It has been way too long since my last post. Sorry, just too busy - not least with getting my wife pregnant. First child on the way in February. In terms of internet entrepreneurship, things have been more mixed as I will explain.

Tie Specialist is going well, continues to make sales and hold positions in the top ten of Google. We have added wedding waistcoats, cravats and wing-collar shirts to the product range and they are selling well. We have updated the website engine to make the site work better, which was a painfull process with a bunch of bugs that took the site off-line for a few weeks. Sometimes if it ain't broke don't fix it. I have come to the conclusion whilst doing the accounts that AdWords does not work well enough for us outside of the Christmas selling peak. The cost of AdWords takes all of the profit we make from sales generated through it and I have found that our profit is higher in months where we stop advertising even though sales are down. The only exception is the run up to Christmas when conversion rates more than double and AdWords becomes cost effective for selling silk ties as gifts.

Art Specialist has a much tougher time. About June this year the ranking on Google plummeted from Top 10 to 400+. Since then I have tried everything suggested by the SEO firm who provided links (It's Cold Outside) but to no avail. It is still stuck way down the rankings. I have now got rid of It's Cold Outside who's links where low quality and I think Google may be treating them as a spam technique and punishing us accordingly. I will find out over the next few months if ranking increases now I have stopped using them. AdWords is also problamatic for art - the conversion rates are very low because people like to browse a lot of art before buying. On the positive side our customers love the paintings and often recommend us to other people or come back for more. I have also added new product lines DNA art portraits and abstract contemporary art canvases to the oil painting reproductions and portraits painted from photos.

Over the last year I have added another couple of niche websites to the collection :

A website that is built by my cousin Tim that sends SMS text message alerts when your football team scores Cheap Footy Scores.com. This site has a very high conversion rate of 10% to 20% and a repeat purchase rate of 80%+ so AdWords works well, the only issue is getting enough visitors to grow the customer base fast enough.

I have also set-up another niche retailing website selling watches for men and ladies from designers such as Armani, Triumph, Kahuna, Lacoste, Seiko and others Watch Specialist.net. I have found that a website needs to be at least a year old before Google takes it seriously so I have set the site up with a good catalogue and watches and just let it set there and mature. This Christmas season I will start to promote it more aggressively as watches make good gifts.

Finally, I set up a website for the cafe and sandwich bar that my brother in-law and wife run in Covent Garden, London. The website is aimed at businesses in Covent Garden, Strand and Trafalger Square area who want sandwiches delivered for business lunches and is called Garden Sandwich.com

Well it is a busy month on the internet marketing front. Another new website launch coming up to tell people about. This one has been in gestation for a couple of years. My cousin Tim has had a basic website working for a couple of years that provides football SMS texts for goals and scores. It has been handy to get cheap texts every Saturday but it has taken ages to get round to finishing off the website so that we can open it up to the general public. Most of the UK SMS football text services are very expensive, 25p a text and lots of texts for each match often the starting line-up, every goal and sending off, half-time score and full-time score and even manager's comments afterwards. If your football team is in high scoring matches it can cost you a couple of quid each week. We think we can do a cheaper solution, rather than using premium SMS messages sent through the phone networks at 25p each, our solution allows people to pay by credit card/ PayPal and this lets us use cheaper text services and sell the service for just 18p a text. You can find our SMS football UK service at Cheap Footy Scores. We also let people completely customise how many football texts are sent. For example if you have a season ticket then you can set our football SMS service to just send you goal alerts for away games. We should get the marketing text finished over the next few weeks and then be test marketing it with pay per click, I will post the results here and keep people posted on how the service is going.

I have just introduced a new product to my oil painting website Art Specialist that I thought would be worth a post. The field of genetics is moving very rapidly and in the last few years we have started to see consumer applications for genetic fingerprinting and analysis. There are now several services for analysing your DNA to understand more about your ancestors or to screen for new diseases. I came across another new application recently, DNA fingerprints being used to create artworks and immediately thought this would be great for my site. You can see examples of the DNA art for contemporary oil paintings here. I now have a deal in place with a testing laboratory, the way the process works is straightforward ; the customer swabs the inside of their cheek and sends the sample to the laboratory. The lab turns the DNA sample into a genetic fingerprint in one of several styles - you will have seen DNA fingerprints on CSI or crimewatch. My artists then paint an abstract work of art by copying the fingerprint in up to three colours of the customer's choice. The result is a work of abstract contemporart art that is utterly personal, unique and interesting. If you are a couple we can even do a painting using both DNA fingerprints. After use the sample is destroyed so that there is no privacy implications. I am now testing to the market to see if this service will sell, there are a couple of companies selling DNA fingerprint art but the others all simply screen print the image on to the canvas I believe we are the first company to actually hand paint it. Come back to the blog to find out how it is going and what the demand is. Have a look at DNA art oil painting section of Art Specialist.

