How many products? This is an entirely subjective decision. The simple answer is: “Enough to enable you to make a profit” (i.e., more money than you started out with.) For some bloggers, 5-10 products will be enough. For others, two or three pages of products will suffice. It all depends on the profitability of the products you have selected.

“Profitability” is the final consideration which you should factor into your decision-making process about which products to advertise. When you have finalized your product list, have evaluated them and found them to be satisfactory, you need to check the information provided by the supplier to determine what will be the percentage of your commission, earned on each sale. Practically speaking, given a choice between two excellent products, you might as well choose the product offering the highest commission. If you have allocated enough space for several advertisements on your site, of course, you can offer as many products as you have room for, even those with a lower commission, however, if you think of your website page as a sort of “virtual shelf” like a shelf in a store, you may want to consider the concept of

Product Rent

Supermarkets, department stores and other large businesses use “product rent” when calculating the cost and profitability of merchandising specific products on their shelves. The purpose, of course, is to utilize shelf space most efficiently and to maximize profits. Businesses will promote the best-selling, higher profit items, by giving these products the most prominent locations on the shelf in the most actively shopped sections of the aisle, as determined by marketing research. Vendors who stock the shelves will compete aggressively to have the best position on the shelf ( perhaps eye-level and near the front of the store.) This is not something which is critical for you, although, you may want to put your most profitable products where they will be seen first. In some cases, in larger stores, low-profit items or those which do not sell well will be phased out and eliminated. The exception to this practice would be low-profit items which are popular with customers. Ultimately, as with blog content, you want to keep the public which patronizes your business, happy, so they will return.

I have mentioned this product rent concept here because, although, as a website owner, you will probably not have the same constraints and costs of doing business as the large supermarkets or department stores, you are limited in the time you have to manage your site. Writing posts, reviewing comments, replying to e-mails and performing whatever additional management tasks are necessary to keep your site functioning smoothly, will take some time and effort. You may, for practical reasons, want to limit your product offerings to a few of the most popular products with the highest profit margins. In this way you will earn the biggest profit from the smallest investment of time and effort. If you have an abundance of time, then you can do whatever you want. Consider, though, that a smaller number of really great products with a high profit margin may accomplish the same profit objectives as pages of products and may get more attention from online shoppers who have fewer choices to check out.

The analogy I would use to clarify the point I wanted to make above, is this: Modern day gold mines process 10 tons of gold-bearing matrix to get 1 oz. of pure gold. With the high price of gold, it is ,apparently, feasible to do this. Consider, however, how much more profitable it would be, especially factoring in time and effort, if a mine processed a rich, gold-bearing quartz vein that yielded 100 oz. of pure gold per ton. The point here is that if your time is limited and you do not want to have 10 pages of products, then one page of high profit products can serve your purpose quite satisfactorily.

The product selection and evaluation process I have outlined is a suggested procedure. It is not “written in stone.” However, if you are new to online marketing, or have a website to which you have not yet added products to sell, these suggestions offer a workable guideline that will provide you with a starting point to help you accomplish your commercial objectives for your site.

However you decide to find, select, and evaluate products for your site and however you promote and sell these products, I hope you have great success. Yes. It takes some time and effort to do this but it is part of the fun” After all, you are stocking the “shelves” of your own business. If you have a blog–this is the essence of How to Make Money With Your Blog.

Good Luck and please feel free to visit again,

–wil