In this next post on how to make money online I’m going to cover drop shipping. I’m not talking about selling your neighbors lamp on eBay, I’m talking about selling the products for a company that offers drop shipping services. Most of these products are new and are purchased slightly higher than if you were to buy in bulk.

What Is Drop Shipping

Drop shipping is a method of selling a companies products without having to invest in buying the products in bulk. The pricing is generally slightly higher than if you were to buy them wholesale but they are still priced to allow you to make a profit.

How Does Drop Shipping Work

Drop shipping works by setting up an account with a company that offers drop shipping. Then you place the products on your website, generally through shopping cart software of some sort. Your visitors then complete the purchase through your website. You’ll need to accept payments online through either a merchant account or even through Pay Pal.

Once the sale is completed you’ll need to notify the drop ship company via the method that they specify. Some companies will want you to email it to them while others will require the order be faxed in or completed on their website.

Once this is done they will fulfill the order that you specified and generally email you a tracking number which you can pass along to your customer.

Benefits Of Drop Shipping

The main benefit of drop shipping is that you have no up-front cost. If you don’t sell anything, you don’t need to pay anything.

Another benefit is that most drop shipments are done anonymously meaning that the companies information is nowhere in the delivered package. This is a benefit because if the customer wants to reorder, they will most likely come back to your website for repeat purchases since they know nothing about the company that actually shipped their order.

Also, one nice thing about drop shipping is that it’s low maintenance. You don’t need to keep inventory, pay payroll or even rent to store all of the merchandise.

Additional Information On Drop Shipping

If you’re interested in reading more on drop shipping companies you can view an entire article that I wrote on making money drop shipping. In the article you’ll find information on locating drop ship companies in additional to common fees that you’ll likely incur.

Best regards,
David L.
www.WebsiteToad.com

I was thinking about what I would write about next and I thought that a common question is how to make money online so my next few posts are going to be a few different ways to make money online. When you decide to make a website you’ll want to have a clear idea of what your intentions are or you’ll find that you keep having to go back and make changes to your website.

What Is An Affiliate Program?

Affiliate programs allow you to make money by referring your website visitors to a specific companies products or services. Most affiliate programs are free and can be setup in about 5 minutes.

After you have completed your registration you’ll be given a unique id within a link to the website for example, www.VendorSite.com/affid=1234. When you make your own website you’ll simply link to the vendors website using this unique URL.

When a visitor to your website clicks on that link a cookie is placed on their computer to ensure that you are given credit for the referral. If the visitor completes a purchase with the vendor you’ll receive a pre-defined percentage of that sale.

Some companies pay you per lead such as mortgage companies. What happens here is if the visitor completes a form or some other lead generating method you are paid for that as well. As I mentioned, you’d run into this will mortgage companies in addition to insurance companies, credit card companies, etc.

Low Startup Cost

As I mentioned, setting up an account as an affiliate is generally free so it’s a great way of making some additional money without having to come up with any sort of money up-front.

If you happen to have a particular subject that’s related to your website you can search for companies that offer affiliate programs and link to them. This is your best option because if your website is related to cars it doesn’t make much sense to have affiliate links to baby gifts.

Additional Information

I have created an ‘how to’ page on making money with affiliate programs if you’re interested in reading information on affiliate marketing and easy ways to manage you’re affiliate campaigns it’s definitely worth reading.

Best regards,
David L.
www.WebsiteToad.com

I’ve spent the last 5 posts explaining how to make a website, basically from scratch. Well I wanted to spend 1 post on how to build a website using an online website builder.

For those are unfamilar with an online website builder, it’s an online application that will allow you to build a website without needing to purchase software that needs to be loaded on your computer. You simply visit the login page and everything is there ready for you to make updates from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.

This is ideal for those who just want to put up an informational site with some text, photos & images related to their business without having to learn all of the HTML involved with building a website we offer Website Tonight.

Online Website Builder Demo:

URL: login.websitespot.com
Username: wssdemo
Password: Wsspassword1

Popular Online Website Builder Features:

1. Step by step setup
2. No HTML needed
3. 100+ Templates
4. Video & Audio Uploads
5. Easily publish changes
6. Click Here For A Complete List Of Features

This will allow you to login and see exactly how easy it is to change templates add images & text as well as publish your website. Once you’ve made some changes & published them you can view your changes at www.WebsiteSpotDemo.com.

The great thing is that you can update the template that you choose at any time and we offer upwards of 100+ templates to choose from. It’s definitely an option for building a website without the struggles of developing a website from scratch.

