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Dropship Focus Now Free?

I’ll keep this quick.

Worldwide Brands and their flagship product Onesource are THE authority for helping small businesses find dropshippers and wholesalers. For almost 10 years, they have linked home business owners with product sources from across the globe (handpicked by the WWB team of experts daily), and if you’ve ever searched for “dropshipping” or “product sourcing” online chances are you’ve heard of Worldwide Brands.

Long story short, their popular Dropship Focus product ($97) is being given away for a short time absolutely free -  no credit card or Paypal address required. I’m going to do a more detailed Dropship Focus Review in the coming days, but considering this offer could end at any time, I wanted to make sure you knew about it as soon as I did. 

I have personally met with the management at Worldwide Brands, and I couldn’t vouch highly enough to their integrity and intense passion to help people make their dream of starting an online business a reality. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to make money with dropshipping as well as learn the 3 most common mistakes new dropshippers make (I especially liked Mistake #2 and would have never thought of it on my own), get Dropship Focus for free today.

The One “Advanced” SEO Technique That DOES NOT WORK

A Note From StomperNet…

Things in the SEO world are constantly changing - but the folks over at StomperNet make it a point to stay on the cutting edge of SEO. Which is why I want you to watch this important free video.

This new video is from Leslie Rohde. If you don’t know who Leslie is, let me just give you the quick description: In 2002, Leslie was the very first person to advance the idea that Search Rankings could be affected by using the text in links that point to a page.

…Yeah, THAT Leslie Rohde.

Since he’s an SEO Engineer, and a StomperNet Faculty Member, I know this video is going to cause trouble. Lots of trouble. LSI has been the “buzz” word for years, and in one fell swoop, Leslie basically shows you why that notion is garbage and how 80+% of the so-called experts have gotten it wrong.

LSI stands for “Latent Semantic Indexing,” and in 2006, Google filed a whole bunch of patents that led a LOT of SEO folks to believe that LSI was in FULL FORCE and EFFECT at Google.

(Too bad NONE of those patents were actually about LSI - they just LOOKED like they were.)

No matter.

In this video, Leslie will PROVE to you that LSI is NOT having any effect on your Search Rankings. Which means, if you’ve been struggling to get Rankings on Google because you’ve been chasing LSI - STOP.

Do this instead. Leslie is going to talk about an SEO Strategy that you ARE going to want to know about…

…It’s called “Referential Integrity”, or “RI” for short.

Yes, this New Video marks the beginning of the SIXTH series of StomperNet’s famous Going Natural Videos. (I heard a rumor they’re re-opening their awesome Stomping the Search Engines 2 and Net Effect Journal for just $1!)

If you want to stop wasting time on SEO and only getting mediocre rankings, then you need to watch this video - more SEO Video Goodness from StomperNet.

P.S. You’re not gonna like the ending. But you really should opt in and see the 2nd part of the video. And if you opt-in, they’ll also send you a 7-part report from Jerry West called The 7 Deadly SEO Mistakes. As an affiliate myself, this targeted report for affiliate marketers looking to rank their sites organically is incredibly helpful!

StomperNet KNOWS SEO. I think they want to prove it to you.

Personal Experience: I am currently one of Clickbank’s top 100 clients (as an affiliate) thanks in part to the training I received from StomperNet (I’m a proud Stomper alumni). You need to at least watch their free content because it’s better than almost any paid SEO training you can find today. It’s beyond current, it’s the techniques SEO experts will be talking about in 2010 as “ground breaking.”

Every time I watch one of their free videos I learn something, and that’s what they want. Watch the video, and let me know what you think. I, for one, am going to completely shift my SEO focus thanks to this free video series.

Can You Really Make Money From Dropshipping?

There are lots of ways to make money on the internet. In this article, I’ll share with you some of the pros and cons of selling real, physical products online.

1) Dropshipping

A lot of people think dropshipping is a great business opportunity. If you don’t know what dropshipping is, here are the basics…

A dropshipping company buys inventory directly from a manufacturer and stores it in their warehouse. As a client of the dropshipping company, they allow you to sell whatever products they have. If you sell something, you pay the dropshipper for the product plus shipping, and they ship it to your customer for you.

