Internet Entrepreneurship: niche internet retailing of ties, wedding accessories & watches

2010-12-21T06:16:00.000-08:00

A quick update, because I am angry at the software company that I bought rank tracking software from. Rank Tracker is part of the SEO Powersuite software. What they don't tell you when you buy it (and it is over £200 so not cheap) is that the day after your six months support ends the software stops working unless you sign-up for thei "Live! Plan" support package for another $50 a year. I like the software but don't like being held to ransom and forced to pay a subscription that wasn't clear when I bought the product. The software is dece nt but the business practices are frankly dishonest.

I have no problem with paying for updates should I choose to, and if it was voluntary then I probably would. However making the software refuse to work if you don't by the update is underhand, sneaky and a terrible way to treat your customers

Steer clear of the cowboys at link-assistant.com and go elsewhere for SEO software.

2010-06-04T05:34:00.001-07:00

WZNSURAMJ563

2010-06-04T04:27:00.000-07:00

I have been trying some article marketing again. Using SEO link vine one of severl Brad Callen products that I have used over the years. With it you can write articles and get them published on the blogs of people who are looking for content. It also has an article spinning facility which means that you can set the articles up with synonyms and alternate chunks of text and titles so that the article looks different enough for the search engines not to count as duplicate content. Will see what the results are. I have been using the article marketing to promote the watch specialist site which I set up a few years ago and allowed to sit there (Google has an age penalty), now is time to promote it. So far best selling brands have been Tokyo Flash watches as well as Krug Bauman watches. The next step for the watch site is to try using some price comparison sites as well as listing on Amazon to see if those sales channels work. Will let you know the results.

2010-05-13T04:11:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened since I last got round to writing a post. Simply been too busy to blog. I have had another daughter, Ella to add to Lara who was born last year. Within a couple of years have gone from the freedom of childnessness to the joy of fatherhood and a full sized family. Loving it.

On the internet business front. TieSpecialist.com goes from strength to strength. We are selling a lot of wedding accessories such as waistcoats and cravats. I have done very little link building or search optimisation but we still rank top 10 on google for silk ties and bow ties and wedding stuff. Sales have doubled over the last year and we seem to be building a decent percentage of regular users.

I also set up the www.watchspecialist.net website a year or so ago. I have done very little with it, because in my experience you need to have been around for a while before the search engines take you seriously. Now that it has a reasonable age I will start working on getting links so that it starts to appear in the search engines. I did a bit of research using Googles keyword research tool (part of adwords). It lets you find keywords that have less competition but generate decent traffic. For Casio watches the best ones for me seem to be black casio watch and casio watch bracelet. We sell cheap metal watches by Casio and Seiko amongst others so hopefully sales will start to kick-in.

The cheapfootyscores.com website that I have with my cousin Tim, continues to slowly build. It has an incredibly high conversion rate - almost 20% of visitors sign-up for the Premiership SMS football scores text service. The trouble is getting enough visitors. It seems that not many people use text message services to get their football scores any more. Or at least we haven't found a way of getting thousands of them instead of hundreds. We are top 5 on Google and spend money on Adwords but the site is still doing no more than breaking even.

2008-10-22T04:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-06T05:48:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-11-05T07:14:00.001-08:00

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.

2007-09-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-09-19T03:17:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-04-09T11:16:00.000-07:00

Getting free links, search engine optimisation for dummies.

When I started my first site selling woven silk ties from the UK I signed up with a SEO company called 123rankings who guaranteed that they would get me into the top ten on Google for five search terms within six months. I paid their fees for four months without any noticeable results. Then my web developer told me that they used a piece of software called SEO Elite and had good results, he gave me an ebook by the softwares author a SEO expert called Brad Callen, you can download a pdf copy of the ebook here and go to his website here. I was shocked at how easy it was when I followed the instructions. I was also surprised at how badly the SEO company 123rankings I had been paying each month had been doing and now do it all myself. Here are the steps I went through.

