Jed Clampett, an Upcoming Survey, and a Free Dropshipping Course

Personally delivered to you by Steve Lindhorst, author of
"Selling on 'the River' and "The Niche Book"

The newsletter has a new design. I finally caved and bought the "Thesis Theme" for WordPress and Oh my Gosh - it is the best thing ever for a WordPress blog. As part of the new design, I've added jump links to the "In this Issue" section, so you can skip around and read the articles you like. I hope you like it.

Despite what you may hear on the news, people are still buying and selling. If you are in a position to offer bargains on your products, there are shoppers looking for you. The recession is creating opportunity for many, I hope you're taking advantage of it. Remember, when life hands you lemons, slice them and put them in your gin and tonic. On to the newsletter...

In This Issue

1. Pre-Paid Labels for Your Amazon Orders - Interested?
   
2. You Could Be Sitting on a Goldmine
   (Interview with Jim Cockrum)
   
3. PayPal Shipping Labels - Not Going Anywhere
4. If you want to Learn About Dropshipping, this is a Must Read...
   

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1. Pre-Paid Labels for Your Amazon Orders - Interested?

What's one of the most common questions new Amazon.com sellers ask?
Without a doubt, it's: "Is there an automated way to create pre-paid shipping labels for my Amazon orders?"

If you have sold on eBay, and created shipping labels through PayPal, there is a good chance you have wished for the same ability when selling on Amazon. Sellers use a variety of methods to get their Amazon orders shipped. Many print the shipping address and pay for the labels over the counter at the Post Office. Some create labels one at a time through PayPal, typing in the address for each order. In any case, it's a pretty time consuming process.

Your Feedback Appreciated

I am looking into creating a web-based tool which will eliminate the clumsy process of shipping Amazon orders. Before I get too far in development, I'd like to know:

1. Is there any interest in such a tool?
2. What features would you like to see?
3. What price range would be fair for a push-button, web-based shipping tool that would grab your current Amazon orders, and spit out a pre-paid shipping label?

To find out what you think, I've created a survey with SurveyMonkey. On Sunday evening, May 10, 2009. I'll send you an email with a link to the survey. It should only take a few minutes, but it will determine the interest, as well as some of the features that may be included. Please take a few minutes to fill it out - it's only about a dozen questions. I'd really appreciate it!

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2. You Could Be Sitting on a Goldmine(Interview with Jim Cockrum)

Remember Jed Clampett? Barely kept his family fed. "And then one day while a'shootin' at some food, up from the ground come a'bubblin' crude? Oil that is...black gold...Texas tea."

Well, that story might sound a bit far fetched, but some people are finding there are businesses right in their own hometown that are willing to pay you for help. Many of you know who Jim Cockrum is. Jim helped me get started when eBay University ended and I wanted to write and market "Selling on 'the River." If it weren't for Jim, you would not be reading my newsletter right now. I owe him a lot.

Last year when he told me he was starting up a new site that had something to do with local businesses, I didn't quite understand where he was going with it. He said something about helping local businesses get on the internet.

It's a proven fact that people search for local businesses on the internet more often than they use the old-fashioned Yellow Pages. But you would be amazed at how many businesses right in your hometown do not have any kind of website.

I became a member of Jim's site, OfflineBiz.com. Since then, seven local businesses have paid me for my internet knowledge. To top that off, I never made a single sales call. They were all people I already knew, and the business just came from normal conversations. What amazes me is that I have pretty basic internet skills, but I'm way ahead of the offline businesses.

I interviewed Jim about the site for you here, he explains things a lot better than I do. I hope you enjoy it:

Steve: Can you give a brief description of OfflineBiz.com? Why did you start it?

Jim: OfflineBiz.com was established as a result of the huge trend towards online/offline marketing. Let me explain that:

A lot of businesses in your local community don’t understand internet marketing.

Maybe they've put up a website, but it’s not generating any results. Maybe they’ve played around a little bit with email marketing, but in 99% of the cases, they haven’t got it figured out yet. So, as internet marketers if we understand even just a few basics we can help them dramatically. All we have to do is apply a couple of very simple concepts and it can revolutionize most traditional businesses. It’s not complicated or difficult to go into a traditional business and help them with their internet marketing.

