Poor Richard 39
#039/05-Jan-00
POOR RICHARD'S WEB SITE NEWS
Geek-Free, Commonsense Advice on Building a Low-Cost Web Site
Editor: Peter Kent
Top Floor Publishing
http://PoorRichard.com/
Over 40,000 Subscribers in More Than 100 Countries!
IN THIS ISSUE
- Beginner's Column: Use Bundling To Increase Your Profits And Sales!
- Not Just Your Own Products
- An Online Store Diary
- A Quick Way to Replace Text Across Multiple Files
- Online Seminars Using Voice and Web
- Poor Richard's Web Site and Other Top Floor Books
- Book Reviewers Wanted
- Reading Back Issues
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Beginner's Column: Use Bundling To Increase Your Profits And Sales!
by Larry Dotson
An effective way to increase your profits and sales is to bundle many products or services together into one package. This gives people more reasons to buy your products and services. People also have come to believe package deals are a better value. You want all the products or services to be closely related. For example: if you're selling a computer you could add in software, hardware, computer furniture, etc.
There are many ways to go about choosing the right products or services to bundle into one package. You could survey your customers and see what products or services they would like you to offer in the future. Spy on your competition and see what products and services they're offering or not offering. If you would like to, bundle unrelated products or services together, ask your customers which ones would be of interest to them.
Bundling can also increase your target markets which in return would give you a larger audience to sell your products and services. For example: if you're selling a baseball magazine you could add a free baseball when someone buys a subscription. You're now targeting people who want the baseball magazine and those that want to play baseball out in the yard. Some people buy a package deal just to get one of the products.
There are many sources where you can find products and services to create a package deal. You can buy them from wholesalers or drop shippers. You can buy the reproduction/resell rights to other people's products. Team-up with your competition to create a package deal. You could joint venture or cross promotion deal with other businesses. You could also create your own products and services. Be creative!
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Not Just Your Own Products
The above article from Larry Dotson reminded me of another way to profit from your Web site -- sell other people's products, whether bundled or not. By increasing your product line, you can increase average sale value quickly and easily.
My Top Floor Publishing site sells books published by, not surprisingly, Top Floor Publishing. But we recently began selling two other books, one from IDG (Making Money in Technical Writing), and one from Ventana/Coriolis (The Official Netscape JavaScript Book). The decision to sell these books was easy; I wrote both books. In the case of the first book we have to buy it from the publisher at the normal bookseller discounts; as for the second book, we purchased the remaining stock when Coriolis let it go out of print. We could be selling books that I didn't write, of course (and will probably look into doing so soon). The real reason we added these books is that we believed many of our visitors would also be interested in these titles.
We don't make anywhere near as much money on these books, though, as on our own titles. However, rather than selling five titles we're now selling seven, a forty percent increase. And simply having these extra books on the site means we make more money. We find that many people who buy a Top Floor book add one of these other books to their basket. And we're also selling these books on their own -- people who would have left our site without making a sale make a purchase because we have a wider selection.
If you're selling products online, attracting people to your site to sell to them, increasing your product line by finding compatible, non-competitive, products is a quick and easy way to increase sales.
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An Online Store Diary
Thousands of people are setting up sideline businesses online. Most probably fail to cover their costs. Yet many do very well. Why? A combination of factors, including picking the right product -- something unusual and hard to find is likely to do better than a mundane everyday product -- and investing a little effort in effective promotions.
The following is a short "diary" my business partner wrote early in December outlining his experiences in setting up an online store, what was intended as an experiment in online commerce. He tracked down a product that is very difficult to find in the U.S., yet is likely to be of interest to many people. With a little effort in promoting the site -- and I mean that literally, only a little effort -- he was able to push sales into thousands of dollars a month very quickly. Here's his story.
My online store -- a Diary
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Mike Ceranski
http://www.SoftNeon.com/
"If you build it, they will come" may be true in the cornbelt, but it is the biggest single misconception on the Internet. If you are considering creating an online store, be sure to sit back and consider how much time and energy you will be able to put into your store's promotion. The simple act of putting up a web store does not guarantee traffic, even if your wares are unique. You must be willing to invest effort and brain power, and perhaps a wee bit of cash, in order to drive traffic to your storefront. To give you an idea what's involved, here's my story about selling on the Web.