First up was on-page factors, which means getting the keywords on your site right. This has only a small effect on your ranking but is important to get right. First up I found that the SEO company had changed the title page of my site and webpages to a meaningless list of keywords most of which were not the main ones that were selling my ties. Not only was this reducing my rankings on the keywords I really wanted, but if someone did dig deep enough into their google results to find me then the text that apppeared was a meaningless list"Print, theme, woven polyester, cartoon, novelty ties and cufflinks." that does not include silk ties or even tie. Instead I changed the titles back to a meaningful phrase that would look good in google and on top of my site and would have all the right keywords. The keyphrases I have been targeting are woven silk ties, silk ties, silk tie, English silk tie and UK silk tie. My title page now reads "TieSpecialist.com. Luxury English handmade woven silk ties. Satisfaction guaranteed with every tie.". This works as both a sales pitch when coming up in search results and contains all my keywords. I went through all my header tags and keywords and as this has just reminded me I have just gone through again and made quite a few changes based on what I have learnt over the last month. This needs to be a continuous process of adding new words, creating cross-links across the site (to help Google to understand your site and to get some key sub-pages on to the search engine results) and polishing up the text so that it converts well with people and looks good to the search engines. I also bolded keywords on the top page and ensured my main search phrases were sprinkled over the page with one near the top and another near the bottom for each key phrase.

The main grunt work in search engine optimisation (SEO) is getting links. Google uses links as the main factor in search results so this is the key to high rankings and therefore free clicks and customers for you. Google uses several factors including the importance of the website (Page Rank), the keywords on the page, the title of the page, the text your site is linked from (known as the anchor text), the other links from that page, whether your site is linked back to the site that links to you (reciprocal links). To assess the page rank you need the Google Toolbar that you can download here this puts a little guage in internet explorer that shows you a ranking for every page you visit. The page rank runs from 0 to 10 and if it is greyed out then the site is not on or has been banned by Google. After four months I had got up to a Page Rank of 3.

The first point of call for links should be directories, by which I mean hand-edited lists of sites not search engines. The key site to be registered on is the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org. My SEO people had registered my tie site with this, but had used the crappy list of keywords above. Once I corrected my listing I gained 30+ places on Google on some search terms. Google and most of the search engines place a high importance on the ODP and their search results are syndicated out to 100's of other sites so a listing there rapidly spreads. Submit your site there now if you havent done so already. You can also do a Google search for more directories and register on at least all the ones specialisting in your product.

The next thing to do is to type your target key phrase into Google. For me it was woven silk ties. I then picked the top ranked site which had a Page Rank of 5, next fire up SEO Elite and type in the url of the top ranked site and select analyze backlinks. The software will then show all the sites that are linked to that top ranked site. If you can get the same links then you will be on your way to the top of the list too. Th software lists them in Google Page Rank order so you then simply go to each of the websites in turn from best first and submit your site listing or submit a link exchange request or failing those options by far the most common approach is to email them with a link exchange request. You get the best response if you add a link to their site first and then send an email like mine:
"I run a website selling silk ties http://www.blogger.com/www.tiespecialist.com. I like your site and am interested in link exchanging. I have added a link to your site from: http://www.tiespecialist.com/useful-links-i-14.html I would appreciate a return link as follows: English woven silk ties. Every silk tie comes with free worldwide delivery."A few hours doing this gave me 20 or so links. I have also tried searching for tie listings in Google and getting listings on all the sites that came up. I have also searched for listing sites for markets I am interested in such as weddings. I sell a lot of ties for weddings with grooms and ushers often bulk buying and because I offer big quantity discounts I get quite a lot of these orders and want more. There are also link exchange sites. I have used used LinkMetro and this site allows you to find people to exchange links with and it helps to automate the process some what I have got 30 links for each of my sites with a few hours work on this site. It works particlularly well for my reproduction oil paintings site art specialist. I have exchanged links with lots of art sites, poster and print sites and also gifts and birthday sites were both ties and oil paintings make great links that will help my rankings on those search terms.

