Using Drop shippers for online retailing

Many website owners and bloggers who are looking to monetize their sites only use AdSense. I think this is very dangerous and shortsighted. While AdSense is a good program Google has a habit of discontinuing accounts without notice and little explanation. If you read Googles own help forums on AdSense you will soon realise that if this happens to you you will have very little chance of persuading them that they have acted in error in terminating your AdSense account. So its a very dangerous strategy to rely solely on income from AdSense as a way of monetizing your site.

Selling products online

In previous posts I covered a number of different alternatives to AdSense. In this post I want to talk about a specific strategy - selling products yourself directly online. Now the first objection to this ( it was my own) will be - I don't have any products to sell so how can I sell products online?


One of the fascinating things about the internet is how it has created new business niches and markets or diversified traditional ones.

Retail and wholesale
Think for a minute about a traditional retailer. He buys wholesale and takes the goods to his shop then sells them at a retail price and keeps the difference.

Now think about purchasing goods by post. You buy from a retailer and the goods are posted to you. You are not even aware of their wholesale origin. Now imagine that you purchased those same goods by post and that they arrive but unknown to you it was actually the wholesaler who posted them directly to you on behalf of the retailer. Imagine that they did this in a way so that as far as you were concerned you were receiving your goods from the retailer. This is basically how dropshipping works.

How dropshipping works
With drop-shipping you, the retailer, advertise goods/products for sale. But you keep no stock of these products. When an order is made that order is passed to the drop-shipper who arranges delivery of the product. So you can act as a retailer but without needing to carry any stock.

I use this model very successfully on places like e-bay where I have an eBay shop. I make my sales on e-bay, classified sites and through a number of my own web-sites ( using free and cheap hosting)- but all the delivery and ordering problems are handled by the drop shipper. If you are interested in expanding your online portfolio from just AdSense enabled sites to direct selling and bigger bucks then this can be a very lucrative way to operate.

I mostly use dropship-business.com as they are reputable and have a large range of very high quality products at wholesale prices. Their start up packages are also very reasonable. As I have become more experienced I have added a couple of other drop-shippers for particular items.

This method of starting a real online business is certainly much less risky and much less hassle than trying to handle orders and shipping yourself and having to get things like a merchant account. Personally I have found that it works best when you market strong well known brand names and supplement these with more specialist items - but of course that depends what products you want to focus on.

Being innovative but listening to Google.

One of the interesting things about the Internet is that it provides endless opportunities for people to spot potential niches which others have not yet thought of. Sometimes these ideas will help you to be a more effective publisher and in turn will support your goals for earning income from AdSense. This desire to find different ways of doing things is of course not what drives everyone. Many AdSense publishers are content with developing a blog or two and sticking to that.

Personally I have always enjoyed trying to think out of the box and trying new things so I am always thinking of new ways to use the wonderful tools that the Internet has given us. Now I am not claiming to be some super dooper innovator or anything like that. I do like to experiment though and I would encourage most people to push the boat out a little that way.

One of the things though that you must be clear about if you are going to experiment with different ways of using blogs ( or websites) and seeing how this improves your AdSense income is that not every idea you have will be a gem. Sometimes what seemed like a good idea just won't come off. You shouldn't view this negatively though. You can learn even from ideas that don't work out.

I had this experience recently. I thought of an interesting way to use a blog which was innovative ( innovative for me - others may have had the same idea) and had some propect of both being useful for a visitor and being a good vehicle for AdSense. So I set up a blog to implement my idea. All seemed to be going well for a couple of weeks but then the blog ( a blogspot blog) got flagged by Googles spam filter.

Now this hadn't been my intention. I could have tried to get the flag removed of course but I realised that the way I had implemented the idea would always run the risk of the blog getting flagged as spam. So what did I do? Well I have reworked the idea and essentially put that blog on ice until I can think how to do it without it just being spam. This may not be possible - in which case I will just delete it.

