So I’m thinking of taking a tour group to China when I return in March or April. Sort of a remote live seminar, a “study abroad” if you will.

I figure that there are a few people that are already in business, selling on ebay or from their own e-commerce stores, that are currently using drop shippers or American distributors, and would love the chance to buy all their products at a fraction of what they’re paying for them now.

For example, if you’re selling something on your website for $49, you might get it from a drop shipper for $30. It probably cost $5 in China. It’s unbelievable. Like a Hugo Boss-style briefcase that would retail here for $129 or more. There, it’s $8.00 (really).

Wedding favors that we retail for $2.95 (that sell in stores for $8) cost $2 from a drop shipper. Or you can get it in China yourself for forty cents (including all the shipping costs!) and cut your product costs by 80%.

It’s an eBay seller’s dream. On eBay, you know, it’s very difficult to use drop shippers because the margins just aren’t there. if you bring in your own stuff directly at 20% of your normal cost, you can sell it on your own web site or sell it on eBay, or even wholesale to other web sites.

The minimum quantities usually range from $2k-5k, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Plus, we could let people use our containers for shipping if they don’t want to bring entire container loads in themselves (yet). And they could use our agents for “quality control” (very important).

What do you think?

I’d have to write the whole description and web site, which will take awhile. (I’m better with short paragraphs here and there, like blog entries.
Anyway, maybe I’ll see if there’s any interest first. If there is, I’ll put up a web site, take deposits on the trip/seminar and take a few people with us on our next trip. (We’ll be going in March or April or both).

Here is my overview of the idea: If you’re interested, send an email to chinatrip@bradfallon.com and I’ll keep you posted.

I think the whole seminar/trade show/factory tour trip would last at least 7 days and would cost around $10k (if I include the $1k plane tickets so we could get a better package deal). For the $10k my seminar abroad would include the following:

- Round trip airfare to China. If we’re going to Shanghai in March, United now has a direct flight from Chicago (and L.A. and NY). (We flew on the very first one and got a little certificate and some very strange snacks for the maiden flight.) Be advised, the flight is like 16 hours in the air. Whew.

- Excellent hotel accomodations. (You really want this to be included. A lot of the hotels don’t even take credit cards.) And the ones you can schedule over the internet can be tourist traps.

- Full access passes to the trade shows we’ll be attending. (We’ll schedule the trip(s) to coincide with the big trade shows.) You kind of have to see these shows to believe them. They take up multiple buildings and are ultra, ultra modern. The only catch is that hardly anyone speaks English. Which brings up…

- Full-time personal translator. We’ll get each person (or couple) their own personal translator to be with them full-time for the whole time we’re there. (Very important. It’s not like Europe where you can always find someone who speaks a little English If you don’t have a translator with you it’s very difficult.

- Food. We’ll provide some very cool group dinners at night that will be a lot of fun. Last time we were there we played Charades and Rock, Paper, Scissors with our new Chinese friends. Both, it turns out, are universal games. As far as the food, be prepared for some exciting new tastes. And yes, it’s all very “fresh.” Meaning, it was usually alive when you got to the restaurant.
- Driver. We would supply drives to get you around for the whole time. You don’t even want to think about renting a car. Most of the time, with the taxi trips, it’s best if you close your eyes and just not look at the crazy traffic whizzing around you.

- Cruise Director. We’ll have an English-speaking Chinsese person to coordinate the group activities all week long. In addition to your own personal translator, we’ll have a full-time event corrdinate to make sure everything goes smoothly.

- Speakers. We’ll bring in some speakers to teach about the import/expert laws, legal issues like payments, letters of credit, quality control issues, third party agents, shipping coordination, etc.

- Factory tours. After or during the trade show one or two days, we’ll go out and tour some of the factories that make different kinds of products to give you an idea of how it all works. We’ll meet with the actual owners of the factories — they are always glad to meet new potential customers.

- Meet the agents. We’ll introduce you to our agents that we use both to help find products and manufacturers, negotiate with the manufacturers, coordinate product samples, handle the quality control before you pay (very important), and coordinate the shipping (for example, timing the various loads into the container for shipping).

- After the show. After we get back, we’ll let you use our agents and use our containers if you don’t want to bring in your own full container loads to start.

