What is Dropshipping? A fulfillment method where a store doesn’t keep the product it sells in stock

Pros of Drop Shipping

• Easy to Scale
• Low Overhead
• Flexible Location
• Easy to get started
• Less capital required
• Wide selection of productions

Cons of Dropshipping

• Low margins
• Supplier errors
• Inventory issues
• Shipping complexities

Characteristics of Fake dropshipping suppliers

• Membership Fees: Real wholesalers do not charge membership fees
• Sold to the Public: If you don’t have to apply to become a wholesaler, or your wholesaler will sell to you as a “public” buyer, you are not working with the right supplier

Characteristics of Legitimate Dropshipping Suppliers

• Pre-order Fees: Most dropshippers will charge a pre-order fee ranging from $2 – $5 per order for packaging and shipping
• Minimum Order Size: Dropshippers need you to commit to a minimum order size in order to filter out window shoppers

Attributes of Great Dropshipping Suppliers

• Expert staff and industry focus
• Dedicated support representatives
• Investment in technology (product feeds, ordering, fulfillment, tracking, etc.)
• Can take orders via email
• Centrally located
• Organized and efficient

Picking Products to Dropship

• Picking the perfect product is the biggest factor in success or failure in your dropshipping business
• Marketing Potential: Know your marketing strategy before you launch
• Accessories: Products with many associated accessories can increase your cart-size and margin
• Turnover: Updating products in a dropshipping model is a lot of work, try and find products that do not get updated with new models constantly
• Hard to Find Locally: Products that cannot be easily found at local merchants will increase your chances for success
• Size and Weight: Smaller items are easier and more cost efficient to ship to your customers

Finding the Best Target Market

• Hobbyists: Targeting a base of customers who are passionate around their hobby will help increase loyalty and help you build a refined niche audience
• Businesses: Businesses will be price sensitive, but represent large quantity purchasers with an opportunity to build repeat business through relationship and loyalty development
• Repeat Buyers: Try to aim for products that derive recurring revenues and repeat purchases.

Getting Started

• The most important thing is to start
• Don’t spend a lot of money getting started
• DO spend a lot of time and energy

10 Ten Things to Live By in your Dropshipping Company

1. Accept that things can get messy
2. Adopt a KISS mentality
3. Own up to a botched order
4. Consider multiple suppliers
5. Manage out-of-stock situations
6. Route orders intelligently
7. Stay vigilant with fraudsters
8. Nail down a fair return policy
9. Worry more about shipping as you grow
10. Be constantly invested in support

The post Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping appeared first on Generator.net.

• Best days to tweet are Saturday and Sunday – increasing engagement of a tweet by 17%. Worst days to tweet: Wednesday and Thursday
• Tweets published between 8a and 7p gain a 30% increase in engagement over other timeframes
• Keep your tweets short and sweet: a tweet less than 100 characters can increase engagement by 17%
• Use hashtags: Tweets with hashtags experience 2x more engagement than tweets without #hashtags
• Use hashtags sparingly: tweets with more than 2 hashtags saw a decrease in engagement of 17%
• Amplify your tweets by asking followers to ReTweet or RT. This can increase your ReTweet rate by 12 times
• If you can still keep your message short, spell out ReTweet, instead of using RT to gain more amplification

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Here is a quick, 2 minute video overview of the Business Model Canvas.

You can also find an online lean startup canvas at LeanCanvas.com.

For more information on using this canvas to build your business model, check out this video.

The post Free Lean Startup Canvas Template appeared first on Generator.net.

Click to Download Google Adwords Text Copy Builder

The post A Spreadsheet for Building Adwords Copy appeared first on Generator.net.

