Entries Tagged 'Review' ↓

More products are being sold online everyday, and competition gets tougher and tougher (especially on eBay). Yet, you still aspire to earn the bucks you want, even if right now, you are just managing a small online business. To quit is not an option. You always try to find the best deals available so you can double your profits. And after researching online, SaleHoo.com shows up, claiming they will direct you “to the most legitimate, reliable Product wholesalers, manufacturers, liquidators and drop-shippers, and you can get the results you want FAST.” What will you do now?

SaleHoo?

Whether you are looking for products to sell on eBay, on your retail shop, on your website, or you would just like to find a product at the lowest price available, SaleHoo.com claims, their service is what you need. A Product Sourcing Directory that will help you find suppliers you want and earn a maximized profit.

With 35,000 members from all walks of life worldwide, SaleHoo.com persistently strive on listing and providing information on different wholesalers, liquidators, drop shippers, and manufacturers for various products, and from different countries. Thus, giving their members a bigger chance of finding the best company to transact business with online.

It’s an enticing offer but…

Once we find any site claiming they will help us earn more when we sign up to the service they are offering “with a membership fee” we get excited yet skeptical. Are they trustworthy? Are they worth the price? So we begin searching online about this site or this service, do our homework, and the word “scam” appears on the search results. Oh, my! We lay back and think it over.

SaleHoo isn’t exempted for this word “scam”. There is a website that has been known for exposing SaleHoo as a scam. SaleHoo, however, published an open letter to explain their side on this issue.

So, what should you expect to experience with SaleHoo?

Currently, signing up for SaleHoo requires a lifetime membership / one-time payment of $67.00, and SaleHoo claims to offer their members the following:

1. Has Huge Variety of Goods Including Products
   • They have over 150 categories of goods.

   

   • Aside from suppliers in United States they have suppliers from Asia like Hong Kong, and Philippines. I also found out other countries like Australia, Finland, Britain, Canada, Egypt, Italy, etc… So depending on what product you are looking for, you have good chances to find the supplier that offers you the best deal. Make use of the fully searchable database of SaleHoo; you can sort search results by countries and by type of suppliers.
   • SaleHoo provides access to the best branded, high demand products. I have read some complaints about this statement. Some upset members say this is misleading, because the suppliers they have searched in SaleHoo’s database are selling branded products that are not authentic. SaleHoo said that major designer brands are not selling wholesale, and even don’t sell online. Therefore, if these are the products you are planning to get from this site’s service, you will be very disappointed. If there is a product you doubt is not genuine, SaleHoo suggests that you contact the supplier directly.
   • Right now, there is a feature in the site in beta stage–the Research and Analysis lab. This feature will tell you the percentage of success if you sell a product in eBay. You can check eBay prices while you are still log-in in SaleHoo, know the competition in eBay, what countries has the high and low demand, and list of adverts currently displayed online for the product you are looking for.

   

2. Lists Legitimate and Reliable Suppliers
   • Though SaleHoo claimed that their list has the best drop ship suppliers, genuine wholesale suppliers, liquidation and closeout specialists, and factory manufacturers, there are still chances that the worst are listed in their directory. That’s the point that you should take advantage of the 3 way rating system of SaleHoo. As of now, they have more than 400 supplier reviews.
   • Every supplier in the directory are rated by SaleHoo, Independent eBay powersellers, and the members themselves. So when you are interested in a certain supplier, the rating system–aside from your own analysis–will help you decide whether to continue transacting business with this supplier or not.
   • Some members often leave reviews like if this company is professional or easy to deal with. Some register complains like the company’s legitimacy is questionable; report an error on the information provided; or check the domain registration of the company. Take advantage of these helpful information, and share an input too.
   • I like one comment from a member of SaleHoo, making money isn’t supposed to be easy, do your research people. This is his response to people who are not satisfied with SaleHoo.
3. Caters to home businesses wanting low order quantities
   • “We have suppliers for you regardless of how much of an item you’re wanting to buy. 1 item or 1000.” Therefore, not all companies listed in their directory accept low order quantities. Always check the Supplier Information provided by SaleHoo.
     
