UK & USA Dropshipping

Who to trust and how to avoid the scams

Selling online from Web-Dummy to Web-Savvy
- Posted by proshipper -

So your thinking of taking your first leap into the world of online selling? To begin selling online you don't need to be a millionaire but it's a good idea to have enough money that you can invest into your business to make sure it suceeds. If you take some time and plan it carefully there is no reason why you shouldn't see an idea flourish into a sucessful business. In this post i'm going to walk through all the steps you should consider when taking your first steps into online selling.

Getting your website Developed
This is ususally the most costly but also the most important step when setting up online. You should shop around to find a website development company that offers a good price but also one that has good customer service, if the company has got a bad reputation you can usually dig something up through google. Website development of an e-commerce website can cost anything from around £500 for a basic site upto £10,000 to £15,000 for a high end system. Remember the price's I have listed are for bespoke "built from scratch" sites. There are a number of off the shelf packages that you could purchase but i will come back to that on a later post.

Sourcing Products for your website
There are quite a few options as to how to get your products for your website, the first one that comes to most peoples mind is sourcintg them from a wholesaler. Other alternatives are Dropshipping and Complete Dropshipping. Dropshipping is where the products are kept in a warehouse owned and ran by another company, when someone orders the product through your website you forward the order onto your dropshippers and they then dispatch the product to the customer. The advantage of this is that you do not have to worry about purchasing warehouse space or arranging for delivery or pickups. Complete Dropshipping is slightly different as you get the products even cheaper because you only a pay a set price per month. For more information on Complete Dropshipping and to see our recommended complete dropshippers check out the Award Winning Dropshipper page.

Advertising your shop
If you set up a shop in a busy high street and have good products at tempting prices your shop would quite easily attract attention but online it is alot harder to naturally get hits to your website. When your shop first goes online theres a good chance it won't be listed in any of the search engines so you need to set yourself a good budget to get put into advertising your website using services such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Marketing and Affiliate Advertising.

Mailing your products
Mailing your products can get expensive so make sure you work out the prices and weight correctly. It's best to choose a courier that will be able to come past at regular times to pick up outgoing deliveries.

Complete Dropshipping Solutions
- Posted by proshipper -

Your a busy person, you don't have time to run your own business while keeping on top of everything else you have to do. Many people have the same problem and many of them found a solution by signing up to a complete dropshipping solution. All you have to do is contact your chosen dropship agency, pay the one off set-up fee and wait for your website to be made live which takes 5 takes from point of registration and while you are waiting:

  • Your domain name is purchased
  • Your design is created
  • Your hosting is purchased
  • All of the Dropshipper's products are loaded onto your website
  • Website submitted to all the major search engines (Priority service available, which gets your site into googles listings within 7 days)
  • Analytics code installed (upon request)

All of the above is included in the one off set-up price and once complete you can start selling. All the products on your website are supplied by the dropshipper and when an order is placed the dropshipper handles all the delivery and dispatches it to your customer.

A one year subscription to the service costs £1000. You may be thinking this is quite expensive but in return you are given access to hundreds of high quality brand name products such as the Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and at one of the levels you get a price guarantee that you won't be able to find any of the products cheaper elsewhere. Still not enough? If you don't make £500 in your first month with the Gold package you get 6 months extra FREE!

Interested but still not too sure? Phone us in

the UK on 01908 821271 or in

the USA & on +441908 821271

and see if we hold the key to starting your online business!

SEO Techniques
- Posted by proshipper -

We will start with the Meta Tags. I know you have already heard of, and are probably currently using meta tags on your site. This is great. I just want to make sure you are using them effectively. We will only go over 2 tags: the "title" tag, and the "description" tag. We will not go over the "keywords" tag, as the major search engines have placed less and less weight on this one, and some would argue this tag has no weight at all. I still use this tag however, as I feel there is some merit and no drawbacks to using this tag.
 
 I have found it effective to use similar text in the "title" and "description" tags, and to place your keywords prominently in these tags (near the beginning and more than once). I have seen sites with "sitename.com", "New Page 1", or "Welcome to my site" in the "title" tag, which really does not help in their quest for higher rankings for their particular keyword. Also, try not to use words such as "and", "or", or "the" in these tags.

2. Important note about your keywords. Search engines evaluate keyword prominence, keyword weight, and keyword density when determining a site's ranking. All three are calculated individually for the page, the title tag, the description tag, as well as other areas on a page. Keyword prominence means how close the keyword is to the beginning of your page. Keyword weight refers to how many times a particular keyword or phrase can be found on the page. Keyword density is the ratio of the keyword to the other words on the page. You do not want the keyword weight or density to be too high, as this can appear to the search engine as "keyword stuffing" and most search engines penalize sites that stuff their keywords.

3. Place your navigational links (and JavaScript) at the right or at the bottom, but not on the left, of the page. When the search engines "read" your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or Javascript. Ideally, you want to have your heading tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what's important on your page.

4. Place alt tags on all of your images. Search engine spiders cannot "read" pictures or images. The only way a spider knows what an image is about is by reading the alt tag. This is also another chance to place more of your keywords in your HTML, improving your page's keyword weight/density. Alt tags are easy to make and they can make a big difference in your sites keyword ranking. A simple alt tag looks like this: alt="put your keyword phrase here." Search engines separately calculate keyword prominence, density, and weight in alt tags as well, so optimize your tags.

5. Place your keywords at the bottom of your page. Just as search engines place more weight on the first words of your page, they also do the same to the last words. The general thinking is this, if your site is about a certain subject, then the main points, or keywords, should, appear at the beginning, be spread throughout the page, and be prominent at the conclusion. But if you have all of your navigational links and JavaScript at the bottom, your relevant page text could end well before the HTML does. An easy way to have your keywords at the bottom of your page is to include them in the copyright information. For example, if you have a dog food website, you could have something like this at the very Search engines are not (as of this writing), penalizing sites using this technique, and it wouldn't really make much sense for them to do so.

6. The Anchor Text of your links. Anchor text is the actual linking text on a site. It is what the user clicks on to navigate to that particular site or page. If a search engine finds many links to your site using the term "dog food", then the search engine concludes your site is about "dog food". This is overlooked quite often, but it seems to have a very large impact on your search engine rankings for a particular keyword. Your anchor text needs to be the keyword or phrase you are trying to target. Try to avoid anchor text such as "Click Here" or "yoursite.com"
 Also, if you're running a reciprocal link campaign, be sure to use variations of your text. If an engine notices every link to your site is identical, it could place less weight on these links or potentially penalize your site. This is because search engines generally give more weight to "naturally occurring" links, and less to "reciprocal link exchange campaigns". Using different, but relevant anchor text can dramatically affect your targeted keyword rankings, by making your links appear more natural.

Effective SEO may seem difficult at first, but as you have read above, little tricks that require little or no programming knowledge, can make a huge impact on your website's keyword ranking.

Source: http://www.websition.com/