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How to build a dropship website

Selling physical goods online can be quite lucrative specially if you know how to generate niche traffic. The problem with physical goods is the fulfillment/shipping and other handling issues. Here’s an interesting article on how to source your products, have it drop shipped, etc. You focus on your online store/ecommerce/promotions, the dropshipper focuses on fulfillment. It covers both the advantages and disadvantages of this arrangement.

Flippa’s guide to dropship site building

What Is Drop Shipping?

Dropshipping is when an e-commerce website owner outsources the warehousing and distribution of the physical products they’re selling. You (the website owner) look after the website shopfront including the marketing, sales and customer service, while the drop ship company stores, packs and ships the product to your customers.

Just like with any solution, it’s not all rainbow smiles and happy butterflies… There are downsides to consider:

Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? You focus on what you’re good at (web development, online marketing, the sales funnel etc) while the dropshipping company does all the tedious boring stuff. It’s a marriage made in (choose your preferred afterlife paradise).

Not so fast, cowperson. Consider the following before you decide dropping your ships is the bee’s knees:

  • Customer service. If you’re looking for a hands off passive online business, don’t consider drop shipping. In most cases you still have to handle all the customer service inquiries, complaints and refunds.
  • You don’t control the distribution process. Depending on your relationship with the dropshipper, you have little control over the speed of the delivery, packaging and general care taken in distributing the product you sell. You can have a customer on one end demanding their product, and the drop shipper on on the other shrugging their shoulders saying “it gets there when it gets there”, so choose your dropship partner wisely.
  • Multiple drop shippers can be challenging. If you’re selling products from multiple dropshippers and a customer orders one of each, you’re going to have to have some clever postage charge logic in your shopping cart. It’s also more than likely customers will receive the products separately.
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    High Revenue Admin 28 March 2010 business models 1 Comment

    How to buy websites and not get burned

    Here’s a detailed step by step buyer’s CASE STUDY of what to look for when buying mainstream sites.  Regardless of your site’s exact business model, these tips apply.

    The article was prepared by person behind Flippa a website sales exchange

    Resource: Site Point

    The key focus of this buyer’s guide is how to accurately gauge the potential of a young website that makes no money. Its methodical approach lets you size up the site’s earnings potential, niche competitive strength, and scalability.  I especially appreciated the focus on COMPETITION.  You don’t want to buy into a losing proposition.  That’s like willfully contracting pneumonia.

    Next, we want to find out how competitive this niche is. Competition analysis is an in-depth topic, so it’s worth checking out some of the posts on sitepoint.com for more details. For basic metrics, I use Firefox with the SEO Quake Extension to display competition information, which will indicate the degree of difficulty achieving a #1 ranking for this site. The current #1 ranked site in Google’s results has the keywords in the title and a PR (page rank) of 3, but the keyword phrase is excluded from the domain name, another factor that can influence search rankings.

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    High Revenue Admin 28 March 2010 business models , No Comments

    How to make money off your money losing PR 1 site

    Everyone’s got these… money losing or underachieving PR 1 sites.

    Before you trudge off to Sitepoint or other forum sections to unload that “turkey”, you may want to consider this interesting way of making money off underachieving/low traffic sites with PR.  NOTE:  We don’t condone this behavior.  This is purely for informational purposes only.  The steps below are what we THINK are the steps such blogs take to create this money making system.

    Step 1:

    Apply for an account at cpalead.com

    Step 2:

    Install the code on your WP blog

    Step 3:

    Set up the blog so that all comments are publicly viewable.  Make sure your comments are all DO FOLLOW.

    Step 4:

    Publicize your blog in all DO FOLLOW blog directories.  Publicize your blog in all webmaster forums you can get your hands on.  Publicize your blog at twitter.

    What do you publicize?  Build BACKLINKS to your site through a DO FOLLOW link from a blog with PAGE RANK.

    Step 5:

    Sit back and optimize

    How it works:  Webmaster forums are filled with link builders.  They are always looking for blogs with page rank to build DO FOLLOW links on.  They see your blog and visit.  The CPA LEAD free survey panel opens up when they visit.  They have to take a survey to view your blog.  They fill out a survey–you get PAID by CPALEAD, they proceed to the comment section, they comment.

    Win Win situation, right?!

    Possible issues:  The javascript used by the CPA LEAD filter might trip Googlebot…  However, the sites we observed that do this seem to be doing okay.