It is worth pointing out that pretty much any link exchange is worth having although those from high ranking sites count a lot higher. It makes sense, if your site is linked to from the front page of the BBC website (which has a page rank of 9) then it is clearly a very important site. The only links you do not want are those that are greyed out on Page Rank these could be banned sites. Google bans sites for trying to manipulate rankings in ways that it finds unacceptable. If you are linked to a bad site this will drag your ranking down. The SEO Elite tool also allows you to view how your website apppears to Google by analzying your backlinks, showing you the keyword ratings this generates and the number and rank of each site linked to yours and listed on a search engine. I am currently up to 73 links showing in this way. Which is now enough to have catapulted me to top ten on Google, MSN and Yahoo for "english woven silk ties" and "UK woven silk ties" and top fifty for "UK silk ties". Now I am targeting shorter search phrases. To break into the top for very competitive phrases you can need hundreds of phrases for example a guy at one of the internet marketing companies said they had over 17,000 links. But now I was adding links at the rate of 30 a month to each of my sites but I am after more. Next article I will tell you about my next step which brought hundreds of top quality links.

Some useful links.
Song Lyrics. All about music and song lyrics.
PCShowbuzz - Tune into more than one thousand TV channels from all over the world using your internet connection.

2006-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

I recently received an email from a reader of this blog, Louis Roberts. It's great to know that people are reading my blog already. Louis asks "I first read your article on "ezinearticles" and it brought me to your site; I like your online store. How are your online businesses doing? Are you hitting your goals of $1000 profit per site? I am very interested in opening a store myself. Since you seem to enjoy sharing advice; I was wondering of you could recommend some good products to sell, suppliers, dropshippers, etc. that carry as you would say "healthy margins"? "

These were good questions, so I have devoted this post to answering them.
Thanks for the note, glad someone reads the articles. In answer to your questions:
No I am not yet anywhere near reaching $1000 profit per site per week. I expect it to take a year to reach that figure. As my sites are less than four months and one month old respectively there is still a way to go. It is easy, reading some of the web business sales pitches out there to believe that instant riches are easily achievable. This is not true, it takes hard work and dedication to make money. I have reached the break even point on both sites which was the first milestone - initially I was losing $500 per site per week as the cost of advertising on Google AdWords way outran my sales.

It is hard for me to tell you what to sell, but I can recommend the criteria that I used to rate a product:

Niche product where there is not a major house hold name supplier (i.e. don't go into the book business against Amazon)
Must be being sold on the internet already (you don't want to have to create a whole new market by yourself)
Must have keywords that people searching for that product would use but that are not shared with other products (for example "silk ties" and "oil paintings" are good "gifts" would be bad)
Do a search on Google for the product. If less than 5 advertisers come up on the right hand side, then chances are you can get reasonably priced traffic
Must not need a support to get it working. Things that need technical support are too problematic. You want things that are easy to use and where you can sell and forget.
I have also made it a rule that I will not hold or carry stock at least until I have strong sales and good demand already. So need a drop shipper or a make to order product.
A final point that I have learned from trying to do ties, is that you need a $50+ margin per product. The cost of attracting customers for paintings or massage chairs is not much higher than the cost of getting customers for ties, although the conversion rates are lower. It is easier to reach break even with higher ticket price items.
It also helps if it is a product that you have bought yourself and get interested in and passionate about.

Based on these criteria I have gone for silk ties, oil paintings and soon to be launched a massage chair website. I tried selling cuff links on my tie site but the AdWords competition was so fierce that I needed to pay 75c per click to be on the front page and there was no way to make money, I dropped that idea quickly.

As for good drop shippers, I search for reviews or feedback on any supplier I am thinking of using and then do a trial order with them to make sure the quality and service is good. However popular drop shippers will have lots of people selling their products and it will be hard to make money. Always check eBay to see what prices the products sell at.

Another option is to find suppliers in China of make to order or high value products I used www.alibaba.com to find suppliers and have dealt with them by email. I hope this helps.

2006-03-27T11:50:00.000-08:00

The conversion rate is the key stat for a website. As long as you are paying for clicks, the efficiency with which you convert those clicks to sales is really the only measure that counts in determining your website design. When I started my UK silk tie website it took a while to get enough data to start tracking and conversion rate as you need at least ten sales to get any sort of statistically valid result. It took a couple of weeks to make the first ten sales and I calculated my conversion rate at 0.5%. As I was paying 25p per click, this means that it was costing me £50 per customer. Even with an average order size of £30, this was a long way from profitability. Luckily, conversion rates can change quite dramatically with things like the website design, sales copy, products on the front page, range of products, product descriptions, guranatees, pricing, ease of payment etc. etc. In short there are many things you can do to get conversions up.

