Showing posts with label make money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label make money. Show all posts

Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Affiliate Marketing Is Broken But Ecommerce Companies Can Adapt

Affiliate Marketing Is Broken But Ecommerce Companies Can Adapt

We’ve all heard digital marketers say, “You don’t need to sell advertising on your site, you can just take a percentage of a sale through affiliate marketing!"
While that may have rang true five years ago, affiliate marketing has changed dramatically — for the worse. Much of the action has now morphed into coupon affiliate sites like Coupon Craze and eBates. It boggles the mind why some of the biggest merchants in the world support these sites so wholeheartedly, because actually they’re paying them for sales they've already made.
The goal for all ecommerce marketers should be incremental sales growth, but that is hard to do when you’re paying twice for an incremental sale with these coupon affiliate sites.

What’s broken?

For the uninitiated: You know how when you’re checking out online, there’s always a field for a coupon code? Naturally, you’ve now learned to go online and search for coupons from the store. You might do it for shoes, electronics, or health products. (I do it for domain names.) You’re happy, because you saved money you otherwise would have spent.
If you’re the store owner, you see the predicament right away. There was a user who was about to purchase something at full price, and somehow they input a coupon code and cut in to your margin. Now you have to pay the affiliate site for something that they didn’t even refer, a commission to the broker, and offer a discount on the purchase. Ugh! It bums me out when I explain this to clients and see the dismay on their faces.

How affiliate marketing should work.

In a world where everything in affiliate marketing worked, a customer would be going on Coupon Craze to use it as a discovery platform. Today, it’s the opposite!
Sites like RetailMeNot say that they curate the best deals for their visitors, but they don’t. Affiliate sites should theoretically work likeGroupon and drive incremental sales, but Groupon and Teambuy’s deals don’t scale into actual customer acquisition. Consumers and merchants are also starting to feel “daily deal fatigue" as well.

Time to cut out the middle man.

Marketers have become dependant on affiliate brokers like Commission Junction (now CJ Affiliate)LinkShare (now the Rakuten Marketing Network), and eBay to handle their affiliate sales. Instead of depending on brokers, how about showing affiliate publishers’ sales by giving them limited access or even screenshots to your Analytics campaigns? In the past you would get access to amazing sites that could increase your incremental sales and get your name out there  by paying broker fees.
Times have changed. You won’t see any incremental sales today from paying brokers fees. I recommend directly calling the unique site or publisher you want for your partner. Make your own deal without going through a broker.

Reallocate your affiliate budget for your best marketing efforts.

By cutting out the affiliate, you get to play with more resources. Reallocate the money you were spending for affiliate marketing to proven customer acquisition channels wherever your sales are good, and some of it exploring new acquisition channels.
In the meantime, build your own coupon page and optimize those pages to drive search traffic. It might cut a bit into your margins, but at least you won’t unnecessarily pay an affiliate marketer. For example,Felt Noir has begun using coupon codes that have good SEO results without utilizing any affiliate networks (Disclosure: I'm a partner with Felt Noir on this initiative).
Affiliate marketing is more dismal by the day, but you can still develop incremental sales by working to become independent of the current system. You can create a robust sales funnel that isn’t reliant on third parties while everyone else continues following the leader, chasing smaller and smaller ROIs.