Sounds awesome, right?

Well, if it were that simple it would be awesome. Here’s the problem…

When you use a dropshipper, you are paying for the convenience of not having to deal with inventory yourself. Typically you end up paying a lot more for the products you are selling and a lot of times you have to pay additional shipping & handling fees, dropship fees, and possibly a monthly membership fee just to use their program.

Here’s a real life example:

Let’s say you want to sell coffee pots online. You find a dropshipper that carries the coffee pot you want to sell. The coffee pot has a retail price of $120 and your cost from the dropshipper is $90. They charge a $4 dropship fee and $12 to ship the item to your customer if you sell it.

If you sell a coffee pot for $120 and charge your customers $7.95 shipping (to stay competitive), here is what the numbers look like:

$127.95 (total you receive from your customer)
- $90 (your cost to buy the product from the dropshipper)
- $4 (dropshipping fee)
- $12 (shipping fee charged by dropshipper)
————————————————————————
$21.95 profit in your pocket.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Not so fast. In most cases, people shop online to save money, so you have to reduce the price of the product by at least 15% to actually sell anything online.

Let’s look at the numbers again.

If you take 15% off your coffee pot so you can actually sell it, you sell the coffee pot for $102 ($120 - 15% off) and then charge your customers $7.95 shipping (to stay competitive). Here is how the new numbers break down:

$109.95 (total you receive from your customer)
- $90 (your cost to buy the product from the dropshipper)
- $4 (dropshipping fee)
- $12 (shipping fee charged by dropshipper)
———————————————————————
$3.95 profit in your pocket. Ouch! Hardly worth the effort now…

And that doesn’t include any expenses you have in making that sale such as advertising, credit card processing fees, etc.

I don’t know about you, but selling a product for $109.95 and only making a profit of $3.95 is not very exciting. Sad thing is, that’s how most dropshipping arrangements work.

2) Buying Wholesale

Now for the good news.

Rather than forking over most of your profits to a dropshipping company, you should consider buying inventory directly from the manufacturer instead. Typically, this will allow you to buy products at 50% off the retail price instead of the 25% off you were getting from the dropshipper (dropshippers mark everything up 25% on average).

Now let’s look at the numbers when you buy products direct instead of using a dropshipper.

Again, using the same theory of selling your coffee pot at 15% off the retail price…

$109.95 (total you receive from your customer)
- $60 (your cost to buy the product direct from the manufacturer) 
- $12 (shipping fee charged by UPS)
————————————————————————
$37.95 profit in your pocket.

Hmmm, $37.95 profit compared to $3.95. That’s the difference between a thriving business and one destined for failure.

I know what your saying to yourself.

You don’t want to buy inventory, store it in your garage, spend 2 hours a day printing shipping labels, shipping out orders and driving to the post office or UPS everyday. And that makes perfect sense.

But what if you didn’t have to do any of these things and can still make those huge profits at the same time?

There is a service out there called Shipping Elite (http://www.shippingelite.com) that does all of that for you and it costs you next to nothing to use their service.

Here’s how it works.

1) You buy merchandise from whatever product sourcing technique you want.

2) You have that inventory shipped directly to the Shipping Elite warehouses.

3) You sell your inventory on ebay, through your website, etc.

4) Shipping Elite packages your orders, puts the labels on & ships them out to your customers within 24 hours.

It’s just like dropshipping, but you get to keep all your profits instead of giving it to a dropshipping company.

Shipping Elite charges a small fee to store your products in their website. It’s just $0.02 per day per item stored with them. So, if you send them 50 coffee pots, you only pay $1 per day in storage.

As you sell products, your storage fee goes down each day to match however many items remain in their warehouse.

The shipping fee Shipping Elite charges is a flat rate based on the weight of your orders and it’s pretty much the same price you would pay to ship things out yourself. Also, since you are charging your customers for shipping anyway, you can pass that cost on to them and it costs you nothing out of pocket.

