I heard about the Liverpool 08 Business Connect site recently and I’ve just registered for free. It appears to be a popular site with some 3700 organisations listed along with about 4600 individual members.

The aim of the site appears to be along the lines of a social networking site for people looking to do business in and around Liverpool (we’re over the water on The Wirral in Hoylake – home to the Open Golf in 2006 …what a fantastic event that was!). You can create your own profile page (here’s mine) and can search for other businesses and make contact. There’s supposed to be a members-only offer page too, though it’s currently missing.

I’ll let you know if I make any new contacts or drum up any business. Let me know if you’re also listed by the way – leave a comment here or get in touch.

New Tesco ad features The Spice Girls. Or …

The Spice Girls ad features Tesco. You decide!

As an update to a post in my old blog, here’s the list of Dragons Den panellist websites including a new link to James Caan.

• Deborah Meaden
• Peter Jones
• Duncan Bannatyne
• Theo Paphitis
• James Caan
• Rachel Elnaugh
• Richard Farleigh
• Simon Woodroffe
• Doug Richard
• Evan Davies

Managed to stumble upon En The Web this morning, a magazine for entrepeneurs everywhere but with a North West slant. There are some interesting articles about businesses from various sectors. Currently there’s news about Just Search.

A couple of quick bits I’d do if En The Web was my site:

• Offer an RSS feed (even though you offer paid-for hard copy mags)
• Resolve the duplicate content issue with http://www.entheweb.co.uk and http://www.entheweb.co.uk/news/
• Include email details on the contact page default view

A week or so ago I posted about free content being a good thing. But today I’m posting about an opposing view.

As many of us visit or subscribe to the same blogs you may well have caught sight of the new Brian Clarke (of copyblogger fame) site teachingsells.com? But if you haven’t, I recommend that you simply subscribe to the site and get a copy of the free pdf document. I didn’t bother until one of my favourite bloggers, Aaron Wall, gave it the nod today. It’s well worth the 15-20 minute first read.

There’s some obvious link bait headlining and content in it (suppose I’ve fallen for it of course by blogging about it!) but there is also some great thought provoking content too. Brian suggests that his reason for blogging is as an attraction strategy – I like that phrase and it’s why I started blogging about search marketing myself last year. As an aside, my own initial aims for publishing this blog (it used to be www.anotherjunction.com) were to:

• attract the attention of other blogging affiliates and search marketers
• join the community – to both share and learn useful information
• promote our search marketing company
• and a bit of me too, I blog

It isn’t my intention to make marginally significant money from this blog. Though as Brian says in his pitch:

To make money online, you?re always selling something?even if it?s just space on the
page.

That’s certainly true of course and what we’re all about on our commercial sites. Typically, on a site or page that includes content but no affiliate links I’d obviously consider monetising the page with adsense. Brian suggests that this method is flawed and is promoting his own view that you should charge for your content. I’m not in total agreement with his comment:

The people who do manage to make money with niche content and AdSense have to
be quite ruthless about getting people to click away as soon and as often as possible.
Beyond aggressive positioning of ad units that obscure the actual content, there is no
motivation to make the content engaging or even useful.

If you’re using adsense for commercial gain you do need people to click away but I’d argue that there is motivation to still publish content that is engaging or useful. But hands-up, on reflection I could do better on the engaging content front!

Don’t forget that Brian is concentrating on content that he believes can be paid for. He isn’t concentrating on earning money from things like credit cards, DVD rentals or mobile phones. My understanding that his proposed new platform is focusing on charging for information or intellectual knowledge. Free content or paid content aside, you still need eyes on pages …or at least eyes on your content. The latter is what Brian seems to be aiming at when he says:

When you have something to sell, you have leverage. You don?t necessarily need
traffic, because you can borrow someone else?s audience as long as you can offer that
publisher a compelling deal.

Knowledge is power perhaps.

Take a look at teachingsells and feel free to comment.

The latest email from springwise covers an interesting new service. A possibly unique service from new Canadian outfit brandfame.com is aiming to bring advertisers and social video producers together in order for the advertiser to pay for product placements in videos aired on social video sites such as youtube, grouper, metacafe and the like. Take a look at the guided tours for a little more info.

Whilst it’s early days I think there might be some mileage in this idea. Well worth watching for progress.

I’d recommend subscribing to springwise by the way – they cover some great new business ideas.

In a move that should spark some efforts within the UK affiliate marketing industry, Richard Bransons Virgin Megastores business has been sold to a management buyout and is to rename itself as Zavvi according to an ITN news report.

If you are looking to buy CDs, DVDs, games, etc then online retailers such as play.com offer stacks of products at competitive prices and free UK delivery.

As it’s a new brand name with no internet presence as such, I’d expect to see some pro-active affiliates building some landing pages around the brand name. We’re not really into this particular market ourselves at the moment so we’ll be leaving Zavvi to other affiliates who do operate in that marketplace.

As a high street business, music retailing is finding it tough going, with competition coming from both online downloads and from the mighty supermarkets. One of the biggest players in the market, hmv for instance has recently updated its image and managed to acquire the domain hmv.com as it attempts to regain market share.

Click here to visit Zavvi

Diageo is the drinks giant that owns that well known Irish stout called Guinness. It’s good for you – allegedly. It is fair to say though, in my past experience with this particular product, you can have too much of a good thing!

Anyway, Diageo makes about 10% of its profit from beer and the black stuff accounts for 50% of that. Can you guess which country generates the most sales? Ireland or UK? Well, it’s the UK that comes out on top for highest total sales (I do my bit to help of course, down at The Ship Inn).

But here’s the surprise. Ireland isn’t the second biggest market for Guinness. Neither is America. No, the second biggest geographical market for Guinness sales is …Nigeria. Now, I could well be showing my ignorance here but that’s a bit of a surprise to me – I just wouldn’t have guessed that Nigeria sinks more pints of Guinness than Ireland, regardless of population differences, etc.

I think it demonstrates that as affiliates / search marketers we shouldn’t have any preconceived ideas about what products will or won’t sell in a particular market place.