How to Sell Essential Oils from Home
Booming interest is creating a big business for people selling essential oils. Customers see essential oils as a natural way to deal with stress, improve mood, relieve pain, care for hair and body, clean nearly anything, and even as a bug repellant. With thousands of uses, it is no wonder sales are skyrocketing. There is real opportunity to make money selling essential oils from home.
Choose an Essential Oil Company—or Two
Before getting started selling essential oils, you need to select a product line. You don’t necessarily need to limit yourself to just one, but if you are just getting started, it is best to focus on one and perfect your game before branching out. In such a fast-growing field, you have a large number of company choices and business structures to choose from when considering selling essential oils from home. Do some research before diving in and evaluate the options based on these criteria:
Reputation: How long has the company been in business? What do reviews from customers and representatives say? Are there controversies associated with the company or their products?
Brand: What does the product look like? How professionally does the company present itself? Does the brand feel like a fit for you and your values?
Product: Do you like the products? How are they made? Do they offer enough product line choices so you can develop a niche and then to expand from there?
Support: What does the company do to support you as a rep? Look at training, sales materials, promotional programs, and in-person and online support.
Fees, costs, and restrictions: What does it cost to start doing business with the company? What costs are associated (i.e. cost to buy brochures or maintain a web site)? Are there sales minimums required? What restrictions are placed on you in terms of selling and promoting? Read the fine print!
Compensation: The two most common ways of selling essential oils are with multi-level marketing or affiliate sales. More on this below!
Top Companies for Selling Essential Oils from Home
New essential oil companies are seemingly cropping up every day. Here are ten of the most highly rated essential oil companies:
dōTERRA
Young Living
Plant Therapy
Rocky Mountain Essential Oils
Edens Garden
Mountain Rose Herbs
Aura Cacia
Now Essentials
Lisse Essential Oils
Ananda Apothecary
Essential Oils Direct Sales Choices: Multilevel Marketing or Affiliate Marketing
When selling essential oils from home, you have choices on how to structure your business. The two most common options are:
1. Multi-Level Marketing:
You start first as a distributor directly selling essential oils as a local rep, then recruit other distributors to work under you (downline) and rake in a percentage of their sales. Buy your starter kit and you are off, enjoying ongoing marketing support from the company.
Example: doTerra
Benefits Include:
Earning money from the sales you make
Earning passive income from the sales your downline makes
Support materials, training, and promotions from the company you rep
Help from your network of sellers
Making ongoing profitable relationships with customers
Best if you are new, need help, and enjoy being part of a team
2. Affiliate Marketing:
You promote a company’s products and earn a percentage of the sale or a commission. Getting started is nearly free, but you have to pay for all the advertising and promotion. You are essentially on your own.
Example: Rocky Mountain Essential Oils
Benefits Include:
Earn money from the sales you make
No kit to buy; low cost to start
No need for inventory to buy and ship
No need to serve customers; just focus on selling
No distributors to recruit
Best if you know what you are doing and don’t need much help
Make Money Selling Essential Oils from Home with Digital Marketing
No matter what business structure you choose, selling is the key to making money from home selling essential oils. Outbound marketing, attracting attention and finding customers, is critical to both ways of selling essential oils.
With both multi-level marketing and affiliate marketing, you can sell essential oils the traditional way by distributing flyers, calling people, manning tables at fairs and expos, and the ubiquitous “party.” These methods definitely work, but they take a huge amount of time and energy. As one person, even with a downline of distributors under you, you have a hard limit on your time and energy resources.
That’s where digital marketing comes in. Using digital marketing in selling essential oils gives you the biggest payback for your time and energy. The tools in your arsenal include your web site, social media properties, search engine optimization, email, pay-per-click, and guest posting. The Digital Marketing School is ready with help and information at no cost that can transform you and your business.
Seven Benefits of Selling Essential Oils with Digital Marketing
1. Immediate start.
You can set up your business with a few clicks. Work through established marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, use an existing ecommerce platform like Shopify, or, with just a little more effort, set up your own website and store. All you need to start selling essential oils from home is a computer, an internet connection, and a bank account.
2. Low upfront costs.
The cost to get started is relatively cheap—a few dollars and some elbow grease. Signing up for a marketplace and setting up an ecommerce platform is often free. Setting up your own website is very nearly free, a few dollars for a URL and hosting is all you really need. If you use a website builder, you’ll be in a few dollars more, but we are not talking big bucks in any case.
