Financial & Travel Musings

When people first start out with their plans to make a fortune online one of the first strategies is to maximise the traffic to their site.

Fair enough, but no matter how high the traffic to the site may be, it doesn’t mean that you’ll actually make any money from it simply because the high traffic doesn’t equate to high conversion of viewers to customers. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.

That’s a big term for a big area. What’s entailed is a very full analysis of your site to ensure that it’s properly planned, the text is professionally written to maximise the impact for potential customers combined with analysis of how well it’s all working. Even small enhancements can mean quite substantial improvements in the effectiveness of your site in terms of converting views to actual customers.

Popularity: 52% [?]

Although these days we’re all used to buying books and booking our flights online, there’s a massive amount of other stuff that you can also get online which often surprises.

Garden and household furniture is one of the most surprising that I’ve come across lately which are a whole class of item that I’d never have thought would have been economic to ship any kind of distance (which goes to show that we’re getting ripped off by the house movers!). At the other end of the scale there are Christmas cookies which sound like they’d be that little bit fragile to arrive in one piece but then again my last backup drive arrived in just that way with minimal packaging so either stuff is a lot more sturdy these days or the mailmen don’t handle the packages nearly so roughly as the joke assume.

Anyway, whatever you’re looking for at the moment, it’s worth having a look online. Large, heavy and fragile no longer seem to be showstoppers for shipping.

Popularity: 56% [?]

With Christmas coming up it’s the time of year when many businesses are being innundated with offers of all kinds of promotional products to give away to their customers over the Christmas and New Year period.

The sheer range of such products increases enormously every year so you’ve lots to choose from. However, the extra options don’t necessarily mean that they’re suitable for your business.

Ideally what you want is something 1) that the customer will keep, 2) that contains the relevant contact information for your business and 3) that is appropriate to your business. This, of course, explains the enormous numbers of diaries and addressbooks that we all receive as that covers the first two points easily enough. However, is a diary appropriate to your business? Sure, you can get one that lists, say, all kinds of electrical standards for those in the electrical industry but that doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate for your business.

You might think that it doesn’t matter that it’s appropriate and, to be fair, that’s in part just icing on the cake. However, if you do take the extra time to get an appropriate gift then chances are that it’ll be in the place in your customer’s business which is most appropriate too. For example, if you’re selling electrical gear to professionals then a little circuit tester with your details on might well be used by the people who’d be buying off you when a diary would end up in the admin section.

Popularity: 21% [?]