St Patricks Day is coming!

I’ll be honest – I kind of like leprechauns. And so, I especially think the St Patricks day promotions are funny.

original image

But we’re going to talk a little about St Patrick’s Day and the markets it serves.

St Patricks Day is the national holiday of the Irish. It is celebrated formally and informally in most English-speaking countries.

The Biggest St Patricks Day Parade is in Savannah, Georgia with 750,000 celebrants. There are many large St Patricks Day festivals around the country.

For whatever reason, St Patricks Day is associated with drinking alcohol. Its really a Catholic religious holiday (the feast day of St. Patrick) so some people are offended by the commercialization of the holiday, particularly the undignifed image it presents.

Ok, so a big event celebrated with bars and parades. What does that mean? Ha Ha! It means Blinkies! It means Beads! SO stock up on St Patricks Day Merchandise

But, don’t just buy products and leave them lying there. You have to get after it. If your business is online, there’s a few things you want to do to take advantage of the opportunity.

1. When people are shopping for holiday merchandise, it is more likely to be based around the idea of holding to a certain budget. It’s better overall to create holiday themed sections like “Gifts Under $10″ that emphasize meeting a budget.

2. Any holiday is an appropriate time for giving. You can absolutely increase sales by associating your products with a good cause. You should avoid patting yourself on the back when you go to sleep at night but its still a good thing you are doing. Here are some tips on maximizing the publicity value of your efforts. The tips come from this great article about small business charitable giving.

Publicize your donations of goods or services to charities by sending press releases and photos to the local media.

Include your charitable involvement in your marketing materials such as newsletters, brochures, signs, displays, advertisements, and commercials.

Get involved with high-profile causes that attract the media’s attention.
If you have given significant support to a program, ask that it be named after you or the name of your business.

Give away information about your charity as a part of your business transactions such as placing pamphlets in your retail outlets, having employees wear clothing or pins and buttons publicizing your charity, or placing charity information with your product when it ships.

Lastly, be sure to ask your charity to recognize your support in their publicity efforts.

3.  Shipping cutoff dates for holidays. Add it to your order page, add it to your template so its on every page.

If you are really interested in making the holidays work more effectively for your business. Here is a great video with an extensive Q&A and tons of ideas. It’s 45 minutes but highly recommended.

This is WHY you go to this effort: because the holiday itself is what we call an opportunity. But, its more than that it is  also

It’s fellowship. Drunken fellowship, but fellowship nonetheless.  You have staff. You have coworkers. Make the extra effort of every holiday you promote pay off for coworkers and staff with fun and festivities. Tie the effort to the reward, and its a win acros the board for you, your company and your customers.

Wacky Wholesale Products

I ran across this new article over at the News Room, it’s a great idea, its a product that can be sold at grocery stores, it’s goofy and it performs amazing feats. It’s the BAGGLER. Anyway no matter how awesome the Baggler is, the opportunity it presents is even better because here’s something wholesalers provide by the bucket load. Crazy, wild products that you haven’t seen in stores, because you don’t know the right stores.

Everyone loves a Blinky!

I often refer to this site as ‘The Greatest Site In the World” but that’s because I love blinkies and can stare at that page for several hours. I just think it’s funny to have a blinking martini attached to you, I’m thinking tie tack, or maybe on a knit cap – it would be a nice snowboarding accessory.

Not Sure What This is Used For

But, I like it! Please enjoy Nose With Hair!

“Tiny compressor inside helps him blow bubbles from his bottom.”

With a quote like that, I hardly need to write anything. HEY HOLD ON… From now on, this is a Wacky Products Blog…

I’m not sure who you would give a Bubble Geezer to as a gift. Maybe a retiring high school band teacher? I would avoid giving this at, a bridal shower or as a Xmas gift for your boss but I’m a careful cat.

I’m probably about to do about 90 wacky product posts in a row. Those of you interested in this blog’s survival and prospering please send me links – or post them as comments on the blog and I will check them out.