The great thing about internet businesses is that you can make a change, measure the result and if it doesn't work, then change it back. I am constantly trying new things to see if it affects the figures. Initially I changed too many things too quickly and it was very hard to unpick the results of different factors. Also the Christmas period started when I was one month in and conversion rates rose strongly and then fell back after Christmas, it was hard then to unpick the seasonal effect from my changes.

One of the first thing I experimented with was pricing. From my initial prices of about £9 for a woven silk tie, I tried cutting them to £8 for a few weeks and then putting them up to £11 for a few weeks, then cutting back a bit, until settling on prices about 15% higher than my first try, just over £10 average price. Cutting prices below this point did not seem to increase sales.

I also looked at which ties sold well and put them on the featured products list which are then randomly selected on the front page. I worked a lot on the cataloging of the ties by colour, style etc. and added keywords so that people could find what they wanted easily.

I also experimented with my sales copy and have made the money back guarantee more and more prominent. One of the first things you need to establish when people visit your site is credibility. So I have the address at the top so that people know we are easy to physically track down, I have put the Visa and Mastercard symbols near the top for legitamcy, I have signed up to affiliate programs for upmarkets shirt makers so that I can display their ads to add credibility and as I started to get a few pieces of nice feedback from people, I added them to the site. All of these changes have pushed the conversion rate up to over 1% and I am now targeting 2% with my next wave of changes which will try and capture email addresses for follow up mailing by offering a free ebook on a mens fashion related subject. More about that another time.

There is a feature in both AdWords and Overture which, once you have inserted a piece of html code into your payment page (or, as I did got your web site supplier to do it) will allow you to track conversion rates by keyword. I am only now building enough data to do this justice, but it allows you to cut out keywords which don't convert well. For example, I had been buying the keywords "how to tie a tie" and was getting 50 clicks a day at a bargain £0.02 each, however after 1700 clicks I still hadn't made a sale, despite making sure there was sales text in with the tie instructions and ties shown either side. Not entirely surprising as people searching for tie instructions were not looking to buy ties, but clearly they do wear them and I thought some people would buy one. Not so. So now I am saving that money.

Other Peoples Blogs You Should Check Out Are:

Millionaire Tez. The Internet Marketing blog of what works and what doesn't, in the world of Internet Marketing.

2006-03-20T13:57:00.000-08:00

Google AdWords has been the biggest expense in getting the business going. To have a successfull internet business you have to get people to come to your site. When you start a high-street shop you have passers by to sell to but when you start a new website you have no passers by. Google does not rank new websites highly so no one will find you by accident. The only way to get visitors quickly is to advertise. I figured that offline advertising wouldn't be very good, much better to sell to people when they are at their computers already. I also figured that banner ads and listing sites are poor value for money. I therefore focused all my advertising on AdWords first and then Overture.

AdWords is a very clever system. Completely automated, it allows you to advertise to people whoare searching for particular keywords in particular countries. For example for www.tiespecialist.com I want people in the UK who are searching for tie, ties, silk ties, woven silk ties, wedding ties, bow ties, polyester ties etc. The adverts appear on the right hand side of Google and you only pay when someone clicks through. In this way it is better than traditional advertising in that you know you get visitors to your site for your adspend.

How far your ad is from the top depends on how much you are willing to pay and your click through rate (CTR). In essence Google maximises the money making potential of each search by showing the ads people are most likely to click on and that pay the most. When I started my website I put in lots of keywords, wrote an ad and aimed it at the UK. I quickly found that I needed to pay 20p to 35p per click to be in the top 3 for the ads. In the first week of advertising I generated 150 clicks or so per day at 25p each on average and got no sales. After the 1st week sales started to come in at the rate of 1 or 2 per day. When I worked out the cost per conversion I was paying £40 per day for 1 to 2 sales, giving a cost per order of £20 to £40 pounds. The gross margin on an average order is only £10 so I am losing money with every order. This is to be expected at first and I was quite prepared to invest in marketing to get potential customers so that I could improve my website and then build a customer base which would give me long term profitability. However to make pay per click advertising work I needed to do a whole bunch of things:

Cut my cost per click dramatically
Improve my conversion rate once people clicked through to my site
Increase the average order size

I have managed to get the cost per click down to less than 15p per click average by doing a number of things.

