If you’re wondering how to make a website to sell stuff, you’ve come to the right place. Selling things over a website can be done in a few ways. In this article I’m going to cover the best ways you can start making money from a website by selling stuff! Don’t forget too that you can sell physical products from eBay, and other auction sites (Bonanza, eBid, eCrater, Etsy etc.). Facebook marketplace offers a free place to sell your household items. So unlike eBay, you won’t get any sellers fees.
But if you want to sell something you don’t own personally, there’s a clever business model known as affiliate marketing you can use. With affiliate marketing, you can promote many products using your own unique affiliate link. When you refer a customer to a product, you earn a commission. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn online from a website. You don’t need products of your own to sell and you can sell products without speaking to customers or physically handling products yourself.
How To Make A Website To Sell Stuff – Traffic
You might thinking selling stuff from a website is easy. Simply build it and they will come, right?! Sadly there’s billions of websites on the internet which were built with this attitude which see zero traffic. The “build it and they will come” mentality doesn’t apply to a website, sadly. Imagine a gas station in the desert and you’ll have an idea of what your website looks like.
One thing you will need to sell stuff from a website is traffic. Without a hefty flow of website visitors who are purposeful about your products, you’ll struggle to sell anything. Even the best product in the world won’t sell without visitors to your site; and some of the worst products will sell if they have a large volume of targeted visitors looking at them. See how to know your target audience.
You can set up a website very easily and quickly with no technical skills or experience. Here’s a video which shows you a couple of free website platforms which can be set up in minutes.
How To Make A Website To Sell Stuff – Traffic Generation
What “stuff” you’re selling will determine how you set up your website. There’s a variety of ways to generate traffic to a website.
- You can create content and use SEO (search engine optimisation)
- Share your content on social media
- Use paid marketing to drive traffic to your website
- Upload videos to YouTube and link back to your website
- Link to your site from other sites on the internet
These are the main strategies and some website owners will spend years building back links and working on their SEO. Others might use paid marketing to generate sales more quickly. Your own marketing strategy will depend on your personal financial circumstances, risk aversion, product choice and available time and resources. Someone with a lot of time on their hands, but who has less to invest might use organic marketing to sell stuff from a website. Someone who works long hours will want to use paid marketing to build an online business quickly.
What Stuff Are You Selling?
What you decide to sell on your website is an important consideration. It will determine your choice of marketing, and can have a bearing on how you build your website. If you want free traffic to your website, you’ll need to consider the main keywords you’ll be targeting with your content. If you’re selling low value products this is an option you could choose. Let’s say you decide to use Amazon’s affiliate program and sell photography equipment. You might want to build your website around the keywords “photography equipment”, for example as this can potentially help you get traffic to your site.
If you’re selling high ticket affiliate products, you might be more keen to use paid marketing to automate traffic generation more quickly. If this is the case, you might choose a domain name which has a connection to your product and which is part of your personal branding. This site, for example has been built on keywords “affiliate marketing mentors online“. Another site I have built is called defy9to5.com and is used with paid marketing.
So depending on how you will build traffic to your site, through either paid or organic marketing, you’ll want to consider your domain name before getting started.
Free Website Building & Blog Sites
In the previous video (above) I show two of the main free website builders Wix.com and WordPress.com. Anyone can use these sites to build a website with which to sell stuff from. This is ok to get started but it can be more difficult to sell products from. This is for a few reasons:
- Free website builders sometimes limit functionality such as linking to some affiliate products – and so they can limit your ability to sell.
- You’ll find it more challenging to get free traffic from the search engines with a free website.
- Your domain name doesn’t inspire confidence and doesn’t show the authority of having your own (i.e. would you rather buy from https://timrhalloran.wixsite.com/affiliatementors/about, or tim-halloran.com for example?)
There’s other free blogging sites too you can use such as Hubpages.com, infobarrel.com and iwriter.com plus many more. With these kinds of sites you can earn income from commissions or advertising placed on your content. You can also link to some affiliate products from some of these kinds of sites.
How To Make A Website To Sell Stuff – Recommended
Since marketing your website is the most difficult part of selling stuff online, I recommend using a program which offers a range of products already set up for you to sell. With many affiliate products you only make tiny commissions. See affiliate marketing business models. Amazon for example pays only from 1-11% commissions on any products you sell from their site. But with digital products you can earn a lot more (40% and above). Subscription affiliate products can pay you a recurring monthly income from sales and high ticket products give you a nice fat payday too! In combination with each other, this is the best business model I’ve found for selling stuff online! See also fastest legit way to earn money online.
You’ll also be able to use a website builder which will let you set up your own website, with domain name with a few clicks. Click on the image below to see a short video which shows the process of building your own website:
Building A Niche Website To Get Free Traffic
This website is an example of a niche website and has been carefully built around specific keywords: “affiliate marketing mentors“. You can do this too and the ease with which you can get free traffic will depend on a few factors:
- The products you choose to promote
- The niche you decide upon
- Your knowledge of your niche and
- The process you use to create and share content
Ideally, if you’re going to choose this route to sell stuff from a website, it’s a good idea to choose a topic you love, or have an interest in. Otherwise it can be difficult keeping up the necessary motivation to keep going getting your site up and running. Without traffic to your site, you won’t sell anything. So you’ll need to put in some work to get people to see your products. See this article for more on this strategy.
Building An Email List
Most people don’t buy directly from a website the first time they land on it. It takes some “getting to know” before they will trust it. For this reason, it’s a good idea to build an email list of subscribers. An email list is usually built from a website by offering something to give away to visitors in exchange for their email address.
Once on your list, you can promote products and services to your subscribers and build a relationship through offering value in your emails. On a website, someone only has a small window to purchase something you’re selling. But once on your email list, you can extend this time period to weeks, months and even years.
See the power of email marketing.
If you’re serious about building a income from the internet, you can access a free video series here to learn more about how it’s done.
