After you get the wholesale price list from your prospective supplier, find out how much others are selling for that exact same item.

Some good places to check pricing:

• Ebay.com
• Amazon.com
• Overstock.com
• Walmart.com

Many people selling on these sites (except walmart) are suppliers. Since its very competitive there prices are lower there. You really have to make sure you are able to compete with those sellers there.

Your sell price should consist of these parts:

• wholesale price
• shipping cost (if you offer free shipping)
• listing/success fees (if you sale on ebay/amazon etc where you have to pay for listing/success)
• Operational costs (this could be hosting, office supplies etc)
• Marketing expenses (marketing costs like ppc etc)

Based on this see how many percentage of profit you can make per product. If you make less then 25% profit, I would strongly recommend looking for some other supplier.

Source:  WebcosmoForums.com Webmaster Forum

Here is a short list of some major places you can sell your products. Remember this is not an elaborated talk on them.

Your E-Commerce Site
Although you can control the shopping experience and other aspects of your business, its really tough to market and make money. Specially it takes quite a bit of time and effort to get people come to your site and get used to shopping.

EBay
Largest marketplace of all. Your products would be visible to a huge ebay audience.

Amazon
Amazon is a great marketplace. Although not as big as eBay, it still a giant marketplace.

Google Base
Its free to use. You can upload your products and make them indexed on Google for people to search.

Shopping Comparison Sites
Most of them charge money to list products. Here are some major ones to mention:

• Shopzilla
• Bizrate
• Shopping.com
• Ciao
• Price Savvy
• Next Tag
• Kelkoo
• Price Grabber
• Price Runner

Twitter gets the most out of this:

• Free news coverage from the rumor. This is a damn smart marketing trick. This “Rumor Game” worked pretty good getting Twitter a huge momentum.
• Solid income for Twitter if they partner with Google. Even if Twitter eventually gets no deal with Google their income would increase several times more then what they earn now, just from the huge number of new users they would be getting.

FaceBook had huge momentum last few years. People just loved it. Now with this Google Twitter Rumor Game Twitter can take away a big part of the spotlight. I would not even be surprised if Google and Twitter planned this whole thing against FaceBook.

Marketing Lesson For Us:

This is a very classic example how rumor can be utilized for marketing.

Last night I put my webmaster forum for sale on the buy/sell section at webcosmoforums.com and few others. Most of the readers at my forum immediately realized its a April Fools joke. People are indeed smart at my foum for sure.

At other forums only one person realized it was a joke. Then I got quite a few PMs asking for more information; some people offering a price as well. It was fun to see how much people think the forum might sell for. Highest price offer I got was $300.

I think there were several lessons to learn from this for me:

• It let me somewhat see how much my forum was worth to them. I wasn’t happy with the prices offered of course.
• Showed me how much people would be interested in the forum. That actually signifies the marketing aspect of the forum, if it has a market value at all.
• It shows me there are lot more work to be done to have a selling value that would make me happy. But for a 11 month old forum it wasn’t that bad, considering there are tons of forums being sold for less then $100.

Marketing a forum is real tough. Specially new forum owners without any other established sites get real hard time marketing it. Main reason for that is, there are many other already established forums in the niche your forum is.

Problems with new forums include:

• Not much people join
• If people join, they don’t actively participate
• People leave after a few days

Why does these happen? Did you think about these problems putting yourself in your possible visitors shoes?

People don’t like about forums:

• Slow load time
• Non-sense design
• Ads everywhere
• Empty forum
• No active users online.
• Not much posts.
• Lots of threads with no replies.

A big percentage of your wanna-signup people would look at your stats first to see how active the forum is. People would ignore the cheesy design of a forum if they find it active and useful. Put it another way, everybody love to be a part of the something successful not something new and unsure.

Marketing forum does not mean only advertising to the outside world on other sites; it also means taking care of your own house.

Based on my experience here are some BASIC tips you may find useful for marketing your forum.

