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Super Categories: 100% Salesman
Skills and tools needed:
Not just writing like a salesman, but learning to think like a salesman too will be required to succeed at this assembly line choice. Luckily for you, selling on the net is nothing like being a used car salesman, it’s more like playing a game of chess and then reporting about it in an article. It’s mainly about tactics; get them to opt in first? Get their money up front or later? Sell them a smaller product then ‘upsell’ them? Tack on other products and sell a bigger package? Etc… There are so many ways to go about selling things online, it’s almost impossible to give a representative sampling here.
There are many good sources of this information though, here on this site and elsewhere, so don’t let that stop you if you already have a product to sell.
The tools you’ll need will mainly be an e-commerce website, a secure server for taking credit cards through, and more than likely, an Affiliate program running on the same server… Why be the only salesman for your product when you can have an army of affiliates linking to your site, raising your website popularity drastically, and sending you more sales every day than you could ever hope to get yourself?
Description of a self-product seller:
A salesman of their own product can actually be selling a product, a service, or someone else’s products and services through an online storefront of some kind. This is different than an Affiliate, who may be writing the sales copy, but isn’t doing the transactions themselves, a self-product seller is the one with the merchant account conducting the transactions.
Occasionally such a storefront will be stocked with products exclusively from other stores, or many other stores simultaneously. That store owner will be the point of sale for another manufacturer or wholesaler who Drop-ships the product directly to the customer. A large percentage of storefronts on the web are actually just dropshipping for one or more manufacturers, and are not themselves owned by that manufacturer. This can be a profitable business model indeed since the store runner won’t have any physical inventory, no shipping, no insurance, no real estate, etc… Much like a seller of Mater Resale Rights products, because those are all informational products, needing no physical inventory.
The absolute worst (profit-wise) model of a self-product seller is someone who sells their service online. I guess it’s better than not using the web at all, but there are absolutely no advantages besides increased visibility. Meanwhile, there’s no chance to ever get rich that way due to the fact that such a store owner would have to be manning a store while performing the service in question, while making the site popular, while manning the customer support desk, while answering phones, etc… This business model will only work once your business is large enough to pay a full-time position for each of those 4 or 5 job descriptions.
Lifestyle of a self-product seller:
Having sold my own SEO services online in 2004, I learned the hard way that this is a difficult route to take. I woke up in the morning and answered customer support questions until I finally had to make myself stop, and then got to work making my customer’s websites grow in popularity, one way or another. This part of the job took me the rest of the day, and if I didn’t have a website selling for me, I never would have gotten a second client.
A much better approach would be to sell drop-shipped items. Another store I ran in 2002 online had that going for it; I had no physical inventory. (The only reason that it didn’t stand the test of time is because I chose a niche market that was a complete fad, and now no one even remembers the whole market existed!)
My store at that time sold items from 4 different manufacturers around the US, and one from China. I had a website running OSCommerce shopping cart software, (which is free & powerful) and I wrote copy for all the product pages that I made, totaling over 200 products. (I backed up the server & changed a few prices occasionally, but that was all I ever had to do to the website once it was launched.)
My day would consist of replying to customers who had questions, (usually product requests and delivery speed complaints) and then ensuring that the orders are forwarding to the proper dropshipper correctly. (One of them only accepted faxes… Barbaric by today’s standards.) At the time I only felt safe by printing out each and every order and filing them, so I could point out the details to the dropshipper & IRS later… But usually that wasn’t necessary, and I bet in the last 4 years the technology has solved this and this won’t be an issue. You many not even need a printer!
So customer queries and process flow monitoring is about all you have to do to keep it running, the rest is automatic between your website, your dropshipper, and your payment processesor. Adding new products and of course making your website more popular should be the things that fill up most of your time.
And building a subscriber’s list should be a biggie too. Perhaps once every other week you should hold a sale on some item that you can discount for a day, and email all of your past customers to take advantage of it before it’s gone. Finding content to add to your newsletter shouldn’t be too difficult, depending on your niche, and it would go a long way to keeping more of your customers happily on your subscriber list. | 
