If you’re thinking of selling stuff online to make money, this post is for you! There’s lots of ways to make money through selling stuff and the online marketplace gives you the opportunity to sell to anyone, anywhere. Even if you don’t have some “stuff” to sell of your own, you can make money selling other people’s products, too.
A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you use almost any product you can find online and sell it for a commission. Then there’s a clever business model called drop shipping, or direct selling in which you sell products from your website and have them shipped to the customer worldwide directly from the manufacturer.
Drop shipping and affiliate marketing offer the potential of building a scalable business from anywhere. The most important skill for these models is marketing. But if that’s not your bag, you can start where I started, using eBay or some other online selling space such as Facebook marketplace, Gumtree or Craigslist to sell unwanted items from your home.
Selling Stuff Online To Make Money
I’ve long been a fan of selling stuff online to make money and before I discovered affiliate marketing (more on that later) I started selling my own stuff through eBay. eBay is a great place to start if you haven’t sold anything yet. Get an account by signing up to eBay if you haven’t already got one and list an item you’d like to sell.
Choose something from your house to get you going. Once you have figured out eBay, there’s many other ways to use the platform to sell. You can also find bargains on eBay by using misspell checkers. This little “hack” is a good place to start and you can find bargain items which simply don’t get the attention they deserve simply because the seller has listed the item badly!
I’ve written a post on this strategy here so check it out if you like the idea.
Another way to use eBay is to buy in bulk from a company such as Alibaba.com and sell multiple items through a single listing on eBay.
Selling Stuff Online To Make Money – Drop Shipping
Drop shipping is a business model similar to affiliate marketing whereby you create a website and attract customers, usually through paid marketing methods. Place a product in your “digital store” and when someone buys it, you can send the product directly from the manufacturer to them, without ever having to touch the product yourself.
Using software you can even connect your website to the wholesaler directly to minimum the technical tomfoolery you’ll have to deal with!
For more on drop shipping checkout Shopify.com.
The main skill you’ll need for drop shipping is marketing since a website won’t attract any visitors without it. Another similar business model where you can get paid selling other people’s stuff is affiliate marketing.
Selling Stuff Online To Make Money – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is probably the simplest business model online and many people gravitate towards it as a means to earn an income online. With affiliate marketing you have less to do than with drop shipping, on the technical side.
With drop shipping you have to take orders and deal with customers. However with affiliate marketing you only need to refer customers to products through your affiliate link. This is done through a variety of marketing methods and you can choose the most suitable one for your particular situation.
Amazon, for example, has an affiliate program which anyone can join and promote any of the 12 million products on their website. The main skill you need to learn with affiliate marketing is marketing. Here’s a few of the marketing methods which affiliates use to sell their affiliate products:
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Paid advertising (pay per click)
- Social media marketing
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
With affiliate marketing you have a huge choice in products to sell. Some of the best products to sell as an affiliate are those which pay high ticket commissions and recurring commissions, such as membership products and software products which carry subscription costs.
Considerations
If you’re going to be selling stuff online to make money, it’s a good idea to choose a strategy which can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. With drop shipping and affiliate marketing, you can automate much of the process, more so with affiliate marketing. With an automated sales system, once you have started making sales online, you can increase sales simply by increasing the flow of traffic through that system.
For example, if you sell digital products, they can be accessed from anywhere globally without the need for postage and delivery costs. This gives the affiliate a larger chunk of the sale value in commission, since they are doing all the marketing. Digital affiliate products typically pay affiliates between 30%-40% commission, compared to 1%-10% for physical products.
High ticket and subscription products are the most profitable digital products to sell online.