Wholesale & Dropshipping Success

June 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment

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Introduction to Wholesale & Dropshipping

When first starting a small online business it can be difficult to know what is the best use of your time and what sales channels will provide the biggest benefit. Sometimes you follow a natural progression by starting with selling on your own website, then someone will contact you and ask if you dropship, then if it proves to be a winning product they will ask you to sell wholesale.

There are a few different business strategies that are popular now and revolves around dropshipping and wholesaling products. You can source products to sell on your website and carry no inventory, you can sell your own products via wholesalers/dropshippers or direct to retailers with your own program, you can source products that are complimentary to your own products to upsell or cross sell your customers.

Those that are new will ask what’s the difference between Wholesale & Dropship?

In simple terms, dropship is when a retailer or catalog advertises a product, the customer places an order, and the retailer will send the order to the manufacturer to ship the product directly to the customer.

Retailer - Manufacturer/Distributor - Customer

Wholesale is when a retailer places an order with the manufactuer and carries the inventory. This cuts out the middle process and goes to direct from the retailer to the customer.

Manufacturer/Distributor - Retailer - Customer

As you can expect, both have pros and cons and one of them is what it means to your bottom line.

Dropshipper get a certain percentage of the sale, say 25-35% of the retail cost and tend to be one offs (one here and there as a customer buys it), but you also are not paying out of pocket expenses. You only pay your vendor after your customer placed their order so essentially you are giving the vendor the customers money while keeping a small cut for your efforts.

Where if you are buying in quantity you get a set wholesale price since they are buying more product all at once but you are also pre-paying the vendor. You will have “inventory debt”, so the goal is to turn the product over quickly and since you are making more money per piece you can shorten the window of having the liability of products sitting stagnant. Most manufacturers will have a min number that a retailer must buy to get the wholesale price depending on the vendor it could be thousands of units or a small case.

Wholesale & Dropship Companies

There are thousands of companies on the internet that offer products for wholesale/dropship, the problem? While researching how to effectively build my dropship/wholesale program I found these differences.

Quality products. You are the face to your customers if you sell them crap they won’t come back. Plain & Simple.

Unique products. Do they put any effort into sourcing unique products to offer or are they just unloading a barge of mass produced items that everyone else is selling. This will make your own selling efforts more difficult.

Customer Service & Security. Since wholesale/dropship distributors are middle men, meaning they don’t actually carry products they just connect manufacturers with retailers, you never know who you are dealing with. It could be a person living in the basement with a website and may take all your personal (& your customers) information and disappear tomorrow. You may also have a hard time getting a physical person to talk to you when you have a question.

Deliver. If they are dropshipping to your customer, you want to know that the product is going to arrive on the doorstep of your customer when it is supposed to.

Let me state, that you do not need to go through a wholesale or dropshipping company. You can go direct to the source and find manufacturers that you want to work with. The advantage is you are most likely going to get a more unique product since it’s not being advertised to the masses, the downfall is it will take you more time and effort to manage the process since most mfgs will have different requirements, and you don’t have a company that pre-screens to make sure they are trustworthy.

What it means for the Small Manufacturers

The world of wholesale and dropshiping open doors for small manufacturers to more sales channels and getting their product in front of more people, but it does take work. Normally, there is some paperwork and emails/phone calls to provide information, follow up and build a relationship with the vendors. You also need to create a description of your products, quality photos and any other promotional materials for the retailers.

I have found that WorldWide Brands has more then proven that they are a great company to associated with and I highly recommend any manufacturer or distributor of a product that has not checked out what they offer to do so now. The application process is simple, you get a backlink to your site from a hard hitting authority site, and they offer a ton of great FREE resources to learn more about the dropshipping and wholesale process.

I have made great contacts from this resource and best of all it hasn’t cost me as a manufacturer anything to set up my account. I’ll admit, as a small operation we have not used this resource to it’s full potential but we are working on this and with the new information they are giving out we expect to improve our process and service for this sales channel.

