You notified everyone in your address book, put up a few FFA ads, paid someone to submit your site to a few search engines, and nothing seemed to generate interest. These are things often heard from website owners that are just starting out. A few years back, I wrote an article titled "I Shot An Arrow Into The Air -It Fell To Earth I Know Not Where."

Some people feel words from this poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow make an appropriate strategy for an advertising campaign for their business. They purchase hundreds of thousands of E-mail addresses, and thinking of each as an "arrow shot into air", hope that some will fall to earth and hit a prospective client.

The odds of this generating business for you are "slim to none". In fact, this is called spamming, and many ISP's, who have a zero tolerance for this, may discontinue your service. So forget ads that promise that you will get millions of email addresses for a very low price, and all you have to do is sit back and watch money roll in. Many of these lists are so old they have "whiskers".

The majority of email addresses sold are actually harvested from web. Most of people who advertise, don't want to compromise their real email address so they get temporary free ones, and this is what they use in their ads.

Statistics show, that only a small percentage of people visiting a web site actually buy something. Now if you're selling a "high ticket" item, that could have resulted in thousands of dollars worth of sales, and may be perfectly acceptable. A "low ticket" item, on other hand may have only netted a small amount, and made a small profit or barely recovered costs.

The web site selling "high ticket" item must balance their production capabilities with demand. Maybe they can't handle any more customers. The person selling "low ticket" items has their work cut out for them.

So let's concentrate on what "low ticket" person has to do.

The pundits say that you must sell yourself first, and product or service will be an easy sale. Well this is true to a certain extent. You must however have something that is saleable, at a competitive price.

Let's talk about price. Yesterday I was browsing through an online Garden Supply Store - yes it is getting to be that time of year. Common items were typically priced at almost double what I could get them for in our local store. While I got some good ideas, that vendor lost a sale. Prices must be competitive - and if you add shipping and handling, differential is even higher. So, concept of selling locally available items at a higher cost just doesn't make sense. The online entrepreneur is going to have a very difficult time competing with chain stores.