Making Money In The UK

So what you are saying for me in order to market to people in UK I need a different Amazon associate account???

I never was fun of Amazon, you just made my lfe eve more confusing that it was lol

@vlad - yes you need a separate account

http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/join/main.html

unless a u.k. person buys a product from the u.s. store then you won't get a sale.

Thanks, I did not know that. Amazon's 24 hours cookies sucks so I don't promote that much of their products.

I just presumed that you can use your affiliate id to direct traffic to UK store

Hey there Mark, I enjoy watching your videos how much money are you making now? I watched your monthly updates on your earnings you havent updated since then you must be raking it now!!

That is a very interesting question indeed. I did some quick searching and read through a few forums on the issue of that actual radio button. It seems like popular opinion is that most people in the uk don't use it. I did e-mail a friend and fellow blogger from the uk for more info on his search process so that I can confirm that info a little more.

By the way, where do you buy .co.uk domains? And can you host a .co.uk domain on a US host?

@patrick - I don't say anymore, but I'm not raking it in. My mortgage is always paid though ;)

@Jason - yeah you can host a .co.uk on an american host, I do at the moment, however I'm thinking to get into the UK results the page needs to be served from the UK, hence the uk host.

just a guess though.

also, even if people don't go to uk google first, I'm guessing they go there first for product searches, which is what I'm interested in most ;)

Of course I'm no UK expert, far from it, so the more feedback the better.

You ever tried clickbank? I'm making some good money on it.

Mark, i can shed a little light based on experience. Coming originally from Australia i relied heavily on google.com.au for returning accurate searches, whether it was info i was after, a product i wanted to buy or a website i wanted local information on. Google.com is useless for me unless looking for purely virtual information. The results are too heavily skewed for the US.

For me and many others living outside the US, depending on your PC localsation settings, Google will default to google.co.jp or google.com.au on the basis of giving you more relevant results. I have to forcible prevent my google from going to .co.jp now i live in Japan.

I think there is a VERY real opportunity for chasing localised traffic. People in different countries use the internet for very different reasons.

A few stats to get the wheels turning and give you an idea as to how different things are here, i'd say there'd be major differences right across the European Union too.

- 3 in 5 Japanese internet users use auction sites for purchases, yahoo being the favourite.

- Yahoo is the most popular browser in Japan by a country mile. Worth getting listed in Yahoo and also having a translator installed to automitically translate and cache your pages for indexing.

- Internet userage in Japan breakdown is the following, 30% yahoo, 5% auction sites, 8% shopping sites, 13% news, 3% blog and the rest is misc usage.

- Saving booksmarks, 96% Japanese use browser favourites, 0.3% use social bookmarking ..... %75 have never heard of social bookmarking.

I'd do some research a get some numbers on who is using the internet for what in the UK ..... i think there's a ver big market to tap in too.

"I'm guessing they go there first for product searches, which is what I'm interested in most" i'd guarantee they Do Mark, which was my point in my opening statement before i digressed. Many times shopping from ebay we're told the item wont even be posted to outside the US, then when it is the costs outweigh the original savings.

Purchasing through your own country, or one closer than the US is the first choice.

@patrick - clickbank is ok but I really like amazon and other stores that deliver real products

@neil - holy cow man what a great answer.

I reckon in my limited thinking I never considered that their may be other differences like the most popular browser in Japan being the Yahoo browser? Crazy.

also your point of you use local search for shopping is great info. When I do seo stuff it's almost always with real products.


thanks

I'm getting even more interested the more I think about it.

"Many times shopping from ebay"

wow, another great store that I've done a bunch of work with the API, wheels are spinning ;)

heres a great article on ranking and seo in the uk

http://www.seo-expert-services.co.uk/blog/posts/better-google.co.uk-search-engine-rankings.html

Mark, just because something costs US$100 in the States, doesn't necessarily mean it will cost 100GBP for those in the UK.

While you're around the mark on that camera, I can think of lots of examples where the prices are adjusted so the price in GBP (or AU$ in my case) is near parity with the price in US$ once the conversion is done.