• Be clear and concise
• Be relevant and targeted to users’ interests
• Reflect Google values and aesthetics
• Be accurate and honest
• No hidden surprises
• Cannot offer prizes for clicks
• Use correct spelling
• Punctuation cannot be repeated two or more times in a row (no !!)
• No exclamation point in the title of the ad
• No substituting words with symbols, numbers or letters
• Use correct spacing. For example, no “c-h-e-a-p” or “shop,buy,sell”).
• No extra punctuation
• Use proper grammar
• Capitalization only allowed for the first letter of each word
• Cannot repeat the same word three or more times in a row
• No offensive or inappropriate language
• No call to action (for example, “click here”)
• No use of Google trademarks
• Superlatives (best, #1) are only allowed if verification by a valid third party is clearly displayed on your site
• Competitive claims (better, easier, stronger) must be supported on landing page
• Prices, discounts, and free offers advertised on the ad must be supported within 1-2 clicks of landing page

Image and Animated Ads Policy

• High quality, clear video and images
• Text must be clear and legible
• No deceptive tactics (mimicking computer functions, dialogue boxes, error messages, features)
• Cannot mimic a text ad
• Must completely fill the area of the image size chosen
• Cannot be segmented, contain multiple copies of itself within the ad, or otherwise appear to be more than one ad
• No rotated, inverted, sideways, or upside down images
• Be family safe (appropriate for minors) — no alcohol, adult, sexual themes or inappropriate language
• No strobe, flashing, or distracting effects
• Ads cannot expand beyond the frame

The post Google Adwords Policies for Text and Image Based Ads appeared first on Generator.net.

Selecting the right architecture helps you to optimize for cost, reliability or performance to meet the particular needs of your website or web application. There are 7 Basic Steps – A decision tree to think through the flow decisions for finding the right architecture. Do you want to focus time on operations or apps and features? AWS allows you to focus on your applications, not your operations with five features:Availability, Scalability, Fast Access, Security and Low Cost

Decision Tree Step 1: Is your application dynamic?
If your customer needs to login, needs to post content to the site, if you are personalizing content to your customer or if you have logic or calculations that are too large to process on the client (can’t run as a javascript application and need to run server side). If you have these needs, your site is going to be dynamic. If not, then you can run a static website architecture using the following three components:

• Amazon Route S3 (hosts website)
• Amazon Cloudfront (global content delivery network)
• Amazon Route 53 (Amazon DNS service – analyzes Internet traffic in real-time to ensure that requests coming from different location are routed to proper server for fastest load time)
  Scalable, reliable and low cost.

Amazon provides Step-by-step instructions to setup this architecture and get started. When it comes to static architecture there are some best practices to be aware of.

You can use dreamweaver or the like to develop locally, then deploy those HTML files to the architecture defined above.

Another option if you don’t want to write a lot of code, you can use a CMS such as WordPress on Amazon EC2 and publish that site to Amazon S3 and shut down EC2 when you are done authoring content.

Use a static website generator such as Jekyll to avoid having to develop HTML, CSS and Javascript. Good if you only have a front-end designer and not back-end.

Static configuration at Amazon Web Services allows you to pay on a per-page-impression basis. For example: if all of your pages are .5MB and the average user is looking at 2 pages. It would cost you $1.20 a month to serve 10,000 users. This is very cost effective for a site that is monetized on per impression basis.

For Dynamic websites, you can still leverage this low-cost architecture to serve your static content such as CSS and HTML pages, lowering the cost of your database storage fees.

Decision Tree Step 2: Can your web app run on one Virtual Machine (VM), one VM and one Database, or is it larger?

If your app is small enough to handle peak number of users at any time of the year, you can have one VM that has two components – the web server and the database.

If it is bigger, you may split the web server and the database onto separate virtual machines.

Single Virtual Machine Architecure:


Elastic block storage is disk storage for your EC2 instance.

Having the webserver and the database on the same database may not be best practice from a security standpoint based on the type of content stored in the database. The Webserver will have specific ports open, such as port 443, so be sure to consider the level of security required for the data stored in the database.

The EC2 instance can host a CMS application such as WordPress and you can run the dynamic aspect of your content in the EC2 instance.

