I recently was contacted by a harmonica manufacturer (THE harmonica manufacturer). They are rolling out some new products and they want to generate buzz. They wanted to put their banner on my pages, but they don’t want to spend much.

I put a test up on a few pages over the weekend and it generated enough traffic to blow their website out of the water. They must have used a real bargain basement hosting company.

I have offered them some advice, but so far they are ignoring me and continue to go down what is obviously the wrong road.

I don’t call myself a marketing professional, but I have taken half a dozen graduate level marketing courses. I think a lot about promoting my own sites. I have frequent articles here about monetizing my websites. I teach web site optimization, SEO, and E-commerce in the course I teach at night. I worked on IBM’s eCommerce suite. I helped write some of the early versions of a PayPal type site. I have been running several eCommerce sites for about ten years now.

I am thinking about labeling myself as an eCommerce consultant. I look around and the so-called experts all seem to have less experience than myself. Is this a new career?

On second thought, probably not. I would rather just retire and write my novel.