4. Updates Lists Regularly / Daily Updates
   • Salehoo claims that they constantly verify and add new suppliers that pass their screen test. As I said above, there are still chances that some suppliers listed in their companies are unreliable. So with regular updates, you are assured that SaleHoo is trying their best to eliminate unwanted suppliers.
   • There are still members in the forum complaining about certain companies they have deal with like counterfeit items and scammers. I’ve noticed SaleHoo responds quickly to these complaints. The staff and other senior members constantly gives advice to these members, and suggests companies on products these members are looking for.
   • I think members should not only rely on the reviews on suppliers on SaleHoo search results, but also participate in forum discussions to keep themselves updated and informed.
5. A proven, and trusted source of info with a guarantee
   • Being listed as a verified merchant of the Fair Trade Authority (FTA), SaleHoo guarantees members that their site adheres to the FTA’s Merchant Code of Ethics and insures members for up to $300 against fraud or scam.
   • SaleHoo offers a 56-day money back guarantee (eight weeks). Members who are not satisfied with the site’s service may get their refund as long it is reported within the 56 day period.
   • Membership payments are processed by ClickBank.

What about free stuff? Other privileges?

Once you sign up you will receive SaleHoo alert software, and full access to the SaleHoo Private Members Forum. In the forum, SaleHoo will inform you what suppliers to avoid and to trust. Members freely share their experiences whether it is bad or good. I was surprised to find out that it�s all transparent! (Insulting members, however, are not allowed.) SaleHoo�s competitors are even mentioned and everyone freely discusses their views. You can send private messages to other members, too.

Education and training is also provided for free. You have access on videos and articles so you will be successful in selling on eBay, be informed on what not to sell and finding what to sell, knowing the legitimate and catching illegitimate wholesale suppliers, building an online business, etc.

If you have any problems, there is always a full time or 24/7 live customer support. There is no voice support, however. SaleHoo says, “The cost of offering live voice support would mean an increase to the membership price which we do not want to do.”

Whose side are you on?

Many SaleHoo members are sharing there success stories. They say this is a great site to work with in building an online business; their best investment; and an excellent supplier of information. However, there are also members that are disappointed with what this wholesale directory offers to them. They say SaleHoo tricked them with their marketing campaign; it’s not worth the membership fee; fake products; etc. But SaleHoo says, they don�t have control over the product of these suppliers; they only provide members access to these suppliers; offer thorough evaluation of listed suppliers in their directory; and online assistance to members so that they will be successful in achieving what they want.

Now, we see the three sides of the stories�SaleHoo, satisfied members, and dissatisfied members. Thus, to say that SaleHoo works for you will depend on what products you would like to sell, and on how persistent you are to find the wholesaler, the manufacturer, the dropshipper, or the liquidator that gives you the profit you want.

Even if SaleHoo constantly evaluates all of those that are listed on their directory, and removes those suppliers that are unworthy to be listed, you still have to analyze each of the suppliers that are rated and reviewed to find out the one that works best for you. You still have to do your homework after becoming a member. SaleHoo just provide you information and links to the official websites of these suppliers.

Remember, we differ on our wants and priorities.

My last note is�

I believe SaleHoo can be a good business, but not the one I would want to get into because of the overhead with inventory that may be involved. I prefer to have not any inventory to handle. Although I know, dropshipping may be an option it still seems like too much of a hassle for me. I prefer to just stick with affiliate programs where I just send referrals to the seller�s site.

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Disclosure: The above was a sponsored review, however the review was written to be as honest and un-biased as possible.

With different social networking sites I am registering on, sometimes I am lazy to fill up the profile section. No account profile contains the exact information about me. So I was grateful to find ProfileBuilder.com, a new online identity management platform, founded by Boyan Josic.

With this site, I can set up an online personal profile page for free and include my Profile.es icon across the web like in Facebook, Friendster, eBay, Linkedin, Match.com, and other sites that welcome HTML Code.

It is easy to register, and only requires your name, e-mail address, username, and password. By the way, you need to open www.profilebuilder.com with an Internet Explorer 7 browser, or in Mozilla Firefox.

What I like most about this product are the following features they claim:

• I can manage the information I want to show in my profile by location (websites where I included the code from Profile Builder). I can either include or remove any one of these on my Profile Page: Photos, Resume, Links, Blog, Contact, Twitter, and other Channels like eBay.

• I can track where and when my profile is being accessed with their statistics feature.
• I can change the color of my profile page to match with my personality. There’s more options coming for page customization!
• And more exposure! I can put the feeds of up to 5 of my blogs, and show the items I sell in eBay!

