With one of my fashion blogs generating significant traffic, I wanted to explore other channels to monetize my blog. Adsense was still the main income generator for the site, but frankly, the revenue per click wasn’t really top dollar. I kept asking myself, “How to sell online?”

Obviously, I needed to sell more products on my site. I could think of Party dresses, accessories, hair styling products and shoes off the top of my head. The problem was, it would cost significant investment to purchase inventory to start my store.

The stakes were high for me - I couldn’t say with certainty that I was selling the right products to my site visitors. If it didn’t work out, my money would be stuck in inventory for months.

The next option was to look at Dropshipping. I read up about this concept, and checked out product lines at numerous drop shipping websites. Most of them had huge inventories of a wide variety of products. Prices vary between each, and some such as the www.worldwidebrands.com require hefty membership fees before even being eligible to view their products.

Other sites such as www.DHgate.com, www.Myeglobal.com, www.chinadropshipper.com and www.ekitchengadgets.com, were amongst the other sites I reviewed for dropshipping. Then, I stumbled upon dropshipping forums such as www.dropshipforum.net and www.dropshipforum.co.uk which attempts to provide information on unscrupulous dropshippers based on past user experiences.

Apparently, many drop ship sites engage 3^rd party wholesalers to fulfill their orders. At times, they fail to check the legitimacy of their wholesalers. Thus, buyers may end up having fake goods delivered to their customers, or even refurbished or used electronic items being sold as new products.

This really didn’t put dropshippers in a good light. I needed a simpler way to monetize - a low risk method that required low investment, but at the same time easy and quick to jumpstart with minimal hassle of delivering goods to customers. Of course, my trade-off would be the lower profit margins I would be getting, in exchange for the lower risk.

I started checking out affiliate products, and then came across this ingenious way to simply pull product feeds from publishers. All inventory descriptions and prices were readily available to be extracted. I didn’t need to worry about sending products to my customers - the product publishers will take care of payment and delivery. At the end of the month, I’d receive commissions on what was due to me.

One of my favorites is www.popshops.com. All you need for this is to have your own domain and website, accounts with affiliate networks such as www.linkconnector.com or www.shareasale.com, and you are ready to fill your site with products of your choice.

With a search field, Popshops makes it really easy for you to find the product that you want. And, there are just so many publishers over several affiliate networks to choose from. The great thing is that you get to see a thumbnail of your product and corresponding description before you decide if you want to display it at your store. If you change your mind, you can just as easily remove it from your list. Everything is just a drag and drop.

What’s more, Popshops allows you to customize how you want your products displayed, such as the number of items to show on each row, the size of the items and the length of the descriptions you want. Popshops lets you open up to 10 free “stores” as a trial, and there is no time limit on your testing. All you really need is to have an account with the affiliate network of the publisher of your product.

Once satisfied with your selections, you’ll be given a set of Javascript code that you can copy and paste onto your website. Your feed is automatically pulled from the affiliate network each time your site is loaded. Users are sent to your affiliate publisher, and they take it from there onwards.

Isn’t that a great to “How to sell online“? No wonder Popshops has been named the Best Affiliate Tool of 2007 by ABestWeb. To me, this is an excellent tool to start out with when selling online. After all, I can always switch to drop-shipping or even stock up my own inventory once I get the ball rolling.