You heard me dropshipping!
This is kind of a triple threat tip. Whether for:
- Blogging
- Making Money Online (i.e. starting and succeeding with a Profitable Web Site
- Or for expanding the revenues of your wholesale business
Dropshipping: Its a business model. Sellers do not keep any goods in stock. Sellers get orders and send them to wholesalers where orders are filled direct from their warehouses and shipped to the customer. This model is perfect for web entrepreneurs , it allows you to focus on web site creation and promotion–leaving fulfillment to the dropshippers
There are entry level dropshipping solutions like DOBA and Salehoo, but they require fees in advance to get to the information/ordering part. If you are looking for a total turnkey solution, use DOBA, but you can figure it out all on your own.
The first thing you need to do is think of an item to sell.
You don’t need to be an internet marketing expert or a dropshipping afficianado to think of an item to sell. You can just look around for ideas. Here’s several different ways to find an ideal product for dropshipping.
- Look around your house – Yep, you buy stuff, and what you buy is available for dropshipping. Get a legal pad and write down the first 100 items you can think of. I would avoid heavy or bulky items, and focus on things you own that you personally like.
- Choose from your hobbies or interests – Do you like computers? Directron will drop ship them for you. Or if you want to pick a niche, how about mouse pads. You can sell cool ones from Cafe Press – you can even use your own designs to make great mouse pads.
Cafe Press is the easiest way with no upfront layout, but what if you have a great original idea? Custom printing even for specialty items like mousepads will only run you around $300 for low quantities. If you have a really great idea or can capitalize on an existing trend, you can make them in larger quantities for less than a dollar apiece. - Think about activities that people have to buy things for – this is a particularly good one around this time of year because of New Years Resolutions. Basically, even though they shouldn’t, lots of people pick up a new activity (like jogging or scrapbooking), the first thing they do is go out and buy a bunch of stuff to help them get started. Maybe you do this…exploit your own weaknesses mercilessly and think of all the ideas that seduced you into buying something.
- Do a little research. Once you have a list of products, you can find out how popular they are. I think the best way to do this is to estimate their search volume. I use Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool to do this. Ideally, you would pick a product with more than 1000 searches daily. And then you want to estimate competition from other websites for that keyword. A quick and dirty way to estimate competition is to use a special Google Search. Type this into Google:
intitle:ballpoint intitle:pens
The above search asks Google for all the pages that have “ballpoint” and “pens” in their Page Title. Basically the theory here is that every sensible website that is trying to compete for the term “ballpoint pens” is using “ballpoint pens” in their page title.
The rough guideline here is 500 daily searches for the product and less than 50,000 competing pages. Of course, 1000 daily searches and 100,000 competing pages is fine too. Basically multiply the daily searches by 100, but that involves math. Plus there are no hard and fast rules.
Much More About Using Dropshippers with your Online Business in upcoming posts.
