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Web butterflies don't get rich
I've been a butterfly for a long time I've run hobby sites for years. Last year, I took my first steps towards becoming an Internet Entrepreneur by teaming up with a partner who had both capital and the experience of running successful non-Internet companies. If you want to run an online shop and you haven't ever run a successful business, first get a partner who has. Our first venture, an online retailer of clothing made in south west France, is now established and growing at a satisfactory rate. We've learned enough SEO to get our site on the first page for searches on our most important keywords, but life's never as simple as the Internet Marketing gurus make out. We found that people searching with intent to buy often click on the paid ad even if the site appears alongside in the 'organic' search results... Recently, as part of the launch of a new membership drive, Web marketing coaching company Stompernet published a number of excellent free videos to give an idea of what anyone who won the right to pay them several hundred US dollars a month would receive, and how hard they'd have to work to get their money's worth. I've been playing with the apparently straightforward instructions on how to set up and optimise an Adwords campaign and use Google Analytics. It isn't as easy as it sounds, if you haven't got a coach to get you over the initial stage of familiarising yourself with how to set up the Google tools. If you don't have big numbers of visitors or sales, it takes a few days to see that you haven't designed things correctly because the numbers don't add up. However, the main message comes over loud and clear - if you can't measure, you can't tell if your actions are improving anything. There's no point in tweaking anything unless you can tell what effect the tweaking had. And you really need a year's statistics, or the experience of a good mentor, to be able to tell whether you're seeing real improvements or seasonal variations. It will take a while to get our next venture - a travel site funded by advertising revenue - off the ground. I have been using my own 'butterfly' activities to test out various concepts, but that's only useful for testing structures and layouts, not ways of generating money. Within the last few weeks, after digesting all the free material I could find and playing with several small sites without putting enough effort into any one of them, I've finally accepted that for a site to get above an erratic trickle of Adsense revenue that just about pays the hosting costs I must create a steady flow of new content. My time and energy are strictly limited, so I've stopped playing and I'm dedicating all my energy to one site: www.newfreebooters.com, a blog about France that's aimed mainly at expat residents and holidaymakers. In a few months' time, I hope to be ready to post a new Intel to Qassia passing on the things I have learned.
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Contributor's Note
I don't sell Internet Marketing expertise, but I'm trying to use all the free coaching I can find. As I do, I'll create Intels telling about the pain, the successes and the failures - in the hope that I'll fill in some of the gaps that seemed too trivial for the experts to mention.
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Stompernet videos and site analysis tool
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Nice to see another user in the South of France joining Bessy. About your online ventures, not directly related to the thrust of your intel, but my jaw dropped when I read that you retail clothing made in the South of France. How can that work? I'd have thought that you'd need to have the manufacturing done in places like Bangladesh, or Honduras, or warehouses in Arizona full of locked up Cambodians.
 |  | nick Jun 13, 2008 08:32 | |
CONTRIBUTOR'S REPLY
The clothing is rather specific: espadrilles and berets. there are only a couple of firms left in each industry, where there used to be hundreds. The Chinese make them cheaper, but of inferior wool - and you need to buy your inventory in thousands. If you're curious, take a look at www.ropeysoles.com.
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