The end of an era…
// As I mentioned in my last newsletter, The Online Trader is about to be put to bed forever It is almost six years since I first published an email newsletter and since then, I have sent out a newsletter every two weeks (ok, I did miss a couple of dates but if you look back through the archives you will see that my delivery was pretty faultless!) The vast majority of my newsletters are archived here: http://www.theuktrader.co.uk/archives-4/ although I am afraid I didn’t keep copies of the very early editions so I guess they are gone forever… So why am I stopping? Well, there are several reasons but the main one is simply that it is time for something different. After so long, I must admit that I am finding it harder and harder to sit down each week and come up with something worthwhile to write about. Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of information etc to pass on but it is often too much to fit within a single page newsletter. Also, if I am being completely honest, I have lost a lot of my interest in the ‘email newsletter’ format. It is something which has been
So what actually works these days?
// I was chatting to a friend the other day and we got talking about Internet marketing. During our conversation, he asked me what the latest ‘thing’ online was and what actually works these days? When I asked him to clarify exactly what he meant by ‘works’, he said, ‘Oh you know, what’s the best way of getting traffic and making sales?’ When I took a step back and thought about it, there is no ‘latest thing’. The things which work tend to be exactly the same things as worked a year, two years, even five years ago….. Let’s take getting traffic as an example. Broadly speaking you can spilt traffic into two main camps: free traffic and paid for traffic. Free traffic can come from a variety of different sources such as organic search results, affiliates, virally via eBook links and so on. Paid for traffic can also come from a variety of sources including pay per click advertising and general banner advertising. Five years ago (actually probably longer than that), a large percentage of my traffic came from organic search results from the main search engines such as Google. Nothing has changed today – Google and the other
Do you get it?
// What’s the ‘£300/month ideas’ category all about – Find out here… I base many of my articles and newsletters on my own day to day experiences in the world of Internet marketing. Things that have happened to me. Emails I have received. Interactions I have had with customers, subscribers and other Internet marketers. The more I work online, the more it becomes apparent to me that some people just don’t ‘get it’. What don’t they get? Well in my experience, many things but the ‘thing’ that someone didn’t ‘get’ this week was the benefit of marketing an affiliate product which has a recurring income element to it….. One of my membership websites, SimplyWholesale, has an affiliate program which allows anyone to link to the site and earn 50% of any sales generated by their visitors. Nothing special here – millions of websites offer a similar deal. In addition, because one of the payment options offered by SimplyWholesale is a monthly subscription, my affiliates can also earn 50% of future monthly subscription payments made by a member who they introduce to the site. Again, nothing special here – many membership websites have the same arrangement. So what’s the story? Well,
Let's make some money!
// One of the downsides of living on the coast as I do is the winter. Whilst I get to see some of the best weather the UK has to offer, I also get to see the worst. We are not even close to the main winter months yet but I have still spent the last couple of days holed up at home watching some spectacular storms over the sea and ‘enjoying’ force 8 winds battering my house! Some of the more crazy locals chose to windsurf in the incredibly rough sea but given that I managed to crack a rib a few weeks ago windsurfing in next to no wind, I figured I would give it a miss It looks as though the summer sun has been and gone for another year….. On the plus side, as we creep into the autumn/winter months many business owners will be heading towards their busiest time of the year. This is especially the case if you are in retail of some kind as the run up to Christmas should, ideally, mean that you will be rushed off your feet for the next two or three months. Every year I start to
How much easier can it get?
// In my last newsletter, I wrote about how you need to put in a fair amount of hard work before your online business becomes successful – there is no such thing as an ‘overnight success’. Despite this, setting up and running an Internet business is a hundred times easier today than it was, say, five years ago. There are just so many more services and products available to assist you and I got to wondering how much easier things could really get? This week, the UK Post Office has announced a new free service which allows people to buy their stamps online. You simply pay for the stamps you require with a credit/debit card and then print off a label to stick on your envelope. I haven’t used the service yet but as far as I can tell, the label even includes the address to which the letter is going so you don’t even need to write it out (or print off a second label)! A similar service has been in operation in the US for some time but this is fairly new technology in the UK. Just think how much time this new service could potentially save the