We don’t like Quickbooks Online

If you’re not too busy watching the Global FInancial Market crash, (if you are you might want to check out this blog from some n00b who just lost 31K in the futures market), then perhaps you have a second to discuss Quickbooks Online.

Quickbooks Online is the small business equivalent of Quicken. A web-based solution for an accounting package is highly desirable because it allows everyone who needs to look at the financials the ability to do so, without having to transmit a data file. Sending around a data file is not only terribly insecure but it also creates problems in terms of making sure all stakeholders have the most current update to the accounts.

We love them newfangled Web-based applications, because, he chants in a sing-song tone,

1. You don’t have to install them
2. They are platform independent
3. No viruses
4. Can use API’s

And then we have Quickbooks – which only works on Windows and even worse only works on IE!

We sent them a friendly note about this, asking how much longer they were going to keep us out.

We’ve heard from many people that they’d like to access QuickBooks Online Edition (QBOE) from other operating systems (like Macintosh) and other browsers (like Firefox). We don’t have a version of Online Edition designed to run on the Mac or in non Internet Explorer browsers. However, we have heard that some users use a PC emulator to run QBOE on their Macintosh systems. Some customers have reported that there can be performance issues when using an emulator, most notably speed problems, so we encourage you to do some research to determine if this is a reasonable solution for you.

OK, I’m used to emulators, after all I dont run windows or a mac. But, the idea that I would use an emulator to run a Web Browser. Even worse, run an emulator to run Internet Explorer? Ha, Ha. it is too laugh.

If an emulator is not an option, or you would just like to be notified when we add support for the Macintosh or Firefox, you can sign up here:

https://sc.accounting.quickbooks.com/interested/interested.cfm?case_channel_id=12&preselected=32

Quicken Online, the personal equivalent of QuickBooks Online Edition, runs on a Mac. QuickBooks is a BIT more complicated, but not really. Why would I want to sign up for a wating list, so you can tell me when your product finally does what I want. I’ll probably find an alternative first.

Here comes the good part,

If you’re interested in knowing why QBOE chose to only support Internet Explorer, our reasoning is as follows:

QuickBooks Online Edition is a web based Software Application, not just a Web Page that displays static information. While designing a Web Page to be available cross platform is very routine (though still presenting its challenges), creating a Software Application requires tremendous cost and effort to develop and maintain for any one single platform.

For example, AutoRecall is a feature that allows you to begin typing a name and QuickBooks Online Edition fills in likely selections. This requires a lot of interaction with the browser and is not standardized across platforms, browser versions, or browser brands. Writing a web application places far more requirements on a browser than even a highly-interactive web site. We’re not 100% satisfied with Internet Explorer on Windows, but it comes the closest.

So, given the challenges of application development, we made a very simple business decision to target the platform with 95% of the market, so that we are available to the widest range of Small Business Customers who need a web-based accounting application. At this time, the effort from both the engineering and testing perspectives is too large an undertaking given the market share of other platforms and browsers.

See, now you understand right. If they didn’t lock it down to Windows and IE, then it wouldn’t be able to try and tell you who you are about to write a check to. That’s their big argument. Sure you could do that in Firefox if the database was interoperable with javascript or lots of other things. Sure, the program isn’t really that good at guessing. Sure, YOU PROBABLY KNOW WHO YOU ARE GOING TO WRITE A CHECK TO ANYWAY.  Nonetheless, Quickbooks OE better stick to IE. Firefox is neck and neck with IE 6 for market share and well ahead of IE 7. If they would make it work with Firefox, then it would work with the Mac as well.

What’s the end result? Clerks have to work harder producing reports because Sausage-fingered bosses can’t access the interface. I find it hard to believe that Intuit really wants to tempt the wrath of bookkeeping clerks the world over.

Do You Need to Buy a Wholesale List?

I saw a nice post about buying wholesale lists on one of the few wholesale blogs that isn’t just junk, and I think its a good topic for this blog to address.

