Anyone who has inquired about getting into the drop shipping arena has probably asked themselves about Doba vs Shopster. Many of you may remember the four-part series I did on Doba not long ago.

Both companies aggregate hundreds of wholesalers and allow you (as the entrepreneur) to sell products of your choosing. So let’s jump right in and see the fundamental differences I uncovered.

Shopster has an amazing backend interface with an intuitive web 2.0 feel. The web newbies and less web savvy will find solace in Shopster’s 5-step program on getting started. Literally within 15 minutes you can be online and selling products with the sitebuilder.

The sitebuilder is huge for the average joe without web skills. Doba does not offer a sitebuilder and is partnered with a company called 3XP web solutions that will cost you more money on top of your monthly subscription to get up and running.

I created two sites to see where the rubber meets the road in terms of usability. I created Dealflicker.com (Doba) and trimslimusa.com (shopster). I built dealflicker with open source Creloaded 6.2 and shopster with the built-in sitebuilder tool.

Shameless plug – If you need open source webdesign (drupal, megento, oscommerce, drupal) you should be using Hyperactive media’s web services.

Because of the custom nature of building Dealflicker, I immediately faced product distribution problems (not Doba’s fault….but lack of sitebuilder is). I had to do csv exports and custom formatting to get products out to 3rd party distribution channels like google base, pricegrabber, bizrate etc…Shopster on the other hand was a joy, I clicked on the 3rd party export channel and had 7 preformatted exports for various distribution channels.

Inventory management was the other shortfall I saw in custom building a site for Doba. Again, it would have been easy to build a custom module or add some code to facilitate inventory management, but that limits the average entrepreneur for an out-of-the-box solution. The inventory quantity seamlessly intergrates into the website to montior out-of-stock etc…

The one drawback I saw with Shopster compared to Doba was the breadth and range of products available for sale. Doba has an impressive inventory of products available to drop ship compared to Shopster’s smaller inventory. A relatively easy solution to solve for Shopster I’m guessing, as products are continually being added.

Ebay Features
Both sites had the push to ebay features where products are selected and formatted on the fly and sent to ebay for live auction. Again, the Shopster really shined in terms of interface here, although both sites were effective in terms of functionality.

Education features
Both sites had ample education resources, with Doba having more educational resources than Shopster but not necessarily presented as effectively as Shopster.

Support
Shopster was genuinely interested in making sure I had the resources needed and solving my problems. Doba was helpful as well, but leaned more toward online resources and upselling my account and 3XPservices.

Overall UI (user interface) and usability was obviously a big design choice for the folks at Shopster where as Doba was about functionality and content and large inventory, both valid approaches. I think Doba could benefit tremendously with the addition of a sitebuilder (acquisition of 3XP maybe?). Shopster could benefit from a larger inventory. In the end both are formidable drop shipping solutions but I think Shopster gets my vote in the end with the ease of use, comfort level and affordability.

Word to the Wise
Profit margin and shipping costs and fees remain to be a problem with the “drop-shipping clearing-house” space in general. It remains a challenge to turn a profit with so many mark-ups before the end user. Reason 101 of ecommerce tactics…don’t compete soley on price.

Although the ebay features are nice to haves, ebay has proven time and time again to fail as a money maker for the average drop-shipper.

The top ten traffic generation tips is one of the more popular requests from readers (actually traffic generation in general, I just chose to make it a top ten). I find this list can be about 10% subjective but will work for 90% of the blogging crowd who wish to drive more traffic. These are the top ten that have worked for me and I hope you can comment and add to this list so I can repost for the top 25 traffic generation tips…

1. Use Ping functionality. I use wordpress, so there is a simple built-in ping function for automaticly notifying sites like Google or Technorati that new content is ready to crawl. I know most of the other blogging software on the market has this function so investigate regardless of your blogging platform.

2. Quality content is king. YAWN! —-I know you have heard this a million times before, but seriously write content that means something at the end of the day. How tos, case studies, short lessons etc… You will be surprised at how little people actually write about content you’re passionate about.

3. Community. Be part of the community, you don’t have to be a hard core blogger or a prolific website owner, just some geninue comments on blogs, websites and social networks will be enough. Not only will you get inbound links to elevate your page rank, but you will make people aware of your brand. This includes leaving signatures on newsgroups, comments, forums and social groups.