Tuesday, 5 May 2015

Top 8 Proven Benefits of Business Blogging

Many small business owners put off blogging thinking this “fad” is just a waste of their time and effort. This line of thinking is not what successful Digital Marketers have with regards to business blogging.
As much as 81% believe business blogging is a critical business process according to Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Report.
The latest iteration of this report, generated from a survey that involved 3,500 marketing professionals, revealed that blogging is one of the most important lead sources for their business and is highlighted as having the most substantial impact in terms of ROI performance.
These figures are just some of the factual evidences that proved blogging as a very important business resource. If you’re still not convinced with these figures, then let the following top proven benefits change your mindset about business blogging.
1. Business Blogging Generates Relevant Traffic  – eMarketer previously predicted that as much as 60% of the entire American internet population will read blogs at least once a month. Figures could have gone way over that threshold, with the likes of HubSpot confirming that at least 46% of people online read blogs at least once a day.
2. Business Blogging Helps You Generate More Leads – Companies that harnessed the power of business blogs reaped the fruits of their efforts by generating up to 67% more leads than businesses without blogs.
3. Business Blogging Helps Your Acquire New Customers – The 2013 version of HubSpot’s report highlighted the same figures, with as much as 82% of marketers surveyed getting a new customer by blogging daily. The latest update of HubSpot’s report highlighted that blog content creation is the top inbound marketing project for companies in North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
4. Business Blogging Generates a Positive Marketing ROI – In 2013, HubSpot reported that as much as 79% of companies with blogs generated a positive ROI for all their efforts. The recent version of this report highlighted that blogs remain to have the highest overall impact in terms of generating a positive ROI, with businesses and marketers who focused on business blogging generating up to 13 times more likelihood of generating a positive ROI.
5. Business Blogging Establishes You as an Industry Expert or Leader – The Internet is a great equalizer with the fact that even small businesses can go head-to-head with large corporations online by developing the trust and loyalty of their targeted customers. They can develop such clout as an industry leader or an expert through the valuable information they can share though their business blogs.
6. Business Blogging Develops Stronger Customer Relationships – One of the attributes of business blogging that differs itself from traditional push advertising is the engagement and interactive facilities present in blogs that can help you develop stronger relationships with your customers. You and your audience can engage in healthy conversations through the comments areas commong to most blogs.
7. Business Blogging Builds a Strong Social Media Presence – In Social Media marketing, your brand and business can be discovered by targeted audiences that can eventually turn into leads and sales. But like any other digital marketing channel, social media needs content, preferably evergreen content that you can generate through your business blogs.
8. Business Blogging Drives Long-Term Results – Consider this fact: HubSpot reported that as much as 70% of website traffic each month was not generated by their active posts for that month – but from posts that were published in previous months. What this means is that an article or a blog post you publish today can still create a big impact on your business for days, months or even years to come. That’s long term benefits for you!
Want more? See the infographic below!

Top-8-Proven-Benefits-of-Business-Blogging
http://www.business2community.com/infographics/top-8-proven-benefits-business-blogging-infographic-01219725

Friday, 27 March 2015

22 Essential Elements of a Successful Internet Marketing Mindset

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by blogging?
It seems as you have too many things to do, and your time is never enough.
Have you ever felt as your internet marketing efforts are being wasted?
When you don’t see good results it’s hard to go on.
Have you ever wondered if you’ll ever find the answers you need to succeed with your online business?
So many times your questions were unanswered.
These are just few of the problems that affect who has a blog, you know it.
Let me tell you that you can solve all those problems almost overnight.

Don’t believe me?

The Problem (and the Solution) is Your Mindset

You may have traffic problems, conversion problems, engagement problems and many more, but the solution is always the same.
It’s the same solution for the problems that I described at the beginning of this post.
It’s the closest thing to the famous magic pill.
You could speak with thousands of successful people, and you will notice that most of them reached the success in a different way, but all of them have something in common: the mindset.
Your mindset is the key to your success…or to your failure.
It’s your choice: you can adopt a successful mindset and succeed, or you can stick to an unsuccessful mindset.
Let’s be honest: adopting a successful mindset requires huge efforts and concentration, but it’s the only way to long-lasting success.
Adopting a successful mindset it’s hard if you don’t know what to do, but I can help you with this ;)

1. Ask the Right Questions

When you ask a poor question, you get a poor answer.
When you ask a great question, you get a great answer.
If you could just take one idea from this post, let it be this one.
You’ll find many problems in your life, and you’ll get many solutions as well. Better questions will make you find better solutions.
For example, you may ask yourself “Why can’t I get the traffic that I want?”without getting any good answer – and feeling quite demotivated – or you can ask yourself “How can I get more traffic than I’m currently getting?”, and you’ll find some interesting answers.
You can ask “Why can’t I reach the success?” or you can ask “How can I reach the success?”. This time even the second question is a bad one: it won’t really bring to specific and actionable answers.
You can change it in “How can I reach the success efficiently using my current resources?”, and this question will lead you to better answers.
Here are the takeaways:
  • High quality questions lead to high quality answers
  • More specific questions bring to more specific and actionable answers.
  • When you can’t find the solutions, it’s because you are not asking the right questions

2. Find Your “WHY”

Why are you doing it? Why are you working hard on your blog while having another job?
Give these questions your true answers, be honest with yourself.
There’s nothing bad in desiring to have a lot of free time to spend with your dears.
It’s important that you find your real reasons and visualize them in your mind. Make vivid pictures.
Do you know why is this so important?
This is the only thing that will make you go on when you feel the pain, when you are in your darkest moment, when your fears come out, when others don’t help you, when results don’t come and when you feel like you are running after an impossible dream.
The only way to go on in those moments is to have a solid, strong motivation. You won’t be motivated enough if your aren’t running after your real dreams.