Wholesale lists, I’m pretty sure, predate the internet, and they would have really been high-value publications back then — because how else would you find the locations and details of USA wholesalers prior to the web. You could go to the library and pore through 100 phone books I guess, but would you? Or you could find a trade magazine, but that’s even pretty difficult to find, they aren’t distributed widely. My former employer, distributed trade magazines at flea markets and swap meets, which is a good way to target your readership to the best available customers, but if you weren’t reselling through that venue, and you wanted to get the best possible deals (meaning get around working with a local or regional distributor) how would you have done it? Well, if you have the money that you can cut out a middleman that breaks bulk, you could probably afford to fly to a trade show, but, holy cow, isn’t there an easier way?

And thus we have the oft-rumored seldom seen wholesale lists. You give someone $40 and they sent you a neatly typed list of Company Names, Phone Numbers and Descriptions of Items Sold. That was a deal back then because if you were serious, you were likely to save more than that on the first order.

But, it really is a different ballgame now. The lists, like Salehoo and Worldwide Brands, are still what I consider a “hidden” competitor to my efforts over the years to get wholesalers’ products in front of the audience that really needs to use them. And they have responded to the competition that Top Ten Wholesale provides, with their (paid) membership areas, where they can offer updates, but really what they are going to do is try to sell you other products from their line. In truth they can’t compete with a web site like Top Ten or any of the other worthy wholesale search and directory web sites out there, because their model is to take money from the small reseller. Top Ten’s business model is older than the term “Web 2.0″ but taking information people normally charge for, making it free, and earning revenue through advertising opportunities for businesses that want to reach this newly-empowered audience is Web 2.0 all the way baby, much more so than rounded corners and blogs.

That doesn’t stop the listmakers, of course, it just makes them market against us. What kind of validates my theory that they ore the old school and we are the new school is that the practice the marketing technique known as FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that was made famous by IBM. See, IBM revolutionized the world of information processing, from typewriters to supercomputers and pioneered a LOT of new markets. When the competition eventually came, IBM was already there, but they were a huge company and could easily lose market share to a better idea, more aggressive pricing, etc. So the IBM sales force (which was one of the most admired organizations in the world, many years ago) used a tactic that was described by a former employee turned competitor as “spreading FUD.”

The old quote is “Nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM” which really means “You could get fired if you recommend some fly-by-night company who will abandon you when its the middle of the night and your orders can’t be processed. Oh, did I mention that we can have a 6 person team there to fix it the next day?”

And that’s always the model. If you have competition, you find yourself saying eventually “you can’t trust those guys…” It happens. I just hope you are telling the truth when you say it.

Chris Malta, the CEO behind Worldwide Brands, will try to tell you that

“Real Product Sourcing Wholesalers are NOT in the Search Engines”

Hee Hee. I beg to differ, Mr Malta In fact, its not just this web site. I watch all the search engine competition and Google which used to really have a bunch of junk in their listings, now has seen the light and has pretty much indexed our customers too. They still leave junk all around them which makes it hard to use them to source products efficiently. Basically, Malta’s argument is that all the huge wholesalers don’t advertise on the Internet because they don’t want to be bothered with small retail customers. I could name about 20 huge wholesalers who’ve been around for 20, 30, 50 years who advertise on Top Ten. Malta says these people want to work with you, but you have to find them.

Wholesalers are advertising, wholesalers don’t just want your business, they need it. Are there giant wholesalers who don’t advertise very much beyond to the trade, because they have contractual understandings with their dealer network so they don’t accidentally steal customers from their bread and butter network. You bet. But, what happens when you get all Sherlock Holmes up in heah and find them and send them an email. “Hey What’s Up Mr Double Secret Wholesaler?” What happens is they refer you to their network of dealers So I guess Mr. Malta isn’t technically wrong. But, why don’t you just skip all that nonsense and search for the product you want

Whats my rule? If somebody ever tells you “Don’t bother doing that, it will never work” – They are trying to keep you away from doing it because they fear it will work. Hmm, fear, hey look “fear” is the first component of the FUD strategy.

Malta also says

Most of the wholesalers who do show up in the search engines are actually middlemen and scammers who are trying to cheat you out of your profit margin.