I also appreciate how quick their response rate is and of course, they are very personable to work with. This makes a huge difference to me as well. I give them a high recommendation no matter if you are a retailer, manufacturer, ebayer they have what it takes to grow your business.

Check out some of the FREE Ebooks that WorldWide Brands offer. Who better to learn from then those that are experts in the field of dropship and wholesale?

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM

Your Hardest Working Employee

February 27, 2008 | 1 Comment

By Nelson Bates, Author Best Website: Simple Steps to Successful Websites

When it comes to making money online, you have the best opportunity of making the most money with a product that you own the rights to. My recommendation is to create a product that can be completely delivered online, preferably without your involvement as this is probably your best bet at making a consistent and significant profit online.

For instance, BuySellWebsite.com is a great example of a service product delivered online since among other things, BuySellWebsite.com sold classified ad listings to people wanting to sell their website businesses. Just to give you an idea of how powerful this can be, I’ll walk you through the steps of creating this database from scratch, with no programming knowledge.

To start, I need to give a brief explanation of how BuySellWebsite.com operates. The website accepts classified listings and then displays them on its website for users to search. The pages are set up similarly to eBay’s with a number of listings on each page where you can click the hyperlink to read more about each business for sale.

The database for BuySellWebsite.com ran most of this site. This is fantastic because it’s like having an additional employee for free. After successful payment, the database took the listings, inserted them into the database, rotated the ads properly, deleted old listings, processed renewals, retrieved lost passwords and allowed users to update their listings.

The classified listings we sold were sold for $99 and cost essentially nothing to provide. Whether we sold one or one thousand, it still cost the same small amount of time and money. Since the database basically ran the website, this is why having one is so valuable. Note: I sold BuySellWebsite.com in 2006.

How did I do this? Employ a database.
When a person wanted to place a classified ad, they clicked on a payment button to start the process. We used PayPal as our merchant account provider (more on PayPal later). Once payment was made through PayPal, they were redirected back to our site where they could fill out the ad listing form that was then automatically uploaded to the site and rotated into the active listings through the database I created.

The database also allowed users to retrieve lost passwords, delete old ads, update their listings and track how many times each ad was viewed. A database can be your best friend and hardest working employee. It might sound like a complicated process to set up, and it can be, but I built it entirely by myself using my web design software’s Database Wizards. (I use Microsoft Expression Web; there will be more on web design software in Chapter 4.)

What does this mean? It means I built the entire database by going through a ‘wizard’ that asked me questions about how I wanted my database to operate, then Expression Web wrote the database code for me! This is an incredibly powerful tool. By learning the Database Wizard, you can eliminate having to pay for a database designer.

Virtually all people who work with Web developers find the process very expensive and incredibly difficult to get what they want. Most people fail to make it beyond trying to design their site because it becomes too difficult to continually explain what they want and then they run out of money. The more you are in control of your website, the better off you’ll be.

Please visit BestWebsite.com for step-by-step instructions to building profitable websites.

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM

BOX4BLOX

February 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment

LEGO Bricks and LEGO Blocks clogging your vacuum?

Tired of stepping on those little LEGO Bricks in the middle of the night?

I am creating a new step by step Case Study on how to use Squidoo to build a Lens for an affiliate program. I chose the BOX4BLOX toy box as my affiliate program.

While the payout is not as high with traditional Internet Marketing Affiliate programs, this is a product that I believe all families that have the LEGO pieces in every nook and cranie of a the house will find as useful as we do.

Go Ahead, the Squidoo Squid won’t bite, Give it a Click and Let me know what you think of my latest lens!

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Chaos of Life, Squidoo, Tips & Advice, Toys

New Version of Keyword Research from Google?

February 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment

TOOL SUGGESTION OF THE DAY:

The Google Experimental site allows you to opt into one of several experiments that Google is researching- they include, keyword search, different views of search results, and keyboard shortcuts.

