of products or service you want to sell online, you first have to check the demand and competition for related products.

Keyword and advertising research will show you what people are looking for online (related to your product idea) and more importantly, tell you if they are willing to pay enough to make it profitable. Using a keyword research tool will give you a look at what people are looking for online. If a person searches on Google using the keyword phrase "pet gifts", they have a desire for pet gifts. Keyword research will show you how many people searched on any keyword phrase over the last month. If people are performing a lot of searches for your specific keyword phrase, you may have a winner.

Advertising research for the same keyword phrase will show you if those searchers are willing to pay for a product or information on the subject. Monitoring the major pay per click search engines is a good way to gauge activity for a specific keyword. If you find many ads from Google AdWords or Overture targeted to that keyword, chances are good that there is money to be made with that keyword.

Doing this research manually will take a huge amount of time. If you value your time highly (which you should), automate your keyword research and ad research as much as you can. There is a good free keyword research tool that will help you available here: http://www.goodkeywords.com Doing ad research can be even more time consuming. A good solution that automatically (and quickly) researches any keyword phrase while it does ad research for that keyword at the same time can be found here: http://marketresearch.for-your-biz.com

As you can imagine, a tool like this will be a huge time saver, especially when you have to research 20, 30 or even 50 keyword phrases until you find a winner.

When you have found a profitable keyword phrase related to your product idea, it's time to set up your lead capture system and sales page to test it out.

Step 5 of this series will cover all of that, while teaching you the most effective way to sell your product. This sales system will be totally automated, so once you set it up, you just feed it targeted prospects and perform occasional fine tuning to your sales page. Creating and fine tuning the sales page is coming up next in Step 4.

Ken Leonard Jr. publishes New Marketer Ezine weekly. Get the advice and direction you need so you can make a living working from home. If you are serious, see what others are saying about New Marketer here... http://www.kenleonardjr.com