A Product is:

When I first started my first website, I had actually created my first product. It wasn’t a very good product. And it didn’t make any money. But it was a product.

Years later, I got better at it. I launched a website and I put ads on it. This made a little money. Very little money.

I’ve done a number different products on many different sites. E-books and physical books. Clothes, Camping Gear, Audio Books, Online courses, Services and consultation. All of these were products.

Unless your business is to give stuff away, you will need to find a way to monazite your product. And depending on what your product is, your monetization method will be different.

My first product was content. I made a website that had information on it. (Like this one) And I placed advertising on it. It didn’t make much money, but its a monetization method. I call it the monetization method of last resort. Generally you don’t want to run adds for other sites on you own site if you have other products because it will send them to other sites, and they might not come back. And if you are selling products, your competitors would love to put ads for their own products next to yours on your site.

So ads are a last resort for when you have no other monetization method. But as methods go, ads are the easiest. And so lots of sites have them. This site does too.

If you are selling services, like me, then you will need a way to have people contact you and request the service. Contact forms are great and easy. To step it up a notch a form that helps your lead or potential customer pre-qualify and understand the service and cost it even better. Sometimes.

If you go to a mortgage site, they are going to ask you a bunch of questions on the contact form. And if they are a good site, they are going to tell you what your payments might be and fees and such before you finish the contact form. There are two reasons to do this.

1. It makes the lead or customer engaged in the process early. Their investment in time will incentivize them to stick with you later.
2. It filters out people that are not serious. A window shopper can cost you a bunch of time and money following up with them when they didn’t really want to pay for your services anyway.

There are also reasons not to do this.

1. Asking for too much and giving too little turns people off. Having a detailed contact process that ends with, “We’ll be contacting you soon with a quote.” is a bit of a turn off. So if you will need to do this, let them know that at the beginning that they won’t be getting a quote online.
2. Serious contacts that don’t have all of the info you are asking for may be prevented from completing the form.

If your are actually selling a thing, be it physical or virtual, then you want a way to sell it from your website. There are a few different and still effective ways to do this. Listing a product on an established platform like Amazon and Ebay and Etsy are good ways to get your product in front of potential buyers.

Selling from your own site is also pretty simple. If you do it simply. If you just have a product, I recommend using a Paypal button. But once you get past a couple of products managing paypal buttons is not the best way.

If you have more than 5 items but less than 100 products, I recommend woocommerce. Woocommerce is a plugin for WordPress that lets you turn your blog into a store. I really like this technology as it gives you the power of WP CMS and lets you use it with an ecommerce engine.

If you have more than 2oo products in your store, or in your catalog, then you will want to use something a bit more powerful. For this I recommend Magento. Magento is not simple. And it doesn’t have a powerful CMS. But it handles large catalogs and lots of checkout and payment processing options.

There is one other monetization method that I find worth mentioning. That is affiliate programs. Some affiliate programs that can be used like ads. And there are others that can be used like a partnership. Amazon has a good affiliate network to supplement a thin catalog.

And there are combinations of these that can fit any product and website. The best method to monetize your products and business and website will be found by studying the methods available, and then measuring what works best for you.

No matter what you do as a business, you have to sell something.  There are basically two things you can sell.  There are Products and there are Services.  Most of the time I will call the Service a Product as well.  (I do that just to be confusing.)

The point is that you have to identify what you are really selling.  You need to know what you are selling for two very important reasons.  It helps you decide what to charge.  And it allows you to find your customers, market, and suppliers more effectively.

A person that is in real estate may visualize themselves as selling the American Dream.  But that will distract them from pricing their services correctly.  There is no scarcity on dreams.  And the limits to America are vast.  This would lead a person to think that they have an abundant supply of American Dreams to sell and that they will virtually never run out.

But really they are selling homes.  There are only so many that are for sale at any given moment.  And America may be vast, but you will need to target a market much smaller than the nation if you are planning to have any type of success.

With the realization that they are actually selling homes, and that they are only selling them to people in the Houston, TX area is a great help.  They need to find and connect with housing developers, title companies, loan companies and customers in this area.

Now that they have a better sense of the elements involved, they can see what the costs of the services needed are, and get an accurate handle of the inventory available for sale.  And now they can figure out what they will be able to charge for their products.

This is a high level overview.  This is true for every business from selling shoes, to houses, to books and to services.  If you are in business, you are selling something, and you need to identify what it is before you will know how much there is, and how much you can charge for it.