David's AW News: Leaving on a Jet Plane

Greetings from Bali,

A little sad because this is my last day of this Asia trip. But also looking forward to getting back to Europe - later this evening I will catch a Turkish Airways flight to Istanbul, then change there for Malaga, Spain.

It's been an epic journey - starting 6 months ago.. and travelling to Bali, Java, Nepal, India, China and back to Bali.. Many new products, sourced, designed, ordered and on the way (hopefully) to your shops and stores. Toni from Spain came for part of the trip, Tomas from Slovakia and Sandra (our talented designer) came for the China and Bali parts of the trip. Thank you to them all for their epic contributions.

Also, a special thank you to Bondhan, our Indonesian main man, who has been a big part in the development of travel videos - you can follow on YouTube.

Last week I was telling you about Blitar City and drum-making artisans.. if you missed it you can catch up here..   Or see the YouTube video that Bodhan crafted here. And as a bonus you can see Bondhan playing the drums..

AI changes everything.

On this trip, I have been trying to develop skills as a YouTuber.. I am quite a shy person, and really didn't want to go down that route, but so many friends, customers and my team kept banging on about it that I had to try.. it's a lot harder than I realised. Before, we used to just use YouTube as a convenient place to store clips, and the occasional "Can you Sell this Video"  which I want to develop more..

The marketing world is changing so fast.. before we just did SEO and a bit of Google AdWords and our customers came.. and we kept a relationship via newsletters like this. But gradually google decreased the amount of space for natural listings and pushed paid content.. until users got fed up.. and now they have an alternative, AI.. I for one rarely use Google now ( I use Perplexity and ChatGPT4o) .

These last three weeks, Tomas and the digital marketing team here in Bali.  AW-Advantage.com have been working hard to understand and pivit.. Basically if you are not prepared to spend a high proportion of your sales on google ad's then you need to do SEO or OFE  Optimize for Everything.. including or especially AI. and social media.. and I would argue information media.. because YouTube is not really social media, you can't socialise much there.. but you can soak up News, Information and Entertainment.

Check out our Java Village of Stone YouTube also..

Meanwhile, back in the EU..

Lots of Indian stock has been rolling into our warehouse.. And we are working hard to get everything online.. And some of these lines are beautiful and on trend. Check out our coming soon page to feel as excited as we are!

Father's Day is almost here.. and we have the trending stuff you need to wow your customers. And amazing offers, so make sure you stock up soon before its too late. 

Anyway, have a lovely week.. I'm just off to the airport..

David

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