I generally use Google Sandbox, Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Yahoo and several more methods when researching a new word or phrase. I find this can often takes a great deal of time and like life, you can over analyze and never get anything actually accomplished. I relate it to sitting at a slot machine, you may find that perfect Keyword that is going to magically bring you a niche with tons of traffic/money with the next pull.

I opted for the Keyword Search Results experiment, clicked one easy button and it brought me to a search box that is shown in the screen shot.

Notice that as I started to type in words for my search, the tool offered suggstions. Then the best part is they offer the actual results number before you even leave the screen. I know off the bat that I’m not going to try “Senior Move Management” with over 2 million results, but “Senior Move Manager” is in the 600,o00’s - that’s a much better start to work into a niche.

Google states the following about the details:

That’s pretty cool. How does it do that?
Our algorithms use a wide range of information to predict the queries users are most likely to want to see. For example, Google Suggest uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers. An example of this type of popularity information can be found in the Google Zeitgeist. Google Suggest does not base its suggestions on your personal search history.

Google works well as is. Why should I use Google Suggest?
By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make your searches more convenient and efficient by keeping you from having to reformulate your query. Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing.

Go ahead, give it a try. Due to the fact it’s in Experimental, I don’t know how accurate the information is but it’s better then starting from scratch.

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Keyword Research, Tips & Advice, Web 2.0

What Type of Website to Start

February 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment

By Nelson Bates, Author Best Website: Simple Steps to Successful Websites

I want first to mention the structure of a successful website. I’ll define a successful website as the website that makes the most money, takes the least amount of time to run, and provides the most flexibility. The most successful website structure I have encountered is managed by a single owner who hires out some of the duties of his or her website business, like graphic design and database design, and then manages the Internet marketing campaign and any website updates alone.

There are certainly many ways to build a successful website. For instance, if you have the Internet marketing knowledge, and someone else has the website design knowledge, you can partner to build a great website. Of course, this means you lose some control, and you have to split your profits. I will show in Chapter 4 how to get all the work done by either doing it yourself or hiring it out.

Deciding what “type” of product to sell is pretty simple. You’ll have the best opportunity of making the most money with a product to which you own the rights, whether it is a physical product, an information product, or a service.

If you have a product that can be delivered completely online, preferably without your involvement, this is probably your best bet at making a consistent and significant profit online.

I’d like to use BuySellWebsite.com as a great example of a service product. Among other things, BuySellWebsite.com sold classified ad listings to people wanting to sell their website businesses. The classified listings we sold were $99 and cost essentially nothing to provide. Whether we sold one or one thousand, it still cost the same small amount of time and money. Note: I sold BuySellWebsite.com in 2006.

The classified ad listing is a great example of a product that can be delivered online. If you have a product or service that is delivered online without your involvement, your profit margin will be much greater than with a traditional product. You’ll see, later on, that you’ll probably need this extra profit margin and any extra time to survive the startup process and pay for your marketing campaign.

By choosing a product that is delivered online, you are starting out on the right foot. I don’t want to make it sound like you cannot succeed with a traditional physical product. I’m just saying that, in general, on online product is probably the most effective and profitable option.

A few more examples of products delivered online are e-books or membership sites where users pay a monthly fee to access information. Another example is Website Appraisals. This is a service that we sold on BuySellWebsite.com and the appraisals were then delivered through e-mail in an Adobe PDF document.

Please visit BestWebsite.com for step-by-step instructions to building profitable websites.

Like my Post? Maybe you would like to Buy Mama A Java! It will help to keep me reading, writing and scooping out the info

Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM

Success Means a Profitable Website (and Profitable Doesn’t Require Perfection!)

February 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment

By Nelson Bates, Author Best Website: Simple Steps to Successful Websites

I believe people lose money online for two reasons. The first reason is because they get bogged down in the details of building their business. Things like server platforms, coding choices, graphic design, layout options, entity formation, and search engine optimization, among others. It’s very easy to get confused and lose track of where you need to go.