First of all I tested lots of keywords to find ones for which there was little competition. For example "how to tie a tie" has no one else advertising on it so I can get traffic for the minimum of 2 pence per click. However the keywords have to be relevant to your product and ultimately convert to sales. I have still found that the vast majority of searches are on the simple keywords; tie, ties so I have to find a way of getting in to that space if I want to get decent numbers of visitors.

Secondly, improve the ads. A great feature of AdWords is that you can run multiple ads simultaneously and track the click through rates of each. Then you get rid of the worst performing ads. The key here is to change one part of your ad at a time (so that you know which change causes the effect) and to wait until you have had least 50 clicks on an ad before making a judgement on it (at low numbers of clicks the performance can fluctaute dramatically with chance). As your ad gets better CTR you get more visitors and a higher ranking so you can reduce the amount per click and still get the same performance. I have improved my average click through from 0.75% when I started to 2.6% by running better ads.

Thirdly, remove poor performing words. You will find that there are some words which are not particularly relevant or have lots of competition, where your clickthrough is low and cost high. I have found it is best to delete them. I have also used negative keywords which allow you to exclude certain words. For example with "tie" I found that some people were searching for "tie fighter" so had "-fighter" in AdWords to exclude these searches. This improves CTR and position.

Fourthly, check out the competition and decide where you need to be in the ranking. For my art website www.artspecialist.co.uk selling oil painting reproductions of masterpieces, I have found that for many words the competition are selling painting courses or prints. Why pay high CTR's to rank above these companies when potential customers will be scanning past them anyway. I have found it really pays to type each keyword into Google and decide where you need to be to match your competitors. On some words I can be bottom and still be the first company selling oil painting reproductions.

I hope you have found this useful. Next post I will take about conversion rates.

Useful links:

A great place for skiing, Lake Tahoe Vacation . Offers local information about the lake tahoe area.

Post free classifieds in Burlington Ontario including real estate and FSBO ads

The divinorum grow salvia shop. Visit our divinorum incense salvia site.

Offers love poems and love quotes.

2006-03-19T04:48:00.000-08:00

I started my first business silk tie retailing using a ready made website template and shopping cart. This was because I did not want to spend a lot of money having a site built and did not know anything about web retailing so wouldn't be able to specify what I needed anyway. It seems to me that this was a good decision. It meant that I could concentrate my work on getting the product, merchandising, sales text and internet marketing right and not worry too much about the other stuff. As I have progressed I have wanted to change some things in the site design but it has been fairly easy and cheap to do so and I have changed only the things that really needed to change. I got my website from DPBUk who have been good but there are many other companies out there selling ready made retailing websites.

The first step in getting the business up and running was to add my sales text. I decided to aim initially at the UK market only as that is the one I know and is less competitive than the us. My sales text for the front page aims to do a few things; show that I am UK based, show that people can trust and rely on the site (site looks professional, address is prominent, email and phone numbers are listed, money back guarantee and testimonials from customers) and encourage people to browse the ties knowing that prices are reasonable and shipping is free.

Next priority was to make finding the right tie easier. I did this by creating all sorts of categories; by colour, by style etc. Then was the grinding effort as going into every tie in the catalogue and adding it to various categories. This effort was well worth while however, if people can't quickly find what they are looking for then they will go elsewhere. It is so easy on the internet to pop into the next shop that you must make it very easy for people. Not only did I categorise every tie in to multiple categories, but I also tagged each tie with a basic description so that the Search box on my site would pull up relevant searches. Finally I selected what I thought were the nicest ties for the featured products on the front.

