Prosper Newsletter: December 2006 > Ecommerce
You understand that the following information is educational in nature and is not intended to be legal, accounting, or tax advice. You are responsible for your own financial decisions and should consult your own legal, accounting, and tax advisors before making your financial decisions.
Student's Website Ranked #1 on Google and Yahoo within 48 hours!
When I started the prosper program, I had already had a website for over a year, but had very little success getting it noticed by search engines or consumers. Recently I developed a new product to market on my website. Using the tools my coach taught me during my 12 personal coaching sessions, I developed a page on my website for the product, along with subsidiary pages of related information and wrote and submitted my first publicity release on the product. Within 48 hours of submission the PR on my new product and new web page was number one on the Google and Yahoo search engines with one keyword phrase. In fact, it held spots one through four on Yahoo and was number four on Yahoo with a second keyword phrase. I am very pleased with the attention the new product page has drawn from Search engines and look forward to real success with the product.
- Martie L.
Rockvale, CO VA
Increase Your Bottom Line by Decreasing Your Costs
There are many ways to find manufacturers of the items you are drop-shipping on your website. Finding other manufacturers will allow you to shop around for better pricing, shipping, policies, etc. If you can save $10.00 on each of the 100 items you ship out this month you will profit an additional $1000.00. Many businesses don't spend anytime looking for the better option. Here are some methods do find suppliers and manufacturers of product.
- Visit stores and jot down names of companies listed on boxes, tags, etc.
- Search the Internet for keywords that relate to your products linked with words like drop-ship, wholesale, etc.
- Join affiliate programs through sites such as www.cj.com, and www.linkshare.com.
- Join online manufacturer and drop-shipper sites such as www.theshipper.com, www.thomasnet.com, and www.alibab.com.
- Attend Trade Shows to connect with companies to product source from.
Finding a Product Niche
Niche is defined as a specific or targeted area or product of supply and demand. It's something specific as opposed to something broad. For example, baseball is broad, but baseball cleats or baseball bats are specific.
Why find a specific niche? Why focus or something specific rather than something broad? To understand that, we need to understand how Internet traffic moves. Search engines primarily drive Internet traffic. A person interested in baseball cleats can go to Google, type it in and see how many results come up. Google compiles a list of the top results, pages, or websites for baseball cleats. We want to be one of the best sites for a targeted niche. We become the best niche by search-engine optimization, but the first step is deciding what we want to be best at. We can't be the best at everything.
Supply and demand is the basis or foundation of economics and business.
For an example of demand, think of children. Children are demanding. They want things now. Demand is the measurement of how many people want what we have to offer or might choose to offer. Internet offers sources of information on what people want and what people are looking for, or how many people searched for a specific item.
The second principle is supply. Supply is the number of people or web pages supplying information about that product, or actually offering that product specifically. You can go to Google to find that out.
Google is the largest search engine on the Internet. It drives 50 percent of search engine traffic. So go to Google and put in basketball shoes. In February there were 21,000 searches done in Yahoo!. Somewhere over 10,000 is best.