With Shipping Elite, anybody looking to get into dropshipping can make a lot of money online with almost no effort and minimal cost. You can check out their website for exact pricing and to learn more about how it works.

Highly Recommended Training Product

It’s VERY RARE that I come across a product that I feel is absolutely fantastic when it comes to internet marketing.

I bought a product called Commmission Blueprint on Friday afternoon after reading some good reviews about it. I was curious to see what the fuss was about.

Expecting it to be rehashed nonsense like most internet marketing products, I began watching the training videos Friday around 4pm.

I got sucked into the videos and watched all of them non-stop, finishing at about 10pm Friday night. I think there were about 18 videos total and each one was pure meat, no filler content.

He talked in depth about things like “here’s how to find a profitable product to promote”, “here’s how to track your advertising spending”, etc.

I’ve been marketing online for several years and I even learned some pretty interesting things I didn’t know about tracking in adwords.

Almost everyday someone asks me to recommend an internet marketing training program that is good. Unfortunately, there are not very many good one’s out there to recommend.

But, commission blueprint is by far one of the best values I’ve come across as far as training programs go.

The content in this course blows away most of those $1,997 “home study courses”, no joke.

I’d highly recommend you check out the videos. They are only $97 and the videos that talk about tracking your adwords traffic are worth 10 times the cost of the course.

Even if you don’t buy from my blatent affiliate link here, you still need to get this course if you are looking to make money online. It’s just good stuff that you need to learn…

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One Of My New Businesses

Wow, time is really flying!

I haven’t had a chance to post in a while because I’ve been so busy building my 2 new businesses. Both are taking off nicely, and since I’m no longer in the “guru business”, my life is much more relaxed and enjoyable…

I figured I’d share a few ideas with you that I’m working on right now because I think it will help you make money and that’s what this blog is about.

When starting a new business, there are a lot of thoughts and emotions that run through your head. Things like:

- Will this business make money as I put in all this time and effort?

- How much money will this business make?

- I don’t want to risk too much money in case something goes wrong.

and any number of other self doubt questions coming from the “voices in your head”.

I’ve started more than 50 businesses from scratch and purchased of 100 websites in the last 6 years, and I STILL have these questions coming up in my mind.

The fact is, there is never a guarantee that any business you start is going to make money. If anyone promises that to you, they are lying. But, as long as you are willing to put in the effort and stay focused, you will have a much greater chance of success.

One of the two businesses I’m working on right now was purchased. The other I am starting from scratch. I’m much more passionate about the one I’m starting from scratch because it is my own idea and I’m creating it from thin air.

The site I bought is making money and chugging along nicely, but I don’t have that connection with it. It almost feels like I’m just working on someone else’s project. That’s the downside to buying a site vs building a new one.

Anyway, the new site I’m building is a hybrid of an offline service mixed with a website and internet marketing aspect.

I really think this is where the money is right now. By focusing on your local market, you can avoid 99% of the competition online. The fact is, the MAJORITY of people in your local town or city have NO IDEA how the internet works.

Since I’ve been working online full time the last 6 years, I am an extreme expert compared to the offline business owners in my city. Compare me to experts who focus their businesses teaching people online, and I’m probably considered an “average guy who makes money online”.

Many of you reading this blog already have more knowledge than people in your area with offline businesses.

So, rather than being a small fish in a big pond online, you might want to consider being a big fish in a small pond offline like I’m doing right now.

Here’s why I like helping offline businesses with their online marketing:

1) Offline companies are used to paying lots of money for stuff.

Yellow page ads are $25,000 per year. Leases are up to $8,000 per month. TV commercials are $300 a day and typically generate little to no results.

Compare that to people online who are used to getting everything for free and where you can literally start a business for $15 including a domain name and hosting. There is a completely different mindset between these two types of people.

If you want to sell a training program to people online, you have to struggle to convince people to pay you $37 for your ebook. Offline, businesses will literally throw $4,000 checks at you for basically the exact same information (and not complain or ask for refunds either!).

If you can provide a do it for them service, those checks increase even more.

2) You can actually help them improve their business and feel good about what you are doing.

