Taking the "How" out of "How do I sell on the Internet?"

I don't have a clue as to "How". I will tell you what I am doing.

My current theory is to blog about what you are interested in.  Do original work on your blog.  Also give away stuff for free... and charge for other things.

There are a lot of good sites to find more information on selling, but here is how I got to where I am now. (Your mileage may vary.)

I do not create a lot of work at the moment, nor do I want to spend much money to get started, so instead of a big web site that is more like a splashy catalog (which I'd love to do,) I decided to go with just a blog at first. This makes it easy to write about ideas that interest me, yet still allows freedom to offer work for sale.

I decided to go with blogging software from Radio Userland. They offer an advance blog application, with the features I want, plus they will host the site for a year. You may need to be sort of comfortable with HTML code. Cost $39.00 a year. (You get updates to the software.)

Radio Userland hosting does not include your own domain name and email. I felt that it was important to have a URL and email address that would be recognized, so I went with Yahoo Domains. They registered my domain, offered an email address, and allow me to forward folks from www.john-norris.net to my Radio Userland blog URL. Cost $35.00 a year.

I like T-Shirts, and also wanted to offer something for everyone right off the bat. It is also is fun to explore some of my ideas in a different medium. The folks at Cafepress allow you to upload a graphic and place it on various items. They handle all the billing and hosting for that area of your site. They sell me the T-Shirts for about $14.00 and I add a little to help cover my expenses. I'm in the middle of setting this up so we'll see how this goes...

On 11/21/02 I filled out a form on the Ceramics Today site to have my site included in their list.  (I was later awarded site of the week by them!)

The T-Shirt sits waiting to be inked up, but I got out my first piece..the Fine Art Print Untitled by Anonymous. It sums up a lot of my early posts, and allows me to give something tangible to the folks who come here.

I added some handouts that I had made to teach ceramics with.  I'm "giving them away" under a creative commons Sharealike license.  I like to help folks out, want to get my work out there, and figure it will have folks come to my site.  These turned out to be very popular.

I put in a full ecommerce site to sell my work.  I've included individual items for sale as well as the ability to collect donations.  I won't quit my day job just yet.  I went with Paypal because they are well known and have the lowest point of entry.