• Never open a forum on a niche you don’t have good knowledge on. There are lot of already successful forums on almost any niche you can think of. And you gonna be competing with them. If you don’t have knowledge on the niche, you will fail to give people good info. Specially at the beginning its gonna be you helping out people.
• Post useful info. Think of your forum as the source of good info on the niche. Fill it up with good info.
• Make a few accounts. Login using several computers and browsers to make the forum look active.
• Get your friends join you.
• Make a list of authority forums in the same niche as yours, post on them regularly. Be kind and helpful, people would come look at your forum. Trust me this is the best marketing you can do for your forum.
• Run posting contests. Start with small money. At the beginning there would be few people joining the contest. Once more people get interested, you can raise the prizes. This is your give away to your loyal users. From my experience Revenue Sharing does not work; it does not make enough reason for people post on your forum and be active.
• If you have any other sites, link to your forum.
• Find the social bookmarking sites that are RELATED to your niche. Submit your pages there. This will attract some targeted traffic.

These are basic tips. Not really a detailed marketing tips. There are so many other ways to market a forum. Forums in general takes more then a year to take off. You have to hang in there for that time. If after that time you don’t see enough progress, think you better analyze what you been doing wrong and fix it; if you can’t its time for you quit.

Edit: Feb 17, 2010

After little less then 2 years this is the stats for webcosmoforums.com

Threads: 14,657, Posts: 116,893, Members: 5,892, Active Members: 1,940

I am not too happy with the signup total; but current rate of signup is quite good. End of 2010 we are hoping to have 15000 members.

The earnings are better now. We relied mostly on adsense at the beginning, now we have moved to another ad network buysellads. The forum is now making enough money to cover expenses for hosting, marketing, contests.

Edit: September 14, 2010

Current stats of webcosmoforums.com is

Threads 19,297 Posts 153,648 Members 10,614 Active Members 2,334

As you can see once the forum starts picking up things start rolling faster. Signup, posts, everything gets accelerated.

We recently made a redesign of the forum.  I think our users love it.

The idea is creating a campaign protesting something and you market your site in an indirect manner.

Example is Yahoo
As you know Yahoo is having a big redesign of their site. Now if you start a blog protesting it, it will catch easy attention. You gotta have some solid articles on the site and make some legit points why you think its not good. You can spice it up doing things like signature collection etc.

As you know everything needs marketing. So you have to market this one as well. But the brand your are protesting for should help you a lot in marketing.

Now thats a problem. Why? Lets say you have a store trying to sell everything. And there is a big chain store like Wal Mart next to yours. Who you think gonna win? Not you. Did you ever noticed the type of stores around big chains ones? If not you should.

Play Small and Win
When you are just starting take a small piece of the pie. As like you are baby and can handle only small portions.

There are reasons of doing it:
- You certainly can’t be the expert of everything. Or you don’t have the money to hire people.
- When your site specialized on a certain niche, your site gets authority status to search engines. And that means lot of free traffic.
- Once you can make this small portion working, you can grow later to your way to become the next rich.

Watch the first one:

Watch the second one:

If you ask me I will say their whole campaign doesn’t seem to be working at all. After all I think they have failed to reach the audience they need to reach! Microsoft gotta learn some basic marketing skills now. This whole thing really sounds like soap opera. And with that they won’t be able to get people interested in Microsoft search engine!

You can get the visitors engaged in many different ways. You can run a contest, give away something free, offer a free service and many other things.

I like one of the techniques blogger ShoeMoney does on his blog. He got a “Free Shirt Friday” event every friday. He recieves T-Shirts from different websites/companies and he wear them, take some pictures and post them as a blog entry. As an example I am posting this picture from ShoeMoney blog (hopefully he won’t sue me for this)

Now that ShoeMoney is a reputable blogger and he earns a good amount of money from his blog; why he would spend all these effort taking pictures and making a blog entry? Answer is simple, building customer relations and getting visitors engaged.

Its always good to learn from people who already made the way up.

Now lot of people would think its unethical. I have seen many different forms of marketing starting from business cards to thongs.This one is sort of on the extreme side where the ad text is saying “Sick of DigitalPoint?” and the ad is right on Digitalpoint.

Picture from http://www.webcosmoForums.com