Drop shipping is one of the fastest and easiest ways to start a business on the internet. The startup costs are low, the risk is low and it is very easy to find products that sell well. Because it is so easy, many people try drop shipping on the web.

Like any business, however, drop shipping is not the whole solution to success. A drop shipping business has to be built on a solid foundation and it must be properly promoted.

Starting your drop shipping business should include preparation of a detailed advertising plan as one of the first things on your schedule. Using an advertising plan will separate you from most of your competition because most people simply ignore writing an advertising plan. Getting products to drop ship is easy, so most people rush forward, helter skelter and sell little or nothing. But those who write and advertising plan and follow their plan are most likely to succeed.

Your success wiht drop shipping, in fact, depends mostly on your advertising plan. As a drop shipper you know that you can change your product offering very quickly without regard to inventory and stocking considerations. So it is not so much as to what you are selling by drop shipping but how you are finding customers. So critical in your planning process for your drop shipping business you must set up a detailed advertising plan.

If you are operating a drop shipping business on a limited budget, you are best advised to spend most of your money on your advertising plan rather than spending it on a complex or fancy web site. A well advertised simple web site that is only a couple pages deep will make you a lot more money than a beautiful, complex web site that no one visits. Your goal should be to get customers to your store and to get them to contact you. Then you can sell them. You do this by advertising.

Search engines are the main source of customers that most people running drop shipping businesses consider. And it is the first thing to which you should pay attention for your advertising. It is extremely important that you get your company name into the search engines, in particular the Google search engine, to start the aging process. This is important because your web site may not be shown in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) for up to a year after you put it into the search engine.

Why a year? A new web site has to age before some of the search engines consider that it is real and not a spam site of some sort. The search engines do this by putting your web site into what is euphemistically called ,,the sandbox." Your web site will not come out of the sand box until it is properly aged. So for all practical purposes, your drop shipping web site may as well not be effective for you to find clients during your startup period unless you understand that the sandbox exists and do something to work around it. (You can find a lot about the sandbox by searching the web using sandbox as your search word.)

The solution to your drop shipping business not being visible in the search engines lies with pay per click advertising. With pay per click advertising you can have information about your company displayed in the search engines within about 15 minutes of the time that you place your advertisment. And with pay per click advertising you can pay as little as $.01 per person that clicks on your advertisement and who visits your web site.

So in your first year of business, you are likely to be reliant on pay per click advertising to find customers. Those who learn to use it step way out in front of the competition.

You should also consider other very effective ways to advertise. Ezines are good places from which you can get customers. There are many that you can find that will have customers for your niche.

Beyond the ezines, however, advertise in the small consumer newspapers that deliver hundreds of thousands of copies of newspapers filled with classified advertisements. These small newspapers can not only attract people to your web site, they can attract people to your off line shop. When you consider that almost two thirds of all buyers look at products off line before they buy, you will have the advantage of building personal relationships that overcome the typical fear of buying from someone on the internet.

As you do your research into how it is best to advertise for your special situation you will find other channels, like post card marketing, home parties, telemarketing and more. You should look at all of these and set up a priority list through which you will march.

In all, as you move forward with your business, you will soon see why the key to drop shipping success is how well you promote your business as compared to everyone else, commonly called your competition. So start early and make a drop shipping advertising plan.

You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, give proper author credit by including the information about the author as shown in this page and follow all of the Go Articles Guidelines For Publishers at http://www.goarticles.com/publisher.html If you have any questions or comments, you may mail the author at ads@qlbr.com