Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

Given the shredding Gordon Ramsay’s took this week during a trip to Australia, I thought it was probably a good idea to spend some time talking about managing your reputation, in your case when running an online business.

In the days before the web, a good business reputation was much easier to maintain. If you had bad service from someone, you would offer up the usual “I’ll tell all my friends not to come here”, and then maybe if you remembered, your displeasure would reach about a dozen people.

Jump ahead to the age of Facebook, Twitter, SMS (and any other means you use to keep in touch), and all of a sudden you face a very different beast. If a customer now experiences bad service, they have the ability to not only tell their friends instantly, but the opportunity to tell a whole lot of people who are followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook that can number in the hundreds or even thousands – and these are not necessarily even people they know that well, if at all.  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...

While your key product offering on your site should always be your main consideration, as a supplemental revenue stream, you should consider some form of affiliate marketing.

Basically affiliate marketing is the webs equivalent of a referral – where other sites will pay you to drive traffic to theirs if that visitor buys something. Many of the world’s biggest companies have some form of affiliate program, and one of the oldest is Amazon.com’s, called Amazon Associates. eBay also has one, which pays based on new users who purchase goods, and the adult entertainment online universe probably has more than anyone. Overall, commissions always vary widely depending on who it is, and there are certainly some out there that are dodgy that you need to watch for.

As an online business owner, affiliate marketing could be a great opportunity to generate some extra revenue from your site. There are a few key points to think about here:  Read more...

I’ve been active on eBay for the last 6 years, and am a big fan and advocate of the site. For buyers, it is a one stop shop for pretty much anything they want to buy, with the advantage of great low prices. For sellers, it has gone from being a place to get rid of unwanted stuff around the house, to a viable sales channel for all kinds of businesses.

The story of eBay itself is fascinating, I recommend reading The Perfect Store: Inside eBay. How it went from one man to the e-commerce success story of our time is inspiring.

eBay is not just about auctions. You have the ability to run your items at fixed prices, just as you would in a bricks and mortar store. You wouldn’t expect your customers to walk in the door and offer you one price and come back in a week.  Read more...

So, you have decided to start an online business. What will you do?

No matter which sales channel you sell use, what you are actually selling is paramount. I had the opportunity last week to attend a session with a dozen eBay sellers where eBay management took us through proposed changes. As everybody introduced themselves around the room, it was fascinating to hear not only the different types of thing that people were selling, but why they sold them.

What this highlighted to me was the importance of finding your niche. Let’s face it – it’s hard to enjoy a job when you are not passionate about it. In starting an online business, you are declaring that you want to control your own destiny, so why would you sell something that you are not invested in completely.  Read more...