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 

Women Entrepreneur + Ladybug Shoes + Suri Cruise = Success

May 14, 2008 | 10 Comments

Photobucket

This is the story…

of a woman entrepreneur and how she took a small stroke of luck and turned it into something that can benefit others. I could push the fact that she even got her product on Oprah, but I don’t want the “Oprah” factor to influence all the smart moves this entrepreneur made. But I will mention that she started just like many of us, at our kitchen table, learning every step of online business from trial and error.

Let the Story Begin…. Read more

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Web 2.0, Work at Home MOM 

Lessons a WAHM learned from the “Gurus”

May 13, 2008 | 2 Comments

I haven’t been posting as much as I would like, I’ll admit it. I’ve been so busy reading and trying to learn about how to apply lessons of internet marketing that I got caught up and well, neglected my own blog. I changed themes- some parts are still unfinished, need to complete.

But also, while I was reading all the blogs I found myself in a position of do I blog to share just knowledge or do I blog to share the chaos of my daily life or basically what direction do I take? Then I’ll admit it was about 3 a.m. and it hit me… well, my blog is that of the behind the scenes, real life workings of a work at home mom- and well, that’s okay. I can share my lessons, knowledge AND CHAOS!

So here is my first post that includes a summary of what I have learned so far at an extremely high level that I will be going into greater depth with upcoming posts as well as updating all my personal posts including the one about my latest batch of foster kittens that have arrived, my nephew that has been in Navy Boot Camp and my letters to him everyday have been stealing all my blog posts and he send a letter thanking me for my “DYSFUNCTIONAL” (he meant that in a good way) family stories that help give him something to look forward to. I’ll pull those letters out and post- love that kid especially his own stories of poop schedules in boot camp and banana pudding substances coming out of his nose during gas chamber training.

AHH The Good Stuff is Coming BACK People!!! I’m excited about blogging again!

Here is my top favorites list of what this WAHM has Learned from the Internet Marketing Gurus- Read more

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Web 2.0, Work at Home MOM 

The Lessons a WAHM learned from the “Internet Marketing Gurus” Part One

April 29, 2008 | 1 Comment

It seemed simple, have a product, make a web page, throw a few banners up, and sit back to collect the money while the orders roll in. Well, okay, that is oversimplified but generally speaking when I started on my mompreneur journey a few years ago I thought that the production of a website was my biggest challenge.

Then the reality hits, you have your website just where you want it, you have the product stocked & ready, you put up your banners and….

wait…for that little web stat to blip and a customer to hit that “BUY NOW” button. Back to the books and forums you go. Read more

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

Review of Getting Paid for Blogging

March 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I have a confession… it’s the mom’s guilty conscious thing… and this isn’t about one of those bad parenting moments when you say something without thinking first and wonder if you just hurt your kids self esteem for the rest of their lives…or the fact that I dropped my hairdryer on the baby yesterday while she was innocently sitting in her bouncy seat (yes, it was at least off but I still feel awful). I only feel slightly not as guilty when every other parent around me fesses up to their “accidental” moments.

This is about the fact that I occasionally take money to write a post on this blog. GASP! It’s a method of adding an additional revenue stream to a business, and a large majority of blogs include Affiliate Links.

For anyone that is not familiar with Internet Marketing or Making Money Online an Affiliate link is a link in a post/article/banner for a company/product and if a reader clicks thru and buys it or signs up for something you get a percentage of $ kick backed to your account.  It’s very straightforward and it’s actually a fool proof way to make money online that costs a person nothing except the time of promoting the link and can be fully automated.

I signed up with two different companies when I started to look into the process of getting paid to blog. Linkworth and PayU2Blog.  Here is the scoop:

A summary of LinkWorth: You sign up for a free account and submit your blog to be reviewed to see if it is an acceptable blog. If you have a Blog that is full of random spam affiliate links, don’t bother trying to get accepted, they do have good standards of quality blogs… after all, I got accepted.. sorry couldn’t resist. :)

Once you are approved and classified, you will get emails from companies that think your blog is a fit for their company and offer you X amount of money to write about them within a certain time frame and meeting their requirements of word count, keywords and outgoing links.

Here is what I like most about LinkWorth, YOU get to APPROVE or DECLINE the offer! The ball is really in your court. What I do is visit the site, poke around and I think it’s worthy I will accept it.  If I think it’s crap, I decline it.  Yes, I hate to decline the money for something that will be about 10 minutes of work, but I don’t want my readers to have to sift through junk because you’ll get irritated (just like I do on other sites) and won’t come back and in reality, my readers are more important then a quick buck.

Now, once you approved the assignment and write up your wonderful review or post you publish it. You have several options to let them know it’s been posted, you can login and do it manually, have an html option or what I think is the easiest, use a WordPress LinkWorth Plugin that does it automatically. Perfect.  The LinkWorth team will then review the post and approve/deny the post.

My first assignment I was denied three times… I missed one certain keyword that needed to be created into an anchor text link, I fixed it and re-submitted and was approved. Within a few hours, the money was deposited into my PayPal account and I was at the mall the next day getting the kids new sneakers… just kidding, but really it is deposited into your PayPal account very quickly.