Cheers

Stu

Hello as I am from the UK (mainland) I am more than happy to give you the lowdown on selling to the UK.

The big draw for us Brits is that the pound £1 buys around $2 so that all other things being equal American goods and services are very cheep.

Some companies set the price in $$$ and then change the sign to £££ (Sony and MicroSoft are dire for this) you may be able to export software packaged for US but you will need to give access to en-GB dictionaries. Be aware that Sony and other games companies often make their games easier for the US market (they don't think you can handle them on normal mode... that one supprised me too).

USP#1: you can undercut us Brits.
USP#2: relatively we have more disposable income

However, British opinion towards Americans is mixed and I am sorry to say that we don't have the most impressive opinion of you guys as a nation. To overcome this you are going to have to work on your language for two reasons SEO and trust.

When a Brit wants to look up tables and chairs outside eateries he or she will look for "Pavement Furniture" as opposed to sidewalk. If you optimise for US words and US spellings you will miss the UK custom.

For UK custom optimise for specific US/UK words and spell them the British way. This often amounts to cheating at scrabble. We spell color as "colour" and we use the Z a lot less than you do. The only way to get around this is to set a second account and make sure all you spell checkers are set to en-GB.

USP#3: You use the correct spelling

On podcasts and videos don't try to put on a Brit accent because you will sound fake (the same goes for slang). Just be yourself. However be aware that sometimes word differences are funny.

There is the story of the Church Preacher that had a message that we all make excuses "we've all got buts" was his message and it was very serious. For some reason the Americans were in stitches...

The reverse is true. Don Francisco has a song called the Pants Song which is funny in it's own right but pants in the UK is your underwear and so it is doubly funny in for us Brits even more so when he sings it to Christian audiences...

USP#4: You can make us laugh by understanding the difference between us

This is the big secret to getting listed. IP addresses and domain names are not vital to being listed. I use a mix of .uk and .com and use a super cheap US server but still seem to rank well. I think that Google uses language clues to identify pages to countries.

The UK culture is also different. We don't much care for US politics and when one says world politics we expect to see as much air time for Uganda, Germany, Russia, Japan, China as USA and the near EU. But generally US peeps seem to see US politics as world politics and local as meaning their city or state.

If you can overcome these mind set differences which are not universal for either group (more stereotypes) then you should do fine.

USP#5: You can bring fresh ideas to the market place

Sales wise you will also find a huge difference. We are an extremely skeptical bunch and the average single column sales squeeze page may or may not work at all. If it looks like sales then it probably is and we move on.

You are far better engaging with us. One way to do this would be to address the differences and create a form of approach aiming for "international understanding" between UK and US and as you are in the US probably by trying to "get Brits". I could be wrong but this (if done honestly) would break down a lot of walls.

Market research is going to matter as some things you love we don't care for and some things you never think about we love. That's life. (An example of this is beer which I fear you guys don't understand at all).

I'd also sign up for the main BBC news feed to try and get a feel for what matters. You might notice we which a lot less telly then you do and that we get your shows a year or so later (unless we use bittorrent).

Other than that be yourself and most rules still apply.

There are whole niches where there is no Brit attention at all!!! In such niches (a word you seem to pronounce as if it had a T in it like "itch") you would be well advised to find uk based bloggers/writers/businessmen to partner with. For example if you were to go for the under maximised real estate niche (I have no idea why that is not brim full) get some UK based bloggers as business partners in a joint effort. This gives you instant UK culture and insight but also gives you someone in the right timezone.

USP#6: You can bring experience of competing in overcrowded market places to a less saturated one and provide higher value and quality.

For example make me a good offer on a partnership and I will be more than happy consider working with you.

One thing that makes a difference is seeing the £ (pound sign - # is called hash) rather than $. Try to pitch for UK based affiliate programs (if you use them) like DGM.

Long time reader here, first time commenter, and from the UK.

Couple of things.

