An eCommerce website is a site that sells a wide range of products in a shopping-cart style manner. For example, Amazon is the largest eCommerce website on the planet, with an emphasis on books.

With an eCommerce website, you’re generally selling physical products online. Most markets are fairly competitive, so make sure you either have a foot in the door, know the market, or are targeting a small enough market such that you believe you can compete in it.

Here’s how to get started with setting up an eCommerce website.

=> Merchant Accounts, Payment Processing & eCommerce Platforms

To get your merchant account, you need to incorporate and get a Federal Tax ID (FID) or Employee Identification Number (EIN).

Launch your site as soon as you get your first merchant account, but in general you should also have a back-up merchant account. The graveyards of web businesses are littered with sites that had their merchant accounts frozen for one reason or another and had to shut down as a result.

Choose an eCommerce platform that works best with what you’re looking to create. Make sure the back-end system works with your merchant account. Often times you’ll need to set up a payment gateway using Authorize.net between your eCommerce platform and your merchant account.

=> Managing Inventory – Warehousing, SKU Set-Up and Drop Shipping

There are two ways to run the fulfillment side of an eCommerce website: through drop shipping and through warehousing.

The benefit of drop shipping is that it’s easier to set up. All you need to do is pass the orders along to your drop shipper and you’re done. You don’t have to set up a warehouse, stock up to the minimum order or process returns.

The drawback to drop shipping is that it cuts into your profits. Every product that’s drop shipped is charged a drop shipping fee. At some point this fee will significantly outweigh the cost of warehousing and shipping yourself; at which point you can bring your shipping in house.

Regardless of what you choose, you’ll have to set up product ID numbers for each and every product in your inventory. These are registered as SKUs in your eCommerce software.

=> Tips for Increasing Revenues

There are a few things every eCommerce website should do to increase revenues:

* Suggest other items – If someone is buying a fishing rod, wouldn’t they like to receive fishing hooks with that?

* Track disposable items – If someone bought supplement pills good for 30 days, a follow-up email with a discount 35 days later could have great results.

* Upsell – After someone has checked out, offer them more products to purchase.

* Checkout integration – Make sure your checkout page looks like it’s a part of your website, rather than as if they’re going to a completely separate page. Make sure the color scheme, logo and header match. Shopping cart drop-out rates can be as high as 50% if the shopping cart is poorly configured.

An eCommerce website can be hugely successful, with virtually no limit on the volume of sales you can do, unlike a physical store. Make sure you have a great eCommerce system set up, get your fulfillment system down pat and you’ll be ready to launch your first eCommerce site.

Many of the world’s most profitable websites are subscription websites. Even on a small scale, subscription websites can earn a lot of money for much less work than single-sale websites.

Read on to learn more about all the reasons why you might want to create a subscription website, as well as how to go about doing so.

=> The Benefits of a Subscription Website

One huge benefit to building a subscription-based website is consistency of income.

Traffic to websites is often inconsistent. If you’re making money from AdSense or advertising, your income could go up or down by as much as 40% on any given month. That makes it very hard to plan a business.

A subscription-based website on the other hand is guaranteed income every month. Even if traffic drops off for a month or two, you still have income from your past subscribers.

Subscription sites also benefit from the “snowball effect.” Instead of just getting sales, you’re getting subscribers that pay you every month.

That means that as time passes, your monthly income is guaranteed to continue increasing as long as you keep getting traffic – even if your traffic numbers don’t increase! Where other webmasters might feel like their earning power is capped, yours will keep growing simply because of your business model.

=> The Components of a Successful Subscription Website

A successful subscription website needs to have a few ingredients:

1) Trust – People need to know who you are or who your company is. It helps a lot to build a reputation in your space. Getting someone to pay for something every month is a lot harder than getting a single sale. Trust is a crucial component to making the sale.

2) Unique content – What are you promising that’s worth paying for every month? Make sure that whatever you’re selling, you really offer something that your customers will find valuable.

3) A great sales pitch – Have a great page that explains all the benefits of being a member and why they should join.

=> Getting Started

Starting is easy. All you need is a monthly product to sell and decent copywriting skills.

Create your website. Make sure that your site has enough free content or proof such that people can really get a sense for who you are and the quality of your content.

Process your payments using a processor that can handle recurring payments. These include PayPal, ClickBank, 1ShoppingCart and Authorize.net.

Drive traffic to your website through SEO, PPC, social media or through various online communities. Convert people who land on your web page into subscribers through a compelling sales page. Then, as long as you’re driving traffic and providing the monthly content, you get to collect the checks month in and month out.

Pay per lead affiliate programs are often easier to profit from as well as more lucrative than pay per sale programs. PPL, also known as CPA (cost per action) affiliate marketing involves getting people to fill out leads for commissions.

How does it work and how do you make money from it? Read on.

=> The Basics of How They Work

PPL affiliate programs span many industries – dating, finance, autos, health and more.

As an affiliate, your job is to send traffic to that site’s landing page. If that person fills out the form, you get paid.

For example, Match.com’s affiliate program pays about $4.20 per lead for a 6-field submit. When someone lands on Match.com from your affiliate link and fills out their name, gender, age, location, email address and sexual orientation, you get paid $4.20.

The benefit to PPL programs is that visitors never have to take out their credit card. That makes it a lot easier to make commissions, because asking someone to take out their credit card is such a huge commitment.

=> Finding Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs

There are a few ways to find PPL affiliate programs.

The first method is to use an offer search engine. At the time of this writing, OfferVault is the largest search engine for PPL offers.

The second method is to join as many PPL affiliate networks as you can and manually go through the offers.

Joining the networks involves filling out a form telling them about your site or your marketing experience. They’ll then either approve or deny your application.

To ensure you get approved, the best thing you can do is call them right after sending in your application. The most important concern for the network is to make sure you’re not a spammer or fraudulent affiliate, and calling them can build a lot of trust.

=> Evaluating Pay Per Lead Offers

How do you know what a good offer is for you to promote? There are a few things to look for.

* Payout – What does the offer pay out, compared to other similar offers in similar markets?

* Number of fields – It’s much easier to get someone to fill out one field, (example: $1.20 just for an email address) than it is to get someone to fill out a 20-field form.

* Landing page – Does the landing page look professional? Is it convincing? Would you fill it out? Use your intuition to decide whether or not you think the landing page will convert.

Make sure you read all the terms and conditions of each program you sign up for before sending traffic. Some of them only accept traffic from specific sources, some limit what countries the traffic can come from, etc. Know the rules before playing the game.

PPL offers can be an extremely lucrative way to make money. It’s easier to get someone to fill out a lead than to pull out a credit card. To get started, join a few affiliate networks and start promoting the offers that you think will make money!