3. Reach more people.
Digital marketing lets you reach an unlimited number of people. Once you have pestered all your friends and relatives, traditional marketing methods quickly become ineffective. Selling is a numbers game. The more people you contact, the more buyers you will find. Nothing reaches more people at a lower cost with less effort than digital marketing.
4. Ability to finely target a niche.
Digital tools allow you to zero in on a specific target customer. Traditional methods are spray and pray, reaching huge numbers of people who will never buy.
5. Build a consultative brand.
People buy from enthusiastic and knowledgeable people. Digital marketing gives you unlimited space in developing your reputation as an expert. Write blogs that explain benefits and provide tips and hacks. You control your voice, presentation, and content. The vast majority of people do research online before they buy. If you become their source of information, you earn their business.
6. Be Where Customers Buy.
Parties take time, not just from you, but from customers. People are time-crunched and want to satisfy their needs with one click. Selling essential oils from home increasingly means selling essential oils online.
7. Easy Fulfillment.
Selling online means you don’t tie up money in inventory, keep products at home, process order paperwork, or arrange to get products to customers. Online selling relieves you of administration so you can concentrate on selling.
How to Sell Essential Oils with Digital Marketing
Select a niche and learn the products.
There are literally thousands of uses for essential oils and scores of essential oils and blends. If you try to sell everything, you won’t sell much of anything. Pick a specific niche and make yourself an expert. It could be the use of essential oils in the home, skincare, pain relief, or athletic performance. Pick the area that interests you and go deep.
Become an expert on potential customers.
Figure out who the buyers are in your niche. Think about their problems and wants. What would make them buy? What information do they need? Then think about where they spend their time and what media they use. We recommend you create a spreadsheet that describes all these things and then matches them with products. Add to your spreadsheet over time as you learn more about customers and think of new insights for reaching and motivating them.
Create campaign themes.
Come up with ideas to build a promotion, messages, and materials around. If your niche is cleaning, a theme might be “getting ready for spring,” or “preparing your house for the holidays,” or “keeping it clean with kids home for the summer.” These themes will help you pick products to promote, identify what kinds of information people might seek online, give you ideas where to put your messaging, and what kind of content to create.
Plan your success.
It takes more than effort to make money selling essential oils. You need a plan. Get out a calendar and slot in themes for every month or even for every week. Decide what you need to do to translate these themes into campaigns that generate leads and spark sales. Go into detail for the first three months, then sketch in the rest of the year. As you go along and learn, you can add detail so that you always have a clear path for the immediate upcoming three months, and a general idea of where you are going for the year. Set goals to keep you focused and help you grit through distractions, set-backs, and procrastination. Commit and be consistent.
Set up a website.
Your website is the lynchpin of your digital marketing efforts. It is the destination for all of your web traffic and your tool for converting those who are interested into buyers. Use for showcasing your expertise. Some companies are okay with you promoting products on your own site. Others restrict that. You can work it either way. One easy solution is to use your site for your personal branding and content, then link to the company site for the product catalog and selling. Almost every hosting company offers do-it-yourself website builders. You can get set up in under an hour and run your site without being a tech geek.
Optimize for search.
Making sure visitors can find your site is of paramount importance. You could write like Hemingway and offer the best advice since Dear Abby, but if you don’t show up on Google, you don’t matter. Thankfully, basic search engine optimization (SEO) is not hard to do. The Digital School can get you to a solid start.
Promote on social media.
Once your site is findable, you need to drive traffic to it. Open a social media account on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Instagram. Resist the temptation to try to do them all. Pick the one you are most comfortable with and excel there before branching out. You have to be social, actually engage in conversation, and invite people to interact. Don’t push product. Offer helpful tips and ideas. Many social media properties require you to advertising to have your content be seen. Did you know only 2% of your followers see your average post? That is called “organic reach,” and it basically doesn’t exist. Social media companies need to make money and they do that by making you pay for reach. Spreading yourself across too many social media platforms makes it hard to really engage and it can be expensive when you buy ads.
Use other digital marketing tools.
Social media gets lots of attention, but it isn’t the only way to sell essential oils online. You can run ads on social media or buy pay-per-click ads on Google. You can email people with tips or a newsletter. Writing guest posts on relevant sites is another way to get your name out there, establish expertise, and link back to your site for selling essential oils.
Digital Marketing for Selling Essential Oils from Home
Yes—the old methods still work, but they are a lot of work. And your results are limited by your time and energy. Using digital marketing to make money selling essential oils makes exponentially better use of both your time and energy—earning you exponentially bigger profits. We at the Digital Marketing School can help you perfect your digital marketing expertise.