3. Do it NOW

Of course, you can work on your next post tomorrow, but only if you don’t want to reach your goals.
The success is owned by people who act now.
There’s no tomorrow, no next week, no next year, just now.
Take action now, no matter how little is the step. It’s important that you go toward your goals now.
If you don’t try to do something now, probably you won’t try to do it tomorrow.
I know, sometimes it’s hard to do something, but at least try to do it now.
Actions, not ideas, change the world.

4. Be Focused

It’s easy to spread your energies on too many things when you run a blog.
You may start writing blog posts, but as soon as you notice that no one comments or shares them you may jump on Facebook to get traffic; after 2 weeks on Facebook you notice that you aren’t getting traffic from it so you may build an account on Twitter.
Unluckily Twitter doesn’t send you traffic and you try something else.
Having that approach is a complete waste of time.
Instead, to achieve your goals you should focus on one thing and master it before you move on something else.
Find your priorities and focus on them: first things first.
Leave out all the other tasks.
No matter how many things you want to accomplish, focus on your first priority first. Only after your first priority is gone, focus on the second priority and so on.

5. Failures are Feedbacks

Are you afraid to fail?
You shouldn’t.
Are you afraid to make one thing right? No way.
Well, failure and success are two faces of the same medal: feedback.
Both failures and successes are feedbacks. The first one means that you did something that didn’t work, the second one make you know that you did something in the right way.
Now, let me ask you this: how fast do you want to succeed?
If you want to succeed fast, you need to fail fast.
Failures are wonderful tools for learning, you can’t go on without them!
If you had not fallen from your bike many times, you wouldn’t have learned to go on a bike.
If you don’t fail online again and again and again, you won’t run a successful blog.

6. Be Prepared to Problems

You’ll encounter many difficulties on your road to success.
No matter how smart or resourceful you are, difficulties will appear.
It’s the life.
The average person encounters a difficulty, and he thinks: “What the hell! I was doing so great, why this happened to me?”.
A successful person encounters a difficulty, and he thinks: “Oh, there’s a difficulty! What a surprise! Let’s see how I can deal with it”.
Which of the two do you think works better?
Of course the second one.
If you know that you’ll encounter difficulties, you will be prepared and you will deal with them at your best.
Expect difficulties on your road.

7. Fight to Reach Your Goals

Given that you’ll have many difficulties, you’ll have to fight to overcome them.
The problems that you encounter on your road are there just to test you.
They are there to show that you really want something – or vice versa.
When you really want something, you aren’t scared to fight for it.
I guess that you already fought for one of your dears or for your values more than once.
It’s the same with your blog. Do you really want to succeed online?
In that case you’ll fight until you make it.
Show yourself that you are a lion and go take what you want.

8. If Something Doesn’t Work, It Doesn’t Matter

Other than learning from your mistakes, you can understand that failures don’t matter.
Why should you stress over something that doesn’t work.
There are tens, if not hundreds, of other ways to achieve something, you don’t need to think about the ones that don’t work.
If you can’t make great interviews to grow your blog, who cares? You can make guest posts.
Guest posts don’t work for you?
Try videos, or slideshows, or podcast, or forum talks, or building relationships, or social networks, or hundreds of other solutions…
Focus on what works, don’t waste your energy complaining yourself “I can’t do videos”.

9. Work Hard or Work Smart…but Work

Many people say that you have to work hard to succeed.
There are other people who say that you don’t need to work hard, but you have to work smart to succeed.
Here’s the truth: it doesn’t matter.
Work hard or work smart, or do both, but work.
If you do nothing, you’ll get nothing.
Please work.
If you want to reach your goals, the only thing that will get you there is the work.
Of course, some ways to reach the success are faster than others, but if you don’t know how to (or can’t) take those, take the longer ones.
Without working you won’t go toward your goals, so it’s better to reach them slowly than not reaching them at all.