NOW, PayU2Blog is another story. I am actually very disappointed with this site and more so because I saw so many other bloggers endorse it and thought highly of it. If anyone reads this and had different results, I would love your comments posted below and I would be willing to re-examine.

First, PayU2Blog was almost the same as LinkWorth regarding the Free Sign Up process and approval period.  However, the biggest difference is you MUST complete every assignment that is put into your cue. You don’t have the option to pick and choose what you consider is high quality- or average quality for that matter.

They also don’t send you an email notification to let you know you have an assignment. You need to manually put a tickler on your calender to enter every week or two and see what you have waiting. They state every two weeks, but I waited two weeks, logged in and I had 8 assignments in my cue and 4 were already past the “post deadline”.

This is where I found that out of all 8 of my assignments, ALL of them are what I would consider spam businesses. You know, the ones that you delete from your email account about Drug Rehab centers and DeTox and well, you get the idea.  The first thought in my mind is, OK, I’m the “Mother of Four- Goddess of Chaos” talking about being a work at home mom, small business and kids….. and they want me to post 300 words on a Drug Rehab??? I DON’T THINK SO.  Don’t get me wrong, a drug rehab is very important, and I’m sure somewhere in this world there is a Work At Home Mom over the edge that has some issues and may need this service.. was it my post about struggling to wait until 5 oclock to have my glass of wine and unwind after a day of hell???

But again, as I posted in the above, I can’t write about that here, it’s totally irrelevant. I did contact Customer Service, since I signed the agreement during sign up saying I will complete every assignment in a professional manner, I felt I had an obligation to not just ignore this.  I kindly asked what the process is for giving out these assignments and if there was anyway to filter or even know if I’m going to get crap after crap because then I’m not interested.  Another black mark, I never heard back…. hmmm..

I do feel guilty, because I maybe I shouldn’t have been so naive about “posting every assignment” but it really just didn’t dawn on me that I would actually be asked to promote spam like companies.

In summary, you have to know that I love to review products/businesses/services and I mention a ton of them here because anyone who knows me, knows I’m well…. “opinionated”, some of them will be giving me money, most of them not. I just share what works or does not work for me so maybe it will help save someone else time or money or good food for thought.

I do promise that I will not promote anything that I personally do not agree with or find value. I have high standards and will keep those standards, and that’s my rambling confession for now.

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Posted by Kristen | Filed Under Make Money Online, Work at Home MOM 

5 Easy Steps to Make Your Own Editorial Calender

March 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Most business owners think only print publications create and use editorial calenders. Maybe you have gone through the process of contacting newspapers and magazines for a copy of their editorial calender to plan your public relations or advertising efforts. However, every business, especially now in the world of web 2.0, can benefit from their own editorial calender.

Many online business owners today understand the impact of internet marketing strategies and are working to use various outlets.  They are responsible for content on their website, blog, article marketing, and any niche specific blogs or guest blog positions.  While outsourcing content is an option, often with the right plan you can do it yourself and still carry out your other business activities.

Creating a plan at the beginning of the month will allow you to focus your efforts into specific keyword rich topics that will provide the highest quality content to your readers. You can then modify that piece to fit the distribution requirements of other publications by re-organizing the content or slightly changing the focus.

5 Easy Steps to Get Started

Step 1
Print a monthly calender template from Outlook or another online calender maker.

Step 2
Choose your keywords using Google, Wordtracker or SEO Tools related to your market. These will be the pillars of your authority posts.

Step 3
Determine your deadlines and schedule. An example might include posting on Blog 1 on Tues/Thurs and Blog 2 on Mon then post 2 articles a week on Friday.

Step 4
Brainstorm or use Mind Mapping methods to create your list of article topics, potential interviews or podcast topics.This method will also help you determine if larger topics should be broken into a “series” of information.

Step 5
Include scheduled time for research, organization and marketing. I have found that I need to schedule my social networking time as well since this can become overwhelming and suck time away from other activities.

While this method will keep you on track, remember that to add in spur of the moment content.  That’s what keeps the blogging world so current so don’t be afraid to “sprinkle” on a few smaller posts that maybe build on other another bloggers post that caught your attention.

As an extra bonus, stop by clickbank, share a sale or commission junction and see what affiliate programs may apply to your keywords and include those for an extra income stream.

For an excellent example of an Editorial Calender or you can download a copy from Andy Wibbel  of Six Figure Blogging and customize to meet your needs.

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, Web 2.0, Work at Home MOM 

Top 10 Ways to Make More Money

March 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I have been working hard on my business but I have also been doing a great deal of research on how to add additional revenue streams of revenue.  As a small business owner, a piece of advice I hear over and over is “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

I have the following 10 tips that will help you look at additional options for you to easily add revenue with your current business.

1. Add a new line of products or services to your core business

2. Offer consulting services to your niche market

3. Create an alliance with another business that compliments your product/service

4. If you have a web site, blog, or e-zine - sell advertising

5. Offer additional services or another business that will build on your current business

6. Create a subscription newsletter or membership area of your web site

7. Create your own product and sell

8. Teach it! If you have a formula for success teach other people to do it.

9. Source PLR ebooks or info products and sell them on your site

10. Find Affiliate programs that will add value to your customers

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 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.

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 

Matt Cutts from Google

February 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment

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

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 

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