Final priority was pricing. I wanted the pricing to be competitive and to be easily changed, so that I could experiment and find the best pricing. I also wanted to make it clear to people that prices were much lower for the quality than you would get on the high street. I therefore decided to put high-street retail pricing in and then use a Sale to reduce the price to a competitive internet level. This has worked fairly well, although I think I under-priced initially. Now I am slowly increasing prices and it does not seem to be hurting sales. In pricing I wanted to have progressive quantity discounts to encourage people to buy more silk ties, however the cart system couldn't handle it. In the website administration it did have bands for price by quantity which I filled in for every product, only to find that it only worked if you bought multiples of the same silk tie. I haven't yet found a way of doing what I want with the cart, but am glad that I left the volume discounts bulk buying of the same tie in. I get lots of orders for multiples of the same tie from clubs, companies and weddings and having the discounts has definately paid off.

Have a look at the site at www.tiespecialist.com to see the design in action.After a week or so have work every evening and weekend the site was looking good enough to go. I placed a few trial orders for silk ties to make sure everything worked. It didn't. Test, test and test again until it works great. Finally the moment of truth, I was ready to go live and start getting customers. Tomorrow I will explain about by early experience with Google Adwords and the first few customers.

Home Business. An Easy to Learn Internet Home Business Opportunity, an Unique Product which can give people a better life, a product they need and want, a Generous Compensation Plan, and upline help to Succeed.

http://www.Leadersip-tools.com

Danish Big Great Dating Portal. Lot of link to Daiting sites.

2006-03-18T05:50:00.000-08:00

First steps: choosing the business

When I was thinking about starting an internet business there were a few things that were must have requirements.

The first one was that I needed to be able to get the business to profitability for less than a £1000. In practice each site has cost more than that when you figure in the marketing costs needed to get it off the ground quickly. The silk tie retailing site was set up for less than £200 but when you factor in marketing spend, then I have spent almost £500 per month on marketing, mostly Google Adwords and Overture. It is only after month three that I have got close to breaking even. Anyway, near enough and if you are more patient and make less costly mistakes than me then you should be able to do it for less.

Secondly. The business had to need as little manual work as possible. I am after a business that I can start working part time and as am a management consultant and sell my time by the hour, for me time really is money. I am also not keen on hiring people if I can avoid it. The internet has the potential to offer some really virtual businesses and I wanted to use this. For this reason as well as start-up costs this means that I do not want to stock or handle any products. I do a lot of supply chain consulting work so it was obvious to me that I could have a business that used other companies to buy, store and deliver the products. The easiest way to do this is by using dropshipping. Dropshippers are wholesalers that ship individual customer orders direct to your customers.

There is a lot of information on dropshipping online, however it has to be said that there are some terrible dropshipping companies where prices are too high or products too common to successfulull. Typical of these is thSelect which charges a fee to join, but once you join you find that the prices are often higher than they are being sold for on eBay and are widely sold with lots of competition. It is very hard to make good money from these sort of dropshippers. There are however some good companies out there with niche products where achievable margins are good.

The third requirement was that the business needed to have the potential to generate at least Â£1k per month in profit. That way with a few web businesses it could become my full time job. I decided that I was not trying to start the next Amazon, instead I was after a good profitable niche. Something not too competitive and with no house-hold names as competitors. This means that I have not gone into electronics even though it is the area I know the best, it is a very competitive market online and were competition includes Amazon and Dixons. To be successful in electronics you either need to find a niche not served by the big boys or spend serious money to get established.

I then started searching for business ideas. I read the get rich quick newsletters, internet marketing newsletters, internet business forums and drop shipping websites. I searched for dropship suppliers then when I found a product that I thought might be promising, did a search for it and checked out the competition. If after that it still looked interesting then I did a keyword search on Google AdWords to find out how many clicks I could get and at what cost.

While doing this I came across some sites selling ready-made business websites. Essentially they provide a shop template, a catalogue and a supplier of stock and off you go. These sell for between £50 ($80) and £500 ($800). I wasted a fair bit of money with a couple of false starts. I bid on a lingerie web business template on eBay with a starting price of £99; my wife was a lingerie merchandiser for Marks & Spencers and so I though she could help, then I saw a gadgets website from the same people and thought I would get that and see if I could find a gadgets niche and bid for that too. Trouble was I then did some more research and found that lingerie was very competitive online and that the supplier I would be getting had a limited selection of very tarty undies at rather high prices. I also found that the gadget supplier was the Select and as I have already said they are overpriced. I then found the tie web business and decided this was a better niche where margins really are 60% and bought that one from DpbUK who have been very good. Unfortunately no one else bid on the two on eBay and I ended up winning them although I no longer wanted them. £200 wasted. Oops. So do your rcarefulcarefull before buying; look carefully at the sample sites and try and find some clues to the suppliers, check the competition out and make sure the margins are high enough.