10. Read Less, Do More

There are many great advice out there, but the truth is that there are too many of them: you couldn’t read them all.
In a world overloaded with information, it’s easy to read too much and do too few.
Don’t fall in this trap.
It’s way more effective to read one useful thing and translate it into practice than it’s reading many awesome tips and doing nothing.
As said before, to get results you need to take action and work consistently.
Reading should just support your actions, not taking their place.

11. One Step at a Time

Especially when you are really passionate about something, you try to do as much as you can.
Pay attention because working online it’s really like a snowball that rolls down from the side of a mountain: it starts small, but it suddenly becomes big.
It happens that you start working on your email marketing campaign, but you also start writing posts on your blog, making guests posts, tweeting, being on Facebook and so on.
At the beginning you can do all of these things, but as soon as the things grow you find hard to pay attention to all of them.
You may also try to accomplish too complex or too hard tasks. For example, if you haven’t ever made a guest post, it’s an excessive move to try guest posting on Copyblogger.
Take doable steps and do them one at a time.
Before you run, you need to learn to walk.

12. There’s No Finish

Once I believed that when you reach the success things start to become easy, you have lots of free time, you don’t have problems anymore and bullets bounce on your chest.
This is what most of the people believe too.
Whit the course of the time I understood how fool that idea was.
As you become more and more successful, you have to face bigger challenges, you may not find the time to eat a sandwich and you have to keep your success.
Of course, with a successful blog you may take your pc and go around the world, and you don’t have to wake up at 8 am, but this doesn’t mean that you would have an easy life – just a better one.

13. Learn to Take Lots of Decisions

Most of the time you have many options to choose from.
This means that you shouldn’t worry if one of them doesn’t work, but it also means that you need to take decisions. Lots of decisions.
You take lots of decisions in your every day life, but when you run a blog (especially if you run a successful one) you have to take 3X that number of decisions. Many of them are small decisions, some other are big ones, but all of them are important.
You want to be comfortable in the decision making process as soon as you can. This means that you have to embrace mistakes as well – among all your decisions, mistakes will be a constant presence.
Notice that even when you don’t decide, you are taking a decision: you are deciding to be inactive.
Learn to take the decisions that make you move toward your goals.

14. Learn From Others

You can make your own mistakes and learn from them, or you can read about others’ mistakes and shortcut your learning process.
Having a mentor or following a successful person is a great way to learn fast, take advantage of it.
If you hadn’t learned from others, you would have needed hundreds of years to learn what you currently know.
The same applies to internet marketing: you are following many blogs to learn how to succeed online because you know that otherwise you would need much more time just to learn the simplest things.
The problem here is that you may follow too many people or you may follow the wrong (for your business) ones.
My advice is to follow no more than 3 people regularly. Choose those people based on your business needs, on how you do feel with them and on how helpful they are.

15. Set Realistic Measurable Goals

Do you want to become a millionaire?
Me too, but it’s not my current goal. The reason for that is simple: currently it seems like an unrealistic goal.
Many people set unrealistic goals so when they realize that they are too far from them, they get discouraged and give up.
It’s ok to set a big goal, but you should be able to reach it or set a smaller goal.
It’s extremely important that you can measure your goals otherwise you can’t see how you are doing.
If your goal is “reach the success online”, you can’t know if you are coming close to it, and you won’t know when this is going to happen.
Instead set measurable goals like “having 1,000 subscribers” or “getting 1,000$ per month”. In these cases you know when you are getting close to them.
Give yourself a time to reach your goals.
This is extremely helpful to see also if you are doing good or if you should change your strategies.
For example if you want to reach 1,000 email subscribers in the next six months, you know that you are doing something wrong if in your first month you just get 10 subscribers. This gives you the chance to improve your strategy.

16. You Can Always Do Better

Your results in the last month were amazing?
Well, you can do better than it therefore try to push your limits.
Anytime you accomplish something, think that you can get even something more.
It’s the way excellence is made: you always try to get things further.
Notice that when you don’t move on, usually you move back – another good reason to push your limits and your business ones.

17. Add Value

Always add value to people.
Add value with your products, with your posts, with your emails, with your comments.
People are addicted to value.
Try to figure out how you can add value to people, because it’s the best way to build a successful business (both online and offline).
If you want to stand out online, this is a great way to do it.
An example comes from my 14-part course Online Income from A to Z. Once it was made by 12 parts, but then I decided to add more value to my email subscribers so I added two more pieces of content to it.

