Thinking Of Selling Products or Services Online? Marketplace vs. Personal website
If you want to take advantage of all of the money being made by all the traffic that already exists online. There are only a few things you need. A product or a service, a place you can start selling your products and a way to accept payment. Basically you have 2 main options. You can join a market place like Amazon, eBay , Bonanza, Etsy or you can sell them on your personal website. There are many benefits to using a marketplace like simple start up, low cost, they make it easy to get in front of an already established audience of buyers that already know, like and trust the platform. The people on the platform are actively looking for something to purchase. Some would see this as an easy target audience and the best route but, as someone who studies direct response marketing this is the opposite of what I want. I don’t want to find people who are already shopping… I would rather interrupt their pattern and be the only person controlling their attention and the only person showing them anything like that. If I’m selling a woman’s watch, I would rather be the watch on her mind rather than when she is out trying on a whole bunch of different outfits that day. The journey of any customer goes through 3 stages. Interest, desire and then customer. All sales go through that process. As direct response marketers we interrupt the attention of the possible customer. We then gain their interest and the desire is created with in them. They become a customer by buying the product. The first time an ad was shown with the intent to sell a product was in 1941 and it was a watch from a company called Bulova. It was a 10 second ad and cost only $9. The ad was shown before a baseball game and the result of this ad was a watch company that made a lot of money. In business you can hope customers find you or you can interrupt their pattern and try to gain their interest. It’s very simple to get started selling products in a marketplace you could learn in an afternoon. I recommend learning how to market and selling your own products and driving your own traffic because then you can control it. If Amazon disappears one day they control that traffic and say goodbye to your business.