My silk tie and art websites are starting to perform reasonably well so my thoughts are starting to turn to the next website in the stable. My website people have just added a watch website to their range of ready to go sites so I have just started one up. Selling designer watches from Armani and D&G and called Watch Specialist. Watches are a decent niche, fairly competitive, but worth a try. I have found that it takes a year or so for things to really take off on Google. Google uses link age as part of it's algorithm, so it means that any website under nine months old can never make it to the first page of a competitive search term. So even though I am not planning to put serious work into this site for another few months, it makes sense to get it set up now, get a few links from decent page rank sites (link my other ones and this blog), add it to a couple of directories and that should make things happen much faster once I start to seriously develop it.

I will keep the blog updated to let people know how I am getting on. A couple of quick learnings so far. After buying the site I checked out a couple of the watch brands. Armani and Dolce & Gabana I knew, but there was also another brand called Claude Valentini that I had not heard of. A quick search on that name threw up a bunch of information on what a rip-off that brand is and some very dodgy marketing practices and upset customers. I deleted them from my site straight away, nothing will destroy the credibility of a shop faster than selling dodgy crap. I am going to concentrate on the decent brands. It does show that it is worth doing your homework before adding other brands to your site.

It has been way too long since the last post, but an email from someone asking for advice has made be want to add some more content. Chris wrote ;

Hi Tony

I've been doing a bit of research about something, and I came across your website. Please forgive me if I'm wrong, but am I right in thinking that your business was set up via dpbuk?! :-)

If I'm wrong then please disregard all of the following!

If I'm right, would you mind if I asked you a few questions regarding your business? I haven't set up mine yet, or even decided which one to choose, so I'd like to ask you some general questions if you don't mind before I take the plunge?

I work in a factory at the moment and hate my job. The idea is to get one of these businesses up and running for a while to see how things go. In time I'm hoping that I can give up my job and live off the proceeds of my internet business. Ok, here goes...

Although computer literate, I have no experience of setting up or running a website - how was it for you? What is it like and how easy is it to deal with your wholesalers?

How long has your business been running? Is this your only one, or do you have others provided by dpbuk? How is business - is there a lot of demand for mail order silk ties?!

Can I be cheeky and ask if this is your main source of income, or do you have a 'day job' too? And if it is your main source of income, do you make a good living out of it or just enough to get by on?

Finally, if there's anything in particular you think I ought to know or you have any advice for me then please fire away!

Hope to hear from you soon

Best regards

Chris

I wrote back as follows :

Chris,

You are right. It is from DPBUK, I am happy to answer a few questions.

It took a bit of practice to work out how best to run the website, but as long as you are persistent and prepared to put in time in the evenings it is OK. I would read up on Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click Advertising and Internet Marketing in general as these are the key skills you will need. Dealing with the wholesalers has been easy, you simply have to type each order into their website and pay by PayPal. It will take time to get going, it will take at least a year to get to the top of Google for your search terms with free searches, so you will have to use Pay Per Click, this takes time to get the hang of - you need to target your keywords tightly and find out what words convert to sales - it is easy to end up paying more to get each customer than you make on each sale. You will need to invest some money in advertising before seeing a return. Once you have built up repeat customers and a decent amount of free traffic from the search engines you should be able to make a bit of money - but don't count on going full time for a while.

I have two websites www.tiespecialist.com and www.artspecialist.co.uk , the ArtSpecialist one uses DPBUK as the host but is designed by myself and I source the products. I have been going for almost two years and although my websites make a couple of hundred pounds net a month at most, it will be at least another couple of years before I can even think of going full time on them. I sell about 25 to 30 ties a week. I have a day job too as a freelance project manager.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Tony

It has been a while since my last post as things have been so hectic here. I have been trying quite a few different things on my sites, as well as having loads to do on multiple consulting projects for my "day job".

So far I have talked almost entirely about my UK silk ties internet shop however I thought it would now be good to tell the story of my latest ecommerce site www.artspecialist.co.uk. The idea came to me while I was looking through a directory of dropshipping and internet wholesalers. I saw a Chinese painting studio advertising, went to their website and liked the range of paintings there. About 10 years ago I had bought a couple of reproduction paintings from an art gallery in Brighton and had really liked them, so I thought this was a good idea. I contacted the supplier and they were willing to paint to order for my customers so I didn't need to hold any stock and they would ship direct to my customers so I don't have to touch it. They also had 1000's of paintings in their catalogue so I would have a range bigger than any gallery. I did some searching on Google and eBay and while there where a couple of other people doing it in the UK and quite a few around the world, there where only a few advertising on AdWords.

I ordered an oil painting as a trial, a reproduction Dali. The quality was good and they were good to deal with so I decided to start the site. I found a suitable template that looked smart and art gallery like and bought a shopping cart from the same company that looks after my tie website. I decided to continue with the "Specialist" them with the site names and picked the .co.uk version because the .com is taken, I enquired how much they wanted for it, but they quoted more than a $1k which is too much at this stage.

I spent a couple of weeks getting a reasonable selection of artists in and putting some of them into basic categories so that it would be easy for customers to find something they like. I also worked up fairly text heavy intros for the main page and each category. For artists, I put a short life history on their category pages. I want there to be a decent amount of content to engage both site visitors and the search engines.