The second reason is that they don’t allow enough time for their business to succeed. Most people will not continue past three months if their business does not start to make money. They become frustrated with the process and give up.

In my opinion, you’ll need at least 3 to 6 months to establish a solid website and start generating enough traffic to become profitable. It just takes that long to refine your website and gain search engine traffic. But, as long as you know what the right path is, you’ll know to keep going.

Success Means a Profitable Website - The 100% Rule
There is one key difference between those who make money online, and those who lose money online. Those who make money online know about the 100% rule, which is that they don’t need things to be 100% correct before they move on. I’ll give an example:

When a friend was designing a website in the past, he needed a login function to check for a user ID and password to be able to view a membership section of the website. There wasn’t any sensitive information located in the membership section, so security was not high priority. Instead of hiring out the database design he needed to be able to validate logins, he just used a submission form where people entered their username and password, and it took them directly to the members’ section without checking to see if the entered information was correct.

Since he knew that the vast majority of people, probably 99% or more, would fill out the new user form first and then attempt to login, he knew it was fine not to have it 100% correct.

There were several reasons to do this. The most important is that he still had control over his website because he could easily create a login function himself using the tools provided by the Web design software. He also saved money that he would have needed to spend on the designer.

Having as much control as possible over your own website is essential. Also, saving time and money is critically important. Most of the time this advice is met with aversion, and I can understand the criticism. However, I am merely stating one of the differences between people who make money online and people who don’t. Those who do know how to build the function they need quickly without involving an outside designer or spending a lot of money.

Profitable Doesn’t Require Perfection!
Most people who start an online business will spend far too much time just getting things set up and won’t have enough time or money to spend on the things that will actually make him or her money. Whether it is dealing with web design, database design or internet marketing, the key is to not try and make things 100% right.

I have seen many websites never get off the ground, mostly because they were trying too hard to make things 100% right at the beginning. Think about the aspects of your website that can be solved the easy way first. Then, once your website is up and running and you understand how people use your website, you can come back to that aspect and correct it or possibly realize that nothing more needs to be done.

My intention with the Best Website book is not to describe the Utopian way to build a website; it is to describe how successful business owners build and run their websites to earn significant money online.

Please visit BestWebsite.com for step-by-step instructions to building profitable websites.

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM

Making Money Online- Traffic and Content

February 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment

By Nelson Bates, Author Best Website: Simple Steps to Successful Websites

The most important aspect of making money online is also the hardest thing to do. This is creating significant and consistent traffic to your website. To illustrate why traffic is the most important aspect, consider this: when I was running my website appraisal business, we received submissions from some of the most poorly designed websites that were earning $10,000 to $20,000+ per month in profit. The key was that they had a tremendous flow of traffic.

I never saw a single example of a great looking website, with no or low traffic, making lots of money. I did, however, see plenty of bad and mediocre websites making incredible money, simply because they had excellent traffic.

The second main point to making money online is designing a great website. This is split into two parts. The first is the modifications you do to your website to optimize it for the Search Engines. The second is everything else that makes up your website, like graphics, layout, navigation structure, and the sales process.
In the design of your website, you want to create immediate credibility in the eyes of the potential customers and effectively lead them through your website to make a purchase (i.e., the sales process), thus, maximizing the number of buyers you get in relation to the number of visitors you receive.

Also, the people who make the most money online, at the very least, know how either to manage their own website (e.g., being able to update content, add links and graphics), or to build the entire website themselves from scratch using one of the professional design tools like Adobe DreamWeaver or Microsoft Expression Web. There are certainly exceptions to this rule but, in general, this is true.

The reason is because knowing how to manage and/or build your own website allows all your ideas to come to life without having to pay a web designer (who usually can’t ever quite deliver what you intended anyway!).

APlease visit BestWebsite.com for step-by-step instructions to building profitable websites.

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM

Make Money Online Blogging

February 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment

HOT HOT TOPIC right? You see it everywhere, how there really are people making a nice living working “in their underwear” while on typing away on the computer. But HOW? Why not you?

