I wrote an article about finding drop shippers on ezinearticles last night. I love this article and it has many secrets and keys to finding and working with drop shippers. That means finding products to sell on your web site. Only you don’t have to send the product to the customer, the company will.

Notice that I have a small ad (bad quality but I had no control over it) from my favorite drop ship directory called The Shipper. Check them out.

The article was a result of interviewing my friend and successful online retailer Erika Wilde of StopDirt.com. Thank you for sharing your expertise with me! I’m very interested in drop shippers and how they can help you build an online store.

Google employees who’ve made a lot of cash on Google stock are leaving to pursuit other dreams. The latest are Bret Taylow and Jim Norris, involved in starting Google Maps. The friends are going to well-known venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. The fresh faced 26 year old millionaires have unique titles there. They are “Entrepreneurs in Residence.”

What does that mean? Getting paid to think about starting a business. I know some more potential employees they might want to talk to!

Here’s the classic quote:
“This gives them paid positions to hang out at Benchmark’s offices on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road and think through starting a business. They have a specific idea in mind, but are secretive about it, telling VentureBeat only that it’s a “consumer Internet” company.”

Read my blog at www.podango.com/Google

Paul Wilson wrote about a tool that shows you how much money you could make on your blog if you used Google Adsense. It’s called Adsensemeter.com. According to that tool I could make around $1000 a month. He compared me against some of my peers. As I’ve mentioned before my friends at BuzzBooster pay their mortgage with AdSense revenue.

I haven’t put Adsense on this blog because I think it’s ugly. It interferes with the writing - which already has little aesthetic appeal. My blog in general is very much based on information. You’ll see I have affiliate ads (thank you to anyone who has bought from my blog). They are pretty ugly. But my friend Mat says, who cares. I guess I do care.

So what do you think? Should I turn on the AdSense ads and see what happens? I think I’ll turn on MightyAdsense - a Wordpress plugin - and test it out. Would it make you leave me?

I’m a little surprised that Adsensemeter doesn’t have any links to how to optimize AdSense for your blog. It seems to me, when you see the potential you want to know exactly how to. They are missing out on a chance to write articles with AdSense ads on them. Or sell ebooks or other eproducts all about AdSense. They could team up with Joel Comm, AdSense king. I just don’t understand why they are not capitalizing on this when their tool is focused on capitalizing.

P.S. - This post is a rebellion against SEO. So please excuse the funny links. I’m just feeling burned out on it today. I spent too long trying to explain it to beginners.

Free Business Cards from Vistaprint (you just pay about $5 shipping)

I just found a few sites to register domain names. It helps you think of variations. If you can use a keyword phrase as the URL of your web site, that is advantageous. Why? because if someone just links to your URL then it’s going to by default include your keyword phrase. This is a strategy for smaller retails and usually not for large online retailers. Many URLs with good keywords are going to be taken and it takes forever to search one at a time.

Jeff Barr told me about Fabulous Domains to register domain names - and I knew about domainsbot. These two web sites help you come up with a domain name for your web site.

What I want to learn more about is where and how to sell domain names. This has come up often lately. I know you can sell them on eBay. You can sell a domain name on Fabulous Domains. There is also Afternic. I want to write an article on strategies to selling domain names.

You can search for related domain names and connect straight to godaddy and other domain name registrars to buy the domain name with fabulous domain:

Thanks to Jeff Barr today is historic for my blog. Never expecting it to be read by anyone but me, I didn’t buy the domain name newspapergirl (try it out, click on the link!). I named my blog a quirky newspapergrl without an “i” because I thought it was sort of like punk rock grrrl bands in the 80s. Or it was slightly nerdy to say “grl.” Something like that. Really all I wanted to do is be a reporter and blogging has given me that and paid a lot more with a lot better hours.

Back to my story. By the time I realized I might want the a more intuitive “girl” someone had already bought the domain name. Jeff Barr came to the rescue and gave it to me for an early birthday present after I blogged about how I wish I owned it. Now if we could just give Jeff his proper domain name of www.jeffbarr.com without a dash between his first and last name.

Just today my colleague asked me if I had purchased my son’s domain name, and I haven’t. I do have plans to turn him into an internet entrepreneur when he’s older. If he’ll have it. He may just look at this whole thing as taking a whole lot of my time and attention and decide to play sports instead. I don’t know how I’d feel about that. I think if it was soccer I could get used to the idea.

I have transferred my new domain to my servers (by myself actually since I couldn’t reach a single geek friend this evening to help…yes, I’m proud of mysefl) and redirected it to this blog. My motto is try to always date a geek because it’s really painful to do yourself. Geeks and marketers actually are a good pair even though there is inherent conflicts because IT has a natural instinct to hate marketers. Next I have a new wireless router to set up and I’d rather wake up at 5am than do it myself.

To sum up after a long tangent: it’s been a real pain to tell everyone how to spell newspapergrl all this time. Now you don’t have to. Type in either spelling and you’ll get the blog.

Thank you again Jeff Barr!!

I really like BlueHost web hosting because the price is great and the service is 24/7. I rarely wait for help and it’s usually top notch. But what I don’t like is their backup makes me nervous. They don’t back up often so be sure you back up your web site or blog. I learned this lesson after adding some code to Kelly’s web site Startup Princess. It took the whole blog down for several hours. I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night.

Once the service was down for several hours and I happened to drive by where the transformer blew. I live in a part of town that seems to have more power outages than anywhere else I lived. It’s old wiring I think.

Anyway, I logged into my Bluehost account today and noticed that they offer $10 off a PRWeb press release. This is for new customers. As far as I know it’s for any paid press release. Prices start at $40 but if you want text links it will be $200. However, for your $200 you’ll get a lot of features.

Ponn is offering a FREE press release from her web site. It’s good for the $200 level - so sign up! It’s not every day you get to save $200. You need to attend one of their early morning webinars to claim it. They are excellent and I recommend them even if you don’t get a free press release out of it.

I found this great graphic that shows the pieces of a PRWeb press release. Now if they could just create a table of their prices along with features life would be easier still.

[tags] free press release, press release, web host, bluehost, web host, PRWeb [/tags]

Here are some resources to get free or low cost graphics for your web site:

www.Dreamstime.com
www.istockphotos.com
www.morguefile.com
www.txt2pic.com/ - words on a graphic – for ads
www.Free-StockPhotos.com
Flickr
www.sxc.hu

http://www.thefreesite.com/Free_Graphics/Free_photos/ - list of a bunch of free image sites

Free Image Editors
http://www.cellsea.com/java-cellsea/media/index.htm

There is a table of free icons from different people – click view to see them.
http://www.maxpower.ca/free-icons/2006/03/05/

I have a theory that the closer you are to being an entrepreneur, the more close you’ll get to being fired. It will be tough to hold a regular job because in some way you’ll always be fighting it. And employers pick up on that sort of thing.

I don’t recall ever being fired, but it’s gotten close a few times. Sometimes I felt like I was kicking the boss over and over and then got mad when they kicked back. In other words, I wanted more flexibility and things to work in certain ways and was frustrated when that wouldn’t work for a company. I still can work for other people, but doing it full-time has lost its appeal. I so far can’t bring myself to do it. And thankfully I haven’t had to since November.

Some people reach a line of no return though. Shoemoney blogged about how many times he’s been fired. I guess when you make the kind of cash he does, you can be as brazen as you want.

————————————-

Here’s Shoemoney’s list of how many times he was fired:
Happy Joes Pizza - fired
Eagles Grocery Store - fired
Target - walked out after 2 days
Best Buy - car audio - fired
Montgomery wards - Left for Sears
Sears - Washers & dryers - Left for Internet Express
Internet Express - Quit to goto college
Internet Revealed - fired
Neo Computers - fired
First National Bank - fired
Wells Fargo Financial - fired
Commercial Federal Bank - fired
Did my own company full time.

————————————————-
Working for yourself means never getting fired. What does your list look like?

– Get a blog! Bluehost helps you install your own blog 24/7 —
Reliable, Affordable Business & Blog Hosting from Bluehost.com.

One of the best ways to do well financially is to own your own business. It allows for more creativity and flexibility in your life than most employers could ever give. However, the barriers to opening a business can be high.

I get mad when people say or think running a business should happen with very little work - which is what they mean when they say it’s EASY. It can be easy, but in most cases it’s going to take SIGNIFICANT investment of either time or money or BOTH.

When someone lies to you about how EASY and EFFORTLESS their program is, they are lying to you. It flies against the basic laws of economics. When demand is high and supply is high, value drops.

Compared to other businesses, starting an online business is a BARGAIN. In an offline business you usually have to open a store, buy inventory, hire employees, etc. If you don’t know how to run the business you’ll have to get a franchise and pay them to teach you. And still work really long hours. Other people start their own business and it’s their whole life.

So if you expect to make money just putting in a few hours a week or on occasion, you’re dreaming. However, it can be fun, it really can be. Why? There is the challenge and adventure of learning. There is the feeling of knowing you created your own future.

SUCCESS has a price. And it’s not $90 for an ebook.

But online businesses have so many advantages, even if you pay someone to teach you. Even if you buy an existing web site that is already profitable (which is a good option if you don’t want to build it yourself). Of course you’re going to pay for it - need capital. BTW, you can also sell your web site.

Yes, you’ll have to learn new skills to build an online business. Yes, it will take time. It’s not like you build a web site and suddenly people buy from you with no work or investment in marketing it (just like in the offline world). However, a lot of the marketing is FREE or low cost. It takes your time. Sometimes marketing online is tedious, but it’s an investment in your future.

The more unique your concept or business the less work marketing will take. Because word of mouth takes over - people start talking about you. Ask how much marketing Twitter has done.

So to sum up: If you want success it’s going to take prolonged effort over time. It’s also going to take money. But the rewards and satisfaction can be bigger than you dreamed. Then everyone else will look at you and think it was easy for you. They want what you have. And they can have it, but they too have to pay the price. That’s just how it works.

Free Business Cards from Vistaprint (you just pay about $5 shipping)

I’m back to my gripe that blogs don’t support many fonts. Here is a collection of free fonts. You will have to use Photoshop to make the words into an image. I’ll put an example when I get a chance. I like the one called, “More than Enough.”