where do i start to market, advertise and sell my product on the internet?

[Guest]

Altough I have no idea what your product is, I will try to help you with the best answer possible...

When it comes to selling a product online you have to think in terms of traffic (customers exposed to your product). If you are serious about promoting a product online your first step should be to get a website.

Once you have a website to promote your product, your job is to drive traffic to that website. There are only three ways to drive traffic to a website: buy traffic, borrow traffic, create traffic.

Buy Traffic:

You can buy traffic buy paying for advertising spots. One of the most popular services for this is Google Adwords. You bid on keywords (the keywords your target market would type to find your product) and your ads are displayed. If people click on your ad, you have to pay a fee (up to the total amount you bid per click).

The drawback of this method is that it costs money, but it is very quick and effective once you get the hang of it...


Borrow Traffic:

Find websites that sell or promote similar products and offer them a commission for selling your product. These sites should already be established and have traffic going to them, so you will basically "borrow" their traffic and share the profits. There are different sites that can make this process easier for you, if you are selling a digital product, I recommend Clickbank.com and PayDotCom.com if yours is a physical product, you might want to check Commission Junction at CJ.com

Create Traffic

This is the slowest and hardest method, but it is long term and usually very cost effective. In order to create your own traffic you must create content and create relationships. I usually recommend writing articles and submitting them to article directories such as EzineArticles.com

Another great way to create traffic is by creating videos and publishing them on sites like YouTube.com or Google Videos.

My personal favorite way of creating traffic is by using Social Networking websites. These sites like MySpace.com, Facebook.com, hi5.com, etc have huge amounts of people looking to make friends. Your goal here should be to meet people that would be in your target market and trully create a relationship with them... help them and in return they will become your loyal customers for life...

Hope this helps.

If you have any questions don't hessitate to shoot me an email.

Guillermo