Two main categories of pricing for EC2:
On Demand or Reserve instances: pay some money up front to have a lower hourly usage cost: 3-year and 1-year reserve instances. A micro-instance is a one-year, heavy utilization instance.
You predict that this web app will be used constantly, then a heavy utilization instance would be a good approach to help bring pricing down. For example, a Linux instance under this heavy utilization, one-year instance would cost $62 up front and $3.66 per month. Over the course of a year, that would amount to about $8.33 per month.

Single Web Server with DB Architecture



Adding a relational database – Amazon RDS – A managed database service – they handle backup, patching and other database management services (offered for SQL, MySQL and Oracle).

Under this architecture the database will be separated from the security group where the web server resides adding another layer of security.

Pricing: Add in a one-year, heavy utilization instance of MySQL you are adding around $10.93 per month. With data transfer, this architecture would cost around $21/mo.

Step 3: DynamoDB vs. RDS vs. EC2
This step means that you do not fit into either of the other architectures because we will be larger. So, we will be breaking up the web server so we will need to have the separate database as we go to multiple web servers.

Under this architecture a decision needs to be made: Will we use Amazon DynamoDB, RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) or EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud)

DynamoDB is a fully managed, no SQL database. Single millisecond latency and requires no administration. Amazon RDS is MySQL, SQL or Oracle. EC2 is used if you want to run a different database or manage the database administration yourself.

Step 4: Is your application 2-tiers or 3-tiers?
If the logic or calculations in your web app are too process intensive for your client (javascript or the like), or too process intensive to live on your webservers then it is probably important to create another application tier to manage these computing intensive pieces of your overall app. This would be the 3-tier. If this is not the case, then a 2-tier architecture would be appropriate.

2-Tier Architecture

The main difference between this 2-tier architecture and the single webserver single database architecture, we are going to use an elastic load balancing service and we are going to run the web servers in multiple availability zones. Also, in this tier you can swap in EC2 database, or DynamoDB where RDS currently exists.

3-Tier Architecture




Step 5: Do you need search functionality in your application?
Many CMS applications provide basic search functionality. Amazon also provides a high-scale search solution called Amazon Cloud Search. The architecture to add that functionality would look like:

Step 6: Do you need a cache layer?
When your site is making a ton of the same database requests, having a cache layer in place can deliver performance enhancements to your application and take a load off your database. This allows you to more easily scale your database and operate with a smaller database which could save you money.

Amazon Elastic Cache is Amazon’s cache solution. Added to the 3-tier architecture, it looks like:




Step 7: If you are using RDS or ECS for your database does it need to be Highly Available?
To create some redundancy for high availability you may want to place your database in a separate availability zone.

With RDS it is very easy to replicate your database across multiple availability zones.

These are the 7 decisions steps that you need to go through to select the best Amazon Web Services architecture. You will still need to make decisions about instance sizes based on the amount of traffic you anticipate and if your application is more memory intensive or more computing intensive. Other services that Amazon Supplies:

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS): Helps build loosely coupled applications
• Amazon Simple Email Service (SES): The ability to build transactional email capabilities into your application
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS): setup, operate and send notifications from the cloud
• Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF): A workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications.

With regards to cost, there is a calculator at the following location: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

The post Webinar: The 7 Steps to Select the Right Architecture for your Web Applications – Amazon Web Services appeared first on Generator.net.

The webinar will be available for replay here: http://socialmediatoday.com/best-thinkers-webinar-series

Why Should I Talk to You?

Discussing why people want to engage in your community.

1)      Create an exclusive community – give them information they can’t get anywhere else

2)      Know your audience – What do they want? Observe your audience’s behavior in social channels to find out why they would want to engage in your community. Ask your audience what they would like to engage with you or your brand about.

3)      Be careful with trying to incentivize with money or giveaways. Can lead to building a group of followers who want nothing more than free stuff and are not interested in engagement or collaboration.

Most Do It Wrong

Discussing what not to do when trying to incentivize for behavior or engagement in a community.

1)      Offering incentives can be the wrong way – again building followers who are not interested in engagement.

2)      Being too welcoming – let the community grow – let them participate on their own. Many community members are merely lurkers and if you instantly thanking them for joining or engaging them, they might be turned away.

