Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

My collection - yes, I'm a fan

Paid versus free content is really under the spotlight at the moment, and I wanted to take a look at one of the most successful brands of recent years and demonstrate how providing information and services at no charge can lead to revenue and more on the back end. This is a post that I have been wanting to write for a while, but with a TV show on air in a couple of weeks, it is timely.

Since being discovered on a TV show, Jamie Oliver has become one of the most successful brands of the last decade. I am a huge fan of everything he does in both cooking and business. Notice I said brand, not chef. Sure he deals with food, but Oliver’s real business? Education. His positioning? Simplicity. The Naked Chef moniker of his early days was derived from the simplicity and accessibility of his food, that you can create something great without too much fuss.  Read more...

In business, there are measures of success, most of them around actual sales numbers. In online, there are so many measurements for the way people interact with your site that often times you can be bogged down in numbers and lose sight of those that are actually important to your business. So how do you work out and focus on those measures that actually matter?

Ideally, start at the end and take one step back.

What does success look like for your business? Is it sales? If so, revenue is obviously a key metric. Perhaps equally though, if not more important, is the number of people actually visiting the page BEFORE they commit to purchase. How many people get to that point and change their mind? If this number is too high, then you have a problem with how that page is set up.  Read more...

I wanted to take a rest from talking about social media within your online business, as I seem to have done for the past few posts, and take it back to some basics about setting up an online presence

With the proliferation of DIY website tools like Wordpress, anyone can have a site up and running in less than an hour. I visit a lot of sites every day and read a lot of content, and sometimes there can be a real fashion over function mentality to the design – that is, it might look good, but the usability and functionality are terrible.

This can make people put your information in the too hard basket when it comes to finding what they want, or interacting with it how they want. As an online business owner, how your site looks, feels and most of all functions are key to success. Your content might be great but if it’s too hard to digest, it doesn’t matter.  Read more...

Getting people to any site is a challenge, even more so to a new one. Until your SEO kicks in (and even when it has) and delivers organic search traffic, you need to rely on other methods to get people’s attention.

There are 3 (almost) free tips I can recommend to drive traffic to your site and begin to build awareness (and hopefully quality links).

Blog, and Make Your Content Topical and Current

I am a big believer in blogging, regardless of your niche. Somewhere on your site, you should make room for a blog and write on it regularly. You may think that your insights into your field may not mean much, but to an audience that is coming to your site to know about your product, they may find it useful. And it is a way of actively generating content to a site that may not be otherwise be visited by a potential customer.  Read more...

As I covered in my last post, affiliate marketing can be a difficult area of online marketing to navigate for someone just getting started in online business. So I thought I would talk more about two programs that I think could work well with pretty much any model, and how you go about finding more to suit your business.

eBay Partner Network

I’ve mentioned eBay’s partner network before, as I believe it is one of the most widely applicable available. Considering that eBay offers such a breadth of products and categories, it is difficult to think of a site that it would seem out of place on.

Virtually every version of eBay will have a partner program (with the exception of Hong Kong and Singapore whose programs were recently closed), and you have the option of applying to join one or all of them. US and UK approval can take a while to come through, but when they do you have access to Geo-targeted ads and links that will link through to the appropriate site depending on where your visitor comes from.  Read more...