4. BlogCatalog and Mybloglog. Most people will tell you Mybloglog is the way to go, but personally BlogCatalog has been a strong performer for me. Everyone is down to earth and generally cares about networking. There is a reason 73% of blogcatalog loves Startup Addict, it’s because we all support a growing community of blogs and websites that are relevant to our niche…after all that is the point.

5. Directories and linkback sources. There are so many to name here I don’t know where to start. Take a week you dedicate to the Internet and devote your time to finding nothing but directories that will give you valuable link backs and love. Consider all the heavy hitters like ezarticles, blogcarnival, squidoo, topix and many others. Just remember that web 2.0 and social media has added a whole other directory of link back sources (Facebook, Myspace). It’s better to be part of a long term del.ici.ous bookmark then an ephemeral StumbleUpon.

6. Press Releases. There are several.
Mashables has a great collection to save you on research all the paid and free services available. A good PR piece is essential for any brand to survive on the Internet. I’m offering the link to Mashables because they used #2 in this list (quality content is king).

7. Organic SEO. Do it yourself or hire it out. But the bottom line is I have far outperformed my PPC (pay per click) results by going organic. Technically this could be #8….learn a little CSS and some SEO copy writing and let the traffic roll in.

8. Yahoo Answers and Wikis. These particaluar sites are prime search engine fodder. Keywords rise fast to the top of Google in these Q&A verticals, be sure to find your niche topic and comment until you are blue in the face. Just make sure your comments or answers are actually useful and the Search Engines will reward you for it.

9. Network. Link exchanges, reaching out to fellow bloggers and website owners in your niche is worth its’ salt. Much of my relationships in the web world have come from real world contacts….don’t be afraid to leave your keyboard behind for an hour or two to reach out and make contact.

10. Use your talent for FREE! If you want to make a buck, sometimes you have to give it away first. For example….if you’re a web designer, give away a free CSS design with a linkback to you. If you are a business writer, compile an ebook and distribute for free with a link back. This causes brand awareness, linkbacks and credibility in your niche.

The big institutions like Bear Stearns and Lehman brothers (and others) starting buying up all the risky loans made during the housing boom and packaged everything up into mortgage backed securities. These were sold on the open market with high return (and high risk). In order to hedge the risk and make the securities more palatable to the buyers an insurance policy was sold along with it called a credit-default swap. There was only one catch, it was called a “swap” and not an “insurance policy” for one for important reason…regulation. A swap is not regulated and insurance is. Insurance is not only regulated but requires ample and provable capital reserve in place to cover the default, no matter how great or how many. So this loop hole was exploited with a finacial instrument called swaps and unfortunately had inadequate reserves to cover defaults in large numbers.

Again, you still ask the question how did this happen? People who are smarter than the rest of us…crazy formulas and algorithms from the brightest minds in the world came up with formulas to predict a certain amount of defaults and balance risk and reward. The one catastrophic flaw was you can NEVER model human behavior. As a result here we all are, wallowing in a bowl of our own financial piss. Capitalism that attempted to be to capitalistic. I remember asking myself about 7 years ago when I jumped head first in real estate development and eventually into brokerage “how real estate prices continue to escalate at these prices when salaries are not keeping pace?, something is eventually gonna give.” While I was fortunate to be part of the biggest real estate run in history I am now witnessing the monumental blow-out.

I do have strong faith is this country, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a proud citizen and as always I think we small business owners and innovators will be the phoenix from the ashes of a conglomerate corporate America that got too fat and too greedy. Rome fell in 800 plus years, I hope America can make it more than 250 years. Serious changes need to take place in this country in terms of credit, spending, debt and energy independence.

I’m not trying to come off as a know it all or a Monday morning Quarterback, hindsight has 20/20 vision or any other platitude you can think of. However, I am trying to insert my voice of short-term reason to a long-term problem.

The silver lining in my opinion will fall squarely on the small caps or aka the “startup”. Just like it did in the late 90s and early 2000 when the dot.com blow-out took hold, it was the mighty small cap that led the pack. The over extended, non-nimble, greedy large-caps have committed one of the seven deadly sins…gluttony. It’s as Warren Buffet said “be fearful when people are greedy”, but…“be greedy when people are fearful”. I think the startups that will evolve from the phoenix of the ashes will far outweigh the demise…..and yes I realize that may be hard to see at this point. Whatever small faith I still place in our government, I believe when the time is right the socialist will revert back to the capitalist.