There are several different monetization strategies to make legitimate money online, one method is that of blogging. You may have heard of Blogging for Dollars or Six Figure Blogging- I’m sure the numbers of people that are making six figures blogging are far fewer then you are lead to believe.. .but then again, anything is possible.

For now, I found this great article on one of my favorite blogs about that provides excellent detail and resources that will pay you to make money blogging. Go Ahead check it out and see if you find something that will fit you!

Dosh Dosh Blogging Post

The post has excellent content with great screenshots and details of requirements for each website so you can browse the pros and cons easily and not have to make trip after trip to blind links.

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Reviews, Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM

Legitimate Work At Home Jobs Online

February 2, 2008 | 1 Comment

You get bombarded every day with emails or pop ups while browsing the internet with the promise of making money online or “legitimate work at home jobs online”.

As a result I found the following: Affiliate Programs are key to making money on the internet.

You are basically a marketer for a core product and when someone buys from your hoplink you get a little cash.

There are three keys to sucess for affiliate programs.

You need to have a well identified niche and it must me a niche you can leave a mark in.

A large email distribution for that niche market is crucial.

The ability to generate large traffic to your squeeze page- after all, who is going to buy it if noone sees it.

Two of the most popular affiliate programs you generally see are Ebay and Amazon. I’m not counting all the MLM businesses or the clickbank products since I consider those in a catagory themselves.

Ebay- The primary focus of making money with Ebay is for you to sell what you have to make money. While this method has never worked for me personally to make alot of money, it’s okay for a few dollars here and there.

There are some that do it and do it well enough by having hundreds of listings and sourcing products to sell that they make out ok. I found the cost of listing was a bit high, maybe their new price decrease will help encourage sellers to list their products but it looks like you still get hit with steep fees when the product sells.

I also have been turned off by ebay for the pure fact that so many people are “making a living” on ebay that you end up having a hundred of the same exact product listed instead of individual sellers that were selling something they had around the house. I preferred all the little sellers clearing out their house and selling what they don’t use- I just thought that was more fun and community like.

However, Ebay now has an affiliate program and this is of more interest to me. You sign up and get your ebay widget and if someone clicks thru then you get a few cents. It’s automatic… I like automatic. SQUIDOO has an easy pre made affiliate module that allows you to pick ebay products or fill in search terms and they will populate, take seconds to put one up.

The other popular affiliate program that can earn you as much as 10% of each sale is Amazon.com. Now that Amazon sells so much more then just books, it is easier to find products that relate to your posts or articles and link to it or review it and get a quick easy sale.

Not sure how to get started making money on line with affiliate programs? I’m just finishing up a little report that shows you the steps, what to look for and how to evaluate affiliate programs to get the most bang for your buck. Until next time keep searching for legitimate work at home jobs online and leave a post on what works for you!

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Small Business Blogging, Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM

Are you Killing your own Internet Business?

January 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Don’t Manage your Time Effectively- As a home based business you will find you need to wear many hats but sometimes you may not be wearing the right one….

Spend hours in forums, chat rooms and “cruising” the internet instead of building good solid, keyword rich content for your business.

Don’t track your marketing strategies so you know what is working, what is not and what your ROI is for each method of marketing.

This includes Pay Per Click advertising,if your budget is endless then don’t bother tracking your conversion rates with clearly identified ad objectives.

Don’t ask your customers how they found you and WHY they are buying from you.

You have not written down your goals for the day and planned three things today to promote yourself either marketing, advertising, or public relations.

Acknowledge you can’t do everything but you can create a list of what does need to get done, prioritize and then get to work. Need help? Consider creating an Alliance with other home based businesses to barter services or hire a virtual assistant.

Like my Post? Maybe you would like to Buy Mama A Java! It will help to keep me reading, writing and scooping out the info

Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Small Business Blogging, Tips & Advice, Work at Home MOM