If you are looking to sell products on the Internet, finding a good wholesale supplier is a must.  With such a crowded online marketplace, distinguishing yourself from all the other competitors can be difficult, and many times, price is the determining factor.  The better price you can get from your wholesaler, the better profit margins you can squeeze from your customers.

But how does one go about finding a good wholesaler, and how do they differ from one another?

First, let’s discuss what a wholesale supplier is, and how some “middlemen” disguise themselves as wholesalers in search of profit.  A wholesale supplier is a company that can offer you products at a significant discount to the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP).  You purchase the product from the wholesale supplier and resell it to your customers at a higher price.  The difference in these two prices is your profit.

Wholesale suppliers generally do not sell to customers directly, but only to legitimate resellers with valid reseller certificates (see my article on Setting Up Your Business Financial Structures for more information).  So if you find a company claiming to be a wholesale supplier and they will sell to you without a reseller’s certificate, then chances are, they are acting as a “middleman”.  A middleman is simply a person, or company, that pretends to be a wholesaler offering a low price.  While in fact, they are acting as the purchaser for the real wholesale supplier.  The price they charge you is higher that what they purchase the product for from the real wholesaler.  They keep the difference as their profit.

Another feature of a fake wholesale supplier is the charging of monthly account fees to do business with them.  The only fee true wholesale suppliers usually charge valid customers is what they call a drop-ship fee, and on very rare occasions, an initial setup fee.  This drop-ship fee, usually in the range of $1 - $5, covers the cost to the wholesaler for the services of processing, packaging and shipping your order directly to your customer.  This is also known as blind drop-shipping since they usually include your name on the packing slip, not theirs.  Even though it is an additional expense to you, think about the benefits to you.  You have no inventory, no warehouse, no personnel to handle packaging, and basically, no overhead.  It’s well worth the fee, and as always, the cheaper the fee the better, since it does eat into your profits.

Wholesale suppliers usually differ from one another in the selection of goods available for purchase, their wholesale costs, and the fees they charge you (if any) to drop-ship the product to your customer.  Suppliers with a narrow focus of product lines tend to give a better base discounts on items verses a supplier that offers many product lines.  That is usually because they buy more from a certain manufacturer and qualify for a better discount, which is then passed along to you, the reseller.  The suppliers with a wide selection of product lines hope to lure those resellers looking for a single supplier for many types of goods.

So, where do you find a good wholesale supplier?  There are many places on the Internet that will try to sell you wholesaler/drop-shipper lists, but most are old, out-dated copies of the same lists that have been floating around the Internet for years.  While there is no single source for finding valid drop-shippers, the site that I found to be very helpful and informative is World Wide Brands.  They not only have a current directory of wholesalers, but articles and videos about the do’s and don’ts of drop-shipping.  If you are interested in selling online and are looking for a wholesaler, give World Wide Brands a look.  Chances are you’ll find a good wholesaler from them.  I did. 

Regardless of whether you need only one product type, or access to hundreds of products, do your homework.  Verify that the company is in good standing with the Better Business Bureau and check the web to see if others have done business with them and reported problems.  Chances are that if you’ve found a true wholesaler, you won’t find them listed all over the Internet.  Online merchants are usually tight-lipped about where they get their products from.  This is because they don’t want competitors undercutting their sales.

There are literally thousands of available affiliate programs on the Internet to choose from, and choosing the product is only the first step to making any serious money.  You can have the best product or service in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it means nothing.  The key to making money with any affiliate program is getting your product in front of viewers.  This means that you need to become and Internet sales-person and pitch your product to your readers.

Below are 5 tips for spreading your affiliate program around the Internet to generate traffic for your product.  The more people that see your ad, the more chances you will have of selling it.

1. Blogs

As a sales-person, you have information about your product that you need to convey to your readers.  Take the time to create a small blog dedicated to the product you are selling and provide quality content to support why viewers should purchase your product.  You can create many blogs now-a-days for free, so this is an easy and cheap way to solicit potential customers.

2.  Submit Product Reviews

You want people to buy your product, right?!  Well, write a review telling readers the great benefits of your product and how it will help them succeed.  Make sure to include a link to your affiliate site at the end of your article where they can get more information and hopefully sign-up.  Then, submit your product review to free article websites like GoArticles.com.  Other publishers may see your article posted and copy it to their website, thereby increasing the exposure your article gets.  Again, this is a great way to generate traffic.