Your only competition in this industry are the so called "professional web designers" that are charging tens of thousands of dollars to set up websites, and typically those websites don’t work because there is no marketing.

Even if you aren't a web designer yourself you can do this. You can use outsourcing to get all of the work done. So, for example, I don’t build websites myself EVER. I never have because it's just not necessary for me to do the "techie" stuff. I pay other people to build my websites for me and when I work with a businesses that need a website built, I’m not the one doing the work then either. I outsource all of that.

Steve: This is a relatively new site. Do you have any success stories to share with us?

Jim: We have numerous success stories. Literally daily we’re hearing from people who are members of this website with new success stories. So far, we have 3,500 members and among them are literally dozens and dozens of extremely successful offline marketers.

There’s also hundred of others who are just doing a little bit on the side and creating great income streams from their efforts. For example, if you set up an email marketing campaign for a business you can charge every month to manage that email marketing campaign even though it’s 99% automated- you’re not doing a whole lot.

These are the kind of concepts we teach people. And once you understand the simplicity of this business model, literally anyone with the basic grasp of internet marketing can do it. I would encourage your readers to go over to OfflineBiz.com and check out the success stories that are plastered all over the site. We’ve got dozens of them right there where you can read from the main page of OfflineBiz.

Steve: How do you respond to: "I just lost my job, how quickly can I make this work?"

Jim: In some cases, it can take a couple of weeks to get this business established. So, hopefully, you’ve got a few weeks of reserves. If you ever lose your job, I know it can be a desperate time, but this is one of those opportunities that you can get going very quickly. We actually have people making money the first day they tried this business. In some cases, the first client that you get can take care of your entire family’s budget. You have to understand businesses are used to paying thousands of dollars for advertising and marketing. And if you show them a better way to do it, that’s money they could be paying you. So – yes – if you just lost your job, this is the kind of thing that you could use very quickly to start generating income. It’s a very legitimate business. Your services are in VERY high demand and we show you how to get the phone ringing very quickly.

Steve: Who are the featured experts on the site?

Jim: Andrew Cavanagh and I are the co-founders of this site. He has over a decade of experience assisting real-world businesses or what he calls brick-and-mortar businesses with their marketing and internet marketing efforts. I’ve also been paid up to $750 per hour to assist traditional businesses with their marketing needs as well. So, we’ve both got a lot of experience in the world of internet marketing with real world businesses.

The forums are full of people who are doing this business. We have hundreds of people daily that log in to the site and our forums are extremely busy with activity and posts and comments especially for paying members. Now, we do have a free area on the site where you can join in discussions with other people who are free members, and those areas are moderated by our experts as well, but the most active section of our forum is in the paid area.

You can check the site out for free by checking out the free forum area and seeing what kinds of things are being said and what questions are being answered and asked there. It's a good way to check this opportunity out.

Steve: What are some "member only" benefits of the site?

Jim: If you’re interested in checking out the site, what you should do is go to OfflineBiz.com and download the free report from the upper left hand corner. That will give you a good idea of what the site is all about. There's also page that lists eleven reasons why you should be a PAID member and not settle for a free membership. Read over those two things and you’ll quickly be able to come to the decision if this is something that’s for you or not. I think for anyone with basic internet marketing experience though, you’re crazy not to use this idea as part of your overall business strategy with internet marketing.

The lists of benefits for this site is constantly growing. I would have to say that there’s thousands of dollars value in specific training and education and resources that you can use. For example, one of the tools we give you is the four-line-letter. This letter has about 40-50% response rate when you drop it in the mail to businesses in your local. 40-50% of the time, you’re going to get a phone call back when you drop this letter in the mail to businesses in your area-- that’s how effective it is. So, these are the kinds of tools that we put in your hands once you join as a paid member.

We have members telling us that they belong to OTHER membership websites that charge nearly a thousand dollars per month but they prefer our site over those sites...and we cost a TINY fraction of that.

Steve: What if a person lives in a small town? Is there business there?