Useful Links:

Make Money Online Start making money online with your own 50 page web site in 72 hours or less. Ebooks and Software with resell rights for your own Home Business.

List Builder Magic Building Your List Builds Your Wealth. 253 Secrets and tips the experts use to explode their subscriber lists. Get a FREE 7 part Mini Course and Start Building Your List Today!

http://www.rapidkeyword.com/ Find profitable keywords, analyze competition on pay-per-click engines, manage your keyword lists. Download a Free Trial now.

Linking Strategies, Google Marketing, List Building and Blog Techniques. MakeAChange.com - Traffic Generation and Sales Conversion Techniques to Drive Traffic to Your Site

Affiliate Programs Directory. Find relevant affiliate programs to promote by searching through our comprehensive directory.

Affiliate Program. Become a super affiliate with 100% free training from the most successful affiliate marketers in the world only at TheSecondTier.com

Decision Web Systems Butterfly Marketing SEO Content, Strategy, Niche Marketing!. We teach you how to make money from home. Optimize your website,get into niche marketing; best business opportunities; web content; learn SEO; learn to promote like Mike Filsaime!

Internet Marketing Solutions. Quick Internet Marketing Solutions for web sites that disappoint or fail to generate business - free video tutorials today.

Copywriting. Web Copywriting University - "So You Want a Website That Sells?" How to make people pull out their credit cards and buy what you're selling.

Google Adwords. Learn how to dominate The search engines by utilizing the power of Google Adwords and Pay Per Click with Adwords-MasterClass.This definitive course shows that Google Adwords Are Key To Successful Online Sales Using Pay-Per-Click and Googles Adwords

http://www.elitelinksnewsletter.com/. Free link exchange newsletter. Trade reciprocal links with thousands of our members by subscribing today.

pay per click - ppc marketing. PPC is what we specialize in, not SEO, not Ezines, just PPC. We are the specialists that can get you serious results fast.

Rich Jerk Review. Genius internet marketing mind decides to give up his darkest money making secrets. Step by step plan to massive online income.

2006-03-17T10:27:00.000-08:00

Hi,

Welcome to the Internet Entrepreneurship blog. My name is Tony Gosling and on these pages I am going to share with you my experience in launching and building internet retail businesses. Most of this is going to be about the stupid mistakes I have made along the way which should hopefully provide other budding entrepreneurs with some good lessons.

Firstly, a little background about me. I am 36 years old, married (to Huma) and live in London. I divide my time between management consulting to technology and defence companies as a project manager, change manager, turnaround expert or strategist. I have consulted to companies including Alstom, BAE Systems, Nokia, Motorola and NEC. Currently I work as a freelance consultant for a number of specialist consulting firms.

However, business blood runs through my veins so I have also started a number of internet businesses. The aim is to build a business that I can run from anywhere in the world. First up was silk tie retailing with tiespecialist.com selling handmade English woven silk ties. I started this in December 05 and have learnt a hell of a lot since then making many mistakes. By February the silk tie business was starting to break and I started to feel like I knew what I was doing so I have launched an oil painting retailer artspecialist.co.uk just over a week ago. This site is selling handpainted oil paintings that are reproductions of masterpieces by famous artists.

Getting to break even has been much harder than I thought it would be, the first thing I learnt that the marketing spend to get people to come to your site is large and it is very easy to lose money on every sale. Getting that advertising cost down and conversion rate up are the two factors to focus on.

That's enough of an intro for now. Back shortly for the next instalment of my story.

http://www.kmax.ws/bloglinks.htm http://weblog.bloguniverse.com/.

121store.com Save money on your jewellery and watches upto a massive 75% saving

Paid Surveys. Get free information and details to more than 500 paid online survey companies that will pay you cash money to take online paid surveys. All of them are free to join!

Cape Cod travel guide