Another great thing is the built in HTML modules that will allow you to customize your site with HTML if you happen to need to insert HTML code or you’d like to have more control over the look of your site. You won’t find this flexibility with a lot of online website builders so please be sure to take a look at this when you’re testing out our demo.

Please contact me with any questions because I think that once you’ve had a chance to try the demo that you’ll love the online website builder.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

So far I’ve covered some of the basic steps on how to make a website but I haven’t covered images & nor creating a blog. The images are a very important part of your website in regards to keeping visitors interested & for search engine optimization. A blog is going to keep content your website fresh and if you can write content that’s valuable, it’s going to keep people coming back to your website.

Tip 7: Images & Photos

How often to you revisit websites that don’t spice up their site with images or illustrations? For me, it’s rarely. I like to look at images & photos because it can answer questions without having to read through tons of content.

It’s important to place images on your website but don’t over do it. Many people still use dial-up for their internet connection so it’s important to use images that aren’t to large or exceed 72 pixels/inch. Most monitors don’t resolve more than 72 pixels/inch so you’re just making the images larger for no reason at all.

Another important part of images is the ‘alt’ tag, obviously search engines can’t figure out what an image relates to so it’s important to give your file a descriptive name and use the ‘alt’ tag. A good example of this would be something on the order of <img src=“chrome-wheels.jpg” alt=“Chrome Wheels” />.

To break this down you’re telling the search engine that your image is named ‘chrome-wheels.jpg and the alt tag is another way of describing to the search engines what the image is related to. It’s important to use the alt tag as often as possible because it’s a way of optimizing your web page for search engines.

There is a huge selection of image editing software on the market from free options like Gimp to higher priced editors such Adobe PhotoShop & Adobe FireWorks. I personally use both, I use PhotoShop for editing photos and I use FireWorks for creating and editing images such as banners & buttons. The later two offer advanced features so be sure to research them before making a decision.

Tip 8: Blogs

I’m running long so I’m going to make this short. Blog is short for Web log that consist of regularly updated entries displayed in reverse chronological order. Essentially an online diary or journal. The great thing about blogs is that search engines love blogs because of they are generally updated with new content and generally updated with unique content. You’ll find that almost every single web host offers a blog application with their hosting services.

There are a lot of different options in regards to blogs from hosted versions such as BlogSpot.com to versions that you host under your own domain such as WordPress. I personally use WordPress because I can host it on my own server and there are so many features that you can add to it. By the way, no matter which you choose, blog software generally is free.

You’ll find that we offer WordPress with all of our web hosting accounts as well. One final thing, I’ve covered just a very small area of blogs. In my opinion the best website regarding blogs and how to make money with blogs is at ProBlogger.net. I personally check with ProBlogger.net about 2 – 3 times per week so it’s a great idea to check them out.

In my next post I’m going to cover a couple of SEO, search engine optimization techniques.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com

I just wanted to leave one more quick post regarding web hosting. These are definitely a few things that you’ll want to look at when searching for a web hosting company.

1. Phone Support – Any major web hosting company is going to offer phone support and I wouldn’t host without it. Imagine your website goes down on a day when you have a press release coming out or some other major event where you expect a surge in website traffic. Now imagine that your website goes down and all you can do is send and email to support. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience and phone support is a necessity. Don’t even consider a web host unless they have a posted phone number on their website.

2. Uptime Guarantee – Most hosting companies will offer something like “99.9% Uptime Guarantee”. This is something to look for as well, 99.9% is very good and really no one can guarantee 100% uptime. I’m sure some companies will claim 100% uptime but just be sure that they offer something very close to 99% uptime.

3. Monthly Commitments – I don’t really recommend paying for a year or so upfront. If you sign-up with a hosting company and find out that it doesn’t meet your needs you’re really not out anything. Granted, most offer a 30 day money back guarantee but why have to mess with billing or customer support when you can simply pay month to month. Once you’ve had a chance to host your website for a couple months you may consider committing for a year so that you don’t have the month to month billing plus you’ll find that you generally will save money by prepaying for a year but I don’t suggest signing up for a full year right off the bat.

4. Setup Fees – Unless your getting into a dedicated machine or something that requires custom configuration I would never recommend signing up with a web hosting that requires a setup fee. There are too many reputable web hosting companies that don’t charge a setup fee.

5. 30 Day Money Back Guarantee – What is it going to hurt to be able to try out a web host and know that you can get your money back if you’re not satisfied with their service or support. Again, there are too many reputable companies out there that offer 30 day money back guarantees out there to not choose one.

That’s it for this post, I’m going to leave one more post regarding web hosting and we’ll get into design & the rest of the basics.

Best regards,
David Lalumendre
www.WebsiteToad.com