Some of you may be looking to sell
homemade products from your own website so I thought I would share with you another way to market your homemade gifts. There used to be an old Google project called Froogle. You basically listed your products with them with the use of an excel (.xls) file you uploaded to google's server. Your uploaded product listing(s) would come up when someone would search for a specific product on Froogle.com.
Google has since done away with Froogle and now uses
Google Products. It basically works the same way as Froogle used to work. You upload your listings to
Google Base (that stay listed a maximum of 30 days) and whenever someone searches for a product of the type you sell, your product may show up in the listings. The secret to getting a better listing is in how you describe your product. Pretty much every web property Google owns revolves around its algorithm. If you know the basics of
SEO you can get a pretty good listing there. Nevada explained some of the basics in an older thread. Your product listings may also be found at the top of any search result page at the top under the Shopping link when someone searches for a product like yours.
An added benefit is that certain listings show up in Google's main search index. See
this search result as an example. You'll notice the
Shopping results for cotton candy machine about halfway down the search result page. The product listings aren't
always there, but most of the times they are. You usually need to be in the top 3 to be listed there (again, learn the
basics of SEO noted above), but it isn't really that difficult once you get the hang of what you're doing.
If you don't have that many products to sell, you can list them one at a time through the Google Base page. Just click the
One at a Time link. If you have many products you want to list you'll need to set them up correctly in a spreadsheet or XML file. Regardless of what some may say, you can make some extra sales through this method. The only problem with this is that since Google doesn't make a
ton of money with this, they don't promote it heavily. But many Google users do find their way into the Google shopping results. Just remember that you have to re-upload your listing every 30 days (max). So it may pay to learn how to to upload a spreadsheet file or XML file. Hope this helps someone make a few extra sales of their homemade products!