When I thought it looked decent enough to get started, I did some basic testing by running a couple of dummy orders through. It is really important to test well, I have picked up so many mistakes through testing and made a couple of howlers when I didn't. The two worst? For two days none of the pictures on the tiespecialist silk tie website were working after I had made some changes to the catalogue and during that time I was still spending lots of money on adwords. The most recent one was after we introduced a feature on the tie website to automatically email a satisfaction questionnaire to each customer a week after their order is despatched, unfortunately the first day it was on, it sent 22 copies of the email to every customer in our address book. Dohh! I got quite a few angry emails and had to write back to all that complained to apologise and explain.

For the first week of advertising on adwords, I was getting loads of clicks (I started with bids sufficient to be in the top 3) and after a week still do not have a single sale. Luckily I didn't panic, and on the next day I got two orders (Cezanne and Picasso) then the next day another one (Monet). We had lift off. The reproduction oil paintings were starting to sell at the rate of four or five a week after a month, and the next thing I added to the range were portraits. The portraits are painted from phographs by the Chinese portrait artists, I got some examples from them and put them up on the website. The supplier doesn't have an easy pricing system so I need to email the photo to them and they do me a different quote for each one. I have found that the portraits have all come out really well, in a realist kind of style. The oil painting portraits from photos are selling pretty well at about two a week and I am about to add the option of doing portraits in various styles via a new supplier I have found and am ramping up the advertising money I spend and search engine optimisation I do on portraits.

After two months I find I am in the position where I am making a small profit and am continuosly improving and expanding the service.

Article writing for search engine rankings

When I started my search engine optimisation I was targeting relatively easy phrases to get going such as "English silk ties" and "uk woven silk ties". Initially I focused my attention on my MSN ranking as they do not use site age or link age as a ranking factor unlike the others, particularly Google which puts a high importance on link age, the so called "sand box" that you are in for the first six to eight months. I got into the habit of actively getting link exchanges, both by using SEO Elite to find good link partners and by using Link Metro.

After less than a month I had fifty links for my tie website and was starting to get top twenties for my easy phrases on MSN for example I was ranking 14th for "English silk ties" and 8th for "UK Woven Silk Ties" whilst for better phrases I was not yet on the first page with "woven silk ties" (35th) and "Silk Ties" (245th).

The next boost up the rankings was to come from article writing. I discovered that there are lots of websites out there that publish articles. The search engines rate these sites highly as they offer lots of content with text heavy pages and are human edited. Most article sites let you have hyperlinks in your story and all of them allow a resource box at the bottom with links to your site(s). So if you write some articles related to the product you sell and then post the articles on many sites, you get lots of high quality links to your site.

First job is to come up with a topic. It is best to write articles related to your product, how to buy it, choose it, use it, reviews etc. This means your text and title will have lots of related keywords and you may even get some customers from people reading it. It shouldnt be too hard to come up with a few thousand word articles for almost any site. For ties for example, I have articles on a history of ties, tie tying and tie cleaning. These are on my web site and I publish them to article sites. For art, I am starting to write articles on buying art to use for this purpose. You can get ideas and content from searching the internet and using sites like wikipedia for facts. You can also use the article sites for free content to add to your site. Most of them allow re-printing of an article as long as the links and attribution are left in.

The process is pretty easy. Search in Google for "submit articles" and your topic and then register with each site and submit an article. It can take a couple of weeks for each article to get reviewed and published. Sometimes I get emails saying article rejected and the reason. The reason is usually something to do with links or overly commercial content, but I simply make edits to address their point and then re-submit. If you submit a number of articles spaced out by a month between each one across 100's of article sites then you can build up a lot of links that will do wonders for your ranking.

After I had done this about ten timesI wondered if there was tool that might help, and found Article Submitter Pro this is a pretty cool tool that semi-automates the process. It has more than 700 article sites in it's directory and using a window in the tool you can sort the sites by Page Rank and starting with the best sites register with each one and record the log in info in the tool. Then when you want to submit an article you enter it into the program and it takes you one by one to each of the sites and auto-fills in all the boxes with your login and then the article, biography and resource text. It keeps track of which articles you have submitted to which sites and helps to keep it all organised. Using Article Submitter Pro I can submit to a 100+ sites in a few hours which I do as a once a week task. After three weeks of article submission I am up to top fives for my easy phrases on MSN for example I am ranking 1st for "English silk ties" and 3rd for "UK Woven Silk Ties" whilst for better phrases I am now on the first page with "woven silk tie" (3rd) and "silk tie" (4th) and "silk ties" (25th). The results are really good so I am going to keep on publishing articles.

If you want to make pdf's of your articles for your other sites then try here at PDF Converter the PDF Forum there offers information for people looking to learn more about using PDF.

The next step for me is to pull together ebooks for each of my sites which I can use articles I have written for some of the source text and to harvest email addresses on my sites, by offering a free copy to people.

If you are not good at writing then you can get someone to help you, for example Editing and Proofreading Services from Dr. Jerry, he edits and writes materials for web sites and articles for many blogs.