1. Lurkers are often best converted to participants, not by the moderator, but by others in the community
2. Let the community grow on its own, don’t be too helpful or smart.

3)      Allowing disruptors to continue. The most relevant use of the master moderator role is knowing when to stop someone from ruining the experience of the community for others.

How to Do It Right

Discussing the right way to incentivize participation behavior in a community

1)      Badging – providing badges recognizing authority, reputation, security, etc.

1. Example: SEOMoz community forum – badges recognizing participation and authority. At a certain level of participation, community members can receive discounts on their SEOMoz membership.
2. Example: Warrior Forum – provides Warrior levels to incentivize participation – You provide value, we are going to give you a bump in status
3. Example: EBay Badging recognizes sellers and buyers for reputation of trust

2)      Promote Within – let major participators become low-level moderators

3)      Encourage Engagement through Tools

1. Give people low-level participation opportunities, make it easy for them to participate in a simple way.

i.      “thanks” buttons, Yes/No questions with button type response mechanism

1. People will often graduate to higher levels of participation once they have engaged at a low-level.
2. WeJIT – a simple but powerful online collaboration tool that can live on blogs, in social media, on websites, etc.

4)      Convey Gratitude through backchannels

1. Thank your users on social media or via email

Miscellaneous Notes

What is a Brand Advocate? – Definition from Zuberance: Highly satisfied customer or other person who recommends brand or product without pay or incentives

Top 10 Ways to Reward Advocates

1)      Sneak Peeks

2)      Special Events

3)      Exclusive Communities

4)      Special Content

5)      Seeking their Opinions

6)      Access to VIPs

7)      Contribute to Causes

8)      Honor your Advocates

9)      Show them you Care

10)   Say Thank You

• The 1/9/90 rule: 1% very active, 9% somewhat active and 90% lurkers in an online community
• Expect 10% of your brand’s Facebook following to be listening at anytime
• You can download Ch 1 of @robfuggetta’s book “Brand Advocates” at http://brandadvocatebook.com
• #1 motivation for Brand Advocates: great experience w/ product/service & they want to help their friends. NOT bc of incentives
• Content is still king. If you aren’t sure what your audience wants… ASK them. They will tell you.
• SoMe is a 2 way communication channel, your communities aren’t for just posting Ads but are a forum for engagement. Engage & inform
• Think about what your business’ most valuable goal is, and incentivize your community to help with that goal.
• Use Engaging Copy and Photos to incentivise sharing
• “Organic incentives can be much more effective and long-lasting than monetary rewards for your community.”
• Community roles (organic) – advocates, moderators, content creators.

The post Incentives for Online Behavior appeared first on Generator.net.

• Note to self – Check out Smart Passive Income Reader Challenges
• Note to self – Check out Smart Passive Income Backlinking Strategies
• The content on GI Reviews are both subjective and neutral. The goal is to add in some personality to the content
• Dog Approval – pictures of Brenden’s dogs
• Wife Approval – what she likes about the products
• People buy things because of relationships and this type of content assists in sales
• ZenHabits Website was a great motivator for Branden – “Map out your fears – what is the worst thing that can happen”
• Strategy – Partnering with Brands for giveaways helped drive over 1,000 new subscribers
• Brenden launched an e-book, Epic GI Reviews to help drive loyalty, sales and position GIReviews.net as the authority in the market.
• The site is monetized through affiliates, private banners and now Brendan has branched out into books and DVDs

The post Building Community Around Product Niche – SPI #49 appeared first on Generator.net.

]]> http://generator.net/2012/12/06/building-community-around-product-niche/feed/ 0 http://generator.net/2012/11/19/ecommerce-webinar-checkout-process-optimization-11-steps-increasing-revenue/ http://generator.net/2012/11/19/ecommerce-webinar-checkout-process-optimization-11-steps-increasing-revenue/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:08:18 +0000 admin http://generator.net/?p=214 Cliff notes from the E-Commerce Webinar entitled Checkout Process Optimization – 11 Steps to Increasing Revenue. View the entire E-Commerce Webinar free. Presenters: Presented by Groove Commerce, a Baltimore based full service interactive agency specializing in the Magento Platform. They are also a HubSpot partner, providing award winning services that include web design, development, and [...]

