Finding a Wholesaler/Distributor is a fairly simple process although many find this part most difficult. Nine times out of ten you are going to need to call the wholesaler as many of the decent suppliers of a product you’re interested in will not accept emails etc…

With “WebKinz” I decided to use trusty Google and managed to find a distributor in 10 seconds, I then phoned them to be given my area manager. I did the following:

“product keyword” + wholesaler
“product keyword” + distributor

That?s it.

Another very good but it is the longer, harder route (this is what people hate doing) Trade Shows. These shows are a place where you can find the vendors/suppliers you need to work with.

Just search on Google again for Trade Shows that match your business idea. There will, more then likely be a yearly trade show for your product/idea within your area. Some you have to pay for and others are free, you can turn up and speak to so many suppliers/distributors you’ll be spoilt for choice.

So with that part taken care of we now need to study our Competition. First, Basic research with some product keywords (brand name to start) I am going this to be doing this manually and not using any tools/software. So, I would just go to Google and type in “webkinz” don’t make this too complicated and just aim to beat the websites that are on the first page. We want to analyze why they’re there and what we can do to compete with them and improve on our business model to beat them.

I decided to choose three sites from the first page on Google for our brand name keyword:

Actually, some are irrelevant as they are information based sites like “Wikipedia” so I missed them out and choose actual eCommerce based websites selling the product.

1. www.webkinz.com/ –
2. www.hamleys.com/icat/webkinz –
3. www.ukwebkinz.co.uk/ –

One other website which was interesting that I might talk about in detail later seemed to be run by an Affiliate Marketer, niche site builder. I could tell this because of the Amazon and Google Adsense ads splattered all over it. So armed with the sites selling our product, we now need to Analyze the Business Model of the sites I have chosen – Keyword Search, Search Engine Optimisation, Internet Marketing, Site Age etc…

How many people are searching for your product, well, lets choose the brand name to start with and although very broad you should always aim to eventually rank well organically for your main product keyword. To give me a basis to go on I’m going to use WordTracker the results for this product are outstanding just for this one keyword. Enough to give me even more reason to open a store based around this very sort after product.

I would suggest you Invest in a paid for keyword service though, this will help you identify, organise and optimise your site for at least the top ten searched for keywords used by consumers online.

(I will update this part with some of the Tools I use soon)

I’m going to Analyze the site – http://www.ukwebkinz.co.uk/ –

Quick look at the age of the domain brings up “16-may-2007″ this is great news as they have managed to rank well for their main brand name keyword within a year and in Search Engine Optimisation terms is great going. They could optimise their “Title Tag” much better as at the moment they have “UK Webkinz – Online webstore” nothing terrible with it but it could use stronger keyphrases in the title to possibly rank even better. This would also encourage more clicks/visits to their site.

A better title would be “WebKinz Stuffed Animals and WebKinz Codes at UkWebKinz.co.uk”.

Keywords are important as well and I would take some ideas from what they have on their’s. Oh, on looking they don’t seem to have any other TAGS in their code so this is not fully SEO optimised. They would benefit from an informative Description TAG and a Keyword TAG. Outlined below is how I would set-up an index homepage.

That is a solid structure to use on all your product pages. When we get to the section of using a CMS “Content Management System” we will discuss having a unique “Title Tag” for every product and changing the keywords to match the product on the page. This is very important for SEO and will improve your organic product search results.

Another important factor in your Search Engine Optimisation is incoming links as this shows popularity of the site and is one of the many things Google uses to rank your site for any given keyword(s). They have 4 backlinks to their site which could be very wrong based on using this BackLinkChecker. If it?s that?s a great sign for us.

Very simply you would now need to build up your backlinks using a paid for service or do this or by contacting other related sites within your market asking for a link back to your site.

In 2008 this doesn’t work well so now online entrepreneurs are using Directories by submitting their site to them to build up links to their website. Another way is to purchase web links, known as Text Links which a really frowned upon – with Google anyway.

Read more about whether you should still use the paid for Text Link Ads model in your marketing efforts.

In our next update we will continue with our Competition Analysis and then move onto Choosing the right eCommerce Platform that suits your business model.