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Website Ideas for Mail Order Dealers
THE FIRST THING you need is a website! The Internet is flooded with web hosting companies offering a range of prices and features. For everything discussed below, the minimum or basic web hosting account will do. Nothing fancy is needed, not even WordPress.
HOST YOUR OWN CONTENT - My mailbox is filled daily with envelopes stuffed with sales circulars. If I'm not interested in certain offers, I toss them. These folks could save a ton of money by scanning those documents, posting them to their website, mailing out postcards, and/or publishing small display or text ads in our fine industry print advertising publications. A whole year of web hosting with Namecheap's basic plan costs less than the postage alone to mail to 100 people. Let's not talk about the cost of envelopes and all those circulars! It's a mathematical no-brainer!
JUST WRITE! - Writing blog posts is a great way to get people to your site and expose them to your products, services, and opportunities. If such websites were out there, updated regularly, and owned by Mail Order Dealers, I would visit them daily! Sadly, I have yet to find even one. Again, I'm talking about Mail Order Dealers, not just "extra income" bloggers. The Internet is flooded with those. Writing and affiliate marketing - see below - make fantastic partners!
DEALER DIRECTORY - A dealer directory can be as simple or involved as you want. You can solicit dealers to submit 50, 100, or 500 words to describe their business. You decide how many contact methods - postal mail, email, phone, or website - a dealer can include in their listing. You decide whether a dealer photo or other graphic can be included. You decide if the listing is free or available for a fee. You can tailor it to fit the theme of your website.
AFFILIATE MARKETING - In addition to promoting your products and services, you can promote the products and services of others in an "affiliate" arrangement. Social media sites are loaded with affiliate links being thrown about. A sentence and a link are about all you see. I never, ever click on them. I want to go to your website where you can tell me why I should buy whatever you're referring me to. I want to see what else is going on in your business. Most of these folks don't have businesses, but you do. You're a Mail Order Dealer. Host affiliate programs on your website and use "redirects" as described below.
REDIRECTION - If you host affiliate links on your website, this is a good feature to know about. Create a directory (folder) on your website. Then, in your Control Panel, you set up a "redirect", so that people clicking the link to that new folder are taken to your affiliate site. Your link will look a lot more professional than the original bulky affiliate link. You can create a redirect for every affiliate program or product you have.
HOST THIRD-PARTY CONTENT - Many websites host "extra income mail order" advertising, but most deal in scanned circulars and display ads, PDF files, and other graphic products. It's your website, and you can host whatever advertising formats you wish, but you might consider that the industry needs more sites that host plain text advertising. Sites that host plain text exclusively would do well.
ASSOCIATION WEBSITE - There have been a handful of associations for Mail Order dealers over the years, but as far as I know, none have had an actual website. I say "real website" because one such association did have a website. Still, it consisted of one paragraph that said something like, "For information on the (insert name here) association, write to (insert address here). I never understood this. They had the power of the Internet at their fingertips, they had the visitor at their website, and they still wanted them to write for information. Anyway, create an association - maybe a "discount advertising" club - and create a website to promote it. The possibilities are endless.
SELL BULK AD SPACE - I've never seen this done before, but I've thought about doing it myself. Offer to sell plain text ad space in blocks of 1,000, 2000, 5,000, or 10,000 words. Then, specify how long a person has to use those words. Also, determine the minimum and maximum words per ad. For example, you might not want to sell 10,000 words if the purchaser can submit 25 words at a time. You might both be in a retirement home with 1,000 words left! Consider allowing the posting of ads on behalf of other dealers. The only rules for this idea are the rules you come up with.
CO-OP ADVERTISING GROUP - I thought about this type of program in my "disk publishing" days of the mid-1990s. It will work just as well, if not better, on websites. It involves getting a handful of advertising publishers together that agree to place the advertising of all group members on their publication. So, when one member sells a text ad, it is sent to the other web publishers, who put it on their websites at no charge. This program requires that members agree to the type of advertising they will accept - text is a lot easier - pricing and how long ads will stay posted. Members can advertise something like "Buy ad space on my site, and that ad will be posted to (insert number here) other websites for the same term." Adjust this idea to work for you.
FREE ROTATING ADS - Set up an advertising page on your website. The page will hold only 50 ads. Invite dealers to submit a free text ad for this page. New ads go to the top of the page and move down one position each time a new ad is posted. Ads fall off the page after moving through 50 positions. Dealers may re-submit their ad at that time. The purpose of the program is to generate return visits to your site. Return visits happen when dealers come back to check the page to see the position of their ad. You set the number of total ads on the page and the word limit per ad. I would not try this with anything but text ads. Anything else would be too labor-intensive. With text ads, you copy and paste the ad from their submission email. You could use this system for paid ads, too.
REVIEW SITE - Do you remember the "Stews Reviews" column written by Stew Caverly? It appeared regularly in a few of the larger Mail-Order advertising publications. Stew invited Mail Order Dealers to send him a sample of whatever they were promoting, and he'd give his thoughts on it in his column. Stew's column has been gone for some time, and I don't think that void has been filled. You could fill that void with a dedicated website or a portion of a website.
EMAIL ADSHEET - Use one of your hosting account's email addresses to create an email adsheet. One idea is a "progressive" adsheet. Such an advertiser could hold 100 ads. The newest ad goes to the top, and the oldest ad falls off the list. So, a dealer emails an ad to you. Add it to the top of the ads and email the updated ads back to the dealer, along with payment instructions. There is no conventional circulation. Instead, each dealer's ad rotates through 100 positions. At least 100 dealers will receive that ad over time. Free sample copies provide additional exposure. The above is just an idea. Create a publication that works for you.
DOWNLOADING FOR DOLLARS - You can create an advertiser as a downloadable PDF file. Invite dealers to submit a free 200-word ad for the advertiser. Once you have enough ads, you can offer the file for download for a small fee. You can set up a PayPal account for payment and email the file to them or provide a password to the file's location where they can download it. You can charge for the file and give away the ad space, or vice versa. I like the "free ad" version. I'm sure you can come up with many variations of this idea.
PASSWORD PROFITS - The idea here is to post valuable information such as information reports, reprint reports, mailing lists, and other information products to your website in a single directory. You then "password protect" that directory, and instead of printing out the material for each sale, you send the purchaser the password. You can make the password permanent and allow continued access to the directory, continually updating it with new information. It's up to you!
BAD GUY REPORT - There have been a few of these over the years, but, as far as I know, only in print format. That being the case, there would seem to be a need for an online source of this information, such as "bad check" writers, non-delivery of ordered items, and other wrongdoings. Keep in mind that the ability to post something instantly doesn't relieve one from the responsibility of verifying the validity of the information.