- As it's already been pointed out, all because something costs $100 in the US doesn't mean it costs £100 in the UK. I couldn't find your camera, but a Wii in the US costs $360, and the Wii in the UK costs £180. So you don't get more. In fact, you're basically relying on the economy staying the same. As I sell advertising in dollars, I don't get what I did two years ago, so I'm basically holding out the money in a paypal account your economy'll make it worthwhile for me to withdraw.

- The best thing to rank in the UK is a .co.uk domain name. I'm hosted in the US (as it's so cheap!), and it's helped me rank for an overly competitive term in the UK (bid directory - my bid directory is fifth.)

- UK'ers are not as internet aware - I find - as other nations. What I mean by that is whilst they do shop online, they generally go to the esablished companies (such as play.com, money supermarket, ebay etc.). Very few of them are affiliate aware. Sure, we make a few sales here and there, and there are successful affiliate marketing companies (money supermarket and virtual world direct), but they have huge budgets with TV advertising etc.

Anyway, I'm not an affiliate marketer by any stretch fo the imagination, these are just my thoughts :)

Incidentally, I also agree with what Lord Matt says about the spelling. Learn to spell (it's our language :P). And if you are to do a video, we won't critize the accent, just learn to say aluminium

(al-loo-min-ee-um, rahter than al-loo-min-um)

:D

I'm from the UK so I can answer some of your questions (I didn't read all the comments so apologies of they're already answered).

Over here when we use Google it automatically defaults to the UK search which is quite annoying because of course we're trying to get that US traffic hehe! To search in US results on the UK engine you have to insert "gl=us" at the end of the search.

Amazon is a pain in the backside - you need two different accounts and in your affiliate link you have to choose which one to direct to. How silly is that? If you want to target both you need two distinct links. I don't use Amazon...

Mark

This is where I, and a lot of other UK people, get UK domain names : http://www.123-reg.co.uk/affiliate2.cgi?id=AF219669

Yeah it's an affiliate link but I'm helping you come over here and eat my lunch so it seems only fair.

Either a UK domain or UK hosting should help you get listed in Google's UK results. In fact, you can't change the targeting of a country specific domain even in Google Webmaster Tools. You can host UK domains anywhere in the world so you might as well use the cheaper US hosting. You'll get some slight lag but probably not noticeable if you use decent hosting.

I'd concentrate on physical products if I were you. Brits are far more cynical about ebooks than Americans seem to be.

I did not feel that I entirely did the subject justice with my comment so I've taken it and fleshed out the ideas and added other ideas and written a quite large blog post on the subject.

http://lordmatt.co.uk/item/1079/

Let me know if I have been scant on any topics.

This is really good information. I really never looked at my traffic statistics pertaining to other countries. Thanks for opening my eyes to it. Keep up the great work making money in the UK.

Plus, if you say "Smoke a fag" in the UK, it doesn't mean to shoot a homosexual. Ha!

As an internet marketer based in Canada, I've had pretty great success marketing to the UK. I completely ignored the UK for a while, until I realized how much UK traffic I was getting. I geo-targeted some offers to them and found that they actually converted at a much higher rate than my US visitors.
Take a look at buy.at. I'm loving that network, and they have some good brands that the Brits seem to trust (Tesco, etc.)

@all - thanks for the the awesome comments ;)

@stu @Rhys - Even if things are 1 for 1 it's still a huge market that most people aren't monetizing which appears to have way less competition than the us

@rhys - intersting you use american servers and rank in the uk

@lord matt - fantastic info, I put a link to your article at the top of this post ;)

re: americans - My opinion about most of them is as low as yours. I apologize for their ignorance.

I'll for sure check out buy.at, thanks for the advice

Ok, not sure if the comments mentioned this but...I have been trying to promote and geo target something for UK market via Adwords. The domain extension of the target url is co.uk and adwords is being cranky about it, and suspending the campaign. I am doing a redirect, and have not made a landing page. And according to Google, the url extension must have a .com, .net or .org - talked to them over chat, but could not resolve it.

I myself from somewhere else and one cannot think just USA, there are other countries that have potential.

There is Korea, Japan, Singapore....

UK traffic converts much better than US for PPC.

