For several weeks I have referred here and there to the “Brunlea-Web family of useful web sites”. It is now becoming more of a reality rather than merely a dream.

Following on the annoucement of time-for-more a couple of weeks back the latest addition to the family is Brunlea-Web.com. This is a mini-site on which we will periodically promote four or five selected products or services associated with the building of business on the internet, the selection changing every few weeks.

My experience of the past year in establishing BrunleaBooks on the web, both for used books and new books, has been both fascinating and disturbing. It has taught me much about the vital importance of avoiding the hype of “get-rich-quick” merchants, furiously promoting one another’s products as the best thing since sliced bread, and milking the gullible of their cash.

I decided to avoid like the plague this dangerous vortex of “internet marketing” scams, but of course the web is a valid place in which to do business and there are products, services and advice to be had from reputable organisations, large and small. My aim is to identify some of the the best and to promote them without exaggeration. I do not and probably never will myself merit the title “marketing guru”, but having spent much of my life in other fields working with many of the world’s top specialists in their respective subjects, I’m now looking out for those genuine experts in this area of business who really do deserve to be listened to and learned from.

On this first edition of the site you will find only a few product banners with no associated text other than sectional subtitles. Subsequently, however, I aim to provide links to reliable, well-written advisory papers (and, of course, books) on e-commerce topics. There are many, but they need to be sifted out from those written chiefly to suck their readers into the maelstrom of viral affiliate links.

We will, of course, be using affiliate links ourselves but will try to be completely transparent about this and give a promise that we will under no circumstances promote a product simply because it carries a high commission rate.

The Brunlea-Web – take a first look at it now.

More soon,

Yours bookishly,

- David -

For some months we’ve been thinking of launching a new section of the BrunleaBooks site promoting products which we ourselves actively use on a regular basis. The first of these product promotions focuses on time management and is live as of an hour or so ago, but not in the main web site. We have launched it instead as a separate, but related entity, time-for-more.com.

Why? Because eventually it will be joined by other products and services designed to help us all to manage our time to best effect. Watch out for more.

While I’m here I should also say that we’ve started steadily to upload more of the catalogue of our shelf stock of mainly secondhand books on a wide variety of subjects. At present there are still only a few hundred listed on the web site, with several thousand more to come.

Yours bookishly,

- David -