18. Quality Over Quantity

Should I write many normal posts or should I write few quality posts?
Should I write long posts or short ones?
Should I give people lots of advice or few great ones?
To answer all these questions, keep in mind that quality it’s always more important than quantity.
Do you prefer to receive a life-changing advice or many unuseful ones?
Of course, you prefer the first one (it’s because you get more value from the first).
If you look around the blogosphere, you’ll notice that most of the people are giving many little advice. You don’t follow their blogs, you follow the blogs where you can find high quality posts.
It’s a great reason to write epic post, isn’t it?
It’s because of the value: you get more value from a high quality post than you may get from many normal posts.
Quality rules.

19. It’s All About People

For sure, you know the myth of the self-made man.
It’s a myth because no one can go far without other people.
You need other people to learn fast, to get practical help, to get support when you are in bad moment, to sell (you can’t sell if people don’t buy), to make join venture and hundreds of other things.
You can’t skip dealing with people and building relationships with them.
Remember that all of your works are for people.
This answers the question “Should I write for people or search engines?” and a dozen of other questions.

20. Be Passionate

Are you passionate about your stuff?
If you are working on a blog, but you are not passionate about the topics you treat, maybe it’s not a good fit for you.
Your passion is crucial to make you work when you are tired, better communicate with people, teach well, put your soul in your writing and so on…
When you are passionate about something it’s as you have a secret weapon with you.
You’ll keep going despite your failures and you’ll believe in your stuff even when you are dealing with difficulties.
You don’t want to quit your daily job to have another job that you don’t like, you want to work with your passions.

21. You Have to Invest Either Time or Money

It makes me laugh a lot when I see that many people search for keywords like “make money fast for free” or “easily make money for free”.
We are not talking about a video game, we are talking about the real life. In real life you have to commit yourself to achieve something.
It means that you to invest either money or time to reach your goals.
Nowadays we are really lucky to have internet. Once, the only way to start your own activity was to invest a huge amount of money – between thousands dollars and hundreds of thousands dollars.
Now you can start your own business with 100$, or a little more if you want to take the shortcuts.
Many people argue “But I don’t want to spend money online”. Ok, don’t do it, but know that you’ll need to spend an enormous amount of time…probably years before you get something worth talking about.
Easy and free success doesn’t exist.
Rapid success costs you money, free success costs you time.

22. There are No Excuses

Take your responsibility for your results.
Ok, sometimes you may be lucky or unlucky, but in the long term it’s only your fault if you fail and your merit if you succeed.
Stop telling you excuses and do what you need to do to reach your goals.
I can’t” or “I don’t know how do it” or “I’m not goo at…” are just excuses.
You can keep telling you this bulls**ts or you can show that you are different from the mass and go towards your goals.

Tuesday, 3 March 2015

How to make Money from your Hobby ?






Puzzle Pieces and @ Symbol
Whether you want to make a bit of money out of a hobby, or you hope to launch your own retail business, reaching would-be buyers on your own can be tricky. However, by joining an existing website you can find a ready-made audience of consumers. Alongside some of the biggest online names are specialist websites which might suit you better if you’re selling handcrafted goods. Here’s a look at how much some of the main players cost to use and what you get for your money.

Etsy

etsy online
Pinterest
If you can limit your set-up costs while you build your confidence and test the water, so much the better. Etsy is fantastic for this as listing an item costs just 20 US cents (roughly 13p) for four months or until it sells, plus commission of 3.5% (plus VAT) on each purchase. If you are selling a quantity of the same product, these fees apply to each item sold. The item price is converted into dollars by Etsy before the fees are applied.
Other websites offer much more by way of marketing, but that comes at a cost.
The US-based website’s greatest strength is its vast scale – it has 30 million registered shoppers – but this can also be a disadvantage as you are among many rivals. It is open to anyone to use, which helps if you do not have a track record of selling or if your products don’t fit in with the style of other, more selective websites, but it also means there is no quality control. Indeed, Etsy’s craft disasters – from Sex Burger, a less-than-erotic painting of a naked couple embracing in a sesame bun, to a clock made from a cheese grater – earned themselves such a reputation that was celebrated on the now sadly defunct website Regretsy.com.
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Etsy allows factory manufactured products for sellers who have outgrown the capacity to handmake all their products, but some feel this betrays the website’s crafty roots. It also allows the sale of vintage items, but stipulates they must be at least 20 years old.
Simmi Duffin, 35, from the Forest of Dean, sells felt creations and sewing patterns under her brand Grace’s Favours. “It is incredibly straightforward to use and there are very helpful guides that show you how to set up a shop and what categories to list under,” she says. “You can get sales from all over the world but also choose where you want to make your items available, right down to individual products if they are difficult to send abroad.” Duffin says one of her biggest selling products is a Cuddly Campervan because it is unusual and comes up in searches both on Etsy itself and when enthusiasts are hunting for memorabilia on Google. “Jewellers, on the other hand, complain that it is very hard to be found because there are thousands of other sellers,” she says.