See, I can’t stand this kind of stuff. What if I came up to you and said “Don’t use the phone book. Most of the advertisers in there are scammers.” You would think I was crazy and you might also think “What else I am supposed to do if not use the phone book?’ That’s when I tell you that I have typed up a list of some of the best things I found in the phone book and you can have it for $79.99. Well, hey, maybe there’s a reason I don’t like the phone book, because I stand to make 80 bucks every time I can convince someone else not to like it, too. Chris Malta is the same way, he doesn’t like wholesalers in the search engines because they cost him money.

So here he is saying “You can’t trust something that’s free! Use my paid service” Here I am saying “Use my free service” Who has more credibility?

Q&A on Blogging and Link Building

This post is about increasing traffic to your blogs. I’m surprised about how lame and lousy answers you get from searching Google about this crap. You will get much better advice at bloggerunleashed.com but that guy is drunk all the time, he’s like the Boris Yeltsin of SEO.

Sharp-eyed reader Justin P. left a comment:

I’ve been dying to learn more about effective blogging and link building…what’s the deal?

I’m happy to disclose that Justin is a member of the Top Ten Wholesale team, but this is not a plant. I’m pretty sure he does want to know about this stuff, and I didn’t solicit this question in any way. And, I consider publicly answering your readers question part of the best practices for effective blogging. The great thing is even though that’s a pretty expansive question, blogging and link building go hand in hand. In that, posting to your blog is an outstanding way to build links.

1) RSS Feeds – If you use your RSS Feed right you can gain links. The audience of people subscribing to feeds are hard core information consumers. I have my own linkblog just of posts I read that I share. Lots of bloggers, marketers, and web publishers. But, all those people are making websites designed to go out to a general audience and they always need content. It’s very nice when they reference your content and provide a link. In fact that’s great when they do that. Sometimes, they may not do that, sometimes they may not send a link back and just republish your work. People get really upset about these guys and start talking about how they hate “content thieves” with lots of capital letters and exclamation points, but I don’t waste time with getting mad at invisible people and their web sites. I try to do what I can to make it work better for me. One of the keys to maximizing the links you get from your content is to use a footer on your posts with your links in it. I use a wordpress plugin called Feed Footer, and there is another good one called RSS Footer. RSS footer is super simple and very effective. Feed Footer offers granular control of what you do with your footer and is a very powerful tool in the hands of the right person. It’s entirely appropriate in my opinion to add other related sites to your footer. If you are writing great posts, this will really help you generate more links.

2. Blog Directories

When you are starting the marketing process for a new blog. Blog directories like BlogCatalog are a tempting prospect, but getting backlinks with a wordpress blog is cake, so what’s the point of it? Meaning is there traffic for you? I think there is if you are targeting them precisely. Trackbacks are going to get heavily discounted based on the pagerank value of the referring site soon, so I wouldn’t bother too much with them. I think you have to write comments on big blogs, and get them past moderation. At this point I say avoid the larger directories like mybloglog and bumpzee. I get a little bit of seo traffic so sphinn does ok.

3. “SEO 2.0 is about link love” — Dofollow=Groovy

So you gotta give me a dofollow..

That means install the dofollow plugin. Try to enjoy it while it lasts. What will kill it is organized rings of dofollowers, who start to moderate there posts ruthlessly throwing out people from the wrong side of the tracks like me. Those guys will grow like mold in pligg sites, or BloggingZoom, which you should not run on your blog! It is unsafe, I had it checked out by the somber titans of the toptenwholesale.com technical staff. By the way if you don’t pay attention to your programmer’s technical review of your easy-to-install plug-ins, you are an idiot, begging to be fired.

Posts I Like But Aren’t Super Related to this Because Who The Hell Writes Posts Like This One?:

A Valuable Tip – Use Pligg sites to get good longlasting backlinks.

The Basic Process of Dropshipping is Simple

Making money with wholesale products is a blizzard of new terminology, unfamiliar business models and more than enough to disturb a new businessperson’s comfort level.

