[...] blogs aren’t the only way to make money online. You could open an online store. You could sell things on eBay. Here’s a list of 10 ways to make money online from Web Worker [...]

I am better at it today than I was last year, when it was just an idea or in September of 2006 when circumstances required taking the plunge prematurely. I’ll be better at it next year and the year after that, as well.

I don’t have the money to hire a good web designer … I can barely afford myself! But the site is evolving almost daily and I am able to add some worthwhile content about once a week. I have about a dozen pens yet to post and will soon have about 3 dozen turned mushrooms. Tonight I took photos of 115 old LP albums to post to eBay and this afternoon I got a check for some pens I sold before I started the website.

Today the web site is not much to look at. But a year from now, I think I’ll have a real business on my hands. Today it is functional, but not pretty. Through the next 12 months I will be re-writing it to CSS and re-working some of the graphics such as my logo banner … which I originally thought looked ‘cool’ but now I realize it is too dark.

I can recommend JASC Paint Shop Pro (for less money) to the writer who thought he needed Photoshop. Most likely he does NOT ‘need’ Photoshop. If he has a willingness to tinker just a bit, he could also load either Linux or an older version of Windows into a virtual machine that runs inside and concurrently with XP. I am running Ubuntu inside of XP using VirtualBox virtual machine software. VMWare is another good choice and both are FREE. With Linux, you will also get “The GIMP” with most of the features of Photoshop but for absolutely NO money.

In fact, if software costs are a serious hurdle in your budget, Linux is the way to go. It might also be the way to go even if the cost of software doesn’t loom large for you due to the ease of securing a Linux desktop and keeping it that way.

Anybody wanna cross-link with me? (No link farms, please!)

When someone comes to me with a very limited budget for a shopping cart site, I can’t do much for them besides the basics. Having a professional looking site that is well designed makes customers a lot more confident in their purchases. Just look around the internet and see how comfortable you are buying from a shady low level website compared with a nice, clean and well designed site.

How much should you spend? Well that depends on the number of products, type of audience and forecasted revenues from it.

My suggestion before you start building your site is to do your keyword research to see if people are searching for what you want to offer.

Once you did your keyword research, find an ecommerce site that sells similar things to what you are planning to sell and has an affiliate program. Sign up for the program, and spend a couple of hundred dollars on AdWords to see if your business model is viable.

I think a lot of people will search for decoration ideas, but who knows if they actually would buy their decorations online? Test, test, test, before you invest a lot in an online store.

And I will second what someone else said about having a professional looking site.

1. Visuals are the most important factor in getting people to buy, anywhere on the web. Learn how to take very good pictures and make them prominent in your offerings. Multiple views are helpful, but one good shot to make prominent in the offering is key. It isn’t necessary to spend lots of $$ on equipment and software to do this. The web doesn’t support high-resolution photos, anyway. You can easily put together the equipment and software to do this well for $100 or less. Additional spending won’t be rewarded. Effort put into getting good at using it, on the other hand, will be rewarded many times over.
2. Agree with the comment above on communication with customers. Make sure you are available to your customers via email and phone. Good communications really help.
3. eBay has a feature that allows you to search completed sales. You can use this to see comparable sales…what is selling similar to your goods, and for how much. Even if you choose not to use eBay to sell your goods, you can be pretty sure your potential customers are at least window shopping there.
4. Think through packing and shipping to minimize costs. Buyers hate to pay shipping and handling charges, but it is completely possible to make money on the goods, yet be underwater on the sale after you factor in your gas, materials, etc. to get it shipped, let alone your time.

For a cheaper (possibly) cost of having a website created you could check out http://www.rentacoder.com. Never used it myself, but that is always an option.

I also think Etsy.com is a pretty neat site. There are some very talented folks out there. It might be a good idear to check that option out.

Also, beware of information overload. Don’t subscribe to too many magazines or blogs, and limit the number of books you try and read to gather information. Oftentimes you end up spending more time chasing new ideas instead of working on the ones you already have.

Simplify.

Some rambling thoughts —
We have a merchant account through our bank and can accept major credit cards. However, we do not accept the credit card information online.

I call every customer for that information. This has cut down our fraudulent sales to nearly 0%. It also has tremendously cut down the number of customers returning items as I can clarify the condition, etc. of the telephone they are purchasing.

We offer a one year warranty on the telephones we sell unless the phone has been shipped outside the U.S.