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    High Revenue Admin 11 July 2009 business models 3 Comments

    Making money with online forums

    collaborationHighly specific online bulletinboards/messageboards aka ‘forums’ offers webmasters a ‘highly targeted’ way to generate revenue through site advertising.  In particular, specialist forums that focus on a narrow range of topics and finely tuned categories within those topics. Why do these types of forums stand to make more money than high traffic/high volume “general” forums?  It all boils down to capturing a small refined target market.  Advertisers, on average, pay less for ‘run of site’ or ‘general branding’ campaigns than for smaller, highly targeted campaigns that focus on specific demographics.  A company pushing “smiley icon” apps would probably want the widest audience possible and buy run of site ads.  However, a company that is pushing products to podiatrists would want to advertise only to podiatrists.

    Some basic ideas on how to build, operate, and monetize “ultraniche” forums

    1) Find an ultraniche

    It’s not enough to focus on a niche, focus on a subniche within that niche.  As long as there is demonstrated heavy interest from advertisers, focus on subniches.  How do you measure advertiser interest?  Find how much interest they show via Adwords terms.  You can also check CJ and other affiliate networks to see how many advertisers are running campaigns on this ultraniche.

    2) Find common questions regarding your niche

    Go to wiki answers or Yahoo Answers and compile a list of common questions or frequent questions about your niche.  Analyze them.  Make a logic tree by extrapolating related questions.

    3) Go to Google Keywords Selector to finetune your questions

    Once you have a list of questions and related questions, go to Google Keywords Selector to find high traffic keywords you can massage into the questions

    4) Post your questions and simulate a conversation

    Post your questions and simulate a conversation using many differing “populator” accounts in your forums.  This appearance of activity helps your forum avoid The Empty Restaurant Effect The appearance of activity will prompt real users to register and participate.  Once you have enough real users participating, you can stop the population activities on your forum

    5) Promote your forum using this initial promotions packages

    These are packages and prices available from Webmasterlabor.Com

    • Submit your forum to 1000 directory sites
    • Social bookmark your forum using differing tag combinations focused on your ultraniche
    • Stumble your forum (there’s an easily overlooked trick to this)
    • Issue a press release specifically targeting your audience using trigger keywords/jargon they would react to
    • Find existing forums that GENERALLY touch on your niche (ie., the target forums cater a larger subset which includes your ultraniche target audience) and build links there/converse there
    • Article marketing–write a large series of articles that focus on issues your subniche cares about and inviting further conversation through the “About the Author” section.  The links in this section go to your forum.

    6)  Some key tips to keep in mind

    Running and populating a forum is a marathon not a sprint–hang in there and be patient.  However, keep promoting and populating.  Don’t just start and stop.  That will only lead to frustration.

    Use VBSeo or some other forum SEO plugin.  If you’re using VBulletin for your forum, look into using VBSEO to make your forum thread urls and other forum features more SEO friendly.

    Use forum populator accounts to direct conversations instead of just unloading the answers.

    Find where your market hangs out online and participate/communicate there.

    Photo Credits:  LuMaxArt

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    High Revenue Admin 8 June 2009 business models No Comments

    Why you should offer Free Wifi

    If you run an offline “bricks and mortar” business that needs ‘warm bodies’ inside the establishment to get business, you should consider offering Free Wifi.

    Businesses like coffee shops and restaurants need the perception of being popular in order to get more patrons.  Ever notice that busy walk-in restaurants tend to attract more people.  People even line up.  The same with coffee shops.
    The reverse is true.  When there’s no one in the establishment, people might think the coffee sucks or the food is bad so they stay away.  This is called the Empty Restaurant Syndrome.  People don’t want to try something that is “untried.”  When they see many people at your establishment, they interpret this as a vote of confidence in your business’ offerings.

    The same dynamic applies to online establishments like forums and social networking sites.  That’s why these companies often spend money on website population services to get that “push” going.

    How Free Wifi helps

    Offering free wifi “populates” your establishment with visible patrons who appear to vouch for the quality of your food or coffee.  Warning to restaurants:  This strategy works best only during the “dead” period of 2pm to 5pm.  Anything before or after that might be eating into (pun intended) your busy hours (and your profits).

    What do you think?  Leave a comment and share your experiences with the EMPTY RESTAURANT EFFECT.

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    High Revenue Admin 2 June 2009 business models No Comments