Jim: Yes! We heard from someone just a couple of days ago who lives in a town of 11,000 people. Even his entire community that surrounds this town is a total of only 35,000 people. And he said, within a month he had more business than he could possibly handle. He was just writing a letter on the forums to us to let us know that he was very grateful for the opportunity and telling us that, at first, he was skeptical because he lived in a small town, but after joining and trying a couple of techniques that we tried him things took off! Within a month he has more clients than he can possibly manage. And now, he’s starting to outsource the work to other members that are helping him get the job done, and he’s the one that’s gets paid. You see, it’s easy to find businesses that need help and it’s easy to find people that can help them. You’re just the middleman making sure that the work gets done. That’s very successful business model, and it doesn’t matter what size of town you live in. Another factor that negates the ‘small-town’ excuse is that you can work with businesses all over the world. There’s no reason you have to limit yourself to your local geographic region. We have many members who are working with clients in other countries already. Andrew Cavanagh has clients all over the world and he explains a lot of his success strategy in finding these clients as part of the membership area at OfflineBiz.com.

Steve: Can I go at my own pace? Can only do this part-time?Jim: You can absolutely do this part-time. I would actually encourage you to always treat it as a part-time thing. You’re doing something wrong, actually, if you wind up working 50 hours a week doing this business. You can take on multiple clients -- dozens and dozens of clients—and still have that very part-time job with residual income if you do it the way we teach you to.

The key is to use outsourcing. You should be charging your customers a flat rate to manage their email marketing and their search engine optimization efforts – the very basic efforts. For example, using pay-per-click marketing with Google adwords and managing their campaigns is worth several hundred dollars per month to any business in the area; and it’s only few minutes of work for you each month and even that work can be completely outsourced to someone else.

So, there’s no need to think of this as trading dollars for hours. You’re really creating residual income strings for yourself and it should be a very part-time effort.

Steve: I hate cold-calling. How can I still approach local businesses?

Jim: Well, the short answer to that question is: Don’t cold-call.

You should never actually try to close business over the phone. Now, it maybe necessary sometimes to do just that, but I would really suggest that you establish relationships in other ways and not get into a salesman role with this business. And here’s what I mean:

The way we teach you to contact businesses is to approach them with a really good idea, not approaching them as a salesperson, but as a person who has an idea of how their business could benefit from the internet. And you just give them the entire idea. You lay it right at their feet and say ‘Hey! I think you should try this. I think it’ll really work. Here’s several other examples of businesses that use this exact idea and it’s working. I think you should try it.’

What that business is, inevitably, going to come back to you and say is ‘Hey! That’s a cool idea. Where’d you get that idea? Do you do this for a living?’. Don’t approach your local businesses as a consultant that’s there to help them so you can get paid. Approach them as a fellow business owner that has had some success on the internet and you’re just sharing some ideas. It's just a matter of offering to help them out once you are a "fellow business owner with good ideas".

The co-founder Andrew Cavanagh, doesn’t even have business cards. He doesn’t even have a website or a business name. He just does internet marketing and just happens to offer his services from time-to-time to businesses he knows and does business with. It can be that easy. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You don't need a business name, logo or business card. It can be very very simple. You can be walking into businesses, proposing an idea, walking out with a check for $1500 or $2000 dollars, implementing the entire idea the next few days or outsourcing it so someone else can implement the ideas. And you move on to your next client collecting a few hundred dollars per month from each client as you go, for managing and maintaining the email marketing, the search engine optimization, etc.

Steve: Not everyone can build a website; can I still do this business?

Jim: I’m one of the people that can’t build a website and I’m very successful at this business. As a matter of fact, I encourage you not to add on to your technical skills as you pursue this business. Adding to your technical skill set can be a complete waste of time especially when you can outsource the work so inexpensively. You’ll make a whole lot of money if you don’t waste your time doing the work that others could be doing very inexpensively. We’ll show you exactly how to find people that can do the work for you and get it done right, get it done fast, and get it done far better than you could ever do it yourself.

Steve: How much does membership cost?

Jim: Right now, membership is extremely inexpensive. You’ll probably laugh when you see how low the pricing model is on this site. But, what we’re trying to do right now is build up a community of people that are doing this business and we've pretty much achieved that. With 3,500 members, we’ve got a nice active community already rolling. So, our prices will likely quadruple up to several hundred dollars just to get in the door. And probably $50-$90 per month to maintain a membership.
Right now it’s priced very low though and I would really encourage someone if they’re considering this business; they need to get in NOW rather than wait because our pricing will be going way up very soon.

