Having decided what to sell, the next question on your mind is how do I sell on the Internet? The key here is to use your creative talents to identify the correct market niche and target that market for your product.

In the physical world, the three most important factors in selling are location, location, location. On the Internet, location does not enter into consideration at all. Your physical premise could be located in Houston, Texas. Yet you can accept orders from London, England at any time, 24 hours a day. Users don't care where your physical premise is located. What they are concerned about is the product you provide and the price at which you provide it.

Users spend time on the Interenet for two reasons - entertainment or information. By providing one or both of these on your site you can costlessly attract consumers to your site. For instance, your hobby may be mountain climbing. By providing important information about mountain climbing (eg. mountain climbing equipment, ideal sites etc.) , asking users to e-mail you questions, relating personal anecdotes and tips on your site, you are guaranteeing that your site is useful to the consumer. The idea is to attract the consumer to your site. Then when the consumer realizes that he/she needs to make purchase, he/she can quickly place an on-line order at your store. Note that with Createastore, you have the option of receiving on-line transactions at your store.

Aside from providing information, you can also provide entertainment. Actually these two facts are so closely related that sometimes it is difficult to draw any distinction between the two. Information can be entertaining, hence millions of television viewers watch the News channel. To provide entertainment on your site, simply provide pages which have contents or trivia or entertaining information related to the products you're selling. For example, a music store might have information about celebrities, music trivia, compact disk giveaways, etc.

Now that you know how to attract users to your site, you must be careful to identify and target your consumers. As you know, the majority of web-surfers can afford the equipment and connection time required to surf the Internet. These users are quite knowledgable and not afraid of trying out new things. This category tends to be the one to buy products when they first come out, to set trends rather than follow them. However, with the increasing number of households connected to the Internet, the demographics of users and hence their preferances will change.

There are a few ways in which a user might visit your site. The user can discover your site by seeing your listings on Createastore. The user may find your listing through a search engine. Please note that the top 7 search engines account for 99% of all web-traffic. The web-surfer may see your banner ad displayed on another site. The last method by which you will receive visitors is through word-of-mouth.

Always be certain that you first separate the market for your products into segments, identify the segment you wish to target then take steps to ensure that you have advertised on a site relevant to the product you sell. For instance you might advertise on Playboy magazine page to sell your computer hardware, you may even receive lots of "click-throughs", but you will not experience many, if any, sales. Instead you'd do better to advertise your computer hardware on the on-line edition of some computer magazine which has less traffic than Playboy magazine but ensures a greater potential of a sale to your store.

In the physical world consumers walk by your store and see the large neon sign and window display. This prompts them to enter your store. Your fair prices and great customer service keeps them coming back. On the Internet no one will see your neon sign or window display. The way they find your store is by either seeing your listing on a search engine (which is more and more difficult as search engines list pages and pages of information), seeing your listing on an on-line mall directory, seeing your banner ads, or by word-of-mouth.

In order for consumers to see your 'neon sign' on the Internet, you must undertake some form of banner advertising or form mutual agreements with similar sites to exchange banners. This will ensure that your site receive notice from interested consumers.