Puzzled at the word ‘merchantry’? I searched the thesaurus in the web and this is one of the words given for Marketing!! Cyberspace, everyone knows,denotes internet. Indeed I was wondering how long a person should remain a novice in the domain of internet merchantry? I realised in answer that as long as the ‘novices’ follow the old methods of selling digital products, they cannot become experts.

The digital products are churned out by the numerous self-proclaimed gurus of internet marketing. When they are themselves selling these e-products, how much more money a novice can make by joining them as ‘affiliates’? For late comers, ‘affiliates’ means simply agent or distributor working for a commission, selling other peoples’ products. Is that all to internet marketing? No.

I would suggest to the novices the following steps to become ‘experts’ and also earn real money.

1. First go through all the articles,write-ups, books etc, available on the internet about effective selling in cyberspace. There are numerous freebies available.

2. The authors of all e-books etc. will entice you with how to market these books and articles.Don’t fall into the trap. Learn from these books but do not plunge into marketing these e-things. After all how many people/consumers are interested in marketing techniques?

3.That brings us to ‘real products/things’. A majority of people are interested in buying physical products, where to buy, what to buy. So do some research on these lines and find the niche products/articles people want.

4.Find out who the marketers of these products are and join them as affiliates. You can earn faster by selling a ‘niche’ physical product than chasing the mirage of selling e-products.

5. For selling physical products over cyberspace you need basically a web site. Web sites are available dime a dozen from various web hosts. Buy a reasonable website. Free web sites, free hosting are all hog-wash.They will demand money sooner or later. You won’t ger money long term using free web sites.

6. Adopt the various methods you learnt from cyberspace, from the ‘gurus’ for attracting traffic to your web site and start selling the physical products. You can mint money!

The author is involved in internet marketing.

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