RWAP Services review find the best programs on the internet to make you money.

Create Your Own Shopping Site

(without needing to find your own products)

Other RWAP Websites
RWAP Software
(supporting the Sinclair QL, Cambridge Z88 and ZX Spectrum)

Internet Business Angels
(Providing advice to small business)

This option may seem obvious - if only I had the products to sell on the internet I could make a million !!

Selling Your Items

If you have a few items to sell of your own, or believe that you have some items which would be better suited to collectors and are not sure what price to set, we would recommend that you place them on the world's biggest auction site, eBay We have used this in the past to good effect and find that most items attract a wide range of interest and you can quite often be surprised at the prices that some people are willing to pay.

However, if you have a range of items to sell and know what prices to set for them, then you are just as well to set up your own website. Website design is very important and requires a lot of forward planning. If you are selling your own goods, you also want to avoid any advertising which is not relevant to your visitors - for this reason, we would recommend that you steer clear of free web-space. The providers of free web-space will generally only allow a very limited amount of storage space and bandwidth (that is the traffic between the server where your website is stored and the visitors' browsers); and will almost certainly mean that additional advertising is added to each webpage by the company who provide the free webspace. We would therefore recommend that you look for a low cost webspace provider, who offer fairly high bandwidth limits. It is for this reason, that we would recommend iPower (which we review here), since they provide 800MB storage, 40GB bandwidth per month, for a cost of only $6.95pm (with no set up fees and free domain registration).

Taking payment can also be fairly easy - you can accept cash and cheques through the post, but most purchasers will want to use a credit or debit card. This can be a pretty expensive business and there are several schemes out there, but unless you are expecting a high volume of sales traffic, we would recommend that you consider insisting that purchasers use either Nochex (UK bank debit cards only) or PayPal (international credit cards). Both of these schemes are quick and easy to set up and use, and PayPal allows you to create a shopping cart, as well as providing tools to allow you to email PayPal invoices direct to your customers from Microsoft Outlook, or online.

You will also need to carefully consider how you are to go about advertising your website - submitting your website to the various search engines has to be number one on your list of priorities once the website is established. The rapid expansion of the internet over the past 5-10 years has meant that it is even more important to get your presence felt and to create a corporate identity which will enable your web-site and possibly reviews of your products to be found quickly and easily. Without this a search for any product is likely to return 100+ website addresses, all of which may relate to the given product, something similar, a competitor's website or even something completely unrelated.

As a result, there is no guarantee that you will find your web-site listed on the first page of any given search, however relevant to your company or product. One way around this problem is to bid to have your site listed at the top of search engine results, using a service such as the ever popular Overture which provides its own search engine, but also ensures that your bids count towards listings with MSN, Yahoo! and Lycos at the same time. Bids can take the form of either a one-off payment, or an amount paid to the search engine for each click to your website which is generated from that search engine. Following the creation of our new website (www.rwapadventures.com), we were pleased that we had found a hosting package with iPower (which we review here), who offer $50 to spend with Overture (USA account - although other users can sign up with a US account as well), if you sign up to one of their extremely good value web hosting packages. This has been used to great effect to help drive traffic to our new site.

What If You Do Not Have Any Items To Sell?

Well, believe it or not, this does not have to be a major obstacle.

Thanks to some of the initiatives put forward by some of the affiliate programs, such as Affiliate Window, you can easily create a shopping portal by buying a domain name and website space (we recommend iPowerWeb as one of the cheapest hosting packages with high bandwidth and space - see our review); and then signing up to their shop front program, which allows you to produce search boxes and offer the whole range of products offered by the various advertisers who are part of their affiliate network. Some of the retailers will also provide you with your own area on their website - for example, the link on the right links to a store run by one of the cheapest online DVD retailers in the UK. Deep linking allows you to advertise items on your website and link directly to those items on the main website.

If you are not sure how successful this can be, then have a look at some of the on-line loyalty schemes already available (see our review here).

Making Extra Money From Your Website

A method of increasing the earnings from your website is to add other people's advertising banners on certain pages. This requires careful selection of the banners to appear to ensure that they remain highly relevant to your visitors - there are a wide variety of "affiliate" schemes to choose from, and so we have reviewed these here.