3.  Newsletters

Do you already have an e-mail subscriber list?  If so, send e-mail newsletters to these readers informing them of a wonderful new product you have just heard about that they may be interested in.  Just remember to only send the newsletters to those individuals that have willingly opt-ed into your e-mail list.  There are laws now that protect (or at least try to) readers from receiving unwanted spam e-mails.  Remember, you are looking to make money, not pay fines, so please play by the rules.

4.  Post Comments on Other Blogs and Forums

This is an easy, no cost way to expose your affiliate program to thousands of potential customers with very little effort.  Search the web for either blogs or forums that are similar to, or go hand-in-hand, with the product or service you are offering.  Read the other comments that viewers are leaving and give a courteous responses to them, while at the same time offering a suggestion to look at the product you are offering.  Remember, what you say in your comments reflects on you and your company, so be polite.  No one is going to visit your site if you are rude and obnoxious.  Promote yourself and your product properly.

5.  Paid Advertisements

Unlike taking out ads in newspapers and magazines, the Internet has many ways for publisher to promote their products with very little money and get their ads in front of millions of potential buyers.  One of the best ways to do this is with text based advertising from big companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.  For example, start a Google AdWords campaign with a small daily budget of $25.  Depending on your search terms, you may be able to get several hundred clicks a day on your ad.  If your product has a good conversion rate, this could be a good way to generate money.

Apply these 5 steps for generating traffic to your affiliate program and watch your traffic and your profits grow!

I’m looking for a custom Wordpress blog theme and wanted to know if any readers have any suggestions for some sites for me to look at?  Not looking to spend too much money, but need something a little more customizable than the free ones on the Internet.

Would like widget ability and places for ads and video.  I like the double column on the right concept the best, but am willing to look at other ideas.

I have tried searching and found a couple of sites, but figured a post might be a good way to find some gems. 

If you have suggestions, please leave me a comment or e-mail me at darryl@SimplyWebtastic.com.

Thanks!

Are software costs eating into your profit? In order to keep your home office or small business running smoothly, certain productivity applications are a must. Unfortunately, for those on a budget, software purchases can get expensive. Over the years, I have found that many of the tasks that I perform can be done with free software running on either a Windows PC or a Linux PC, thereby reducing or eliminating a significant yearly expense.

I have tried to compile a list of some free software applications to replace those commercial ones commonly found on a Windows PC and used for small business day-to-day operations.

Office Suite (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing)

This is probably the biggest application that most small businesses will spend money on, and it’s the one that they will probably use the most. Thankfully, there are products out there (yes, life does exist outside of Microsoft Office) that can easily handle your office demands and are absolutely free.

My recommendation for a Microsoft Office replacement is Open Office. This open-source application has been around for many years and has gone through intense community refinement. Open Office 2.3, the lastest release as of this writing, is a remarkable product and the fact that it can open most commercial documents cleanly (except currently the newest Office .docx file-type), helps make the transition away from paid applications much easier.

 
Open Office 2.3 - Word processing is called Writer 

Whether it is word-processing, spreadsheets or presentations, Open Office can handle the task. Most Office documents convert cleanly and require little change. If you still interact with clients that use Microsoft products, you can always maintain the Microsoft file format for their viewing pleasure. Unless you have highly customizable macros and Excel formulas, you should not run into many problems. For those problems that do occur, the Open Office Support Forum Community probably has a fix or work-around waiting for you.

Photo Editing

Are you a professional photographer or graphic artist? Or maybe just a hobbyist shutterbug? Either way, photo editing software is expensive. The standard is Adobe Photoshop and it is a beautiful product. However, it is very expensive. If you are looking for the same image editing and special effects power of Photoshop, take a look at GIMP. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is another free open-source application with a vast following and support forum.

GIMP - Image Manipulation Program 

My biggest disappointment with GIMP is the multiple windowed interface verses Adobes single pane interface which seems and feels cleaner. However, with a little patience and practice, this is easily overcome, and once you discover the true power of this free product, you’ll understand why so many people have turned to it.

e-Mail

Many users use, and are accustomed to, Microsoft Outlook Express which is free. Since it is free, there is no budgetary impact. However, for those looking for another free alternative, I would like to suggest Mozilla’s ThunderBird e-mail client. This e-mail application has all the bells and whistles of Outlook Express and is also available on Linux PCs.

Mozilla’s ThunderBird e-Mail Client 

Do you use Yahoo, MSN or Google as your web e-mail address for your business? While these work fine, it is very cheap now-a-days to purchase e-mail with your own business domain name for under $10 a year! If you are looking for that extra personal business touch, consider upgrading your e-mail to match your business name. It will give your business a more professional appeal.

