November, 2007

I wrote a post a few months ago about our experience dropshipping www.digitalmediastream.net/disallusioned-dropshipper. We did have moderate success with it and have since moved on. But this evening I came across an article http://www.income.com/blog/2007/07/17/what-the-heck-do-i-sell/ that is promoting the same "dropshipping is the answer" mentality that I find irritating.

We found that we had to put in much more time to make the business run smoothly than we anticipated and sold the business on to someone who hired a whole staff to make his portfolio of dropship sites run well.

Yes, dropshipping does work. Yes, it is easy to set up and get running. But, it is not entirely hands off. If you want to provide even mediocre customer service, then you will have to be available during business hours to answer peoples questions, track down orders, and coordinate returns. This is all manageable, but it isn't really the part time gig that most people are looking for. Just my ongoing opinion

I was using the Google webmaster tools when I decided to look at the their blog. I soon came to discover that posting on a Google blog requires that one sign up for a blogger account or establish a new blog associated with an already existing Google account. So I did and quickly proceeded to add a post to see how it would look and more importantly how it might work for cross linking. Nothing special, but here it is: http://vonkirk.blogspot.com/2007/11/it-never-ends.html

My true interest is in discovering how Google will treat links from within its own network. No doubt I am late to this party and many web promoters have already figured out the best approach, but it never hurts to try.