- Warehouse. If you need, you can bring your products in on our containers to our warehouse. Depending on what you’re selling and your quantity of stuff, we could probably drop ship it for you as well if you don’t want to store the inventory yourself.

- Fun. Going to China for a week can really be a trip of a lifetime. We’ll make sure to include some sight-seeing as well!

So that’s the idea. If enough people are interested I will put the whole thing together. We’ll probably do a couple conference calls to talk about it, and get to know the other group members, before we go.

Before I write the whole web site and descriptions of the trip, let me know what questions you have or things you think I should include in the seminar.

If you’re interested in going to China with us this Spring, send an email to chinatrip@bradfallon.com This will subscribe you to the list and I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s an interesting tidbit for Stompers to consider. Search “wholesale wedding favors” on Yahoo. Note that kateaspen.com (our new wholesale wedding favors) company is #2. (A couple days ago it was number one.)

My partner was impressed, but I didn’t DO anything. Heh.

I’ve been telling people, as you know, that Yahoo cares more about on-page factors than Google, and is more susceptible to “pure link popularity” as with link farms, cloaked dynamically generated sites, etc. (Note that the #1 site is a cloaked web site. Can you tell?)

Good or bad, such tactics are killing it on Yahoo now. But most people do it clumsily (and it still works). If I ever did a “black hat” seminar I’d probably make a fortune. Nah. There’s enough amateurish search engine spam out there as it is. Plus, it’s easy enough to do search engine marketing right.

Anyway, look at that Yahoo search. Kateaspen comes up #2 and there are only a couple links! None of them did I go out and purposefully obtain. The ONLY link I did was one from this blog. (Links on bradfallon.com anyone?) And if you look at the results, “wholesale wedding favors” has several sites vying for attention, though most are not the home page.

Granted, kateaspen.com is fairly well optimized for “wholesale weddingfavors” — I didn’t put too much effort into it, but hey, I gotta reputation to consider.
Anyway, I thought you’d find that interesting…Fairly well optimized home page, one decent link, not too terrible competitive (multi-word) search phrase, and there you go — top of Yahoo. Not so on MSN (interesting) but the MSN beta results are sarting to look pretty good to me. C’mon Microsoft, let’s launch it already!

I’m at my parents’ house in Moscow, Idaho. They are retiring in June and moving closer to Atlanta to be closer to their only grandchild. Jennifer and I are working on it, but with her party favor businesses, it’s a little hectic right now. But you gotta make time for what’s really important, eh? I’m 36 now. If I had a kid tomorrow, and that’s not going to happen, I’d be 55 when he or she graduated from high school. But I heard young kids were difficult anyway — maybe we should just adopt 7 year olds… Just kidding. Some kids are fun (my nephew for instance).

Question, do you think I should put his AdSense revenues in his “college fund”, just give it to him (when?), or let him “invest” the money himself in his own internet business, like buying stuff to sell on eBay?

How young can kids be to start their own business? Any good stories or examples, please post…

If you are buying links or aggressively collecting links from link partners, please read this Stomper Update for an important warning.

Recently, Google has been knocking (often highly ranked) pages out of the top 1,000 for certain keywords. One minute you’re on the first page, and the next day, you’re gone.

Ironically, the problem appears to be having too many of the wrong kind of links. I want to share these observations with you and tell you how to avoid this “Link Trap” disaster.

[**Note: To receive these Updates by email, please join the list to the left.**]

Google’s New “Link Trap”

Background: How I discovered this new pitfall…

As many of you know, Andy and I have been conducting an Apprentice Program for the last several months. It’s been a great experience working one on one with our apprentices and their web sites.

We’ve been working with students on real world projects, kind of like Donald Trump except no one gets fired! On the contrary, many of the Apprentices have already seen tremendous improvement in their search engine rankings and their online income is way up.

It’s been very gratifying to be a small part of helping people work toward what they want

President Bush was Magazine’s Man, sorry, Person of the Year for 2004. It was his second nod. (Clinton also got two POTY’s, though one of them was shared with Ken Starr.)

This was not surprising, given that even Andrew Sullivan blogged, “And who other than GWB has affected the world more in the last twelve months. . . .” (link to Hugh Hewitt column discussing same)

According to TIME, President Bush won, in part, simply for getting re-elected.

