Who needs an expensive website?

It seems even homeless people these days have their own websites. Well, not really of course, but it looks like everyone wants one, and the typical business owner feels he or she is at substantial risk if they don't have a significant "web presence".

If you designed and manufactured a product, you could take it door-to-door and try to sell it to one person at a time. Hard work of course. Or, you could hire someone to sell it for you, or engage a company that sells products like yours and ask them to sell it for you.

The first point I'd like to make is, It Costs Money to Sell Your Product. At the very least, it will cost you a lot of your personal time; time that could have been spent doing something more valuable: designing your next product or improving your existing one. Somehow, though, so many of us think that we can avoid paying for the selling of it by doing the work ourselves. Mistake! You need to pay to get your product sold.

If you had created a neat product, for example, that trims eyebrows, you are hardly likely to rent an entire shop-front -- with all its inherent costs -- just to sell that one product, right? No, you'd go to existing shop-fronts and work out a deal where they sell your product for you, while comfortably affording a post office box to handle your communications with the outside world.

The same is true of the Internet. Why would you pay tens of thousands of dollars creating -- and driving traffic to -- a website that sold only a single product? Just like in the pre-Internet days, you would give other businesses a slice of the revenue who sold your product for you.

So, where are such businesses these days? Where on the Internet, I mean. Well, they are everywhere on the Internet. Lots of established websites already have all the traffic you can dream of. In our case of the eyebrow trimmer product, any online health care and beauty business can sell the product.

Question: How do you strike a deal with such businesses so they sell your product for you?

Answer: You go through a broker.

A broker is an online business that matches up companies that have products with companies that like to sell products for a commission. An example of such a broker is Commission Junction. On the one side of their website, companies with products (Advertisers) sign up and list their products for sale. On the other side of the website, companies with web traffic (Publishers) apply to Advertisers to be alllowed list their products on the Publisher's website. Later, when clicks from the Advertisers result in sales, Publishers get a commission for creating the sale.

Local Search

The larger the geographical reach of your marketing campaign, the more it is going to cost.

If all your customers live within a few miles of your business, chances are, all you need is an informational website and a thorough presence in the Local Search listings of the top few search engines.

Global Search

If your business sells products nationally or globally, chances are, you need to either (1) make a significant investment in your website or (2) pay another organization -- a broker -- to bring in the sales and sales leads for your business.

Conclusion

Gone are the days when you could simply put up a website and the customers would come. Competition for website traffic today is, for most businesses, fierce. So if you want to sell a product or service beyond a few dozen miles from where you do business, you need to engage organizations who know how to find customers on the web. Otherwise, be prepared to invest significant amounts of money finding business.