"As it's already been pointed out, all because something costs $100 in the US doesn't mean it costs £100 in the UK. I couldn't find your camera, but a Wii in the US costs $360, and the Wii in the UK costs £180. So you don't get more"

This is true but the point is valid because we are being fleeced at every turn in this country. Just the other week I bought a new keyboard, cost £39.99 on amazon UK, on amazon.com it was $48.99 so equivalent to £24.11.

So yes, regardless of what the economy is doing you will still make more selling to the UK. It isn't called Rip Off Britain for nothing.

Are there any residency restrictions to owning .co.uk domain names? I know that here in Canada there are (Japan too I think).

To get a free .co.uk domain, go to www.streamline.net
The hosting packages are really good value as well, with the unlimited package costing £45 for 1 yr or £34 for two years.
That's £3.75 a month for a year, or £2.83 for 2 yrs.

Hope it helped =D

BTW my domain isn't online yet.

@45n5 thank you very much :)

How many people really buy things like camera's and camcorders online?

I just bought my first camcorder and I got it from Costco. I would never buy stuff like that online simply because warrenty issues are a pain in the butt trying to get things fixed and not to mention you can't see what your buying first to check the quality.

Oh I forgot something, if you look at John Chows network and how much money he makes selling camcorders and such off of his site with the amount of traffic he gets, do you not think there would be a better way to make money online. I just think selling things like camcorders and electronics is a wasite of space. Like said above if people are going to buy those products online, they are going to go to a big firm that is trusted NOT imakemoneyonlinesellingcamcorders(dot)com

@collin - I buy most of my electronics online. the last thing I bought was the flip video camera, bought from amazon.

Online prices usually are way better than offline.

@igotmumps - I don't think so, I own a .co.uk and live in the us.

@all - thanks for the comments

Lord Matt - Never a truer word spoken when you talk about the US' version of "World Politics" .... i was in the US a year or so ago and on a major network, forget which one, when i watched the segment that did a wrap up on the "World Sports" for the week i laughed when they didn't leave the US!

The US-centric idea of world is funny but not half as funny as the book that has been written by a British man who came to live in the USA. He has a website billed as The American's guide to speaking British and it is most amusing.

http://www.effingpot.com/

I recommend it.

I will just add that in Google Webmaster tools you can define the country of origin.

There are quite a few blogs that specialise in optimisation for local search, but key things are including addresses, gaining local links, links using English spelling etc.

I have read that Brits are less likely to be persuaded by long-form sales pitches and hype, but I suppose it all depends on how you do it, and it should be as always tested in your market.

Remember that whilst US celebrities might well be known in the UK, they may not have the same following, and that you might want to target products based around UK news.

Games releases will be often at different times, the same for music and book publishing... if they even become available.

Hardware may well be totally different part numbers, and have a different specification. TVs for instance you might be looking for Freeview.

You have it the right way being in the states - every $1 i make through advertising is only worth 50p over here. The exchange rate is not in my favour at all.

Once more Andy Beard is very wise. Dead on about the long sales and hype it drives me away very fast (I thought it was just me for a long time) - you will need to walk the walk when it comes to relationship/conversational/reputation marketing - the short cuts don't work so good.

All our movies come out at different times, our books have different cover art (as do DVDs), our politics is a three party system (four or five in some years when the greens or euro-skeptics get cracking), our copyright laws are different, our spam laws are different, we have a data protection act, our accessibility laws differ somewhat, we have almost got our own version of GPS (and it'll more accurate if they can get it complete), our money looks different, our TV is different (we use what you guys send us but you tend to remake what we send you more often), we get Doctor Who first though, we swear differently, we sell differently...

However, we aside from the fact the we watch Brit and french films you might not have ever heard of we also watch all the same Hollywood, have almost the same celeb musical types and similar tastes a lot of the time.

As Andy so rightly hints when talking about freeview it is all in the details.

I'd listen to that Andy Beard - he knows what he is talking about.

I was only here to see what else was said sinse last time and to mention that the Q HTML element has a lang attribute that could be used to push the Brit point.