Remember, anything that costs you money eats into your profits. While not every open-source product will meet your needs, take the time to look for ones that can replace your commercial applications. The savings in initial and yearly maintenance costs can be significant.

Let’s face it, most bloggers write to produce some form of supplemental income.  To this effort, they need ways to derive this income and use many common forms of advertisements such as, affiliate links, Google AdSense, Commission Junction Ads, and contextual links ads like Kontera.  These can all be money makers for the publisher, but they are also in some ways intrusive to the blog reader, each in their own way.

Today I would like to discuss contextual ads and use the company Kontera as an example.  I just recently signed up for Kontera but have not yet added the ad code to my blog.  I was utterly amazed at the responses that I read while doing a search for contextual links.  Many viewers find them very intrusive to their viewing pleasure.  You may have noticed going to a website or blog and moving your cursor, whether intentionally or unintentionally, over a double-underline link and having an ad appear on the screen.  These are contextual ad links, of which, Kontera is one of many companies providing such services.

While I only did a small sampling of comments and articles from various websites, it got me thinking as to what is an effective balance between content and advertisement.  At what point do the multitude of ads turn off the reader enough that they just decide to leave the website?  And are they so discouraged from their experience that they decide not to return to the site again believing it is just an ad farm.

I think this type of question is best answered by the viewers and I hope that if any of you are reading this and have the time to express your feelings on this issue that you’ll do so.  I would be curious to see how many viewers are for or against those contextual ads.  Most people by now know what they are, but there are still some viewers who get confused and think they are actual links to other relevant information on the blog.  This is where they may feel deceived or tricked into doing something that they originally did not intend.

As my blog grows and matures, I would like to find and honest balance between income and quality content for my readers.  I know that products like Kontera are configurable, but before I just start dropping various types of ads onto my blog, I would like to know where to draw-the-line.

If you decide to write an online blog, you will need to create a domain name so that others will be able to find you on the Internet.  You have two choices: subscribe to an online blog service like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com, or create your own branded name like mine, SimplyWebtastic.com.

Take the time to consider your blog’s name and how you want people to access it.

If you subscribe to an online blog service, your blog’s domain name will be something like, mysite.blogger.com.  This format is slightly larger than a standard domain name, and it is harder for readers to remember.  However, for casual blogging this is a great method and above all, it’s free and a good, fast way to get started in blogging.

The alternate choice is to register for your own domain name.  You can read my previous article about choosing web hosts to get a better understanding about the costs and benefits of each method.

In this post, I would like to discuss the implications to your readers of choosing one method over the other. Your website name helps you build credibility and a sense of professionalism around your blog.  Having a domain name that reflects your topic, theme, mood, or brand image, helps the reader to associate more with your blog.  Above all, I think that this personalized domain name gives the blogger a truer sense of ownership and pride.  This is your domain!

There are also the more tangible benefits as well.  Your own domain means that you can have e-mail addresses branded with your domain name and depending on the name you chose, you may also get better search engine ranking.

I have been asked many times how I came up with the name SimplyWebtastic.  Honestly, I came up with this name back in 1998 just as the Internet was getting it’s steam.  For some reason, I liked it and decided to register it.  Now, 10 years later, I’m finding a use for it with blogging.  It may be slightly long, but I think it’s a name that is different and may stick in readers heads.  If that happens, then it will have turned out to be a very good name!

So, if you are thinking about blogging, give some (no a lot) of thought into how you want your name to show and what you want it to be.  Let it reflect who you are, and I think you’ll get more enjoyment from the blogging experience.

Sometimes the shortest and simplest articles are the ones that provide the most use and benefit to readers.  That is why I have decided to compose weekly tips (TOTW’s) in an effort to convey practical ideas, suggestions, work-arounds, and other bits of information that my readers may find useful in managing their online businesses, websites and blogs.

If I get many questions or comments for further explanation on a TOTW, I will gladly try to write-up a more extensive summary in a future post. 

For my first “Tip of the Week”, I would like to give you some advice about Article Submissions.

Google loves original content!  When you submit your articles to online directories and services, such as EzineArticles and GoArticles, DO NOT place the same article on your website or blog.  If you do, you may incur a duplicate content penalty from Google and other web crawlers.  These companies may then remove your article from their index.  The last thing you want is to hurt your page rank.

The best thing to do is either, not put the article on your site at all, or rewrite the artilce and only place that version on your website or blog.  Let all the other publishers of your article incur the penalty while you benefit from all the back-links that your article is creating.

