Birth of a Salesman
by Karen Williams | August 17, 2006 - Seminole Chronicle
You could make a ton of money selling merchandise from a Web site. Every day, even Sundays and holidays, hordes of eager customers could visit your site and place substantial orders while you nonchalantly go about your business. That's what I learned at a recent Internet marketing seminar.
While brushing your teeth: ca-ching! Eleven orders from around the country.
While eating your Fruit Loops: ca-ching! Thirteen orders from, say, Europe.
While mopping the floor: ca-ching! Fourteen orders from, say, outer Mongolia.
While dumping dirty mop water over the fence: ca-ching! A bunch more orders from everywhere this side of the moon.
This could revolutionize how you feel about life's drudgery: "Hey, honey, I just knocked a couple of cobwebs out of the corner. I wonder how many orders came through in that amount of time!"
Of course, the question remains: What are people ordering from your Web site?
According to the seminar leaders, you can sell anything via the Internet. It doesn't matter if you don't have a gadget or product ready - just think one up, and there will be plenty of people falling all over themselves to whip out their credit cards.
They mentioned one fellow who's making six figures a year selling wheat grass kits via his site to folks who want to make fresh, healthful juice that doesn't taste good. His kit consists of:
Wheat grass seeds
A bag of dirt
Instructions for planting
Then all he must do is mail out the kits and decide how to spend the riches that are piling up where he dug all that dirt from his yard.
You can do well with any simple product, but it's essential that your site comes up when people search for the name of your item. Otherwise, you could be selling, say, a tonic that makes people look younger than their great-grandchildren, but you'll have no business because no one knows about your otherwise Earth-shattering concoction.
The company presenting the seminar sells software to help folks build their Web sites. I, however, already have a site to sell my writing, so I was just there for the free marketing advice and the free lunch.
It was win-win.
My feller, Mark, designed my Web site a few years back after he noticed I was stressed and tearing my hair out in clumps when attempting to figure it out myself. From my site, people can sign up for free inspirational e-mails that I create, and they could, in theory, buy a book on happiness that I've written.
Even though my site is zooming around cyber-space, book orders are stubbornly stagnant. This week's sales were actually less than zero, if you count the return of two books from a woman in Akron, Ohio, who had thought she was ordering romance novels.
So the seminar was timely, as I will now learn to make my presence known on Yahoo and Google search engines and beat out the roughly mega-gazillion other people who are selling books about happiness on the Internet.
It's all in a manual that I brought home from the seminar. Of course, when I try to decipher it, I become stressed and must eat vast amounts of Cheetos. But Mark will figure it out while I continue to be the creative, though exceedingly low-tech, member of our duo.
I can feel it in my bones: before long, my book will be selling at a good clip - just like wheat grass.
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Copyright 2006, Karen Williams