As of now, the product is on its beta stage, so it is nice to let ProfileBuilder.com know the problems I encountered when I was using the product.

1. Though I can easily understand how to use their dashboard, there was a button here that isn’t working properly or missing.
   • In managing channels option, I wanted to add or design my own so I click Design your own button, but it didn’t work. I tried clicking the word �or� just because my mouse cursor changed to a hand, but it led me back to my dashboard.

   

2. To save time, I cut and paste my resume from my Word file, but it turned out to be more trouble. It does not appear on the profile page. So I have to type my resume in the dashboard. Yeah, it is just a one time effort, but isn’t it more convenient if I can upload my word or pdf file? I found out through their FAQ, though, that they are currently working with flashpaper to add a very cool feature for the Resume page. Therefore, we still have to wait for a couple of weeks before we can spread our outstanding resume across the web.
3. How do I add an HTML code with Javascript on my Facebook and Friendster page?
   • Profile Builder claims that I can put my online personal page on Facebook and Friendster, but these two sites do not allow any code with Javascript. Though I can add an application that enables HTML code in Facebook, this is how the Profil.es icon will look like on such an application�barely visible. Profile Builder suggests putting your name before the icon, and I did.

   

   • I’d rather fill up the Profile section of my account on these sites and add tons of cool applications to show my friends who I really am, than having a barely visible icon that supposedly direct people to know more about me. But this mini icon could work well if you include it in an online article that mentions you. Put the icon next to your name, like Marycris Guevarra . (Click the icon)
   • The code does not work in my Friendster profile page, unless I put the code as a comment in my profile, or put the icon in my Friendster blog, or in Blogger.

Overall, I still find the product innovative. Besides the beta version just launched this July 29. They are still working on new tools and products to be added on the site. So, we can still expect a lot of improvements like customizing the look of our profile. Registration is free so experience it for yourself. They welcome feedback in order to improve the product.

I find Profile Builder helpful to employers and people looking for a job, or to those individuals out there who want to promote their works or businesses across the web. Everyone can search any profile made in www.profilebuilder.com in www.profil.es, by using the name of the person or by using keywords.

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Disclosure: The above was a sponsored post, however the review was written to be as honest and un-biased as possible.

I first heard about AGLOCO about a month ago but didn’t really look into it further. However, yesterday I did a little research and decided it was worth at least joining and trying out. From my understanding, AGLOCO will make money through advertisers, but instead of keeping all the profits for themselves they will share it with their users based on how much they surf the internet. At the moment they are in a sort of prelaunch phase, so they aren’t paying out yet, just building up their community in preparation for the launch of their viewbar. From the reviews I’ve read I can tell you this company is legitimate and judging by how fast they have grown even before they have launched their viewbar they will likely have a very large network in a very short amount of time (They have a goal to reach 10 Million members by July 1).

What interests me the most as an internet marketer is their referral program. Not only can you earn money from your own surfing, but you can also earn money from the surfing that your referrals do and even on down to the surfing your referrals referrals do, to a total of five levels deep. In this sense that makes AGLOCO a network marketing company. I am not usually a big fan of network marketing because it seems most of these companies sell their products for a lot more than they are actually worth, but AGLOCO is not even selling a product, you make money simply by referring people to the network. AGLOCO is actually giving away money, not taking it as most network marketing companies.

As an AGLOCO member myself, I obviously would like you to join also through my referral link, but I am willing to offer some bonuses as an incentive to join my network. Since, I just signed up yesterday I am not really sure what to offer as bonuses, but here is what I can think of so far…

• Free Internet Marketing Tips: As I start to promote AGLOCO, I will share my experiences with my network so you can use the exact same marketing tactics I use to grow your own network. I will give very specific instructions for what is working the most effectively, so even if you have no marketing experience you can still be successful just by copying what I am doing. You can also share these tips with your own network.

• Free Referrals: Every once and a while I will pick one of my direct referrals at random and start promoting AGLOCO using their link instead of mine. So if you get chosen I could give you a lot of free referrals. I will give preference to those who joined my network early on. So if you join within the next few day I can pretty much guarantee you that I will choose your link within a couple weeks and get you some free referrals. In fact, I may even stop promoting my own referral link after a while and just promote the links of my direct referrals as a way to reward those who joined me early on.
  