“For sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his ten-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years, George W. Bush is TIME’s 2004 Person of the Year”

As TIME says, for candidates, getting elected is the test that counts. “Ronald Reagan did it by keeping things vague: It’s Morning in America. Bill Clinton did it by keeping things small, running in peaceful times on school uniforms and V chips. Bush ran big and bold and specific all at the same time, rivaling Reagan in breadth of vision and Clinton in tactical ingenuity. He surpassed both men in winning bigger majorities in Congress and the statehouses.”

Interestingly, “Bloggers” were one of the runners up. According to the OpinionJournal’s Political Diary, Bush almost lost out to the “Bloggers,” who are “slowly building a shadow media infrastructure that will become a significant component of the media in the 21st century.” (will become? heh.)

Now that Google won, Geico lost, and it’s ok to bid on the trademarks of others, an enterprising blogger named Dave Pell did just that.

Dave put the following ad up on Google AdWords:

It’s only me, Dave Pell
I’m taking advantage of a popular
case instead of earning my traffic.
www.davenetics.com.

Pretty funny. He actually got slashdotted and so many people clicked on his ad that it got driven up to the very top for awhile. (As you may know, Google ranks ads according to both the bid price and the click thru rate of the ad. If you don’t know that and you want to run AdWords campaigns, buy the ebook listed in the recommended resources section at the top left.)

Interestingly, he admittedly has no business model for making money from the traffic. (He doesn’t even have AdSense on his blog.) But he makes a pretty interesting point about getting low cost traffic by taking advantage of the hot items in the news.

In the old days, savvy publicity seekers would write press releases tying their business or product into the news of the day. Today, you can just buy a Google ad for whatever hot topic people are searching for. Forget the media. Google’s search results are seen and read by more people than any newspaper or news show in the world — and it links right to your site. Cool.

For more info about how to use Google to increase your business, get Stomping the Search Engines. And let me know what you think.

Google won a big one today (Wednesday) when a federal judge dismissed Geico’s action to force Google to prevent other AdWords advertisers from bidding on their trademark.

Granting Google’s motion for summary judgment, District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that allowing competitors to bid on a trademarked “keyword” does not violate federal trademark law. If this result is followed in other courts, other companies’ suits directly against the competitive advertisers should fare no better.

The remaining question now is whether it’s ok to actually use trademarked names in your ad copy. Can Allstate advertise “Lower Rates Than Geico” in their ad. Answer? It depends. It’s probably ok if it links to a page of price comparisons, for example. It’s probably not if the just says “Geico” and then links to a site that sells a competitive product.

At any rate, the rule is settled as far as Google is concerned. You can bid on any trademarked word you want. But if another company is putting your trademark in their ad copy, they’ll look into it.

Apparently Google has come to Georgia. Rumor has it the newly public company has quietly moved into a signless building near Atlanta, Georgia. Despite the rumor that 100 jobs have been created, what would normally be a big news item, is very hush hudh. Google will neither confirm nor deny that the office even exists, the employees are not authorized to say what company they work for, and it’s all a big mystery. One reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, however, is hot on their trail in this video. (free subscription required)

Most likely, it’s just a big secure data center, as the building used to house Exodus during the dot com days.

Have you seen the new Beta version of Google Suggest? Very interesting! As you begin typing your search in the Google search box, Google suggests likely and other search terms, along with the number of resualts for each query. Here’s Google’s FAQ of this new enhancement.

Of course, the suggestions offered are based on the more popular search terms. As a Search Engine Marketer, such recommendations for the most popular searches could make “the rich get richer.” Of course, people would still be able to type any long phrase they like, but if you are already ranking highly for the most popular searches, it could make it even better. Conversely, if you are depending on traffic from a lot of lesser searched words, as with Traffic Equalizer-style pages, such efforts to drive average users towards more popular searches could decrease one’s traffic.

Brainstorm, plan, execute. Sometimes a little planning pays off — especially when it comes to good practical jokes. Like this project that a group of Yale students pulled off at the Yale-Harvard game. Getting an entire stadium full of Harvard fans to hold up signs spelling out “We Suck” is a pretty great accomplishment.