Five Unique Ways to Launch Your Store Products Online

It's a good thing this blog post isn't entitled "Five Ways to Launch your Store Product Online."

If it had just been “5 Ways to Launch your Store Products Online”, I might have been massively overwhelmed and panicked.   
After all, how could I possibly pick only 5 ways to launch your store products online? And how could I have limited myself to only 5 ways when there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to accomplish this task? 

But ah, what a fortuitous circumstance this is, to only discuss 5 “unique” ways to launch your store products online.  Now I can scour the inner recesses of my mind and come up with what I hope will be considered fairly unique ideas and suggestions for this endeavor.   

First, however, I'd like to clarify that “unique” doesn't necessarily mean “completely new and unheard-of”, so don't hate me if the ideas I propose are ones you've heard before.  

Instead, by “unique”, I mean to discuss ideas and methods that aren't usually the first or primary methods most people currently use to present or market their products online. They should be, though, and hopefully this blog post will help make that happen in some small way.

1. Social Networking, baby! Unless you've been off-planet for the past 2 years, you've undoubtedly heard of social networking.  You may not know it by that name, but if I give you clues like “Twitter” and “Facebook”, almost every living, breathing soul over the age of 10 better know what I'm talking about.  But as popular as social networking is these days, believe it or not, most people haven't yet discovered its worth as a business/marketing tool, or even as a retail business website itself! One of the most wonderful developments in social networking recently has been Facebook's decision to allow its users to create pages from which other users can actually purchase products! Who needs to pay webhosting fees anymore, when Facebook is giving you the keys to the kingdom?  But even without one of these fantastic new Facebook ecommerce pages, the marketing benefits of social networking are astronomical.  It's all about getting the word out, right? And nothing can do that quite so quickly and easily as tweets and Facebook posts.
2. Shopping Comparison Sites – Shopping comparison sites are a wonderful benefit for online buyers, giving them a way to compare products and pricing across various ecommerce sites.  But what many people don't realize is that shopping comparison sites are just as beneficial to sellers and merchants as they are to buyers.  After all, wouldn't it be great if your items were among the ones people saw when they were searching for products on comparison sites like Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, and Froogle (aka Google's Product site)?  Believe it or not, it's not that difficult or expensive to sign up as a merchant on a shopping comparison site and ensure that your products are indeed among those that appear to buyers.
3. Articles – Writing articles scares a lot of people.  After all, they say, I'm a businessman (or woman), not a writer.  Why should I have to write articles in order to sell my products? Well, you may not have to, actually.  I'm not saying that you can completely forego article writing in your marketing efforts – you definitely shouldn't do that – but it doesn't actually have to be YOU who's writing the articles.  Most article sites, such as Ezine Articles, offer services in which you can pay someone else to write the articles for you.   And believe it or not, it usually doesn't cost very much to do so. But whatever you do, don't discount the importance of articles and other original content in your online marketing efforts. Articles can give you incredible search engine exposure in a way nothing else can.
4. You Tube – Video is the future.  Have you heard that yet? If not, you will soon. Putting video onto a website, eBay listing, hub page, blog, etc., can give you great online exposure in a way nothing else can.   Even if you can just create a basic marketing video for your business and upload it to You Tube, that's a great start! We humans are very visual beings, for the most part, and watching a video (even a bad video) will draw our attention much more than just reading words will.   
5. Ebay Classifieds – eBay's Classified Ads are among the most underutilized, undervalued vehicles on the site, yet they're extremely beneficial and full of great potential, and can offer you some wonderful freedom and marketability normal eBay listings never can.  You see, most of the restrictive policies that govern regular eBay listings (both auctions and fixed-price listings) don't apply to Classified Ads.  This means you have a lot more freedom to “toot your own horn” (so to speak) and to spread awareness of your name, your website, your product offerings, etc., without worrying about eBay pulling your listings and accusing you of promoting an off-site sale. 

Obviously, this is only a partial list of useful ways to launch and market your products online, and utilizing these methods certainly doesn't excuse you from using some of the more mainstream, well-known alternatives, such as Pay-Per-Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization, and listing items for sale on eBay and other ecommerce sites.  But one of the best ways to give your business a leg up is to recognize when new marketing trends appear and to jump on them right away.