• Free Bonus products: I will give away free eBooks and software that I have rights to and allow my network to share the same products with their network.
  

If you have any more ideas please suggest them. Since this company is fairly new this is a great chance to get in on something big before everyone else hears about it. Please check out AGLOCO and join my network, so I can start helping you build your network in preparation for the viewbar launch.

http://www.agloco.com/r/BBBV1362

Update: Since AGLOCO doesn’t give contact information for those who sign-up using your referral link please subscribe to my blog feed to take advantage of the free internet marketing tips and bonus products I suggested offering above. I will be providing these to my blog readers.

I just wanted to share this site with anyone who hasn’t heard of it yet. Pandora is a music site that plays music you are likely to enjoy based on music you know you already like. All you have to do is enter a song or artist you like and Pandora will choose similar songs to play. They do this using the music genome project. I know there are many other sites out there that try to do something similar, but from my experience Pandora does the best job at choosing songs I like but have never heard before. They do a good job at leveraging the power of the internet to customize content based on individual preference.

I first started using Pandora about a year ago, but have started using it more frequently after having heard the founder speak at a conference recently. I would probably use it as my only source of music if they had some sort of portable music device, since I tend to get bored easily when listening to songs I own, and find public radio often plays music I don’t really like. I am a huge fan of Pandora.

There are hundreds of ways to promote a business online. I come across new ways to advertise and promote a business online almost every week. However, to simplify things I recommend you first consider doing the following things to get the most bang for your buck.

1. Do some basic Search Engine Optimization
Search engines can bring in a huge amount of highly targeted “free” traffic to your website. You can just launch your website and hope you get listed in Google, but with some SEO knowledge and some effort you can almost guarantee that you will get traffic from search engines. My article Three Steps to Search Engine Traffic outlines a pretty straightforward SEO strategy to follow. While it isn’t really too hard to learn the basics of SEO, it is important to remember that the most important factor in SEO is backlinks, which could take a bit more knowledge and some creativity to obtain in a cost effective manner. Knowing how to do SEO and having the creativity and resources to carry out a plan are two separate things. If you have the budget, hiring an outside SEO firm or an SEO expert in house would be a good investment.

Many of the promotion methods listed below will help you obtain backlinks which will complement your SEO efforts, so it is important to consider SEO first so that you can best leverage the impact of other promotion methods.

2. Run PPC Campaigns
Running a Pay Per Click Campaign is probably the quickest way a business can start profiting from their online presence. One great thing about PPC campaigns is that you can know exactly how much profit you are making on each keyword and you can test different ad copy and get quick results. For a good introduction to Adwords, Google PPC network, check out Perry Marshall’s free course 5 Days to Success with Google AdWords.

PPC click campaigns can also complement your SEO efforts. As you find out what keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are converting the best you can adjust your SEO efforts to put a greater priority on the things that are converting the best in your PPC campaigns.

3. Start a blog
There are many benefits to blogging. It helps build a community around your business, helps with your SEO efforts (it creates more content and attracts backlinks), it can act as a “maven trap” (discussed in The Tipping Point), it empowers customers to easily spread the word about your products and business, and it can help you network with others in your industry.

4. Pay Bloggers to Review your website and/or products
Within the past six months or so many websites have launched which will help you find bloggers to write reviews. The four that I am aware of are ReviewMe, PayPerPost, Blogitive, and LoudLaunch. ReviewMe seems to be the best if you want to reach a large audience because the bloggers there tend to have a larger readership, but you will also pay a lot more per review than the other blogger review sites. PayPerPost could be a good option to increase your backlinks, but don’t expect as much traffic initially as you would from a ReviewMe Review. I have no experience with Blogitive and LoudLauch but I will be writing about them when I do.

I hope these tips help you get the most from your presence online. Feel free to contact me if you have specific questions, and check back often for more advice and tips in the future.