First you must find your dropshipping vendor. We will go into this in great detail over the coming weeks, but I want you to see what you are getting into first.

Setup An Account With A Dropshipper

You will have to contact the shipper to set up an account. This is a process that has gotten easier over the years, with many being about as easy to set up as an internet affiliate program. Dropshippers usually require a little more information than an affiliate program. Soem may require a Tax ID number (EIN). In truth a Social Security Number is every bit as good as an EIN, but dropshippers often require this to try to screen out sellers. It is very easy to get an EIN. They may well ask for credit and trade references, dont be afraid if you don’t have any references like this, just be prepared to prepay for your goods (which is not ideal, but if you can maintain good relations with the shipper, they understand the efficacy of offering you terms and you will usually quickly get the chance to go at the very least to Net 7 or Net 15 (”Net 15″ is a fancy way of saying they will ship the goods and you owe them money within 15 days.)

Selling a Dropshipped Product

When a customer places an order on your site, you will usually get an email message alerting you of this. Obviously, your full retail price needs to account for all the costs of shipping the product that the drop shipper passes on to you. You have a legal requirement to collect sales tax when you are shipping to a state where you have physical operations.

You will turn around and place the order with your dropshipper. If you can become a big success, you will be able to automate with a dropshipper (although certainly not all drop shippers are capable of handling that, it is a case by case thing, but time is on your side, backend systems for the wholesaler and your ecommerce site are getting better every year).

Post-Sale

The dropshipper will fulfill your order and ship to your customer. You MUST know how long this takes, and you must set the expectations of your customer accordingly. When they ship, the drop shipper will charge you the wholesale price, the shipping cost and the dropshipping fee, if any.  Your profit is the difference between the amount you charged the customer and what the shipper charged you.  The supplier will provide you with shipping confirmation, and usually expect you to deal with any problems that occur in transit. It is easy enough to turn around and transfer this information to the customer. I think it is very bad form to let the customer realize that you are not the person ultimately responsible for fulfillment of the order. But, amny lazy merchants try to offload the customer service responsibilities on to the shipping company or on to the dropshipper. You  will lessen the chances of repeat business, but most of all: it is your responsibility, you accepted the customer’s money and the customer quite justifiably expects you to hold responsibility for safe transmission of goods.

The above hopefuly makes it clear that dropshipping, while a good way to make money FAST, is not EASY money. You have a lot of responsibilities to other parties, the government, the wholesaler and the customer, and this is a process you must treat respectfully if you wish to sustain it.

What is a Data Feed?

Data feed is one of those terms that people throw around but half of us don’t really know what it means.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Kyi0WNg40[/youtube]

Every online merchant is supposed to have one, everybody wants you to send it to them, some people tell you, that you already have one you can utilize better, and other people want to create one for you for a low, low price. And here you are, reading this post and saying “What the @#$%& is a data feed?”

OK, well let’s play Lazy Blogger for a second and go to Wikipedia, or as I call it, “The crappy encyclopedia that I don’t have to get up from the couch to use” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about data feed:

Data feed is a mechanism for data users to receive updated data from data sources.

There you go folks! End of post. Thanks for reading and please, tip your waitress!

Just kidding. But, see even the all-powerful wikipedia has trouble with this, so you shouldn’t feel bad. When you have a data feed, what you have is information that is so well organized that someone who wants to can pick out the information they need, get it all and not miss anything.

Take your website. Your website may be divided into categories and have good navigation and fancy menus and may seem organized but it is not a data feed, it may use them but it isn’t one. The reason it isn’t is because you can’t go to any random page on your site and ask a random question about your products and pull out the answer. You can’t go to your Umbrella category for example and use it to show you every item on your entire website that is colored orange. You can’t go to your About Us page, and return all your designer jeans.

However if you opened up an Excel spreadsheet, typed in all your product names into one column, your prices in the next, the SKU# in the next, color in the next, and on and on until you had fully described your inventory, that would be a data feed! How can I tell the difference between data feed and not a data feed?

