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In my previous posts I have mentioned how important it is to become a pepperjam affiliate if you are serious about making money online. They have just made your work easier with the introduction of “pepperjam store builder”. Now you are just one minute away from building the perfect store for your website / blog.
The process here is very simple. Log in to your account and go to the pepperjam store builder page. You will see all the advertisers with product feeds in this section. Remember, You will only see a product feed if you have applied and got approved to that particular advertiser’s program. Select all feeds applicable to your web site or blog’s niche.
If you need, You can filter results to get more specific products. For example if your advertiser has a wide range of clothing products, you can filter it to show only t-shirts. If you leave this field blank, you will get all the products available in their program. You can also select how many products you want to display in one page. I suggest you to use at least 6 products to give your readers a good variety.
Once you finish selecting products, you can customize the look of the store. Don’t be lazy and Do not use the default settings. You can be creative here. Try testing with many color combinations as possible till you get the perfect store to impress your visitors.
You can build the store in your existing web site/ weblog or purchase a new domain just for this. I have seen many publishers built pepperjam stores on new domains. For me, I created a seperate page for my store here. The product feed will be replaced with t-shirts later on.
Doesn’t it looks good? And it can’t get simpler than that. No need to program anything. You just have to copy paste the code given by pepperjam. If you run on wordpress, Do not forget to tick the “Wordpress Optimized” radio button to get a wordpress optimized script.
And to make things much more interesting, they are holding a contest to select the best pepperjam store. If you emerge a winner, you will receive a grand cash prize of $1000. Isn’t that great? Even if you do not win, if you are among the first 100 blogs to showcase a store in your blog, pepperjam will credit $10 bonus to your account.
If you need to take advantage of all these and become a serious online marketer, I highly recommend using Pepperjam Store Builder today.
As you might already know, adwords is the best way to drive traffic to your product related web sites. I am from Sri Lanka. And I have few digital products which I am selling through localized web sites and through international web sites. What I mean here is, for the most profitable products I have 2 different web sites. One is for the international audience and the other one is for customers in my country.
The point of having a localized web site is, you can offer your customers,
1. More flexible payment methods.
2. More flexible Delivery options.
3. Convenient contact methods.
4. Highly targeted information.
If there are 2 vendors selling the same product, customers tend to buy from the vendor more closer to his location.
True, this is year 2008, the Era of multinational online trade. But not all customers are familiar or willing to buy things from strangers who lives 1000 miles away.
This is where your localized web site comes in to action. Speak to your customer’s heart and elaborate the fact that you are one of them.
I can guarantee that you will make more sales than you are currently making from your standard web site.
But, how are you going to get traffic to your web site? Off line methods such as news paper/ magazine/ radio advertisements in your local media is great, but it can be costly. Google comes to our rescue once again here.
People talk about key word targeted adwords campaigns all the time. But have they miss out on Placement-targeted Ad Groups? This is a great way to get your localized potential customers to your web site.
Log in to your adwords account and go to New ad group - start with placements. From there, select your area as the targeted placement. In my case it would be my whole country. If you are from USA it could be your state.
If your product is in a niche which is important only to highly targeted customers use the “Browse categories” and ” Describe topics” option. But if your product has a general appeal to everyone, use “List URLs” option. That is what I am using.
This is an awesome feature. If you type in a web site which is popular in your area it will show you a list of related web sites which is also popular in your area. Visit these sites and check their alexa rank and content. If you think it meets your required criteria add them to your list of advertising sites. In my case, I shortlisted 30 local web sites with great traffic.
Some even had alexa rank of under 20k. And the greatest thing is I don’t have to pay more than $ 0.15 per click to get featured in these highly trafficked web sites. In some cases my cost was only $ 0.05.
If you are selling a cool mobile phone gadget, people who are reading news web sites might also be interested in your product. So do not target your ads only in the mobile phone category. In fact placing them in whole different sites might improve your click through rate. And you will find less competing ads.
I was only using key word targeted ads in the past 2 years and only started using “List URLs” option last week. And only GOD knows what I have been missing out in the past 2 years.
For keyword targeted ads my average conversion rate ( The percentage of people buy my product after coming through a Google ad) was 4.79 %. But in the last week, since I started using this option it increased to 9.12%. So basically my turnover almost doubled.
And the average cost per click also have reduced from $0.09 to $0.07. I wish some one could advised me to use this function long before. I have read many books on ad words but all of them was talking about keyword based ad campaigns.
I have given you some valuable information here. It might not be ground breaking, but I learned it myself through trial and error method. It worked. So I am sharing it with you. You can either ignore all this or start using this method. But if you do not try , you will never know what would have been the out come. To me, The biggest crime is stuck in between a decision.
If you only run a blog site it is high time you start a product related web site too. A product site can make 10x more money than your blog. Am I I am lying? Why don’t you find out for your self?
Many people love to run a business but simply give up the idea due to capital formation problems. But there are few ways to get around this problem. Ever heard of Drop shipping? If not, it is high time you start learning it.