We do not have an email newsletter with our site. We do keep a “want” list and will contact folks who want to know when a specific telephone is available.

We have a UBI number and business license through our state, are members of our local Chamber of Commerce, and are in compliance with local zoning regulations. Being able to show your credibility is important when you are a small business.

Having good photos of your products on your site is important too.

Friends of ours have tried to sell antiques and other items through an online store, and gave up after a year of few sales.

Setting up an online business takes time, patience, and knowing how to optimize your site for good search engine placement for your site. We set up a Google Alert to let us know when our site is mentioned elsewhere.

I’ve been looking for inexpensive cufflinks for a while and found some cufflink gacking to do it yourself on etsy. I got four pairs shipped for under $10, I probably would have spend 40$ on just one pair, and I can wear them plain or glue on any trinket I like.

Erin – I do want to clarify that I have an MBA and over 10 years of Product Management and Marketing experience, so although I don’t have a lot of web experience, I do have business experience. Also, I had my own blog for a few years and used to crudely manipulate that a bit, so what I’m hoping is that by taking the classes I can at least know what questions to ask and research.

Thanks so much to all of you that are currently involved in a similar endeavor and have given your advice and experiences. As I go through the process I’ll make sure to keep J.D. updated and he can post what he thinks might be beneficial.

First question: Would you think it reasonable if someone said they were starting their own financial advising business after taking 3 classes? Restaurant business? Legal business? Computer consulting business?

Though it’s of course possible and though of course it’s been done, chances aren’t very high that these businesses would be wildly successful.

As a web developer myself, it’s maddening to see people who think they can take a few classes and suddenly know everything they need to know about making a successful website. Between the design, marketing, code, graphics and optimization, content, psychology, etc., the chances of a novice/beginner suddenly developing a completely viable and successful only store . . . aren’t incredibly high. Take the Bitty Baby Blankets store above. Yes, they have a site. . . yet even IF they received traffic to the site. . . how many people would be likely to buy from them based on the looks of their site?? Not I, even with a newborn myself. . . .

Not only did I get good exercise, I regularly cleared about 3k for a summer. Not bad for a 1 hour a day job

Here’s an article on how much an e-Commerce website can cost:
http://www.costhelper.com/cost/computers/website-ecommerce.html

Here’s an article on how much website designers can cost:
http://www.costhelper.com/cost/computers/website-design.html

And here’s an article about business merchant accounts:
http://www.costhelper.com/cost/small-business/merchant-account.html

In terms of generating traffic, I have tried Google Adwords for a family member’s jewelry store.

I don’t think I got to the point where the advertising expenses were breaking even, but for me, the learning alone was worthwhile. There are a lot of ins and outs of keyword advertising you learn by doing it, so I think a keyword campaign is worth a small budget for what you’ll learn. If you make enough money per sale (like more than $50 an order) and are shooting for a broad, national audience, I could see a keyword campaign potentially paying off. If you make very little per sale (like $5 for a novelty item), I think it would be hard to make money with keywords.

I would normally also mention selling on eBay (which has lots of users), but I think you mentioned that you want to control your own storefront.

As for marketing, my sister is on a popular web forum for new mothers, which she has used to drive traffic. Also they have done a bit of marketing in local pediatricians’ offices and the like. Hopefully, beyond these meager beginnings, word-of-mouth will start to drive some sales (each blanket has a ribbon with the domain name printed on it).

As far as marketing in Denise’s case, I really don’t know that that many people are looking to buy Halloween decorations online. So typical search-based marketing probably isn’t going to work so well. Which isn’t to say don’t do it, but I don’t think she could build a business on it. I don’t think many people search for Halloween Decorations on Google. Depending on the shipability (I know that’s not a word) of the product, online may not be the best way to sell her product at all. Craft-mall kiosks and local home-decor stores might be a better way to get started. Decor is a strange market, kind of like clothing. People hesitate to buy clothing online because of obvious reasons of sizing and quality that aren’t readily made apparent online. Home decor would seem to have some of these same issues. Also, many decorative items tend to be fragile, and that adds an element of risk, plus extra costs for packaging.

In general, online buying for personal-type items just doesn’t go over so well. Books, computer hardware, DVD’s, digital cameras: yes. Clothing, shoes, home furnishings: not so much. Not to say that it’s impossible, but it’s just much harder. This is why we’re trying to go with word-of-mouth for the baby blankies. If people can see the product in person, they are much more likely to buy it. So hopefully our initial users are carrying their blankies around and showing their friends. Unfortunately, that doesn’t really seem to be happening so far, but we are really only in the beginning stages (the site is about 6 months old).