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]]> Cliff notes from the E-Commerce Webinar entitled Checkout Process Optimization – 11 Steps to Increasing Revenue. View the entire E-Commerce Webinar free. Presenters:

Presented by Groove Commerce, a Baltimore based full service interactive agency specializing in the Magento Platform. They are also a HubSpot partner, providing award winning services that include web design, development, and online marketing services.

Including Shane Lundy from BuySafe. Buysafe enables online retailers to offer a guaranteed shopping experience that increases conversion and customer satisfaction.

Average checkout consists of 5.08 steps
24% of top 100 e-tailers require account registration – 50% of top 100 e-tailers still ask for the same information twice

Step #1: Ensure pages load quickly

• Walmart.com Converted shoppers received pages 2x faster than non-converted shoppers in an e-commerce case study
• Use Pingdom.com – to find out how well your site pages are performing
• Turn on compression
• Remove unneeded code & files
• CDN hosting
• Use Google JQuery Scripts
• Full-page caching
• Track Server errors and performance (New Relic – web application performance management tool that shows end to end performance – how fast pages are being delivered, utilization, health of servers, sql errors, PHP errors, etc.)

Step #2: Offer Guest Checkout without Registration

• 8 of the top 10 US eTailers offer it
• 25.6% of online consumers will abandon if forced to register (econsultancy)
• Average cart abandonment is 65%
• Optimizing checkout is one of the best places where you can improve the top line revenue of your site

Step #3: Keep Forms short

• Don’t ask if you don’t need information
• Don’t ask for answers you already have
• Pre-populate fields if you can
• Maintain Form Data if errors happen
• Especially important for mCommerce – simplifying forms and UI will significantly help when people are trying to checkout with mobile devices

Step #4: Provide clear progress indicators

• Examples include: 25% done, Step 1 of 3, Billing ->Shipping->Payment->Summary
• People like to see that there is progress in what they are doing
• What makes people feel more comfortable to purchase from smaller, regional and niche retailers? They may have more variety and depth than big box retailers, but don’t always set the right expectations with the shoppers.
• One Step vs. Multi-step: A/B tested the accordion checkout vs. one-step checkout module and accordion clearly beat the one-step. Depends on the buying personas – how they shop and how they browse.

Step #5 – provide shipping costs early and often.

• Show the final price before checkout
• Confirm availability
• Remove customer concerns and set expectations. The A-players go above and beyond to set expectations on when something was shipped, when its available, what is the price for shipping, etc.
• Reassurances if anything goes wrong.

Step #6 – provide clear calls to action

• Differentiate checkout/continue shopping button colors
• Make next step button with arrow indicators >>
• Customers should be clear on how to proceed to the next step in the checkout – The Blur test – step back in the room, blur the screen and I should be able to see the three most important buttons on the site – product page add to cart, cart page proceed to checkout, and checkout page “submit your order” are the three most important buttons on your site.
• Enable back-tracking without losing form data
• Test color and font options, different verbage, typefaces, to find what fits with your buying personas

Step #7 – Minimize other navigation

• Remove anything not needed…keep them focused without any distractions
• Use jQuery popups for assurances
• Most e-commerce sites convert between 2% and 4% so eliminate anything not needed in the checkout process. Most people rarely go to the privacy policy, so why distract the purchase process?

