The internet is a mall with millions if not hundreds of millions of shoppers looking to buy. Your job as an internet marketer is to get a slice of the action.
To get your slice of the internet cake, how can you set up a site to take payments? How can you do so on a tight budget?
It’s not really difficult and very affordable for even the beginner to set up a site that can receive payments.
Well, what do you do?
First you need to get yourself a good web host. Not a free one. Why not free? A free host makes you look unprofessional. They have their own advertising on your site. You need to be able to have your own advertising or no advertising so that you focus your customers on your product.
Now that you have your hosting account, the next thing you need is your payment processor.
One other thing you will need if you don’t have it already is software for creating your web pages. There are some very good free programs available on the internet.
With regard to your web hosting provider, here are some things you will need to look for:
As your business grows and you promote more products you will need more domain names. Your web hosting provider must allow you to run a number of domains on your account. You also need to be able to have a good number of subdomains.
Will you be able to run CGI scripts as well as PHP? How many databases will you be allowed to use. Most PHP scripts use MySql databases. This is what makes your sites dynamic. These are all questions you need to get answers to in order to decide on a web hosting provider.
You also need a payment processor. There are hundreds of these. I am just going to look at three of them. They are all budget and very affordable. One is totally free to set up.
The free one is PayPal. You pay them a small percentage of your sale when you make one. Their payment system works with email. You will need to set up a dedicated email account. You will be able to do this with your hosting account. Your hosing account should allow you to set up quite a few email addresses.
2Checkout.com is another payment processor. They charge a one off fee of $50 to set up your account and then a small percentage of each sale. This processor also is used by many internet marketers.
ClickBank is the last of our payment processors we will look at in this article. ClickBank has a huge list of products that they promote. They are used by most internet marketers who run affiliate programs. You can join ClickBank as an affiliate for free and begin promoting products. If you want to become a seller using ClickBank there is an initial one off fee of about $50.
Both PayPal and 2Checkout.com generate code for you to place in your site. You will need to place this code onto the body of your page where you want the button to appear. ClickBank generates a URL which you can link to a sales button.
You see that setting up your site to take payments is both easy and very inexpensive.