Worth a Read:
America’s a new socialist economy
The New Deal
Investment Rescue

Laughter, Laughter, Laughter….

For more info on why developers are giving Vista the cold shoulder head on over to CNET

I lost about 35% of my RSS feedburner subscribers because the nasty little spammers felt compelled to hack my feed with a string of unsavory link ads. The spammers tainted a wordpress file by embedding a rogue javascript that makes “calls” and implants the nasty links.

I’ve upgraded to a newer version of wordpress (not bragging about my version for security) and cleaned / reinstalled numerous files. I have five older posts (feed only) that are still affected by the spam but have the problem relatively under control. I may repost those entries if I cannot fully diagnose the feed problem. Posts and Feeds going forward are clean so no worries on building the feed subscriber base back up.

I thoroughly recommend hardening your Wordpress install and batting down the hatches for security sake. Also check out the following resources which have been instrumental in my own diagnosis of RSS spam link injection.

RobertGaloppini
Linux-by-Example
Kakkoi
Gordon Dewis
Raph

So if you fall victim to spam injection or feed hacks then go through the following resources above…otherwise take a pill and call your doctor in the morning.

The top 10 Ad Focus properties also maintained their February rankings with Platform-A, the ad network combining Advertising.com, Tacoda, AOL, and Quigo, leading the ranking in March, reaching 91 percent of Americans online. interCLICK gained 9 spots in the ranking to position 14, reaching 58 percent of the 188 million Americans online. Real Cities Network and YuMe Video Network both entered this month’s rankings in positions 38 and 43, respectively.

The real question would be to rank the 50 advertising networks in terms of revenue rather than rankings.

Any technology problem that swallows endless hours of my time, compels me to post solutions so someone else can avoid the same pitfalls. Wamp server is an apache, php, mysql bundle for dynamic website development (a localhost environment). The problem I ran into was I could not browse my local host or load phpmyadmin. It was driving me insane because the server was clearly communicating with the index.php file but would not load. So after numerous uninstalls and reinstalls of Wamp I finally decided to track port 80 (duh!). The port 80 was having a conflict with Skype that also uses port 80. So long story short if Wamp installs and you can’t render anything to the browser, skype is probably running.

As always sorry to the non-geek readers….but I know my previous 1and1 cpanel migration to mysql saved people in the past based on the hits.

For the last ten years I had the equivalent of cell phone ADHD until I experienced the Blackberry line of products (Blackberry 8703 in particular). Blackberry’s newest product announcement “Bold” has all the bells and whistles a modern day smart phone should have coupled with the reliability and functionality of the Blackberry name. A few of the press release highlights:

BlackBerry Bold smartphone’s support for tri-band HSDPA and enterprise-grade Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g) networks and its next-generation 624 MHz mobile processor make short work of downloading email attachments, streaming video or rendering web pages. The BlackBerry Bold also includes 128 MB Flash memory plus 1 GB on-board storage memory, as well as a microSD/SDHC memory card slot(ii) that is conveniently accessible from a side door. It comes with the renowned BlackBerry productivity applications, including phone, email, messaging, organizer and browser, and works with thousands of mobile business and lifestyle applications, making it easier than ever to stay connected, productive and entertained. With this powerful new smartphone, users can even talk on the phone while sending and receiving email or accessing the web, and download Word, Excel or PowerPoint files and edit them directly on the handset using the preloaded DataViz® Documents to Go® suite.

STUNNING DISPLAY

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone comes with the most vivid and bold display ever introduced on a BlackBerry smartphone. Its half-VGA (480×320 resolution) color LCD is fused to the undersurface of the lens, making images leap out with stunning definition and clarity. Pictures are vibrant and razor sharp, while videos play smoothly and web pages, documents, presentations and messages snap with exceptional quality and contrast.

DESKTOP-STYLE WEB PAGES

With its newly enhanced, high performance browser and high-resolution, ultra-bright display, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone gives users an on-the-go web browsing experience with desktop-style depiction. The trackball mimics a mouse, making it easy to navigate sites in “Page View” or “Column View” or to zoom in on specific parts of a web page, while various emulation settings allow users to choose between the full desktop-style HTML content and layout or the mobile version. Attachments can also now be downloaded from within the browser and there is support for watching streaming videos (RTSP – real-time streaming protocol).

