The Ramblings Of Lawrence Piper Internet Entrepreneur

Wow it’s amazing how quickly a week can pass. I had intended to write this just a day or so after the last post but alas here we are a week later.   

After we have determined what product lines interest us and have determined there is an existing market for your products you have to make the next decision.

Do you want to stock your own product or do you want to use a dropshipper?

I know in the last post I said we’d talk about finding a supplier next but after giving it some thought I realized that before you can find a supplier you need to decide what type of business model you will follow in order to determine what type of supplier to look for. 

Whether you have money to invest in product or not there are distinct advantages and disadvantages to both models.

(For those of you wondering why I’m not talking about affiliate products please see my previous posts Why I Hate Affiliate Marketing Part I and Why I Hate Affiliate Marketing Part II so this series will concentrate on selling your own products be they physical or intellectual)

Lets take a look at the pros and cons of each model. Continue Reading »

One of the biggest hurdles to getting a business started whether online or offline is determining what product or line of product you want to sell. That’s right to make money you have to sell things. Don’t worry if you don’t feel like a “salesman” but you will want to develop these skills along the way.

Yep you can get started without knowing everything.  “Small steps done are better than great steps planned.”

There are all sorts of fancy methods and websites that will let you do market research and give you all sorts of facts and figures but I used a different method. I was told the best method was to find something you enjoyed and to do a “brainstorming” session which was basically to first list everything you could think of that you could possibly sell. So I combined the two and did something as simple as this.

I got a piece of paper and looked around my house. This is what I saw: Continue Reading »

I recently had a couple of comments on this blog and it appears that I’ve haven’t really developed a theme for this blog which means it doesn’t really have a targeted audience yet. It’s nice to know from the comments that there are readers out there and that I should do them the justice of posting regularly and on a specific theme.

So I’ve decided that I will use this blog to share my knowledge of search engine optimization, reciprocal link marketing and traffic conversion tactics. The examples I use will be real life examples of my own work on the internet and where possible to receive permission to share websites of others I’ve worked with who have acheived similar success on the internet.

 I’d love to hear your comments on what areas of website design and marketing are of most interest to you.

Lawrence

Well I certainly didn’t intend to let the whole month of December go by without making a post to the blog but November was a record month for Excalibur Brothers and December blew November away.

 There’s been a few changes in my SERPs this month as well. For samurai swords I moved up to the number 6 spot (as of this writing) but I dropped for the term hunting knives to #10.

 For a short time both Samurai Swords 4 U and Excalibur Brothers were ranking on the first page next to each other for the term fully functional samurai swords but as of this writing Excalibur Brothers has fallen to around page 4 for the term.

 I’ve also notice that the number of results displayed by Google for most of my search terms dropped dramatically during December so it appears that Google has removed a lot of “junk” from their results. Maybe they just removed all the listings to places that have closed down or it could be they are intent on removing sites known as “scraper sites” that only display listings of other sites but real content of their own.

 Guess that’s all for this time.

We’ve decided to open a second sword store that caters to only authentic fully functional swords. I must admit that I was surprised to find the name http://www.samuraiswords4u.com/ as an available name so I had to snatch it up.

After watching the StomperNet success this last year and realizing that many of the Stompers chose to follow in the footpaths of the mentors and open store related to swords and  knives, wedding favors, tapestries and such and seeing one in particular begin ranking highly in the search engine for many of the same terms as me and in very few instances passing me on Yahoo and MSN it dawn on me that there will always be competition on the front page of the search engines.

I also realized that one store cannot possible satisfy each and every person who visits that store. Some are looking for high quality and some are looking for display only. Some believe that a store that handles display swords can’t handle high quality fully functional swords either.

Therefore the natural conclusion was that if there was going to be competion in the sword and knife market then some of that competition might as well be myself. Samurai Swords 4 U will only carry genuine swords that are fully functional. They will include some of the world’s finest brand names such as Cold Steel, CAS Iberia, Thaitsuki Nihonto, Masahiro, Ryumon and more.

Whether you are looking for an Iaito sword for practicing Iaido or need a high quality carbon steel sword for cutting competions you’re sure to find something you’ll love at Samurai Swords 4 U. I hope you enjoy the selection.

Lawrence