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Fundraise by selling products and info-products on your site Note: Not all the fundraising ideas will suit every site! So browse all the fund raising ideas, be creative, and choose the fundraiser that will work best for your site. Selling Products Directly From Your Website I would like to divide this article into two sections: Selling physical products like t-shirts and coffee mugs that you actually produce and ship, and selling digital information products like e-books: Selling Physical Products - You might have or are considering manufacturing products like t-shirts, mouse pads, greeting cards and etc. as a mean of fundraising on your site. This could be a good idea for your site. The problem is that you have to have an easy way to accept money. Accepting credit cards is the best way, of course. But to do so you have to have a merchant account and those can be costly and a big pain. If you are not sure you want to invest in a merchant account you can use third party processing companies. Here are some popular ones: As a nonprofit there are are certain laws pertaining to physically selling merchandise. So please check with your lawyer first to see how you need to handle things like sales tax and so forth. Here I would like to take a moment and plug an incredible company that I recently used for a nonprofit that I work for. www.stadriemblems.com is a company in New York that makes patches. Before I chose them I searched high and low all over the internet for the lowest priced patch company, and they beat all the other merchants. The quality of the patch was beautiful. We also ordered some of the patches to be glued on to caps (at no extra charge). Both the caps and the single patches sold like crazy at our event. For almost the price of a sticker you can get a patch and they sell better and for more money. You can also glue them onto many products like shirts, bags, wallets and so forth. If you do order from them tell them I sent you. :) Selling e-products What I love about electronic products is that you do not have to deal with ordering and manufacturing the product, or having to package or ship it. Depending on your cause, you can cook up an interesting e-book or software that might be useful to your visitors. An e-book is a book that is all digital. When someone buys it they receive it as a file in their email. The coolest thing about it is that there are companies that will automate the whole ordering process for you. Once you set it up, there is nothing else for you to do (but promote it). The third party processing company will take your order, accept the money and email the book to your customer. In essence, all you do is wake up in the morning and check to see how much money you have in your account from the business that you might have done overnight. The best company that I can recommend is www.clickbank.com. In terms of having a resale license and accepting sales tax I don't think that it applies here (I'm not sure so check with your lawyer). You can also set it up so the book would be a gift for someone who donates a certain amount. E-books ideas:
You're goal should be to fill the e-book with wonderful useful information that is not readily accessible otherwise. Start your own affiliate program! If you cook up a really fantastic useful book that a large number of people will be interested in, consider starting an affiliate program for it. You can also do the same with a physical product like a video or something else that might have a large appeal. Keep in mind that there are different merchant account rules that pertain to a physical product as opposed to an electronic product. Check out www.clickbank.com to find out more information about this. Why start an affiliate program? Lets say you produce a vegetarian cookbook and would sell it for $12. You can feature it on your site and hopefully sell some digital copies and raise $12 a copy. Naturally, you should advertise that the profits from the book will go to help your cause. Now, lets say you set up an affiliate program and you offer 50% of the profit to some other websites that sells the book for you. If you have a really good book, I can see how other sites that deal with ecology, vegetarianism and so forth would be happy to sell the book on their website. Not only they will get a really nice commission per book they can advertise that a percentage of the profit will be supporting your nonprofit (its a win win situation)! But another bonus is that you will get other websites advertising your site and cause. Also, in the e-book itself there should be a link directly to you're site as well. So this will act also as a marketing tool. A great FREE ebook tool Offer the e-book for free! Another way of doing this is to offer the e-book and the redistribution rights free as a gift. Encourage other websites to offer it free as an incentive to sign up for their newsletter and so forth. If the book is really good this can have a viral marketing effect. Because your website is linked in the book, it will be like one big ad for your website! A great FREE ebook tool The easiest way to set up an affiliate program for an e-book is to do it through www.clickbank.com! Related recourses: A great FREE ebook tool if you are considering on creating an ebook as a fundraising tool to give a way this product is free. If you want to sell it it only costs $29.99. I tried this product and was very impressed with it. Here is a good e-book about creating e-books www.stadriemblems.com Order beautiful custom patches here. I used this merchant and highly recommend them. WWW.BRANDERS.COM
great place with hundreds of promotional products. GOPROMOS - Imprinted pens, apparel, corporate gifts and other promotional products! Welcome to Morris Press Cookbooks Produce your own cookbook HeritageCookbook.com - Another site to produce your own cookbook. |
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