When you come across companies who spend $100,000+ per year on various ads and then you find out they have no way to track the effectiveness of these ads, you can have a life changing impact on their business.

Since everything online is trackable down to the penny, you can help local businesses put together ads online and show how these ads are working. Also, you can use the internet to help track the effectiveness of offline ads for these companies.

If the business is doing radio ads, simply buy a new domain name and use that in that one specific radio ad. Setup a simple hit tracking on that new domain name and you can see exactly how many people are responding to the ad.

Nobody is doing this kind of simple tracking offline, even though it is like marketing 101 online for the rest of us.

3) Little to no competition.

Since everyone wants to live the “internet lifestyle”, people are flooding strictly to the internet because they think that’s the easiest way to make money. When these people start trying to make money online, they are immediately hit with fierce competition and quickly give up their dream of making it big online.

Over the last 6 years online, I’ve seen the changes taking place and I see how much more competitive it is to work strictly online compared to a hybrid of offline and online mixed.

4) You get to work with real people.

One thing that can be hard when working online is you don’t have the personal interaction with real people.

Sure, you might have some instant messaging friends or have your buddy “supercool98″ from a web forum that you chat with, but you hardly ever talk with real humans. You spend all your time typing messages that are just words on paper.

When you work with offline companies, you get to meet some great people. Business owners in the town you live in who have lots of local connections. Some may be very wealthy business-people who want to partner with you on a new business idea.

I guess my main point is, when you think about wanting to make money, don’t limit your mindset to only setting up “adsense websites” or selling ebooks. That stuff is pocket change compared to what you could be making by doing internet marketing for offline businesses or combining your online knowledge with local business problems.

Anyone else tried this hybid model before?

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Complicated Businesses Suck

Since I announced my retirement from teaching the buying & selling websites training class, I’ve been hard at work on my 2 new business ideas.

The two new businesses I’m starting are in the travel market and the toys market, neither of which I have any experience with, but are both proven and profitable markets to get into.

While doing my market research, I decided I needed to find partners who were both smarter than me, and have lots of experience in these markets.

I met with a couple guys yesterday to discuss my business ideas and realized something very important.

The main reason I’ve been so successful in my internet businesses is because I always keep them SIMPLE.

I never realized this until talking with these partners. I basically gave them a rundown of what I wanted to do, which was very simple and straight forward. It took all of 5 minutes to explain the entire business plan to them.

Almost immediately, the guys I was chatting with were throwing out ideas left and right.  Each “brilliant idea” was more and more complex and I knew in the back of my mind that:

a) trying to do all of these things would be too overwhelming and probably never get done.

b) these ideas would most likely confuse the customers and result in them not taking action on my offers.

c) would be 3 times as expensive to do and half as profitable as my simple idea.

I didn’t want to tell these potential partners that their ideas sucked because they were so excited about them.  Yes, they were sexier ideas than my plain jane version of the business, but 9 out of 10 times it’s the boring businesses that make the most money.

After talking with these guys, I realized that many of the mistakes people make when trying to make money online are because people over complicate things.  The easier the business, the more effective you can be at doing the things that actually make money. If you are so caught up in complicated technology or constantly trying to be innovative and cutting edge, you will be stuck in a never ending rat race.

Have you figured this out for yourself yet?

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Who Is Your Mentor?

I’ve talked about mentors a bit in the past and how I believe you need to have a mentor if you want to achieve success in making money online.

When I announced my “retirement” from teaching how to buy and sell websites, I got a ton of emails from readers who were sad to see me go. A lot of the emails read “Please don’t stop teaching, you’re one of my only mentors that I can trust”.

It really got me thinking…

It’s true, many people who teach methods of making money online are in it for one thing, the money. And when you have that motivation, you can be sure the mentor you are following has THEIR best interests in mind, NOT YOURS.

While it’s also true, I’m retiring from teaching the buying & selling websites business anymore, I think its important for you to know what to look for in a good mentor so you don’t get burned.

Find A Mentor You Can Trust To Help You make money online

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1) The mentor you are following should have a defined path to success.

