South West eCommerce

If you’ve been following this blog for a little while, you’ll know that South West eCommerce is two guys in Bunbury Western Australia, who are sure the internet is a place where we can make enough money to support our families, and maybe get just a little ahead.

Anyway, there are lots of reasons I like the internet, but truly, I haven’t got round to wanting to play on it.  I started facebook when my kids were travelling and it was an excellent way of keeping up, but when they returned to Australia, I kind of petered out on it.  Twitter came up as a new and important way of maintaining contact, and my partner and I both rolled our eyes and ignored it.  Then our friends at Commission Junction emailed us and said that it was important and we should check it out.  They provided a link to a guy running something called tweet tutor, and given that we trust them, we checked it out, and decided to subscribe and learn something.

Twitter, like everything else, is a useful business tool if you learn to use it properly.  We’re a couple of weeks in, in a busy time that has meant we have fitted it in round other things.  I’ve personally started to do some of the work on our twitter account and I can say, we’re looking at a consistent growth in our monthly income, and twitter is part of how we’re going to achieve that. 

Consider our blog.  While we’re deliberately not telling you what all our products are, we’re talking through the things we use ourselves and that make our affiliate marketing more powerful.  Recently I posted a blog entry, and six minutes later I was in my admin panel, and found it had had 15 views.  Compare that with the website of WA Today, run by Fairfax Media.  I’m sure they have lots more readers than us, but I know that they put me in the draw for a $25 000 prize to get me on their mailing list, and their overheads have to be pretty high.  When I get their news posting (it arrives twice a day), and view a story, I’ll often find I’m the only one reading it.  Twitter is delivering me enough viewers to make me a competitor to Fairfax, if only briefly.

Our Twitter account has been there for months, but growing slowly.  Last week I kicked it into gear using some tweet tutor techniques and grew the list by more than 200 for about 30 minutes work.  I repeated that 3 days later, and I think I can regularly do that.  Readers of our blog are contributing to a revenue increase that’s pretty significant.  If we continue to add value to their lives and their businesses, we’ll keep most of the readers that get sent there.  We’ll be watching the processes and reporting on how useful and profitable they are.

This blog’s been sitting mostly written for nearly a week, and the main account is growing steadily, as with a couple of others.  Just as another indicator of the importance of twitter, we used another of the tweet tutor techniques with one of our consumer goods sites a couple of days ago.  The site took an automated review of one of our products, and tweeted to our 8 followers (no list building yet).  Within an hour we’d had 17 views of that new article.  More traffic is more cash, simple as that, and this is really generating traffic for us.

Stand by for reports.