InternetBusinessManual.com - Step 1: Choosing Your Product

You can make a little money from selling other peoples products, but the anchor to web success is selling a product that is:

1. Completely yours
2. Available nowhere else
3. With an easily-targeted market on the Internet
4. With a large profit margin of at least 60% plus

If you leave any of those components out, you will not make enough sales to be of any value to you.

You will probably make sales, but they will be so few and the money so little, that you won’t experience any change in your present financial situation. Maybe you’ll even be in the hole a little bit from all your business expenses to operate your low selling website.

There are places that will set you up in your own professional looking website, full of brand names. But, since they are the actual retailer, and you are their middleman, your profit is far smaller than if you were the retailer and sold the products directly.

50% is an average profit margin when buying wholesale and selling retail. 65% is commonly possible, even 80%. Businesses that are the actual retailer and pay you on a sliding commission, usually pay you 2-25% commission per sale, with an average of 10%!

If your commission-based site sells $10,000 of goods, your profit may be as little as 2%. That is $200 profit for a year’s work!

Not only that, you have to pay to advertise your commission-based web store. The real gem there is these services that offer fully stocked brandname webstores for you often provide “advice” on how to market your site, and all those places they recommend are services where they will be making commissions off of you!

The saying that applies here is, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Sites like these can be very seductive to the newcomer, and are pitched as “ready to go” “instant web income”, but don’t fall for them. The only one who makes instant income is them, after you’ve paid to advertise their site, and the sales start to trickle in.

Many of these turnkey commission sites even takes 90 days to send you payment on your 2-25% commission, on top of that! Can you wait 90 days to get a check for $60 for the entire period? What kind of financial freedom can you have making $60 in 90 days? You get the picture.

If the items you sold through your web site had been your own products, you could easily have realized at least half of $10,000 as profit, and more if you priced smart.

Then there are companies that let you earn 30-70% profit on their products without your having to carry any stock. This is called drop-shipping. When you sell an item, you then place your order, pay your reduced wholesale price, and the company fulfills the order for you.

If you are not the one exclusively carrying that product in the Internet category where you list your store, all the competition will make it hard for you to sell your stock. You can bet the public will buy from the one selling the same items at the lowest price, which usually is marked down so low that pitiful profit is being made.

All to often, in many drop-shipping opportunities online, a sort of Seller’s Frenzy ensues, where the sellers carrying the same merchandise, will frantically out-price one another like piranhas all trying to eat the same meal, till no profit is left for anyone.

You can bet that if there are any quality products available to be resold or drop-shipped without having to carry inventory, the market will be saturated soon with like-minded entrepreneurs all trying to earn money off the same items! And sadly, the manufacturers offering these dropship ventures often do not care about the cut-throat price wars between their dealers, only looking to the overall volume of their own profit.
It is rare the dropship venture that sets Internet price minimums to preserve the value of the business opportunity for their dealers. More often than not, the manufacturers let the dealers set whatever prices they want, and routinely on the Internet there has always proven to be one or more dealer who will discount only cents above the cost, ruining it for all dealers, including that offending dealer who soons finds they are not selling at the large volumes they thought they would to warrant such deep discounts.

Bottom line is the only web business you can run that has the chance of letting you quit your 9-5 job, is one stocked by products exclusively your own, allowing you to make enough profit for success. So the ideal money–making product for a web business has these essential ingredients:

• Easily-targeted, large audience
• Uniquely yours
• Large profit margin

And even better:

• No mailing
• No manufacturing
• Instant delivery

The key then is to create a product that incorporates all these ingredients. There are 4 types of exclusive products you can create:

1. An information product
2. A handcrafted item
3. Unique merchandise
4. Provide a service

Which one you settle on should be determined by your research done in Step 2 and the targeted market you found in the subject that interests you most.

In Step 2 you will discover how to determine the level of public demand on the Internet for any product. With that knowledge, you will then be able to zoom in on the best products to sell, and build your web business around that.