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How to Make Money on Your Website - Using Merchandising

Business Ideas, Online Businesses

Small Online Business Idea: Making money with your high traffic and/or high reputation website using Merchandising.

(The rest of this post assumes you’ve already got one or many high traffic/high quality websites. If you haven’t finished step 1 yet, go here for information on how to build a high traffic website.)

Merchandising & Your Website - Basics:

Every time you see some kid wearing a sports jersey or musician’s album cover, you’re seeing evidence of someone else’s merchandising. Or, someone else’s $3 profit. Learning how to do merchandising for your own brand is surprisingly easy, especially when leveraging partners like CafePress to help you on your way.

How it Works:

Businesses with custom production and delivery capabilities combine with your custom merchandise needs (logo’d tshirts, pens, mugs, mousepads, books, etc.) to create a virtual store in almost no time. Setup is as easy as 1-2-3:

1) You create a suite of customized products and place them in your “store”

2) You send mobs of eager traffic to the store (possibly on your site, possibly a “store” on another site)

3) You collect cheques after someone else does all the hard work

Dangers:

The main dangers involved are:

  • Wasting your time setting up a store that no-one will buy from:
    • If your online community does not want to buy things with your logos or ideas on them, all your creativity and set-up time could be wasted.
  • Wasting your money setting up a store that no-one will buy from:
    • Choosing a free system (see below) to start with is the best way to avoid this risk. If you start selling material like crazy, you can then do the math on how much %’s you’ll save by moving to a more complex, independent, custom-built system.
  • Setting up a store that people do want to buy from:
    • What will you do with all that extra money?? J

Important Partners:

The following websites are great places to start (and likely finish) your search for an easy-to-operate and inexpensive merchandising system:

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