Ten Day Plan to Online Sales

Recently one of my students asked a great question: We have a product we want to sell online - and we need to make money fast. We already have a domain name. What should I do in the next 10 days?

Here are some ideas:

1. Take *good* photographs of your product. The picture will allow you to charge more, so get a great digital camera and take those pictures.

2. Write a good short sales letter that paints the story of the product - your reason behind creating it, benefits to the reader, vivid pictures of what it will mean to the buyer, etc.

3. Set up a paypal account and arrange to take payment.

4. Start lining up partners who will do an email for you. Find people who already send an email newsletter to your potential customer.

5. Plan to send sample products to the partners you want to work with. That will get their attention and you can seal the deal via email.

6. Set up your site on a template-driven site. It's something you can do yourself with no programming knowledge. You can choose a templates so you have no design costs. It generally includes hosting, so you have no additional hosting costs. You can upload your own photos.

7. You'll need a technical person on call in order to connect your web page and paypal - or at least someone who has a little backgroud in doing this. It's faster than doing it yourself.

8. Use this site for just this one project. Don't try to do too many things with it.

9. Look around for other sites with similiar ideas - selling the same type of product. Then handle yours approximately the same way.

10. Prepare an email for your partners to send to their lists and get it to them a few days before their newsletter goes out. That means you need to get this ready now!

That's a quick 10-day plan. Get started right away and plan to start seeing sales in a little over a week.

By Dr. Jeanette Cates