My big obstacle at the moment is I need to buy a new copy of photoshop — my current copy is so old I can’t load it on Windows XP. I’ve tried some less pricey alternatives but just can’t do what I want to do without Photoshop.

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http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=webmasters

My experience is that you first submit your site to open directory http://dmoz.org/ and then you wait a long long long time for it to get picked up by the major search engines and then work its way up in the rankings.

1. Zen Cart is an awesome, free, customizable shopping cart resource for those who have a limited knowledge of programming. Of course, the more you know, the more customizable the site can be.

2. Stay away from Google. Unfortunately, and this may just be me, but there are several things against you with Google. One is that the main amount of traffic are “browsers.” Conversion to sale with Google traffic was less than half of what I get with the other search engines. Also, the way they calculate clicks and your cost can be a little shady. I believe I’ve received notification of at least one class action lawsuit against them for it.

Basically what I found was that I was paying a lot of money in and getting almost nothing back. I had better luck with comparision shopping sites and other major search engines.

3. Expect it to take a few years to really start ranking in the free search engine listings. You won’t see results overnight.

Be very careful of hiring someone who says they can improve your listing – there are a myriad of ways the search engines use to rank sites, and in my experience, many of these companies will only do one or two of the things that are possible. I should mention that some of the companies are shady as well. I am still fighting with the original company I signed with who did almost nothing for my company after I gave them $2000 up front. We have worked on our metatags and our external links as well as making sure we have good content and after 3.5 years we are now ranking in the 20s listings in a very competitive field.

4. Get a mailing list for an e-newsletter as quickly as possible. One of the most successful methods for retaining customers I’ve had was of course excellent customer service. After that, it was return incentives, such as discounts on a future purchase, advertised both in the packaging I send out with an order and in e-newsletters!

5. Above all, love what you do! You’ll be doing a lot of it!

Even if you end up with a bigger custom store down the road, this is a great way to get an initial start and get your stuff in front of people.

* Google checkout – Good for single purchases at their “free” level, doesn’t really incorporate a shopping cart as such unless you spend some bux.

* Yahoo Stores – A good solution, but beware that customizing the store beyond the typical layout is somewhat complex as regular HTML doesn’t suffice; they have their own scripting language. That said, developing Yahoo stores seems to be a specialty of many Indian developers who won’t charge an outrageous amount to customize your store.

* Custom web site with shopping cart. There are services like Americart and others that provide shopping cart services to integrate with your web design. Most are modestly priced but take a slice of every transaction–as much as 10%, but typically 3-5%.

* eBay store. You can either hang all your goods in the area provided to you on eBay or port their listings over to your own website, though the latter takes some dev, I think. The former is “free,” aside from the cut eBay takes on every sale.

A combination of several of these is possible, too. For example, you can have your own web site with its own cart, and still maintain an eBay store with several select items in it.

Note that I would budget $1000 for a customized Yahoo store, $2-3000 or as much as you can dream of spending for a professionally designed site with its own shopping cart. Doing it yourself is certainly a fine idea, just be realistic as to your abilities and avoid looking like you’re displaying your personal collection of bad animated gifs.

Traffic is tough. One way to generate traffic is to actively participate (in a quality way) on forums, email lists and web sites frequented by people with an interest in your products…assuming the host allows that. By quality, I mean posts that help with no direct shilling of your product (“we make our rubber bats using low temp silicon and an oven–it’s a fun but exacting process”), with your site as part of your signature, as opposed to “it’s really hard to make bats, it’d be easier to buy ours”.

Paid Google search ads might be a worthy experiment, I believe you can cap the amount you want to spend, so it would be worth an experiment–what kind of business does $100 in Google ads generate?

You can also try being an affiliate marketer…offer other sites percentages of sales to drive traffic your way.

Get a decent domain name–investigate domains BEFORE you decide on a business name. “com” is still king, and definitely don’t rely on misspellings or really obscure country extensions.

Investigate who is already out there. Are there 100 small online businesses selling Halloween stuff? If so, can you make a difference from a quality, uniqueness or cost standpoint?

There’s lots more, but that should hopefully provide a bit to get you going. Successful online businesses are a lot of work–scale your expectations to the amount of time you’re willing to invest. That said, who knows? You might be doing it full-time eventually, and that is its own reward.