Over the last few months, I have read many articles that have warned people to avoid doing any unnecessary domain look-ups if they are not going to purchase them right away.  Apparently, various companies are monitoring the WHOIS database and other sites for the domain searches that are being requested.  By the time a user decides to go and register the available domain, it has already been purchased by automated systems.

As a way of combating this tactic, try to have various combinations of the domain you are looking for already figured out on paper before doing a search.  Be prepared to purchase your domain right away if it is available.  Waiting a day, or even hours, could allow computerized programs to automatically purchase that domain before you get a chance to.

I usually register my domains at 1&1.com since they have one of the cheapest prices on the web.  You pay only $6.99 for .com, .net, .org or .us top-level-domains (TLDs).  They also include free, as part of the domain fee, Private Domain Registration, ICANN Fee and a 2GB e-mail account.  Please take a look, you’ll find them cheaper than GoDaddy.com, Yahoo or Network Solutions.

An important, and often overlooked, first step in organizing your new business, is to setup all your financial structures that will control the flow of your money.  In this topic, we will cover many of the back-end infrastructures that should be in place to allow you to successfully conduct your business.  Some of this may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people forget about them.

1.  Business Checking and Saving Accounts

If you own a business, you will probably need to pay bills and collect money from customers.  Establishing a business checking and savings account is a must.  This allows you to separate your personal and business monies which allows for easier accounting.

Most banks have various business checking account packages available depending on your monthly check writing usage.  For small companies, you should be able to find banks that offer packages with no monthly fees.

You should search the Internet for local banks to see what services they have to offer. They are sometimes very competitive and will try to match other banks in order to get your business.

SUGGESTION:  Smaller companies might want to open two checking accounts (especially if they have no monthly fees).  Why? If you sell on eBay, you will most likely use the payment service called PayPal.  While this is a beneficial service for both the buyer and seller, there are many hackers out there that try very hard to steal PayPal account numbers.

I have personally be a victim of a PayPal scam where my wife received an e-mail requesting her to verify information within our account by clicking on the link in the e-mail.  A few days later, my checking account was drained of about $1000.

While the representatives at PayPal and my local bank were very responsive in refunding the money that was fraudulently taken, I needed to then close that checking account and open a new one.  I also needed to order new checks, redo all my on-line banking and change all my on-line accounts that referenced the closed account number.  Quite a hassle!

The addition of a second checking account helps remove some of the hassle should your account be stolen.  Have one checking account as your primary one.  This account is used for check writing and bill payment.  The second checking account can be the one given out to agencies such as PayPal.  By linking up your bank accounts, you can always move the money from one account to another from your secure web browser.

If the PayPal checking account gets stolen, just close it and open another one.  There will be far less steps and headaches than if your primary checking account was stolen.

2.  Business Credit Card(s)

A business credit card will allow you to purchase goods and services for your company and keep them separate from your personal finances.  Again, this is good for tax reporting.  It’s also a good way for someone starting their first business to establish credit.  Establishing good credit will allow you to request credit-lines in the future.

Do your research with the business credit cards.  There are many of them out there that offer different incentives, such as money back, frequent flier miles and points towards special gifts.

Choose the one that best suites your tastes and needs.

3.  Resellers Certificate

If you are going to need to do business with a wholesaler or distributor, they will normally require you to submit a Resellers Certificate when you open your account with them.  This certificate allows you to purchase goods from them without paying sales tax.  It will be YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to collect these taxes from your buyers when they order from you.

Starting your own business, whether large or small, requires many careful financial considerations that will effect you and your future business.  Creating a business entity, such as a Sole Proprietorship, Corporation, Partnership, or LLC, will help separate your personal financial information from that of your business.  The choice you make can impact many aspects of your business, including taxes, liability, ownership and other factors.  Unless you are well versed in legal matters, you are best to consult a trained lawyer properly setup and execute your business documents.

In the end, a properly setup business could save you future financial troubles, since in most cases, your personal assets will be separated from your business assets.  Remember, according to statistics from the Small Business Administration (SBA), most new businesses fail.  This is an unlikely thought that most new business owners want to consider, but they should have a fail-safe plan just in case the worst happens.

The question asked was, “Should I incorporate my business?”  My answer would be ”absolutely!”  Why take the unnecessary risk.  Protect yourself, your family, and your future by developing a well thought out business plan and then formalize it by incorporating.  There will be an initial expense, but in the end, it will be worth it.

You should also talk to your lawyer about the tax benefits of incorporation.  As a business, you will be able to write-off many things that you could not do before.  This alone may justify the initial and yearly fees that incorporation require.