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5 Strategies to Boost Your Affiliate Sales
Copyright 2005 Diane Hughes Are you promoting affiliate products? This article will show you 5 strategies to boost your Affiliate Sales, so make sure you read it and put in practice what I'm about to reveal you. The KEY to affiliate marketing is...

6 Ways to Promote Your Online Business Using Promotional Items
It's getting tougher than ever to compete online these days so more companies are taking a unique approach to Internet marketing ..... custom printed promotional products to help set them apart from the competition and to gain customer loyalty. If...

Here Comes The Content Provider
Well, boasting aside, internet marketing is the easiest way to get across your product globally. Sometimes, I get lost with all the myriads of opportunities for advertising my products online. I think I'm running out of things to sell and what's...

Is Your Website Search Engine Ready?
So you've finished your website and think you're ready to submit it the big-bad search engines? Not so fast Mister. Before submitting there's a few details you're going to want to check to make sure the search engines index your site correctly....

Turn Your Old Articles Into Profitable E-mail Courses
If you've written numerous articles, you can use them to further promote yourself and your business, e-zine or web site. You can re-use your old articles by transforming them into another form of promotional tool. And one way to re-use them is...

 
What should I sell On-Line

One of the first things you will have to decide when setting up an Internet business is whether you want to sell a product or a service, both of which have their advantages and disadvantages.
Products:
Advantage: unlimited income potential because you are not constrained by time, the way you are with a service (the more product you sell the more income you make - especially when you are automated).
Disadvantage: requires stocking and shipping (or drop-shipping from a supplier).
Disadvantage: generally requires you filling large amounts of orders to make a reasonable living, unless you have a product with a very high profit margin.
Services:
Advantage: it is easier to make a profit quickly because the entire price of a service is paid to you (except for any overhead).
Advantage: services can generate a great residual income because the client may want to hire your services again and again.
Disadvantage: you are limited to a modest income because you can provide only so many services each day (unless you hire employees to perform services for clients).
In my opinion, selling a


product online has, by far seen the biggest profit potential in the long run. Once you get a successful product, you can automate the system and move on to new products that will generate multiple streams of income.
If you need immediate cash flow, providing a service is the fastest way to produce instant income... but it will never pay off as big, in the long run, as selling a product with a high profit margin.
If you sell a service, think about how you can transform it into a product. One of the best examples I can think of is regarding the people who submit websites to search engines. Because the competition got so fierce and their business began to suffer, some wrote and sold reports revealing how search engines work and tricks for getting sites listed higher etc. The reports were priced at $20 -$100, and the entrepreneurs in our example found new markets to tap.
I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.

About the Author

David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.