Folksy

folksy online
Pinterest
Folksy is the UK equivalent of Etsy, but much smaller. It insists on products being handcrafted, with no mass-manufactured or vintage products allowed. It turned over around £1m in sales in the year to September and has around 300,000 visitors a month. Sellers have two options: the basic account costs 15p per item you list and 6% commission (plus VAT) on every sale . Alternatively, you can list as a Folksy Plus seller with the same commission charge on every sale, but unlimited listings for £45 per year (including VAT). Users say it is very simple to set up.
Clare Freemantle, 34, from Newcastle runs Serious Stamp, creating custom-made ink stamps for use on wedding invitations and loyalty cards among other things. She uses several channels including Etsy, Folksy, Dawanda and Not On The High Street. “Folksy is my quietest platform. It is still a bit small, but they don’t charge a lot for what you get,” she says.
Given the low set-up costs, it makes sense to list with both Etsy and Folksy if you can to maximise your chances of reaching buyers. With both sites, the more you can do to drive traffic to your store, the better, so build up your social media profile.

Not On The High Street

not on the high street online
Pinterest
The barriers to entry are considerably higher, but many traders say it is worth the extra effort and cost. It has 2 million unique visitors per month, which doubles at Christmas. It costs £199 (£238.80 including VAT) to join and you pay 25% commission (plus VAT) on each sale. The website is highly selective about which products it features.You can apply via a form on the website and you should get a response within seven working days.
Freemantle has had a great experience selling her stamps on the website. “I’ve found Not on The High Street to be the best,” she says. “You have to adhere to its terms and conditions, such as the fact you are not allowed to tell customers from the website about any of your other online stores. It has quite high standards of entry for products and photography but what you get is their marketing might, which is quite substantial. There have been TV adverts, gift guides and press.”

Amazon Marketplace and eBay

You can use these websites to sell homemade creations, although it’s harder to get noticed. “I have used eBay to sell my sewing patterns, but the downside is that people tend to shop there when they are looking to get something cheaply,” says Duffin. “Amazon Marketplace is good if you can do a quick turnaround, such as with printed clothes or cards, as shoppers tend to use it for last minute buys, but it is not suitable for me.”
On Amazon Marketplace, sellers pay a “per-item” fee of 75p for every single item sold, plus a “referral fee” of between 7% and 25% (plus VAT), depending on the category of what is being sold.“Pro merchants” can pay a £25 monthly fee instead of the 75p-per-item fees.
On eBay, as a private seller you can list 20 items for free and after that you pay 35p for each. You can choose to list your items for auction or with a “buy it now” option. Various listing upgrades are available for an extra fee, including larger photographs, multiple categories and subtitles. You also pay a final value fee that is 10% of the total transaction including postage. An extra fee of 3.4% plus 20p is due if your buyer uses PayPal. Alternatively, you can set up a “basic shop” for £19.99 per month with 100 free listings and 8% final value fees. There are further subscription options for businesses selling higher volumes with fees of between £17.38 and £217.38 depending on scale.

Build your own website 

create online
Pinterest
Some traders love the freedom of having their own website, whether it is their main online store or an adjunct to shops on other platforms. Nat Rigby, 38, from Cornwall, makes jewellery from recycled skateboards under her brand Thrashion. She has an Etsy store, but now finds most of her sales come directly from her own website. She says: “Social media has been great. I upload a picture every day to Instagram and that drives people to my website, particularly as it’s a site that’s used a lot by the skate industry.” Rigby used Create.net to build her website and shop, which costs between £5 and £36 per month depending on the functionality you choose, but it is free of listing fees and commission on sales. She says: “It has been amazing. You get an account manager you can talk to when you have issues and it was just as easy as setting up on Etsy.”