3. If you can’t sell soap to your neighbors, you will not sell it online.

Tens of thousands of people are taken in each year by extravagant plans to sell jewelry, medications, vitamins, cosmetics and household cleaning products online. Most of these people would not be a success trying to sell these things offline to neighbors and will not fair any better in digital world.

4. Do not depend on Affiliate Programs for a substantial income.

Affiliate programs are a way to get a few extra bucks out of a popular website. A stable and fairly honest affiliate program like one offered by Amazon.com is good. Some multi-merchant affiliate websites like Share-A-Sale are also worth a shot. Others may be geared to change once you start making any money, essentially robbing you of commissions due for sending motivated buyers to their merchants.

5. Sell unique or competitive products.

Don’t be taken in by scams that get you to purchase a bunch of wholesale junk, and then try to sell it on Ebay. If you do plan on buying to resell online, do your homework. Find out who else is selling same thing for how much they’re charging. The most successful online merchants sell items that are unique or in such high demand that market allows for a wide variety of sellers and prices.

6. Less clicks mean more customers.

The less complicated you make it for customers to purchase your products, more you will sell. It’s estimated that for every one click a customer executes to find or purchase your products, you can lose as little as ten or as many as one thousand sales. Make it easy for them, even if it’s harder for you.

7. Expect worst, enjoy best.

A responsible real world merchant will be ready for major setbacks like natural disasters, thefts and personal injury lawsuits. Online merchants regularly face cancelled listings or withheld payments fueled by buyer complaints, website or payment processing outages and sudden search engine dropouts.

8. Selling is an art. Are you an artist?

Not everyone has personality and skills needed to be a success at selling. Anyone who wants to sell online has to be able to translate his or her personality and skills into digital world. If you are completely baffled by internet and lack time needed to learn what it’s all about, becoming an online merchant would probably be a very bad idea.

The vast majority of people who try to make money online will never meet their own financial expectations. In most cases, culprit will be poor planning. In others, bad execution. Overall, anyone planning a web-based business needs to approach his or her endeavor in a serious way. While optimism is always a good motivator, it cannot replace proper planning and risk assessment.

Can you see anything in their titles that you might use in your speech or article title?

A speech or article is a transitory thing, so needn’t take too much of your time. But you’ll be stuck with name of your company for quite a while, so devote much more time to getting it right.

Your website, and email address are in between. Not as temporary as a speech or article, but probably not as long- lived as your corporation.

The aim of these names is to reinforce your company's image, and remind people of your business identity.

So Joe Black's web site could be named joeblack.com, or, if he wanted something wittier, BlackInk.com, and his email address could be joe@blackink.com.

Joe, like most of us, has other interests than his business. He’s a birdwatcher, and is planning an online newsletter and website for others with this hobby who already know him.

A good name for his ezine could be Black Birds, and for his website www.blackbirds.com, then his e-address for it could be joe@blackbirds.com.

Sometimes you can’t make such an apt connection. For example, when my ezine, which focuses on marketing of financial services, was created it needed a name. I liked acronym "TIP". But what could name I expand it into?

Here’s a few that came to mind:

* The Insurance Practitioner * The Intelligent Planner * The Insightful Provider * The Interested Ponderer * The Insurance Professional * The Incorporated Practice, etc.

To say nothing of all variations that can be rung by switching adjectives around.

See what I finally decided on at: http://www.eTIP.ca/