Many people these days are looking into starting their own ecommerce business, or looking into expanding their existing business onto the web. Once they get this idea they go online and research for hours on how to run a successful business online and most of them come up with junk like, "I made $20,000 in my first month, now I am on vacation and still making money off my website". These places also state you can be really lazy and do minimal work while becoming filthy rich. Well these websites are wrong and must be avoided at all costs. 

Starting an internet business is just like any other business. It takes hard work. You can not just sit around doing minimal work and expect to make a decent income. It will take much of your time getting to understand the world of ecommerce at first as well as finding your niche. Here's a few tips on how to run a successful internet business. 

1. First you must find out exactly what products you want to sell. 
Try to find products that everyone and their moms aren't selling. Find a line of products that are in high demand but very few suppliers of them if any. If you find this (which most people don't) you just took a giant step into a successful business online. 

2. Search for suppliers of this type of products with good prices. 
Of course like any other type of business you would have to find a supplier for your products. Now there is one benefit you will have having your business online which is called drop shipping. With drops shipping you never see the products you sell, you just send the orders to your wholesale drop ship company and they ship it out for you. The best place to find wholesale company's that would drop ship for you is worldwidebrands.com

3. Decide weather you want to sell on auctions or on your own website. 
If you are in a rush and would like to start quickly you would probably prefer selling on auction websites such as ebay. If you sell on auctions I would also prefer you list your products on yahoo auctions since its absolutely 100% free with no costs at all. You will make less sales then ebay but there are no costs. Also you may start up your internet business with a website. Websites usually take much work in creating it and will take some time. You may hire a web designer to build one for you or just build it yourself. I prefer you learn how to, and build it yourself since its your business and you should know what's going on. Learning HTML is very easy. If you know how to use Microsoft word and Microsoft Power Point, then you would know how to use Microsoft Front Page to build your websites! It's that simple. 

4. Promoting your website once it is finished. 
If you sell on auctions don't worry about promoting them because you will get traffic from people searching the auctions site. Promoting your website is very simple but takes much hard work and lots of your time. A few years ago people used to say "Make it and they will come", this is no longer the case at all. If you make a website and open for business no one will come unless you market it well. The best way to get traffic (visitors) to your website is by ranking high in search engines. To do that you may hire a search engine optimization company to do so, but it may be very costly even though most times its worth it. To do the search engine optimization (SEO) yourself here's a few tips. Build as many links as you can to your website with your keywords in the anchor text. You may do this by submitting your site to many many directories, I suggest you never stop finding new directories to list to because every day there are 100's of new directories that open. Search engine traffic may take a while to achieve meanwhile you could list your products on shopping comparison sites such as yahoo shopping, bizrate.com, pricegrabber.com etc. These are pay per click product search engines. I also suggest you list your site on froogle.com since its 100% free. You may also start an adwords campaign. This is simply paying to rank high in search engines with google. You may also start an affiliate program, where people advertise your site for you and you pay them a commission for each sale they give you. If you are new to all of this I suggest you post on webmaster forums to better understand the industry. Make sure you post a signature link to your website on all your posts because it will get you traffic and higher search engine rankings. 

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