12 Tips For Being Successful With Drop Shipping

Guest Post by: Michelle Perrigo

Drop shipping is a profitable means of retailing for small businesses or work-from-home companies. Retailers sell products from a showroom, online catalogue or website, but the wholesale supplier stores the inventory. Customers purchase products from the retailer, who submits orders to the wholesaler.  The wholesaler directly ships the completed order to the customer, leaving the retailer to handle only the purchase transactions. Retailers profit from the difference between the retail and wholesale costs.

You can maximize a drop shipping business with effective networking and marketing. To make your drop shipping business more successful, consider the following tips:

1. Build partnerships with multiple wholesalers or manufacturers.Suppliers are your key partners in a drop shipping business. Get to know the wholesale companies you want to work with. Meet owners and learn their company values. Discuss their specialty products or top selling items and set up a network of business partnerships.

2. Ask about private label shipping. Manufacturers can set-up customized labels as the return address for shipping products so customers don’t refuse a package from an unknown source. Work with your manufacturers to use your retail information as the return addresses to ensure customer confidence.

3. Keep up with product quantities in stock. Back orders can reflect poorly on you as a retailer. Communicate with your manufacturer about available item quantities and potential delays in order fulfillment. You are responsible to know product availability changes to communicate with your customers.

4. Test the drop shipping delivery time and quality. Before you publicly launch your website and products, test the ordering process. Pay a trusted friend or colleague to order products from your site as a sample order. Place the manufacturer order and note the expected delivery time. Have your friend tell you when the products arrive. Personally inspect their quality.

5. Know your products inside and out. Eat, sleep and breathe the product catalogues. Learn everything you can about the details and functions of your products so that you can effectively answer customer questions. Get familiar with all the manufacturer’s items, so that you can expand your product line at regular intervals as your business builds.

6. Visit your manufacturer’s As a means of continuing the business partnership, confirming quality or expanding your product line, set up a factory visit with your suppliers. If they are too far to visit, ask about a virtual tour.

7.Market your products consistently and expansively. Everywhere you can – with paid ads, or free on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, creatively market your products. The more people viewing your website and products, the more sales you will earn.

8. Establish a customer-friendly website for easy ordering. Make your website easy for customers to view products, find specs and place orders. A complete, effective shopping encounter will bring return customers.

9. Regularly communicate with your suppliers. Again, to keep up relationship and stay aware of products, have regular communication check points with your manufacturer or wholesalers.

10. Track your orders relentlessly. Establish a process that clearly organizes your order intake, customer payments, manufacturer orders, payment to manufacturers and ship dates of merchandise. Set up automatic reminders, payments and email notices if possible.

11. Provide excellent customer service. Just do it. Take good care of customers by effective products and addressing concerns. Good ratings help your e-reputation as a quality business.

12. Maintain positive cash-flow. Distribute every customer payment into your business accounts. Pay your bills promptly so you always know where your bottom line stands.

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Ray Walters rlwalters3@gmail.com Skype: rarayfb3

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• Advertising, Opt-in Leads, Email Marketing service helps small businesses market their products more effectively. We provide everything you need, http://www.madviral.com Phone: 256-778-8350 (9am-5pm CST M-F) MadViral Enterprises, LLC 171 Early Rd. Hartselle, Al. 35640

12 Tips For Being Successful With Drop Shipping

Article Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide

Guest Post:  By Steve Shaw in Writing

With Article Marketing you write articles on the topic of your niche and submit them to online publishers such as article directories, ezine editors, and article announcement lists. Along with each article you include a resource box, which is basically a short author bio that includes a link back to your website.

This resource box is the key to everything–this is the one spot where you can talk about yourself and your website and provide a link to your website. Every time your article is re-published, your article gains exposure and you gain a backlink to your website.

An increase in backlinks can elevate your Google ranking, and a higher ranking can dramatically increase the traffic your website receives over the long term.

WHY DO PEOPLE DO IT?

Website owners want and need visitors to their websites, and article marketing delivers. You can receive visitors directly from the articles and also from search engines.

Additionally, an article marketing campaign does a great job of establishing an author as an expert in his field, and also bringing publicity for a business or website.

Through the article, the author has the chance to teach his target readers valuable information, which can build customer confidence and increase the likelihood of making a sale.

WHAT ARE THE PERKS OF ARTICLE MARKETING?

Article marketing is perhaps the most popular marketing tool for the average website owner for two simple reasons:

1. It’s easy (anyone can do it).
2. It works.

Every business owner nowadays needs a website, but very few business owners have the time and technical know-how to learn the ins and outs of search engine optimization (SEO).

In fact, the average website owner probably doesn’t care about the technical reasons behind how search engines work–all they want is targeted leads coming to their website.

Article marketing makes everything very simple:

• Just write articles on the topic of your niche.
• Write a resource box and include a link back to your website.
• Submit the articles.
• Repeat this process every month.

And you’re all set–you are doing search engine optimization for your website, whether your realize it or not!

You’re just doing what you already know how to do–writing. In fact, even if you don’t consider yourself to be a great writer you can still construct a decent article and reap the rewards of article marketing.

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES?

By far the biggest challenge of article marketing is being consistent in your article submissions. For best results, you will submit articles each month over the lifetime of your website. I recommend submitting 8 per month.

The second biggest challenge is coming up with a steady stream of topics to write about. Some people have an easier time with this than others, but it can be done.

The third biggest challenge is being patient–as with any tool designed to increase search engine ranking, it will likely take several months before you start to see an impact from your efforts. Search engines re-evaluate rankings every 3-4 months, so in the first few months you will likely not see much of a change. Be patient though, and your discipline will pay off.

IT’S EASY TO GET STARTED

If you are new to website marketing, I encourage you to get your feet wet with Article Marketing. Many website owners use Article Marketing as their primary marketing tool and see excellent results. So why not start writing your first article today?

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Magnify the impact of your articles by submitting to more publishers. You’ll also build more backlinks and get more traffic to your website. Steve Shaw created the web’s first ever 100% automated article submitter, SubmitYOURArticle.com, which distributes your articles to hundreds of targeted publishers with the click of a button. For more information go to=> http://www.SubmitYOURArticle.com

Article Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide