A little trick that might work for you

Do you have a money making website?  Primarily I am talking about some kind of e-commerce site, but this idea can work for any kind of site where you make money.  If you have such a site, you might want to consider something that I have been doing for a few years.

First, do you know what a “404 Page” is?  A 404 is the page that you get when the page you are looking for does not exist.  It is usually a blank page that says something like “the Page you are looking for cannot be found” or something along those lines.  It might be something more than that, as 404 pages can be customized to any look that you want.  Many people are starting to customize 404 pages with additional information that is helpful to the surfer.

I came up with an idea a few years ago.  It’s kind of an “evil” idea, some might argue, but it works for me too.  On sites where I have an e-commerce store, I have re-programmed my 404 page so that if somebody types in a wrong address on my site, they are automatically forwarded to the front page of my web store!  So, instead of being told that “the page does not exist” they will just end up on a page where they can buy things from me.  OK, that’s not too evil, but the more evil part is that I have actually set up 404 pages on other sites that are related, so that they also redirect to my store!  For example, if you go to bobsite.com and enter the wrong address, you will end up at bobstore.com instead!

There are some downsides to this.  What are they?  Well, the surfer is taken somewhere that he doesn’t want to go.  If he is looking for some kind of information on your site, he won’t understand why he keeps ending up at this web store instead!  That can lead to confusion for the surfer.  I understand that, and to anybody who is confused like this, I am sorry for the inconvenience.  However, I also know that I have made sales by doing this too.  Also, in the places where I have set this up, the sites are related to the store in some way.  For instance, if they are going to a page that is somehow related to Davao City, yet they are redirected to the Davao Store, I don’t see a huge problem with it.  If they were surfing to a page where they expected information on New Mexico, and ended up at the Davao Store, that would be a problem, and also wouldn’t produce many sales, I would say.

Just for clarity, I am not creating pages to attract people, then removing them and redirecting to my store.  These are just legitimate cases of people typing in the wrong address and such.  Nothing devious about that.

Anyway, if you have money making sites, give this a try!  In your web hosting account there should be a way to customize your 404 page.  Just go there, and make the page a redirect to the place where you want people to end up!

Sometimes you have to make moves that you don’t want to make

You know, in business, sometimes you have to do things, even when they aren’t exactly what you would want to do.  I just made such a move, and I may have to expand on what I did in the future.

As you know, I have a pretty good number of e-commerce stores.  I guess I have 15 or 20, but who’s counting, right?  Well, in the last couple of years, the profits that I earn have been dwindling, and all for one reason.  Oh, I still make the same amount of money every week, but even making the same number of dollars, I end up with 20% to 25% less to spend every week.  Why?  Because the US Dollar has been falling in value against nearly every world currency that I know of.  As a matter of fact, let’s remove the word “nearly” because I know of no currency that the dollar is gaining on.  The fact is that just 18 months or so ago, the US Dollar was worth about 56 Pesos.  Today, it’s just over 44.  That is a huge loss.  On top of that, prices are always rising here in the Philippines.  So, it’s a double whammy - my money is worth way less than it was, and I am having to pay more than I used to pay for the goods I sell.

On one of my stores, I raised my prices about 10% or so a couple months ago, and it has not hurt sales in the least.  As a matter of fact, my sales are actually up since raising prices.  But, I’ve lost way more than 10% in real earnings over the past 2 years or so, so that 10% price increase is only getting back a little bit of what I have been losing.  I don’t want to make too huge of a price increase at one time, though.  I feel that making that move would really push customers away.

As I eluded  at the start of this article, I made a change today as well.  On one of my sites, I abandoned the Dollar.  I switched all of my pricing to Euros on one of my sites, we’ll see how it goes.  There can be no question that in recent years the Euro has been a much better performer than the Dollar.  I got a bit of a surprise, within an hour after I made the change, I got a couple of orders on that site too!  If I can go a couple of months and see that there has been little change in sales after switching to the Euro, I will make the change on other sites that I own too.

I will say, I have been thinking of doing this for a while now.  I have been hesitant, though, because I worry about the impact that such a move will have on my customer base.  Will it scare them away, particularly the American Customers?  I do feel that a lot of Americans are not too aware of what a Euro even is.  So it will be interesting to watch.  Another reason why I was not too keen on making the move was that as an American, it’s hard to abandon your own Country’s currency.

The choice, though, was a no brainer, really, if you only look at it through your business eyes.  The slide in the Dollar does not look like it will stop any time soon.

Who’s going to be the Next Internet Millionaire?

Have you caught it? You know what I mean…. the new reality show? No, it’s not on TV, this is a show on the Internet! It’s a one hour TV show that airs weekly, and it’s called “The Next Internet Millionaire.”

The show is a reality show loosely based on shows like “The Apprentice” “Survivor” and such. A group of 12 people have been chosen to participate in the game, in which they will face challenges to determine who will participate in a Joint Venture with host Joel Comm. Comm is a long time Internet Marketer who has built up quite a name in Internet Commerce over the years, and he hosts the show. In the first episode of the show, the 12 contestants are divided into two teams of 6, and they are given the responsibility of coming up with two competing internet campaigns for one of the show’s sponsors.

It’s quite an interesting show. Most of the stuff shown in Episode 1 was not a revelation for me, but there were a few things that caught my attention and think about the possibilities. But, for somebody like most readers of this blog, who are not seasoned e-commerce people, they would probably learn a great deal from watching the show. I do expect, and hope, that future episodes will be more advanced and offer new ideas that I had not considered before.

Who is your favorite competitor so far? After just watching one episode, my favorite so far is Thor Schrock, but that could change as more episodes pass.

Take a few minutes, or an hour, and watch Episode 1. Tell me what you think of it!