Amazing
Business
Ideas!

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.

I used to use Internet Shopping for my grocery shop when I couldn’t drive, a disabled family member also uses it a lot. My question is how far could services like this go?

We both work fulltime, and having met up after work on Thursday the dry-cleaners where we were doing our shopping was shut - she has a priority card for them to get the cleaning done quickly, but what use is that when they are shut?

I managed to finish work early on the Friday and drop it in, and I was pleasantly surprised when the assistant said, “Oh it will be ready on Sunday!”, wow that’s service!

Normally a Sunday collection would be fine, but we were away for the weekend and got back before the early Sunday closing time. Monday we worked until after they were closed, Tuesday we were both off work but had a string of appointments and completely forgot, so here it’s Wednesday and we still haven’t collected the dry cleaning!

Supermarkets have moved into the late night and 24 hour arena in recent times, which is great when you want to go shopping late, or go shopping at 4am! But what about other things?

I’d be interested to see the pricing of a shop/service that was only open in the late afternoon evenings (say 4pm - 10pm) that would do the following:
- Drop things off to the correct people during office hours (whether that be Dry Cleaning to the Cleaners, or my eBay parcel to the other side of the world, to the Post Office).
- Allow me to have my Post Office parcels and packets delivered to them and them sign for them because our collection office closes at 2pm (I know they open at 5am but that’s not the point, I want the packet that evening).

There’s probably a multitude of other things they could do as the business grew (couriering as they’d be on the road locally anyway etc.), initially I think it would make a loss, they’d be costing petrol for just a few people’s items probably all to different places. But you’d probably want to play a volume game, you’re only going to have to go to the post office once in a day whether you have 2 parcels from the evening before or 50! The same with the dry cleaners.

Does anyone have any other ideas for what a service like this could involve, or indeed know of one and the pricing structure?

Are you ready? With only 244 days to go until the big day, you should really start preparing now.

When we discussed the prospect of April being a quiet month in a previous post, I started to think about Christmas! As a rough guideline, I always think you should really start promoting your business for Christmas in the early weeks of November. That’s a full six weeks before the big day (pretty close to my birthday so that’s always a wake-up call for me!).

That leaves us with around 200 days from now, I’m betting it will take at least six weeks, maybe even eight, to come up with your marketing idea, rip that idea up, come up with a new idea, discuss it with colleagues, and then start work on it (we all know it happens!). So in eight weeks time (with around 150 days to go), you’ll start work on your idea!

Let’s say once you’ve created your idea it’s going to take three weeks, maybe four, for you to actually do the implementation (whether that be getting it onto your website, leaflets delivered, new stock in etc.), it needs to be ready go in early October!

Ouch! You are really starting to run out of days!

So, your knew idea will be ready for you to work on in eight weeks time, and you have to have it ready for October. That gives you around 130 days to actually create your idea, in the summer months (June-August) when I’m really betting you don’t want to be sat inside at a computer screen, looking at pictures of Santa!

So if I were you, and you’re having a quiet period now start thinking about Christmas - it’s really not that far away!

If you want to discuss Christmas Promotional ideas, please comment below!

The title of this post is a tagline from the Kevin Costner film, Field of Dreams. I often use it because it sums up the expectations of many website authors when they first create their website!

It’s supposed to be easy isn’t it? Bang up a website, wait for the visitors to arrive and sell them something or get them to click on a link and you make some cash?

Generally it doesn’t happen like that, but just recently I created a website that did just that!

The site I’m talking about has a Keyword Domain, I haven’t had to promote it heavily because it is EXACTLY what users searching for what I’m offering type into Google!

I know some people will probably be itching to know what the keyword was and what the domain is, I’m not going to reveal it at the moment as I don’t particularly want to skew any stats I’m monitoring!

I purchased the domain many moons ago and never really did a lot with it, I liked the name and nobody else had got it - when it came up for renewal I thought it might be time to do something with it!

I added some of Amazon’s products to the site to get commision from the Amazon Associates Program if people purchased them (I’m sure some of our topics will centre around affiliate programs soon enough!), it started getting one or two visitors, and they were buying. I’d built it, and they HAD come!

With a little bit of work (and programming), I used the Amazon Ecommerce System to add all of the related products in that area, and because I’m using the Amazon ECS all the prices and reviews of the products will automatically be updated - automation is the key to an easy life!

So I’d built it and they really were coming, but was it worth it? Certainly!

In March there were 29 products ordered for £430.52 worth of Amazon Products, earning me a grand total of £27.19 - for doing absolutely nothing (well nothing once the site was built). April is looking a little more quiet, but I’m not worried - I don’t have to do anything to the site.

How did it make this money? Simple, for the search term that is my keyword (it’s DVD related) it ranked number one (above Amazon, HMV, Play, Virgin and Asda) on Google for the whole month! It’s currently dropped to the second spot, but I can live with that! It’s frontpage of Google also has a Page Rank of 3 with no work!

That’s how keyword domains can work in your favour! I’d love to hear from anyone reading this that has had a keyword domains success, or even a keyword domain flop! If this is you, leave a comment and let us know!

Keiron and I have a little outing planning in a couple of weeks time. We’re off to see the lovely Michelle Dewberry. For those of you not in the UK, she won last year’s BBC Apprentice television show. She’s now coming to town for a literature festival - or the miserable old sceptics, to plug her new book (shame on you!).

It is fair to say, both my wife and Keiron’s fiancée raised an eye brow or two when we said we were going. Clearly we’re going along to listen to her experiences of working for Alan Sugar (now his auto-biography is good, read it years ago when at college) and her business acumen and has nothing to do with the fact we both fancied her when she was on the show (perish the thought we would be so crude).