In other words, your mentor should be someone who has made most of their money DOING whatever it is they are teaching others to do. If the person made just a few bucks using the technique and now makes the majority of their money from teaching the “how to”, STAY AWAY.

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2) The mentor you are following should help you stay focused.

Have you ever been on someone’s email list and you get offer after offer after offer to buy different products? This is one SURE SIGN that the mentor doesn’t care about you. All they are looking for is their affiliate commission, so they try to shove offer after offer in front of your face hoping you’ll bite on one of them.

It is impossible to be successful with an internet business if you buy a new training program every single week. By the time you learn the technique you bought, the next great “product of the week” comes out and you move on to the next one. You never have a chance to implement anything.

If you get emails from a mentor who offers you many different ways to make money than what you originally signed up for, chances are the mentor is abusing their relationship with you for affiliate commissions.

A lot of times these emails will “appear” to be genuine. Here are some common ones (since most of these marketers have no originality…)

a) My good friend Bob agreed to share his secrets with you on a FREE teleconference tonight at 9.

b) I just found this new way of making $300 a day, download this free report that explains it all.

c) I just got off the phone with __________ and got him to reveal his system how he makes $5000/month with no list, no website, no money, etc.

There are a bunch of similar stories, but the meanings are all the same….They are going to give you a free teaser, waste 45 minutes of your time, then pitch you on the latest and greatest money making technique for $997.

These are distractions to your main objective, and this type of mentor is HURTING your chances of success by throwing different business models at you every single week.

My advice, if you are on a list like this, unsubscribe immediately.

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3) The mentor should not depend on the income from his training course to survive!

If your mentor is coming out with a new product every single week or every month, chances are they are doing that because they NEED the money from these courses to pay their mortgage.

And if these people are that bad off financially, that’s NOT someone you should be listening to when you want help making money online.

You should only be following people who really don’t need your money because they became wealthy using the technique they are teaching. Sadly, there are few people who fit into this category.

You might ask, if the mentor doesn’t need the money, then why are they charging for the training? Well, one reason is, it’s not right ethically to use someone else’s time, knowledge or experience without compensating them. Do you work for free?

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4) The mentor should not sell “dreams”.

Making money online CAN be easy once you know what you are doing, but don’t let anyone fool you into thinking all you have to do is push a couple buttons and then it’s off to the beach to live a life of luxury.

That is physically impossible.

Anyone who tells you that you can start a business with:

a) no money

b) little effort

c) just a couple hours per month

is flat out lying!

Personally, I don’t think anyone should even consider starting an internet business unless they have at least $1,000 - $3,000 of cash in the bank that is not reserved for living expenses. If you don’t have at least this much, you don’t need to be in business because you are just not ready yet.

Internet businesses are dirt cheap to start compared to any other business in the world, but they are still businesses and have certain costs associated with them (ie - hosting, domain name, development cost, advertising, content creation, software, etc).

Compare this startup cost to a real retail business, where you can spend more than $150,000 just to open your doors, a couple grand for an internet business is nothing.

Not everyone is right for making money online. Lack of capital is one thing that keeps people from succeeding online. If you are always stressed about the decision between spending $50 for a website logo or putting $50 of food on the table, you will not do well online.

Advice - pick up an extra part time job and put all of that income aside for your internet business. Once you have a couple thousand saved up, then quit the part time job and focus on building a real internet business.

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These are the big ones to watch out for. You just have to think about the person you are following and ask yourself, “Are they really trying to help me succeed, or are they just trying to sell me their products and earn affiliate commissions from their friends?”

Sometimes it is difficult to know who to trust for advice and that’s part of the problem.

Personally, I like the school of hard knocks as a learning tool. Just go out there and try stuff. Learn for yourself what works and what doesn’t. Stop doing the stuff that doesn’t work and keep doing more of what does. Before you know it, you will be making good money online.

A lot of people are afraid of failure or losing money, but if you think about it, why not spend that $997 on testing a new business idea and see if it works rather than pay $997 for a training program. The money is gone either way, but at least if you invest in yourself and your business, you have a much higher chance of success.

So, who do you follow online?

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