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.