We really do hear from members all the time that this is their favorite forum online. The difference with the OfflineBiz.com forum compared to most forums that are out there is we have a lot of people who are very successful at this business. That's who you'll be hanging out with and discussing ideas with. You’ll see that immediately when you log in. So, what you should probably do is get a free membership at a minimum and check out the discussion forums. If you wanna go a step further, pay a few dollars, become a paid member, and we will hold your hands step-by-step in setting this business up. You will not fail if you follow the steps that we’ve laid out.

It’s a proven success strategy with exact tools and exact help that you need to make this a success.

Hey, Steve. Thanks for the great interview. I really appreciate your time.

I hope you enjoyed that. I can honestly say I get more inspiration from the forums at OfflineBiz than any other. I am amazed how simple this is, and it's been right under my nose all the time. Just like Jed Clampett's "bubblin' crude."

Visit OfflineBiz.com and get the Free Report showing how some people made $1500 the first day - it is not some impossible scheme - it's just simple business.

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3. PayPal Shipping Labels - Not Going Anywhere

eBay recently announced that they would be moving the entire shipping process for eBay items within eBay. Currently, when a sale is made on eBay, sellers are transferred to PayPal to create their prepaid shipping label. What will this mean for people who use PayPal to create shipping labels for non-eBay items?

I recently contacted my old friend Jason Miner, host of PayPal Radio and asked him this question. I used to teach eBay University with Jason, he's a great guy and reliable source. In answer to my question, he said:

All functionality at PayPal in terms of shipping remains. There will be an ability to continue to pay for labels through your PayPal account for non-eBay packages, and multi-order shipping will still be available at PayPal, too.

That was a relief. I regularly use PayPal for shipping eBay and non-eBay items, along with miscellaneous items. Many small sellers on Amazon, Bonanzle, eCrater, etsy.com and other venues, use PayPal lables to ship.

In case you can't find the link to create a shipping label outside the eBay process, you can get the link to create non-eBay labels here.

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4. If you want to Learn About Dropshipping, You Have to Read This...

You can get started making money online in a variety of different ways:

Selling your own product, marketing affiliate products, selling an info-product, etc. But, one of the best ways I've seen to make money online is through dropshipping. Billions of dollars are made through dropshipping every year.

But, there are 3 critical dropshipping mistakes people make every day.

It seems simple, you upload an image of the product and a description to your website or auction, sell the item, collect the money and then send the wholesale payment to the supplier and pocket the profit.

The supplier ships the product to your customer and you never even have to touch the product.

It can be a wonderful business.
BUT there are three Things to watch out for:

Critical Danger #1:
The wholesale price of single drop shipped items is higher than buying many at one time. This is because the drop shipper does most of the work for you (packing, shipping, etc.) and charges for that extra work.

You need to learn how to price drop shipped products competitively in the right markets; otherwise you won’t make any sales.

Critical Danger #2:
You should only be using ONE drop shipper per web site. If you use multiple drop ship suppliers on your web site, you run the very real

risk of your customers ordering products from different drop shippers in the same order. The danger here is that since your customer’s products are coming from different drop ship wholesalers, you will be charged for shipping several times over. And hence, make a loss on the sale.

Critical Danger #3:
Drop Shipping is a low cost ENTRY POINT into a successful online business, but is not meant to be a permanent solution. Most people don’t realize this, and don’t use Drop Shipping correctly in order to advance their business to more profitable stages.

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

BUT, there is plenty more to learn.

Out of all of the companies I've seen online, no one knows more about dropshipping than Worldwide Brands.

This is all they do. Research and pre-screen wholesale manufacturers every single business day.

For a limited time you can get their $97 product, Dropship Focus for F.R.E.E.

You get:

• 23 interviews with the top drop ship and wholesaling experts in the world.

• 5 online videos that walk you through the wholesale and dropshipping process.

It's an impressive product.

But the most shocking thing about Dropship Focus is the price. You would expect something like this
to cost hundreds of dollars, but not this time.

Go and see why here:
http://www.worldwidebrands.com

Thanks for letting me keep in touch,

Steve

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