RICH MULTIMEDIA

While it is designed to meet the extensive requirements of the business professional during the day, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone also caters to the business person’s consumer side during evenings and weekends. It features a 2 megapixel camera with video recording capability, built-in flash and 5x digital zoom. The enhanced media player can display pictures and slideshows quickly, play movies smoothly in full screen mode, and manage an entire music collection. Audio can be played over the handset’s dual speakers in rich, stereo sound, and when using wired headphones or external speakers, the media player gives the user an equalizer with 11 preset filters – like “Lounge”, “Jazz” and “Hip Hop” – that boost or soften audio ranges to create the perfect ambiance.

For managing music and video, the BlackBerry® Desktop Manager software includes Roxio® Media Manager for BlackBerry® as well as Roxio Photosuite® 9 LE, which makes it easy to enhance pictures and create photo albums on the computer. For users that manage their collection with iTunes®, the new BlackBerry® Media Sync application provides a simple way to sync iTunes digital music collections with the smartphone(iii). Support for High Speed USB 2.0 allows all files to be transferred quickly from a desktop computer to the BlackBerry Bold smartphone.

POWERFUL WI-FI & GPS

For even broader high-speed network coverage, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone supports the 802.11 a/b/g Wi-Fi standards, ideal for use in enterprise or campus wireless LAN deployments, over Wi-Fi hotspots and on wireless home networks. A new “Push Button Setup” is included, making it faster for users to connect to protected wireless networks that require a sign on process.

Through its integrated GPS, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone can pinpoint its exact location, supporting applications like BlackBerry® Maps and other location-based applications or services. With its improved rendering capabilities, faster download speeds and ability to support simultaneous voice and data, the BlackBerry Bold smartphone even allows users to navigate while on a call.

FIRST CLASS PHONE

The BlackBerry Bold smartphone features a new acoustic design that increases the size of the phone’s audio sweet spot, improving listening quality and clarity. It also comes with numerous premium phone features including Speaker Independent Voice Recognition (SIVR) for Voice Activated Dialing (VAD), Bluetooth® 2.0, with support for hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits (including car kits that adhere to the Bluetooth Remote SIM Access Profile) and other Bluetooth peripherals. It is a quad-band EDGE and tri-band HSDPA handset that supports global roaming(iiii) and features dedicated ’send’, ‘end’, and ‘mute’ keys, smart dialing, speed dialing, conference calling and call forwarding. It also features noise cancellation technology that offsets background noise, a powerful speaker phone and support for polyphonic, mp3 and MIDI ring tones.

“crafted from premium materials” in the beginning of the press release is no joke. I have dropped my phone half a dozen times (hard) and it bounces back every time. It’s nice to see Blackberry staying fresh in the mobile marketplace especially with the success of the iphone.

Other nice coverage on Blackberry Bold can be found at:

BoyGenius

Gizmodo

Mobile Gadgeteer

Deal Architect

Electronista

1. Focus rather than multi-task. Studies have shown that tasks take 50% longer to complete during multi-tasking rather than concentrating intently on the task until adequate completion.

2. Prioritize tasks appropriately. Don’t work on #4 on your “to-do” list when #16 and #25 are essential for a deadline. This sounds like common sense but prioritizing what is critical, is an essential ingredient in time management.

3. Monitor where your time goes. Identifying where your time really goes in a work-week verses where you “think” it goes is a must. This will reveal what your distractions are as well as what is consuming your time but producing little productivity.

4. Clean the Clutter. This is the one time management technique I continue to fight with everyday. Out of sight, out of mind works well here, When evaluating a task either “Do it”, “Discard it” or “File it”. This includes your digital assets as well like email, and desktop files. This should also help you perform backups on data more timely because your purging your inbox more.

5. Quiet Time. Believe it or not this is an essential technique to decompress from the daily information overload and noise. A minimum of 15 minutes should be allocated to taking a break, walking, cat nap or just reading personal material. The importance of this technique is release the stress value.

The benefits that you will gain from these techniques will be amazing. You should realize at least one of the following.

- More productivity
- Less ADHD syndrome
- Peace of mind
- Pride of accomplishment

so there it is your top 5 management techniques….take 2 pills and call me in the morning. -Good luck.