The Internet has made it much easier and affordable for ordinary people to sell clothes online. While a traditional retail store costs thousands of dollars a month to maintain, a website costs next to nothing to maintain. In fact, you don't even need your own product to sell online. You can work as an affiliate marketer selling clothes made by other companies or people. Every time you make a sale you are paid a commission. Whether you sell your own clothes or clothes made by others there are a few important things you need to do to successfully sell clothes online.
Get A Website for Selling Clothes Online
A website is your own virtual piece of real estate. You have complete control of the content and you can promote whatever products you want. A website has three basic components: a domain, a hosting service and a site building platform. You purchase the domain from a domain registration services, usually for around $15.00 a year. You can purchase hosting for less than $5.00 a month from a hosting service, and you use a platform like WordPress, Site Rubix, Drupal or Joomla to build your website. A website does require a small financial investment, but it is a necessity to sell stuff online.
Add useful and engaging content to your clothes website
In the early days of the Internet, you could do quite well by filling your site with banner ads and promotional copy and wait for people to click through and buy. Those days are gone. People get on the Internet primarily to find information and they will not stay on a site if they're not getting what they want. Your content should be relevant to the product you are selling but should be perceived as useful to the reader even if no sale is made. For example, if you are selling sweaters online, you could have content on your site about sweater materials, how to select a sweater this winter, best sweaters for kids, and sweaters to wear to a first date.
Join Affiliate Programs Specializing in Clothes.
If you decide to sell clothes made by other people you will be an affiliate marketer. The easiest way to get started finding affiliate products to sell is to type in your product + affiliate into Google and sift through the results.
Most of the big brands have out sourced the work of finding affiliates to third party websites that run Affiliate products. These websites handle the management and payment.
Popular Affiliate Programs include Commission Junction and Google Affiliate program. You will need to register with them to promote their products. Registration is free of charge. Once you join you can choose clothes to sell from a thousands of manufacturers. Once you have chosen a product you are given a link that you place on your website. Every time a visitor on your website clicks the link he is directed to the manufacturers website. If he/she makes a purchase, you are paid a commission that is anywhere from 5% to 75% of the price of the product.
A common misconception with affiliate marketing is that you first choose a product and then you plan your marketing campaign. You really should plan your marketing campaign first, then choose your product. The reason is that a full blown Internet marketing campaign involves a lot of dedication and writing on your part. You want to choose a topic that you feel passionate enough about to consistently work on for a long period of time. It also helps to know about your topic, but it's easy to quickly learn more about a topic that holds your interest. Once you know your topic, then you can easily choose relevant products from the many possibilities.
Drive traffic to your clothes website
There are a number of strategies for driving traffic to your website and they loosely divide into two categories: free traffic generation and paid traffic generation. In one sense, neither one is free because if you are not paying for advertising, you will be spending time writing articles. If you are going to sell clothes online for the first time, I recommend starting with article writing, as you can lose a lot of money on pay per click advertising if you are not doing it just right.
Article writing is writing articles for your website and waiting for Google search engine to add them to their index. The goal is to try and make sure your articles appear on google results every time someone searches for the type of clothes you are selling. If you are selling sweaters.Write articles about red sweater, female sweaters, kid sweater etc, so that your articles are found every time someone types those words on Google.
Article writing starts with keyword research. Target each article to a long tail (meaning more than three words) keyword potential buyers are likely to search under. Your goal is to have your articles show up on the top page for those keywords.
Your traffic will come from people finding your articles in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Write and publish articles regularly--once a day if you can, but at least two or three times a week. You can have several articles targeting the same keyword, but you should aim to have articles targeting as many keywords as possible to drive a steady stream of traffic to your site.
It is neither difficult nor complicated to sell clothes online. But it does take a bit of an investment of time and resources to get started on the right foot. You will need your own website that's filled with useful and engaging content. Then you will need to write articles targeting relevant keywords that bring visitors to your site. Finally you will need well chosen clothes that your visitors will be receptive to buying.