A new website called Review Me, which pays bloggers to write reviews, just launched yesterday. It is similar to Payperpost.com, but has a few differences that in my mind make it superiour. One difference is that while Payperpost pays all bloggers the same amount per opportunity, review me pays bloggers based on how much thier blog is worth based on several factors, such as traffic and feed reach. For example this blog would fetch $60 for any review. However, bloggers have to be invited to write a review on review me. The differences in Review Me and PayPerPost will cause more high scale bloggers to be drawn to Review Me since they would be able to make more money per post, while more lower end bloggers will be drawn to PayPerPost since they would be able to easily write post after post and accumulate quite a bit of cash, whereas their opportunities may be more limited on Review Me. As an advertiser, although it may cost more to get reviews written on review me, the cost may be worth it because advertisers have control over who they invite and since there will be more higher end bloggers available, who have a larger readership, news about what is written in the initial review(s) could spread furthur than they would on PayPerPost.

The above was a paid review (this fact did not influence my opinion, though).

I was glad to find that someone had launched a site with the intent to pay bloggers per post on their blog when I found out about PayPerPost.com, although I was kind of disappointed to find out that I was not the first to launch such a site. My friend Garrett and I had this same idea and actually met to work out the details about six months ago. However, we agreed that we did not have the resources or time at that moment to really make it work. I remember thinking to myself I don’t care if someone else takes this idea because I would just like to see such a website exist so I could you use it to advertise my own projects.

On a related note. Yaro Starak, has recently published a free eBook for bloggers, teaching different ways bloggers can make money. He is also offering a membership mentor program to teach bloggers all about making money with blogs. Check out Yaro’s free ebook by clicking here.

I recently created two accounts at PayPerPost.com. One as an advertiser and an other as a blogger. I wanted to try out blogging for cash so I added this blog on thier site as my blog that I wanted to use for blogging about stuff listed on PayPerPost.com. However, my blog was not approved due to the fact that it did not meet their requirement of having 20 post in the last 90 day. It is true that I do not blog very frequently, but is frequency of posts a good measure of the quality of a blog?

I’ll admit that even in my own eyes this blog isn’t that valuable. It only has a PageRank of 3, gets less than 100 unique visitors a day, and has a very small readership. However, I thought that it had least enough value to merit being paid by an advertiser in PayPerPost.com’s network. I am sure there are a lot of blogs in their network that may have very frequent posts but no PageRank and little traffic.

I am not that disappointed though, I was planning on using PayPerPost.com mostly as an advertiser. However, I am going to withhold linking to their site from their site from this post as form of protest for them rejecting my blog. So, if you want to visit their site you’ll just have to copy and paste.

I started using PageFlakes a few days ago. It is a really cool website that you can customize then set as your hompeage to see stuff like the weather, stock quotes, your e-mail, etc. all in one place when you first open your browser. This is not a new idea but PageFlakes does it better than I have ever seen before. There are several modules to choose from, and you can add RSS feeds of you favorite blogs, news sites, or whatever other site you want to stay up to date on that syndicates thier content. They also allow you to organize your modules using tabs, so instead of having everything on one page you can just see a little bit at a time then nagivate to other modules through the tabs. That is a really cool feature.

I set up all the blogs I read and a bunch of del.icio.us bookmarks to come up when I launch PageFlakes. It was taking a little too long for my taste to load so I went back to just using Google as my homepage, but I now use PageFlakes as kind of my feedreader where I go to read all my blogs and check out my bookmarks. It is a really cool site, and it is free to join, so if you have a minute you should check it out.

I also added PageFlakes to my Squidoo lens, A List of Cool Websites, so if you want to see other cool websites I have come across and recommend please check that out.

I just started using Squidoo, a website where people can share thier expertise and make some money through afilliate programs. It is a really cool site because it makes the process of sharing your knowledge and recommending products and services really easy. The way it works is you create what Squidoo calls a lens, which is just a page about certain topic. Then you tell people about your lens and you get a portion of the revenue that is generated from the lens. Each lens is given LensRank which determines where it will rank in search results on the site and is supposed to measure the quality of the lens. This rank is based on user ratings, links, clickthrough rate, and update frequency.

I have started creating a lens called “How to Rank High in Google and Other Search Engines“. Someone has already given it a rating of 2 out of 5 because I had just barely started building it at the time. So please give me a higher rating if you like the knowledge I share.

Squidoo also have a referral program where you get $5 for referring people. Here is my referral link if you want to try it out, or if you just want to be nice and let me earn $5.

http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/referral/csandb

Squidoo is a really good idea and I think it will grow fast because all the content on the site is generated by users who have an incetive to create a lot of content. Squidoo is still in its beta version so there are still some things missing but it is already a useful site.