I began my online journey with selling products from home ideas. Initially I used eBay the auction site, to sell things from my house. I quickly realised there was scope for finding cheap items in places like:
- Charity shops
- Antiques sales
- Car boot sales
I would scour car boot sales and charity shops for items I thought would sell. Then I would re-list them on eBay. Sometimes I would make a profit, and other times I wouldn’t. I could break even on some products but the main strategy involved buying at a good price.
You can also use eBay to sell products from home of course. Take good pictures and make sure you’ve got as many keywords in the title as possible to get the best coverage for your items.
Using eBay To Find Low Cost Items
You can also use eBay to search for the items as you purchase them. Find similar items on eBay and see how much they are selling for. There’s even a tool in the advanced search tool which lets you find products which have already sold on ebay and check on their selling price. Checkout this article on How To Start A Profitable Ebay Business from scratch.
This is a great little strategy which lets anyone use eBay to find bargain items. By searching for miss-spelled items, you can use eBay to pick up bargains and then sell them again on the site. Just alter the listing and make sure your title is correct. Then add a number of other keywords to get your listing noticed.
Selling Products From Home Ideas
There’s a limit to how much you’ll want to do this though. I found it incredibly time consuming to run an eBay business like this. You’ve got customers to deal with, products to list continually and then you’ll be posting out items at the post office.
I found the eBay ‘system’ I share in my article above by purchasing an eBook from eBay. It showed the simple strategy of selling other people’s products which were badly listed. It’s a great little strategy and it works too. It’s just not very scalable.
The eBook, however, struck me as a better business model because there was nothing to post out! Even though I didn’t have an eBook myself back then, I thought this would be the best kind of business model to run online: automated, and with the ability to scale to multiple buyers.
Selling Products From Home Ideas – Other People’s Products
The pursuit of this simple idea – (having the ability to build an online sales platform which could sell digital products), led me to a different kind of business model. The business model is known as affiliate marketing and although I pursued this for a long time with dubious success, I later found a model which was far superior.
Anyone can sell digital or physical products online and earn commissions from the sales they generate. They simply refer online website visitors to other people’s products. Their affiliate links are tracked back to them when they make a sale. That’s how they receive a commission. Learn how here.Â
Selling Products From Home Ideas – Create Your Own Digital Products
I created my own digital products after discovering the ‘magic’ of downloadable products. The main problem was I didn’t know how to sell them. I thought I could create a website and people would come. Unfortunately for me, the internet is a vast place. I never got any sales. I didn’t know how to market my own products.
What I did know though was the huge potential of promoting digital products over the internet. Digital products lit up a ‘lightbulb’ moment for me. I knew I could sell the same product over and over, if it was digital. This meant no need for postage or storage costs either. In terms of selling products from home ideas went, this was the best! I just didn’t know how to do it, yet.
Selling other people’s products over the internet is probably the fastest way to generate an income online. But you need to:
- Know what you are doing
- Use the right products
Selling Products From Home Ideas – Automation and Scalability
From the humble beginnings of selling products from home ideas like eBay, I moved on to learning how to build a digital business. This was a whole different kettle of fish! I knew some things, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I learned about the various online marketing strategies and how to build strong foundations to a scalable online business. This involved building habits as well as building an automated sales funnel, with a range of digital products within it to sell.
Checkout this video by clicking on the image. You can see how easily you can set up a digital sales platform which offers a scalable digital online business:
Kinds Of Digital Products To Sell
When I first looked at the business model of selling other people’s products (affiliate marketing), I tried to sell products for around the $100 mark. Even with a good commission rate, the meant I could only earn $40 on a sale. I later learned that the top online entrepreneurs were using scalable advertising, high ticket products and were making commissions from multiple streams of income:
- High ticket items – let affiliates use paid advertising and scale up more quickly
- Up-sells mean you can benefit from later sales made to your existing referrals
- Subscriptions let you earn again and again from each individual sale you make.
- Multi-tier commissions mean you can earn later on from sales made by your referrals and ‘team’.
Access an online business system, training platform and community of online entrepreneurs. Register for a free video series here to learn more.