Amazing
Business
Ideas!

This has been around for a long while, but is what generated the idea for this category (whilst in the pub) so I thought I’d include it first, back in October 2005 Google introduced Section Targeting, here’s the Adsense Help Center page for Section Targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

This allows you to specify which parts of the page your ads are targeted to, it’s great for excluding menu’s and footers to make sure that your ads are targeted purely to the content of the page.

Over a few quiet pints with Glenn (just prior to going to see Michelle Dewberry talk last week, and several pints after!) we were discussing blogs, monetisation of them and just general business ideas.

It seems we have a few hints/tips and other general bits and bobs of random knowledge that each other probably doesn’t know about and may help you! So I’ve created a new category for these tips and we’ll start adding to them every so often - don’t expect long posts and deep explanations - treat them kind of like post-it-notes!

I have a client of mine who we did some e-commerce site design and consultancy with around twelve months ago. We produced a online store for him which he’s been using, but for the last three months been complaining that he is not getting many people visiting and even less buying.

This started about when we turned on over bandwidth and disk space notifications and that got him flapping. So after several emails backwards and forwards, I rang him up to have a chat.

He told me of all the wonderful things he had done to promote the site and how they had made no difference and he said it was a waste of time. It could have been a fair point if it had not just meant sticking a few links from his ebay about me page and one small advert in some low volume poxy magazine.

Now this really does annoy me, as when ever I work with someone like this at the beginning we tell them you must promote your site or nothing will happen. So they know this and just to hammer it home we provide an e-book we have written with loads of top tips on web site promotion. This isn’t a definitive list, but it is designed to spark a few ideas of their own. If they want more from us we’ll do it but at a cost.

So back to this phone call. I checked we had sent him this e-book and he said yes, but said he’d none nothing much from it. He complained his one advert didn’t work - I didn’t have the heart to tell him that one single advert was a waste of money and he would have been better off giving the money to charity.

The thing is with web site promotion is that you need to do lots of things, one or two often will not work unless you throw lots of money at it.

What really annoys me about this conversation (other than the fact it wasn’t billable), was that I doubt he’ll do anything about it - so I have effectively waste 30 minutes of my life. What was even more annoying was that I came up with some great Public Relations activities he could do to get people to know about the site without ramming sales down their throats. Again even more annoyed as they were good ideas I should have charged him to have, but hey he caught me on a good day.

So where is this rambling rant going? Well the moral of the story is don’t kid yourself - promote, promote and promote some more. If you want any chance of getting any traffic and ultimate business you need to get off your fat arse and do something - unless you’re doing it online You need to do lots of different things and try to monitor which work and which don’t. Sometimes you will not know and you’ll have to keep them all going, sometimes it will be clear which ones are the winner.

Promoting a web site is no more different than running your own business. If you sit back and expect the world to knock down your door you’re a fool and will soon die a terrible poor death. If you work hard, get the message out there and be nice to your customers, you could do well and soon have the second house in the mediterian.

While taking a stroll with Keiron after lunch today we happened to walk past a building site for a new leisure gym. Other than liking watching the diggers and dumper-trucks (I am a man after all), it reminded me of a thought I had a while ago about making more money from being in the building trade.

So to start off with, I am not a builder, have never trained to be a builder, but I can turn my hand to most DIY jobs and have done so ever since having my first house - this includes major work in our garden a couple of years ago. Now I’ve got my disclaimer out of the way the idea.

The Idea
Basically it was, get a load of graduates straight from university and train them in the the trades needed to build a house or similar building. Then pay them graduate wages, rather than minimum builders wage and get them cracking.

The idea being that if you pay educated people (It was Jack Dee a UK comedian that said builders always bring their own lunch to work as they are stupid, they basically need to know if they are coming or going by looking to see if their lunch box has any food in it!) good money (and you’ve not hired donkeys), they will work hard - today was no exception, one man in a digger, two watching him work!

Also why does every building site produce so much rubbish. Again if you have people committed and on a bonus to increase quality, decrease time and decrease waste, you’d save more money even taking in to account the increased wages and bonus.

Therefore you could either charge more for your building projects as they would come in on time, or just do more of them and earn more money (do 12 jobs a year instead of the 9 you would have done before).

Is it that easy? probably not, but it’s an interesting thought. I doubt any building companies would try it, but might be an interesting project for the Discovery Channel.