Sep. 1, 1999
I searched for and found a very cool product called electroluminescent wire that glows when power is applied. It has a wide range of possible applications -- from automotive to woodworking -- and can be used by anyone. It fulfilled my requirements for a broad potential market, yet was also easy to sell through highly targeted verticals such as home theater.
Sep. 15, 1999
I contacted the manufacturer and made an investment in enough stock to get the store going. I built a web store using BizBlast's e-commerce technology (being affiliated with BizBlast, this was an easy decision). [Note: this is not available to the public at present, but will be shortly.] Once the store was up, I asked Peter Kent where the best list of online newsletters and e-zines was located. This in hand, I crafted a short, 3-paragraph introduction e-mail message which could be easily customized. Late one evening I spent three hours e-mailing e-zine and newsletter editors customized versions of this short letter.
Sep. 20, 1999
My first order came in, and so did 7 e-mail messages with questions about the products and their application. I answered the questions promptly -- a strategy that I've stuck to ever since. Orders did not overwhelm me, but at the end of my first "official" week (Sunday, Sep. 26th) of sales, I had sold about $290 worth of stock.
Sep. 22, 1999
I decided that I should try leveraging another site's popularity to benefit my own. I decided to auction one of my glowing wire kits on eBay.com. The real purpose wasn't to sell the kit, but rather, to introduce my product line and URL to a large number of auction-surfers who might find it intriguing. eBay allows you to create very detailed product descriptions with embedded HTML tags. And this means you can embed hyperlinks from the descriptive text back to your web store. I took full advantage of this and created a visually appealing description with plenty of links back to http://www.softneon.com.
Oct. 3, 1999
The end of my second full week of selling online saw cumulative sales reach a tad more than $650. I decided to check my ranking with the major search engines. I'm horrified by what I find. Even though I had used an automated search submission program to submit softneon.com to more than 500 search engines, I found that such popular search sites as http://www.hotbot.com and http://www.infoseek.com were ignorant of "softneon" and more generic terms like "electroluminescent".
I began hand submitting to the most popular search engines. I also worked on my Meta tag list so a wider range of words or phrases entered at search sites might result in hits for SoftNeon. For instance, I want people who are searching for alternative lighting effects for home theaters to find my site, so I added words like "Sony", "projection", "home theater", "THX" and "surround sound" to my Meta tag list.
Oct. 10, 1999
I decided that since Halloween was approaching, I should to add a Holiday angle to my products. I create a quick Halloween decoration using a ceramic pumpkin and some orange EL wire and take a picture of it using my handy digital camera. I quickly add it to my examples page ( http://www.softneon.com/examples.htm ).
Oct. 31, 1999
I closed out my 6th week of cumulative sales at $1,655.54. I'm not setting a world record, but considering my marketing investment is about 7 hours and $3.25 for my eBay auction item (which sold for $40), I'm pleased.
Nov. 2, 1999
An article I wrote for E.P.E. Online Magazine appears in PDF (Acrobat) format. The article was requested by the magazine's Chief Editor after he received my promotional e-mail I'd sent back in September. Since E.P.E Magazine has a predominantly English audience, sales to the U.K. promptly go up.
Nov. 7, 1999
Sales for the week shoot up to $1,200 for the seven days from Nov. 1 to Nov. 7. Wow! If sales continue at this rate for the entire month, I expect sales will top $4,000. I begin considering what and how to promote for Christmas.
Nov. 15, 1999
Sales have slowed down. I create two new auctions on eBay, one in automotive accessories, and another in Star Trek collectibles. Questions about adding EL wire to things like Klingon battle cruisers and '57 Chevy's go way up.
Nov. 20, 1999
Sales begin picking up. I notice sales from a lot of the same cities (such as Calgary and San Francisco) again and again. This makes me think that my product line has a strong word-of-mouth factor. Perhaps I should consider an affiliate program. (An affiliate program is a system whereby other web sites put up your banner ad and if a visitor to their site clicks on it, they jump to your web store. Then if they buy something while in your store, the originating web site gets a commission.)
