NOTE: Sorry folks; I wrote this mid last week but didn’t have a chance to post until now as I was taken to hospital. Expect a few more “catch-up” posts over the coming days.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the money-making aspects of business that we lose focus on other things such as long-term targets and promotion. As the England’s World Cup Glory Online Store store had already broke-even, I decided to use it as a test bed for some ideas.

I could have just kept the status quo; quietly promote it through word of mouth and make the odd sale here and there. It would have been just one more income source in the pot. But what if there was a way to generate a big boost in traffic and links quickly? How about trying something really different? How about giving away money? But not in some silly promotion or whatever; that would be too much effort to manage.

At The Day Job right now we are trying to raise £5000 for CARE International. There have been a few fundraisers and a team of 5 will compete in a 3-day challenge in early July. I wanted to do my bit other than just buying the homemade cakes various staff had brought in. The store was my chance. By making the shop part of the fundraising efforts, I would have access to a wider audience than my own private network. I would also have more people to promote the store for me. The decision was made to donate all profits from sales to the charity pot.

Putting the philanthropic reasons aside, from a business perspective, this was done simply to raise awareness of the site. I reasoned I could get more links from people promoting the website on its charitable merits than not. These would get the site spidered quickly and I would have a good base to expand on in the future. At the very least, search engine attention might be good for the Adsense ads on the site. While I’m not expecting major numbers from this (as of now Google has only indexed two pages and doesn’t show any link-backs), but every little helps.

By not taking a chance to try something different, I would be struggling to have any pages indexed this quickly and certainly wouldn’t have experienced anything more than one or two visitors a day (if that!). The lesson learned from this experiment is don’t be afraid to try something different, especially if you’re more worried about the long-term payoffs than short-term bonuses.