South West eCommerce

This looking at what we do thing has to seem like a lot of navel gazing, certainly does to us.  Truth is that we’re really more doers than planners, and that might have been some of the problem.  We know others who plan forever, and the planning takes so long that no doing gets done.

Anyway, there’s a part of our business that started a very long time ago.  It started as a bit of fun, and as a rolling test bed to show what we could do for small businesses who decided to take their business promotions online.  Prior to lots of people blogging all the time, we started an online magazine.

It did well as the testbed and demonstrator, but as we got busy, we’d never figured out how to make it pay as more than a fairly elaborate brochure for us.  We knew certain things about the internet and we were sure the internet would pay us to do a good job if we just got the business model right.

As other parts of our business are taking a back seat, this one is coming back into its own.  We have done very little with it for a long time now, but a look at it now suggests that it can pay its way.  The magazine has run on lots of content, and largely pays through adsense.  A clearer look at it shows that it helps drive traffic to some of our other sites and so clearly makes a contribution toward other income.  We won’t count it at reporting time because that’ll require tricky thinking and will skew our numbers, but it factors in when we consider our whole business practice.

We’ve had discussions with other writers in the area who want to break into the writing market and who see the value in being put in front of our mailing list.  Discussions are on now about the basis on which they’ll contribute, but we’re only offering revenue share, and this seems attractive to most.

We’ve learned a few things in the net over the past little while.  One is that content is really important.  People come to see content and they stay to buy stuff.  Crap content seems to work, and repeated content works, but repeat visits come from quality, original content.  What we’ve got in this resource is a way to get quality, original content regularly.

We’ve learned that volume is important, because no one wants to visit a site that says today what they read yesterday.  You can pull it off for a while but building a customer relationship is where the ongoing income springs from.  This has got at least a handful of people on board and the model that’s emerging should enable us to post at least every day.

We’ve learned that one visitor isn’t worth the same as another.  How to translate this content to high value visitors is our next quest, we haven’t gotten it all sorted, but we’re getting some ideas.  Commission blueprint recently supplied us with a spreadsheet of thousands of high value adsense keywords... can I ensure my writers target them?  Let’s give self interest a try.

We’ve learned that like everything else, this is work.  My eyes are hanging out.  But it’s been fun and the site as we built it is something we can be happy to be associated with.  Some of the consumables we sell are just money work.  We’re not above working to feed our families, but the aim is to do things we love and we’re proud of.

This rethink has been exciting.  We’ve got the leverage of having others working for us, well aware of the opportunities they are getting but also aware of the limitations, it’s been completely honest. 

Just as exciting has been the realisation that work we did ages ago still has value.  This site has the capacity if we run it right to sit right up there with some of our other earners.  Who’s got a five year old website with some stuff you wrote way back when?  Can some clear thinking turn it to value?