Nov. 29, 1999
Sales for the month of November come in at $2,475. Not the $4K I'd hoped for, but I have to admit I did not do enough online marketing in October and early November. Still, the store is covering costs and making me a bit of money. Time to do some more online marketing...
A Quick Way to Replace Text Across Multiple Files
If you've built or manage a Web site, eventually you'll run into this problem. You need to replace a piece of text in multiple file, but you're not exactly sure where this text lies. Some HTML-authoring tools have built in search-and- replace tools. But what if you don't use an HTML-authoring tool, or if you're working on files that you can't edit in your HTML-authoring tool?
I've found a great little tool called WinEasy that will quickly replace text across a variety of files -- I just tell it what text to look for, what to replace it with, which directory to look in, and what type of file I'm working with (.html, .htm, .txt, or whatever), and away it goes. It's very quick, and there's even a log-file feature that shows you which files were edited, and how many replacements were made.
Just recently I was editing product files in a shopping-cart system. These are not HTML files, they're just text files containing information about products that a shopping-cart program displays in a catalog. I needed to modify a few things, and WinEasy saved me a great deal of time.
A quick word of caution, though. As with _any_ search-and-replace tool, you must use it with caution. You should think carefully about what you're changing. For instance, if you want to change the word "red" to "blue," take care or you'll end up changing, for instance, "bored" to "boblue."
This is a freeware program. You can find it at http://www.fluid3d.com/software/wineasy.html
Online Seminars Using Voice and Web
I recently heard about an interesting system that combines telephone connections and Web presentations. You can use this system to host a Web-based seminar. You provide your seminar "attendees" with two things, a phone number and a URL. At the seminar start time the attendees dial in, and load the specified Web page, and away you go. (Of course this requires that attendees have a voice line in addition to the line they use to connect to the Internet ... so many home users won't be able to work with such a system.)
This system can host literally hundreds of attendees at the same time. Most of the time the attendees will be unable to talk -- they just listen to the presentation. But you can open up the lines to allow questions, if you wish.
You can find more information at http://www.webinars.com/ You can sign up to attend a free demo if you wish. But having said that ... I don't know what Webinars charge, so I not sure if you'd save much, but it's probably not that hard to create your own "webinars." You can build a Web-based presentation, then use a voice-conference system. There are many conference systems around; you can find a big list at Yahoo, at http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Telecommunications/Conferencing/Teleconferencing/
Some of these services can handle conferences of 1,000 or more people. Participants call the number at the specified time, enter a code, and are placed into the conference.
I haven't dug around for the best price (if anyone knows of a really good deal, let me know and I'll mention it in the next newsletter). Such conferences are not necessarily cheap, though; I've seen prices around 30 cents per person per minute.
Poor Richard's Web Site and Other Top Floor Books
Top Floor Publishing now has five books in print:
Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing
http://PoorRichard.com/email/
Poor Richard's Web Site
http://PoorRichard.com/
Poor Richard's Internet Marketing and Promotions
http://PoorRichard.com/promo/
The CDnow Story: Rags to Riches on the Internet
http://TopFloor.com/cdnow/
MP3 and the Digital Music Revolution: Turn Your PC into a CD-Quality Jukebox
http://TopFloor.com/mp3/
Order direct from the publisher, and you'll get a 100%, 1-Year Guarantee. If you feel the book wasn't worth the money, send it back for a refund!
And remember, these books are discounted at the Web site, and you pay just one shipping cost regardless of how many books you buy!
Book Reviewers Wanted
Do you review books for newspapers, magazines, newsletters (electronic or paper), Web sites, or other media spots? If so, perhaps you'd like to review Top Floor Publishing's latest book, "Poor Richard's E-mail Publishing." Or perhaps you'd like to review one of the other books I mentioned above?
Contact my Marketing Director, Missy Derkacz, at reviews@TopFloor.com. Include your full mailing address, the name of newspaper/magazine/whatever in which the review will appear and the probable date of publication, and the editor's contact information.
Reading Back Issues
If you need to refer to back issues of this newsletter -- and search the archives -- you can find them at the following location: http://PoorRichard.com/newsltr/
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