Making money via Business to Business (B2B) Trading

Copyright (c) 2008 Fione Tan

Does internet marketing work for wholesalers, manufacturers and trading agents? Definitely! B2B is business to business whereby you sell items on wholesale, while B2C is business to consumer, where you only sell retail, piece by piece.

How does one earn money with Business to Business (B2B trading) as trading agents, distributors, manufacturers, or wholesalers? There are a variety of internet research tools to assist B2B marketers to locate best selling B2B product searches, especially tips on how and where to find big volume buyers.

These searches can be done in B2B portals. The best one we are using, and it's free, is NOT alibaba.com, but another popular one which can tell you the popular related searches. For example, if you are searching for jewelry, they will tell you the related popular searches (which are not those we thought): jewelry offers, jewelry importers and more.

Some of these portals also enable you to find volume buyers. For instance, in one of these B2B portals, i located an Eyptian buyer who was interested to purchase 50 tons of frozen food. So how can you make money if you are not selling this type of frozen food?

You can act as a trading agent, and find sellers who are selling this kind of stuffs, and tell them you have a customer from Egypt who is looking to buy the stuffs and ask if they are interested.

An alternative way is to post a Buying Lead - where it's an intention that you want to buy this type of product and then get interested sellers to approach you. So in no time, you can be doing B2B trading!

Companies that sell to other businesses are discovering that the Internet offers great opportunities for:- a. Generating new leads b. Acquiring new customers c. Retaining current customers

All the online marketing strategies that works for Business to consumer (b2c) market, can be applied to the business to business industry, after it is readjusted to meet your goals or B2B objectives.

Many research companies have published their survey findings that B2B companies No.1 goal for intenret marketing is to generate qualified leads. Also high on their list, though second to leads, are branding goals. In a Forrester research found that 40% of B2B marketing executives consider online marketing to be very effective for building their company's brand image.

Alternative Business to Busines internet marketing strategies that every firm should utilise is SEM - search engine marketing using but free organic search rankings and pay per click advertising, video marketing and company blog marketing. Among these BtoB internet marketing tactics above, over 85% of those interviewed in USA and Europe consider their most effective technique to be Search engine marketing

If you can master these strategies, you will surely have a competitive edge against your competitors, the majority of which are only using one or two of these strategies, if any.