Step #8 – Provide a guaranteed shopping experience

• Provide reassurances of personal security information
• Merchant is reliable and underwritten by 3rd party.
• Customer is getting the best price.
• Many different types of buyers – some are very savvy and others are very concerned with shopping online. Concerns of these types of buyers:
1. Security of their personal information
2. Reliability of merchant – product will be delivered on time
3. If something goes wrong, you will honor all terms of sale
4. Assuring the consumer is getting the best price from you
• An industry-wide problem – the structure of the Internet creates a disconnected purchase experience and shopper concerns
1. 73% of consumers say that shopping online is riskier than shopping offline – Visa/Cybersource
2. 98% of consumers will bounce from the site and make the purchase elsewhere if they have concerns
3. Signal to the consumer that you are a reliable merchant: McAfee Secure, Norton Secured, TRUSTe, Verisign Secured, BBB Accredited, Google Trusted Store, BizRate, BuySafe
4. BuySafe provides guaranteed shopping experience:
• $10,000 blanket identity theft protection
• $1,000 purchase guarantee
• Same store low price guarantee – if you buy today and the item goes on sale, BuySafe will reimburse you for difference in price.
• Standard conversion lift is between 6% and 10%

Step #9 – provide help options

• Make phone easy to find
• Extend customer service for peak holiday times
• Don’t make users leave cart to use live chat
• Proactive chat with your best customers
• Cart-based rules for chat (Velaro – live chat tool with cart-based rules – if x $ are in a cart, you can proactively reach out to help close that deal)

Step #10 – Multiple Payment Options

• Different payment methods help appeal to as many potential customers as possible
• Leads to increased sales & revenue
• Gift cards, Amazon Payment Gateway, Paypal, Google Checkout, etc. – make as many available as possible
• Take friction out of the buying process to increase shopping cart conversion rates

Step #11 – Provide a Final Summary

• Provide a full summary before final submission so customers can ensure they entered everything properly
• After checkout, the order confirmation should include order summary with order number, contact information, shipping details, social and sharing icons

Bonus Step – Consistently review your data

• Review funnel tracking data within your analytics – Fooman analytics extension for Magento helps you setup additional Google Analytics funnel tracking
• Refine & test top exit areas – figure out what the money pages are – what generate the most money and what lose the most money
• 2 types of testing & analytics: Single Page: Buttons, colors, banners, font, text, verbage
• Site-wide: Site wide test to turn on and off trust building icons, payment option icons, shipping offers, etc.

About 25 minutes of Q&A, plus polls should be watched in this ECommerce Webinar

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]]> http://generator.net/2012/11/19/ecommerce-webinar-checkout-process-optimization-11-steps-increasing-revenue/feed/ 0 http://generator.net/2012/08/22/improving-the-online-shopping-customer-experience/ http://generator.net/2012/08/22/improving-the-online-shopping-customer-experience/#comments Wed, 22 Aug 2012 22:32:41 +0000 admin http://generator.net/?p=192 The following are the Internet Marketing Cliff Notes from a webinar put on by ComScore and UPS on August 21, 2012. You can download the slides by clicking the following link: UPS Comscore Webinar: Improving the Online Shopping Experience Online retail up 15% in 2012 – $80B 8.7% of all consumer spending goes to online [...]

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]]> The following are the Internet Marketing Cliff Notes from a webinar put on by ComScore and UPS on August 21, 2012. You can download the slides by clicking the following link: UPS Comscore Webinar: Improving the Online Shopping Experience


• Online retail up 15% in 2012 – $80B
• 8.7% of all consumer spending goes to online retail
• Apparel is top category
• According to the Online Shopping Customer Experience Survey conducted by ComScore and commissioned by UPS, 55% of consumers would cancel transaction if there is no free shipping once they get to the end of their purchase process.
• Nearly three-quarters of shoppers surveyed want to see free shipping as an option at checkout
• Mobile or Tablet purchases constitutes 9% of all e-commerce dollars
• 60% of online orders are over $50
• It is important to show the shipping costs as early in the shopping process as possible to avoid shopping cart abandonment
• 42% of shoppers surveyed abandoned their cart because of the estimated delivery date – in addition to shipping costs, show the estimated delivery date as early in the shopping process as possible.
• 60% of shoppers look at the return policy before making a purchase.

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]]> http://generator.net/2012/08/22/improving-the-online-shopping-customer-experience/feed/ 0