The best-kept secret to selling consumer electronics is to niche it.

You may have stars in your eyes to think you can build a consumer electronics business like Amazon.com. As a one or two-person entrepreneur, sole proprietorship, or partnership, how can you compare to the Amazon.com organization that spent millions and millions to build the online business that took 6 or 7 years to come into the black with a profit? They obtained their operating and advertising money from capital investors and did a great selling job convincing the investors to pour in money year after year.

The small business that wants to sell consumer electronics needs to concentrate on selling the items with which they can capture a percentage of the market and make a decent profit margin.

You need to research your products for your supplier price and availability, and the market price that you can sell at then calculate your profit margin. Many retailers of consumer electronics pick popular items and cut their prices to the bone to compete head to head with the big guys like Best Buy, Amazon.com and Circuit City.

A better track to run on is choosing higher end products that better informed customers might prefer and build a value-added mini-market around those special pieces. Provide the consumer electronics product, specialized accessories and related items making a profit center.

Or provide a service center around one product type, like a camcorder battery replacement service for every type of camcorder on the market. With the right wholesale supplier you can have easy access to the camcorder replacement battery grid and they will drop ship to your customer their particular camcorder battery.

I did very well with items like Photo Printer Paper for the Canon CP-100 Photo Printer. There were four varieties and each had a profit margin of 40-60%.

I had two very good drop ship suppliers that always carried these items and either one of them or both always had them in stock. You can access the same consumer electronics drop shippers with my Wholesale Secrets Revealed How To Manual: Consumer Electronics Website available at http://ebook.endeavorsonline.com

Another secret is to set up your web page for these items with maximum search engine optimization. Use the brand and the item number with description, like Canon KP-36IP Photo Paper for the Canon CP-100 Photo Printer.

This utilizes these keyword phrase combinations for a total of 1406 hits. Canon Photo Paper had 1096 searches in July 2004 on Overture. Canon KP-36IP had 107 and KP-36IP had 161. Canon CP100 had 42.

Go to http://inventory.overture.com and https://adwords.google.com/select/tools.html to check out the best keywords to use in your description, limiting the keyword phrases to two for optimizing your shopping cart page.

Use the keyword phrase in the page title, meta tag description, meta tag keywords, in a Heading Title - H1 through H3 - on the page, and again in the product description.

Then use the same keyword phrase and description in your Adwords or Overture ad campaigns.

With this strategy I maintained first and second positions in the Google Search Engine and had many profitable sales.

Margaret E. Booth, Webmaster of http://www.endeavorsonline.com || http://ebook.endeavorsonline.com || and http://etools.endeavorosnline.com || She has been business owner of Tech Selections selling consumer electronics and Racing Fan Shop selling Nascar Collectibles since 2000.