Big Encouragement For Internet Newbies

Are you one of those Internet marketing beginners who beat themselves up over the fact that you are just geting involved with Internet marketing now? This could get worse if you read testimonies of those who started an online business fairly recently and have made amazing progress within the last one year or even six months. Don't worry, it's not too late to start an Internet marketing business becuase it has been discovered that with the introduction of broadband connection facilities the use of the Internet in homes has greatly increased. Also, more people are shopping online than ever.

In a recent Newspaper report, it was said that more people are doing their shopping on the Internet now, apparently as a means of beating the credit crunch. The report went on to say that Britons spent a whooping £14.7billion making purchases over the web last year alone. That is almost $30billion in Britain alone. This amount is also said to be nearly ten times the growth rate of the total retail market.
The report went on further to state that the number of people who bought goods online also increased by 24.7 per cent to 22.6million. The Research also showed that people are spending over the Internet more regularly. People spent over the Internet an average of 16.9 times last year, up from 14.2 times in 2006. This research was carried out by www.verdict.co.uk. and published in various newspapers.

In another recent report, published in The Guardian of May 22 2008, it was said that in the United Kingdom, 59% percent of rural households have Internet broadband connections while the percentage of urban households with Internet broadband connection is slightly lower at 52%. The reason given for this slight discrepancy is that people living in urban areas have shops and other facilities nearby unlike those living in rural areas who would probably have to travel long distances to get to the nearest departmental store, which makes it more convenient for them to shop online.
The objective of the report is to show that people living in rural areas use the Internet more than those living in urban areas but I am citing these reports to encourage those who are still contemplating setting up an online shop. The market is growing rapidly and it will definitely grow bigger.

Small business owners who do not have an online presence now will most definitely lose a lot of business to their competitors who have set up websites to promote their businesses. A website has been described as a virtual landed property, which, under normal circumstances, should increase in value with time.

There has never been a better time to start an online business than now. A number of big businesses now have affiliate programmes, which any webmaster can take advantage of.

Online shopping is expected to reach about £50billion by the year 2012. Would you not like to have a slice of that cake?

Selling Ring-Tones

I once dabbled into selling ring-tones online, gospel ring tones. My ring-tones were actually customised. I recorded some popular Christian hymns and choruses individually, converted them into mp3 formats, sent them by e-mail to a ring-tone company that converted them into monophonic and polyphonic ring tones, which were e-mailed back to me. I uploaded these tones on the website, set up the procedure to download them and started marketing. I bought a banner space on a Christian radio website and, voila! I started getting traffic within a few days! I actually succeeded in selling a number of tones before the advert campaign ran out.
The first noticeable problem was that of ‘non-deliverable tones’. Some of the subscribers would purchase up to five or six ring tones and only one or two would be delivered to their phones, and I only got paid for the ones delivered. I called the ring- tone company about it and, trust them, they put the blame on the subscribers. The second problem was not completely unrelated to the first one. I reckoned my ROI was not good at all. It was in the negative integer actually.
I then devised a solution to the problem, I would not reduce my advertisement expenditure but I would have some more affiliate links on the site. It was close to Christmas 2005 so I decided to include affiliate links to sites selling Christmas presents. I also started a PPC (Pay Per Clip) campaign with Overture and I guess the traffic really trooped in because the site crashed! Oh yes, it did. I reckon it was because I did not increase the bandwidth after adding those extra affiliate links and the site could not cope with the extra traffic coming from the PPC campaign. I was really disappointed and gave up completely when I should have rebuilt the site with extra bandwidth.
One lesson I learnt, which would always stay with me is that Affiliate-marketing is good business if you sort out your ROI, that is, if you are making more money than it is costing you to get traffic.
One last word about selling ring-tones online. It’s probably not such a good idea anymore. I invested quite a bit on making customised monophonic and polyphonic ring tones but hey, what happened shortly afterwards? Phones that could play real tunes started becoming popular and right now if you’re not using a Nokia 3310 or some other archaic handset you probably won’t even know what a monophonic ring tone sounds like. Most of the latest handsets in the market now support real tunes and there are ways of getting real-tunes without paying a dime. Especially with some of these phones that come with voice recorders. Apart from that most Networks also offer real-tunes for sale to their subscribers.
So if you are thinking of joining a ring-tone affiliate programme please consider what has been said above.