Selling online begun with the idea of selling used items and antiques online. Today, an overwhelming volume of products of various types are traded over the internet. The question is: How do you start selling products online? What products should you sell? Where can you source your products from? 

What products should you sell?

There are two ways you can approach this - sell products with high demand and high competition (commodity products), or sell unique products with lesser demand but higher margins.

Selling products with high demand and stiff competition means that you need to be able to source products at the lowest prices. In order to break into the market, you may sometimes need to sell your product at cost, or even below cost. If you can pull this off however, you have the potential to sell a high volume of a fast moving product.

Unique products such as collectibles or antiques are usually more expensive and do not get sold as quickly. However, the higher profits also mean that you get better value out of your time spent to market your product. You would still need to determine if there is significant demand for your product though. Products with too few potential buyers would not be worth your efforts.  

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I had planned to write about selling tangible products today. However, I wanted to discuss on something more popular these days - social media.

This topic has been hitting many blogs recently. Popular sites such as Doshdosh.com, Problogger.net and Caroline-Middlebrook.com have all been talked about how social network and social bookmarking sites and tools such as Twitter.com, Facebook.com, StumbleUpon.com. Blogcatalog.com or social aggregators such as Friendfeed.com

Now, the question is: Is there money to be made on all these social sites? If yes, how can we sell online though these sites?

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If you don’t know what referrals are, just visit the websites of these popular bloggers:

Dosh Dosh (http://www.doshdosh.com)

Caroline Middlebrook (http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com)

Daily Blog Tips (http://www.dailyblogtips.com)

Problogger (http://www.problogger.net)

Notice the 150 x 150 pixel square ads usually located at the right site of these blogs? These are known as referral ads. Working similar like Google Adsense ads, you get paid for each click you refer to the sites that these square ads link to.

Personally, I’m not entirely a big fan of referrals. People may notice them, and they may consider them, but they don’t get a whole lot of clicks. In fact, I get fewer clicks on referral ads, than on Google Adsense. However, with their attractive designs and animation, they do help to make your site or blog look more interesting.

In the end, referral ads do not help you make a lot of money online, but they can help to supplement your blog or site income if you happen to have a lot of traffic. Here’s a list of sites with referral programs, and my thoughts for some of them:

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