All the advice you read online about how to make money will point to selling affiliate products as the best and easiest way to get started making an income. However, most will point you in the direction of selling ebooks from Clickbank and selling by using PPC (pay per click) on the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. The main problem with this is that so many people are promoting the same ebooks via the same methods that it is difficult for a newcomer to break into the market and make any money particularly as the amount spent on PPC can quickly run into hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
I believe an easier way to get started is to sell physical products rather than digital products (ebooks) and utilise FREE methods of sales and advertising rather than expensive PPC.
How do you find physical products to sell that people want to buy?
The worlds largest online marketplace eBay provides a simple solution to this. eBay helpfully supplies an area called the Pulse where you can easily see what items are hot right now. Dont worry you dont need to sell anything on eBay or even have an account to use this.
To use the Pulse go to eBay .com homepage. You will find the link to the Pulse just under Marketplace Research on the left hand side of the page.
When you first click on this link you will see that the first Pulse page you see is for All Categories. Here you can see what are the most popular searches and the most watched items on the whole of eBay note that the most watched items are nearly all How to Make Money!
Click the down arrow beside the All Categories at the top of the page and this will bring up a list of all the different categories on eBay. For this example I will click on the Sporting Goods category. Again you will see the most popular searches and the most watched items in this category. Now I notice that the #2 most popular search in Sporting Goods is Fishing so I change the category to fishing and notice that the most watched items are fly fishing rods, reels, lures and fly tying materials. A lot of people are looking to buy these items on eBay so these will be good affiliate products to sell.
Now I need to find some fly fishing rods and accessories to sell. There are many affiliate companies who deal primarily in physical products. One of the best of these is Commission Junction (CJ). It costs nothing to become a member and sell these products. Checking the get links area of CJ I find that there are several companies offering hundreds of different fly fishing products that I can sell.
One way that I love to use to sell affiliate products without paying for PPC is Squidoo. Here you can put up as many mini-sites (called lenses on Squidoo) on as many different subjects as you like and sell your affiliate products without it costing you anything and in fact Squidoo even pay you a percentage of all their advertising income every month for building lenses.
If you would like to learn how to sell affiliate products on Squidoo without paying for PPC check out How to Make a Living on Squidoo
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