So was all this a waste of time? Of course not. I have learned a lot from trying to implement my idea and who knows - maybe some time in the future it will emerge in another more usable form.

The lesson from all this is that it is good to challenge yourself to think of new ideas and try to implement them. But don't hang on to these experiments as though they were your children - if an idea doesn't work out learn from it and move on.

Competetive Ad filtering

One of the issues that confronts the website or blog publisher with AdSense on their site is the issue of ads appearing for competitive products or sites.

Now this can be both a blessing and a curse. If you have a blog about a particular niche then your visitors will be coming to your site hopefully with the subject of that niche in their minds. If your traffic is coming from the right sources they will be coming primed to find out just the information or product that you are going to present to them. ( You came here to find information about improving your AdSense performance I assume?)

So you will quite legitimately have written your posts with an eye to this and with the aim in mind of meeting your keyword objectives. Hopefully you will also be imparting some useful information or service to you visitors.

Those same keywords that are in your mind as you post are the same keywords though that trigger the ads on your page. And guess what? A proportion of the advertisers who are bidding on your site will also be attempting to meet the same niche needs as you are.

So your visitor comes to your site and they are primed not only for your content but also for the messages that your advertisers are giving. Of course if this results in the visitor simply leaving your site straight away by clicking one of the ads then this may or may not be a problem for you.

Why do I say may or may not be a problem?

Well it depends on the nature of your site.

There are in general three types of AdSense publishers.

The first are those that are giving you a tangible product for example selling you things.
The second are those who are providing you with useful information or opinion. ( This blog falls into that category)
The third are generally useless and have little real content and are simply a place to hang adverts.

So which type of site has a problem with competitive adverts?

Product sites in my view have the most to worry about in relation to competitive ads because once the visitor has gone then a potentially lucrative sale has in all probability been lost.

Information and opinion sites have a little less of a problem. They were not trying to sell you something in he first place ( except themselves) and when the visitor leaves they get a small payment for the click. But wait - its not that simple. Most information or opinion blogs want more visitors and repeat visitors. So if someone arrives and simply sees an attractive competitor ad and leaves straight away you may be losing a repeat visitor. You may be losing someone who would have read your material and bookmarked you, or emailed your link to a friend, or written a post about your site.

So you need to think carefully about the impact of competitor ads and the use of the competitor ad feature in your Google account. Strike the right balance between excluding direct competitors who will suck your traffic away - but don't go overboard and lose potential AdSense income.

Adsense blog, website - or both?

Sometimes beginners who are trying to earn income with AdSense find the whole thing a bit confusing to start with. This can be a particular problem for people who are not really familiar with how websites are constructed, what the AdSense code is and how it should fit within their
page. In this post I want to cover some of these basic AdSense issues. Apologies to those of you who are already familiar with all this.

First of all be clear - you cannot be an AdSense publisher unless you are using a platform or a hosting service that will allow you to place the AdSense Javascript code on your page.

So, for example, if you are signed up to a blogging platform like Wordpress . com then I am sorry you wont be able to use AdSense - not unless you sign up for a different platform. (or use Wordpress on your own hosted site)

Perhaps the easiest way to start out on the path to earning income from AdSense is to sign up with Blogger. This is very easy to do if you already have a Google account. If you haven't already done this then do it now!

With a blogspot blog putting AdSense on your page couldn't be easier. You just use the AdSense widget on the page elements Template page.

More sophisticated AdSense users know that a better way to run your AdSense is to have more than one site. You can create more than one blog and put your AdSense on these other blogs - but make sure you have good content on them. Don't just put up MFA sites.

Even better results from AdSense can be achieved if you have content on different domains. This allows you to do some constructive cross linking and to develop a number of niches. Using different domains will increase your search engine exposure. A great way to start is with a FREE web hosting package.
I recommend the following FREE web hosting supplier ( they are offering great introductory packages and FREE hosting).
http://business.runhosting.com/
http://adsense.runhosting.com/
http://best.runhosting.com