You probably already have your own offline sales pegged. Maybe you are selling through markets and fairs or already have your own store. You think you can sell just as easily online. No kidding!

When was the last time you bought something online? Was it a holiday or present? Did you comb the World Wide Web purely to find the cheapest or was it a particular benefit you were after? I bet you checked every web site you could possibly find, spending only seconds on each one if it didn't immediately tell you what you wanted. There you are then you are now an expert at what is required to sell online. Yes when you were shopping online did you care that the sellers were reputable fine people who had been selling for several years and just want to make an honest living. No. Oh no. What you wanted was to get your product at the best possible price or benefit to you. Most shoppers are entirely selfish; remember this in every step of your site design and you will be successful.

Firstly consider your product or offering. Is it such a compelling buying proposition that it will stand out as the happy shopper flicks through all those websites? Is it the cheapest? Does it offer the best benefits? Is it really so good that it can take this kind of World Wide competition. If not forget it. Spend your cash on offline advertising instead. Remember on the web you may well be in competition with your supplier. Or with National companies that need to shift their stock to bring in the newest latest and greatest product. Even worse you may have competition from suppliers who obtain their stock from dubious sources or from auctions.

Okay okay so you can pass the first hurdle. Whats next? Well your site and your products need to be seen so that your customers can appraise them. Of course you will be up against fierce competition to be seen on the web but don't worry this is not an impossible hurdle.

As soon as you have your home page online get busy listing yourself with all the free directories. This provides you with incoming links and increases the importance of your website. However they often take a while to put your site in so list with them as soon as possible. There is lots of free software around that helps you list with this. Then when you have your products online, list your products with as many price comparison websites that will let you list. Sites like Kelkoo and Dooyoo and don't miss Google Products; this is sure to be important soon.

Try to build quality links into your site. Quality means sites that are in the same business or similar business to you. Try typing into a search index "MY PRODUCT followed by RECIPROCAL LINKS". The sites that follow will all be the main ones to link to for your business and some of them will have onscreen instructions as to how to link to them.

Do you have a newsworthy side to your business? Anything that could be the subject of a press release? If so shake it up a bit and send it off to all your local media. Then send it into as many blogs as you can. You can also submit to groups. Google groups are easy to log into and you can send messages to a variety of groups, but try to restrict it to ones that could be interested in your product.

Hey so now you are depressed. That's right there is a lot of work in this internet selling. This can be helped and sped up of course by greasing the palms of the internet advertisers and companies that will enhance your profile. It's called SEO, search engine optimisation. Try Google Ads words, MSN or YAHOO, they can all bring visitors to your site for a price. So to return to hurdle one; if your product really is competitive and your profit for one sale can fund the one hundred or more clicks, that are required to bring enough visitors to the site for a sale, then all well and good. However if not you will have to build links to your site yourself.

Make no mistake Internet marketing is a tough market place. Probably the toughest. But the rewards are also the biggest and with Internet sales growing like crazy, it surely is the place to be.