It also gives us the chance to have a cheeky beer before and afterwards. I am sure we’ll report back on the evening - assuming we don’t get too drunk and forget

Edit: Just thought I’d add a link to Michelle’s Book, Anything is Possible for anyone that is interested, Keiron

The Problem
A few years back while reinstalling my PC, I thought how wonderful it would be for a single resource to see the latest versions of the programs and drivers I have installed and used. Obviously when reinstalling your PC, you want to make sure you only install the latest and greatest version of your programs and drivers you want to use.

So what do you do in this situation, well you go off to 20 different web sites to find out if the version you have stored on your PC is still the latest. It’s a pain and time consuming.

The Solution
So the idea being a web site that you register with and list the name of products and drivers you have and the version you are running. The site would then provide an update if it new if a newer version was already available, but more importantly could provide this update when you wanted to reinstall or update your PC.

Adding on to this, a software company could post updates to their product on the web site and anyone who has registered against that product could be notified of new versions or updates etc that are available.

Making Money
Initially you need to get critical mass. Sign up as many people as possible and provide a way for people to email companies who are not registered to put pressure on them to sign up to the service. Again initially let companies sign up for free. Once you get this critical mass you can start charging the companies for using the service. Also you could cross-market other products, based on the users profile of their registered products.

It would definitely a long term project and something that might not be possible now to get off the ground (this idea was originally thought of circa 2000). The web has moved on, but if you’ve got some bottle and could get some good PR then it could still be done - PR probably being the key. It would require a considerable amount of custom site design.

Is it a runner? Well yes I believe it is and thought it was, I even went as much as registering a whole load of domain names for it. That might not sound much now they are so cheap, but in 2000 domains were still pretty expensive. This is one for long term gain, high chance of earning no money, or high chance of earning a fortune. Just need to work out a way to monetise the service.

I am pretty sure I am not the only person ever to have not been able to find the manual for some piece of gadetary or household item when you really needed it. Now, in my ever increasing old age I am getting what Keiron calls lazy. Personally I call it common sense and appreciate of what my time is really worth.

Therefore a while back (a couple of years to be fair) when I could not find the manual for something that is insignificant for the point of this post, it came to be that it would have been a great idea to have just been able to go to a web site and enter the manufacturer and product number and for a few quid download a PDF of the manual.

At the time, I couldn’t find anything that let you do this online. Yes you can go to the manufacturer’s web site, but they don’t all have the manuals available and sometime they want to charge you to get a printed copy. Trouble with this is that if I’m looking I want it now, not next week.

So it would have been the perfect solution. Drawback as I saw it was that you’ll need a legal agreement with all the manufacturers of major household items, but if you’ve got some balls you could do this easy enough. Offer them a a kick back from the sales of their manuals, while allowing to provide an add-on service to their customers.

I was about to write why I didn’t follow this through, but then if I do this 99.9% of my posts will be I did not have time - which is true.

In the end I went for the low-tech route: I have a big box in the garage of every manual I’ve ever had and if I want one for something I now know where it is. For me who could be bothered to sort this out, it’s 95% perfect. But then I’m also lazy as Keiron says, so if I could get access to one cheaply without wondering off to the garage from my office, I might be tempted.

Go forth and make money.

We’ve finally got around to setting up a joint project between the two of us, and here it is! You can read about both of us here:

• About Glenn
• About Keiron

Let’s see how this works out!

Hmm, all about me… Well I’m 30, that makes me two years older than Keiron - which not only makes me older, it also makes me wiser! He won’t agree, but then that’s his impetuous youth.

I am a fully fledged member of the serial entrepreneur club. My wife is sick to death with me thinking of weird and wonderful ways of making money - that and trying to figure out how things work, but then that’s the engineer inside of me and that’s another story completely.

I come from a family where pretty much everyone has had a business themselves. My Grandparents ran an engineering company making bespoke (isn’t that a cool word?) machinery. My Great Aunt took over the running of her husbands haulage company when he died (some thing for a women back in the 1950s). My Dad was a professional photographer that had a high street store, my Mum was professional dressmaker when I was a child, now she runs with my uncle, her brother, the rental of our industrial units (and spend my inheritance). My uncle runs a mobility business following a long career in Ford as an engineer (that engineering gene is a strong one). So as you can see my pedigree (woof!) is pretty strong.

Personally I started my first proper business when I was 16 at college, building and fixing PCs. As that dropped off near the end of my degree, I took up writing a piece of software called EasyNote, that sent SMS messages from your PC through a modem and they could be over 160 characters - yes I know it’s not exactly cutting edge now, but it was at the time. It sold hundreds of copies and was featured on PC Answers CD cover-mount.

I then migrated to web design, e-commerce consultancy and web hosting. This is something I still have my fingers in and do quite nicely from it. In addition for the last 3-4 years I have been involved in running a couple of e-commerce web sites, acting as the merchant shipping the goods etc (not one of these lazy drop shippers). More recently I’ve been working on a new software project that currently shall remain anonymous.

As I mentioned, my wife hates the continuous business ideas I have, she really hates it when Keiron and I are together as if it’s not business it’s technology. We are forever bouncing ideas off against each other. If only there was enough time in the day. So that’s why we have this site. Ideas we have and then do nothing with, will get posted here for the world to enjoy. Take them, use and abuse them, all at no cost - although if you make your millions from one of them, bung us a few quid eh?