Data Feed

Not a Data Feed

It’s simple if I had a data feed, there would be structure. In fact when we are talking data feeds we are really talking structured data feeds. The structure allows us to know where certain information is, even if we don’t know exactly what the information is. So if you give me your bee-yoo-tiful web site, I can’t find everything on it that is orange and be confident that I found all the orange stuff, because I might have missed a page, or I may not be able to find the part of the description that tells you what color something is.

But if you hand me your spreadsheet, and you say. “Hey, Smelly! How many orange items do I have?” (why are you so mean, anyway?) As long as you have a column called “color” and I can read, I can find all your orange items. In Excel or OpenOffice, under the ‘Data’ Menu, choose Sort, yep, I’m a geek.

Who cares anyway?

Well, see data feeds solve lots of problems. If I’m a shopping search engine that wants to collect as many stores’ inventories as possible, I don’t want to have to go to every web site and copy down all the info, like in the example above, I might miss some stuff. However, if the site owner, sends me a handy feed, I can plop it right in the mix with other stores data. And since all the info is structured, I can easily pull out all the orange items, when somebody comes to my search engine and types “orange”

If I want to sell other people’s products for them and collect a commission (an affiliate program is what we call this on the web), well I wouldn’t get very far, if I had to start out by copying all the info off the site and building my own web pages. But, if I had a shopping cart program like OSCommerce or an affiliate script and I had a data feed. I can click a few buttons and BAM! I got products and you’ve got sales!
Now that you understand data feeds, we’ll set about making one and using one in another thrilling episode!

GET LINKS TO YOUR SITE: Easy Ways to Promote Your Site WIth Links

It’s extremely important to build links to your site. Links tend to help your web site rank higher in search engines. Links promote your site as trustworthy enough for others to endorse. And most of all, you build links in the hope that the links will send traffic. I like to build as many easy links as I can.

My Favorite Easy Link for a Web Site

My favorite easy link to build a link is at AboutUs.org, whcih lets you quickly create or edit a page about your site.

Write a Press Release About Your Site

You can do this continuously, and should especially if your business picks up an accolade or an honor. Top Ten Wholesale has issued several press releases if you are looking for an example. Or you can check out this recent blog post about writing effective press releases.

I’ll publish a guide to writing a press release in an upcoming blog post. But, once you have written the presser (that’s what “industry insiders” call a press release), how do you distribute it?

PRWeb is the biggest player in this space. And they have a great free distribution service – although I find that giving them $80 for a better distribution virtually guarantees a number of links to your site that will stick around for a long time.

There are a lot of really good press release distribution services where you can submit for free in addition to PRWeb, like PRNewsWire and URLWire Here’s a reasonably recent list of Free Press Release Services.

Of course, if you submit the same press release to all these sites, some of these will get flagged for duplicate content. Google tries very hard to screen out multiple pages with the same content and is partially effective at it. When I have time to maximize the amount of links from a presser, I will pick 6-10 services to submit to and literally rewrite the press release sentence by sentence. But, that’s the kind of obsessive behavior that I don’t endorse for others.

Quick ways to make multiple unique press releases.

• Write one and hire somebody to write one for you. Hire a pro like the one Top Ten uses, David Oates of Stalwart Communications or do it the Joe Preston El Cheapo Grande Way, and advertise to find a copywriter on Craigslist or a copywriters forum
• Target a local area or region with 1 press release and then write one for general national distribution.
• All the press releases I write have a quote. Change the quote, and change where you place the quote within the press release.

Comment on Blogs

This is really the easiest way to build links. Go to blogs, find posts where you have something to say. Make comments and include your link in the space provided. Don’t worry about only going to blogs related to your business. For the most part, and as long as you aren’t being shady, a link is a link is a link. For example, I don’t blog about football or have any football related sites, but I leave a lot of incredibly insightful comments (at least I think they are) at The Jets Blog Good blogs pay a lot of attention to the comments and screen them heavily, but if you have something to say this is one of the best ways to build quality links and its very easy.

More on this subject tomorrow…

Related Posts on Other Blogs

Writing Effective Press Releases

Tags: press releases, link building