I found about drop shipping when I ordered a wristwatch from ebay. The seller was from USA but my parcel arrived from Hong Kong. I was curious enough to do a little research on this and I found out that most of the ebay power sellers are actually drop shippers. And they are cashing in millions thanks to this concept. Good thing is, there is no rocket science here. An average guy like you and me can very easily get in to the system and raking it in.
What’s the story here ?
If done correctly wholesale drop shipping can be a very luxurious business opportunity. What happens here is, when some one orders something from you; you contact the whole seller and give the order to him. The customer pays money to you and your seller directly ship goods to your customer. You pay the wholesale price to your seller. The difference in these prices is your profit.
This way, you do not need to have any physical stock with you. Remember, you can do this both off line and online. But if you are planning to do this off line you need to purchase samples in order to show to your potential customers. Drop shipping solves one of our biggest problem of finding capital.
Beware of scams.
Although this business sounds very luxurious, this is possible only if you have a good whole seller who is willing to do drop shipping for you. If you are planning to do this online you must make sure that your seller is not a con artist. To tell you the truth 90% of the online whole sellers do not have any stock with them. So you must select your sellers carefully.
Many people are selling drop shippers lists these days. Do not buy them. If I have a good whole seller I can make more than enough money from him not to sell out his details. I would rather keep his details to my self. These lists gives names of companies which drop ships and many of them could be the same company in different names or just an individual with a phone without any actual product with them.
If you find your seller online, it is always better to visit him. Or have someone check on them. There are lot of firms which does back ground checks on other companies for a small fee. I know this can be costly. But by doing this, you can start your marketing activities without any doubts.
If your seller scams you, eventually you will become a scammer from your customer’s perspective. And that is not pretty. That is why I insist you to chose your sellers carefully. ( Do not worry, There are plenty of good whole sellers. Otherwise there won’t be an ebay.)
How to find a whole seller for you to drop ship?
You can find many good whole sellers who are not new to drop shipping at alibaba and at worldwidebrands. Read this article to figure out how to not get scammed by whole sellers.
One of the best ways to find out whole sellers is to do a search off line. If you can approach them and present your idea, there is a high chance that they will agree to do the dirty work for you. After all, it brings more sales to them.
However it may not be easy as finding a whole seller online, but it has more benefits and it is much more secure.
What you should sell in order to cash in ?
If you are planning to make a fortune from drop shipping keep this simple factor in your mind. Sell high end niche products with a profit margin that leaves you plenty of room to advertise! This way you do not have to worry about advertising cost. ( PPC is the best. ) If you are selling a product for $15 and it costs you $5 to get a customer, there is not much in it.
But if you are selling something for $400 and your profit margin is $100 then there is plenty of room for you to advertise. Even if you spend $25 to get that new customer, so what, you’ve still made $70.00!
Go high end niche and cash in. After all, you’re drop shipping and there is no need to carry any inventory, so go for the gold! Plasma TV’s , LCD’s, snowboards, high end phones are few examples that comes to my mind.
Let’s make some money.
Now you have a very clear understanding about how drop shipping works. Now the matter is getting customers for you to sell your products. You can proceed with the traditional way of making a web site and driving traffic through PPC. It will work; there is no doubt about it. But there are much easier ways of doing this.
You can practice this method on world’s largest online market place, “ebay”. As I said earlier, most of the ebay power sellers are actually drop shippers.
I have run few successful campaigns with ebay and drop shipped N95’s when the market was big for Nokia N95. This was back in June- September last year. I had a supplier in Singapore who supplied N 95’s @ $580 for me. Back then the retail price on ebay was $ 700-$850.
The above image you see is a picture I used in my ebay listings. I had few phones with me as samples because most buyers need some photo proof before placing an order.
I had a nice run till they introduced the N95 8GB. My supplier could not extend his deal with Nokia and our relationship ended unfortunately.
And the other great place to sell your products is “alibaba.com”. I love their market place. When you post a sales lead it is almost guaranteed that you will have at least few inquires within the few hours. And you can always reply to buyer leads and find new customers. They have a great system and the house where I am living at the moment was bought from the money I earned from alibaba.
Ebay gives you one sale at a time. Alibaba gives you $10,000 worth sales at a time. I was drop shipping Nokia N95’s and E90’s to Australia, Germany, USA, UAE and UK. And 50% of my assets in fixed deposits also come from alibaba sales.
Do your self a favor and join this great market place. It is totally Free to join and to do business. Once you are a member, download the “trade manager”. It is a chatting software like msn messenger but the difference is all your contacts are wholesale buyers and sellers.
Build your profile with correct information and post few sales leads with accurate and complete details. If you do everything right you can expect buyers to contact you within few hours. And remember, you can use the same method to find suppliers for you too.
I have given all the information you need without holding anything back. If I have not revealed anything here, that would be my current supplier’s details for gaming consoles. And I am not going to trade that information for anything.
I hope you would appreciate my effort of writing this post. You can share your thoughts in the comments section and if you like the post please give it a thumbs up. That is the best thing I am expecting from you.
1. More flexible payment methods.
