South West eCommerce

We’ve had this info for a while now and it was going to be important in the scheme of things to tell you how we were going and what that means, how we respond to good news, what we do about bad news etc.

So here’s what happened for December, one of the early months in our reinvented business.

Things were good in some areas, less good in others, and overall we saw an increase in cashflow.  We should be excited and if this increase was January numbers over December numbers, we would be, but this was December over November and we guess things should have improved by more than we saw, so we’re leaving the call at “a bit excited”.

So what do the numbers look like and what are we going to do about it.  Overall we’re up about  50% for the month.  As you’d imagine, everything would be good if that was a normal month but we don’t know how much of a spike we’d expect at Christmas time anyway, and it may be that we’ve only held level.  We are keenly aware that to keep ahead of things, we need a regular increase because the raw numbers are still a little low.

To get some meaningful analysis, we’ve broken that down site by site, and it looks like this.

Site A – Something we have had for a long time that was never a money making enterprise.  Went from zero to zero.  This is fine because we’ve started to redesign the site which has a great readership and some cool backlinks to become more commercial.  Action for the month needs to be to get some saleable product on it, and continue to offer something to keep the readership returning.

Site B – A magazine site that once was really powerful but has never made great money.  Went from making not enough to making even less than that.  This site has been a lot of work for us and isn’t paying its way.  We’ve brainstormed what we do with it, and have come up with a plan that will generate some cash, but probably not in January and maybe not in February.  It’s the last gasp for something that we’ve had a lot of fun with, but we’re busy and it will only survive if it makes a contribution to the business.

Site C – Consumer goods site making a reasonable sum, about a third of a bag of money.  Improved by about 2%.  A disappointing outcome for a site we are very hopeful about.  Something great about this site is that we had contact from the vendors and they like us, want to know will we do some work with them as they expand the scope of their marketing and change their affiliate program.  We’re waiting for them to do some work and we’ll multiply this site a number of times.  Other good news is that in early Jan this site reached #1 in Google for our chosen search term. 

Site D – Consumer goods site making a reasonable return, maybe a quarter of a bag of money.  Up about 50%.  We believe there’s also a major improvement on this to be had, the market’s huge and we’re ranking well for some keywords on the SEO process.  Using Market Samurai we’ve found another keyword that will generate much higher traffic rates and that process is taking us significant energy, but in the short term it makes enough cash to support itself.  Action for this month is to keep the SEO activity going and hope all the increase wasn’t Christmas driven.  (We know some of was).

Site E – Probably the flagship this month, this was up about 500% and made us more than it ever has.  About two thirds of a bag of money.  We know it was largely Christmas driven, and we know that in January this’ll go down, but if the drop leaves us at a better place than we started from, it’s pretty good.  This market has no keywords that make masses of traffic, and we’re at the top of the search engines for the best keyword.  To improve we just have to be aware of the need for Search engine ranking and behave accordingly but we can’t do major work, maybe links from friends over time will help.

Site F – We’re replicating site E.  This is an interesting strategy, the first site took a long time to get to the top and our competitors self refer from sites with lots of content.  We can sell similar product from two vendors and we hope that by getting two sites to the top we’ll displace some other competitors, and this way none of it is duplicate content.  This lost us money for the month, but we’re hopeful and will continue to SEO it and see the benefits over time.  Action for the month is to refine SEO, refine PPC action, and look for ways to generate free traffic including our own magazine site.

Site G – A strong enough site with a software product that isn’t selling.  This made about 1% of a bag of money and continues to do so, bobbing up and down at a similar level, even though from month to month you might see a 100% increase or a 50% decrease.  When we first considered affiliate sales, and before we got involved with Commission Blueprint, we purchased this site and got conned.  The story’s interesting but we won’t be telling it.  Thankfully we have more understanding and a better way into real business sites now.  Action for this month is to utilise the site by finding products that will sell, and starting the SEO process with them.

Site H – New site, lost a tiny bit of money, but happy enough with it, continue the normal stuff we’re doing.  This is a busy market but should pay us over time.  Interestingly, we got excited about a keyword opportunity we found in Market Samurai.  After a time we had an email from them alerting us to a common enough mistake people make reading the data.  That’s the value of training from a good crew, and the importance of reading everything properly.  The keyword we looked at is probably 25% as valuable as we first thought but will still pay for itself over time.  Action for this month is to continue with SEO marketing .

Site I – Another new site, lost a little money on PPC, also found with a keyword opportunity presented by Market Samurai.  Same hiccup but the traffic for the site has still been very good and it’s a fairly high value item we’re selling.  Good traffic for the month, even for a new site, but no conversions.  Refer to our blog item about monitoring, we’ve started querying the affiliate program about what’s going on, we’d have expected to see something.  Action for this month is to make sure that if we’re making conversions we’re getting paid.  Decisions due after the outcome of that action is known.

Site J – First sales, came to about 2% of a bag of money.  Started out as something that seemed like a good idea at the time.  We bought the stock and we know the market exists (one of our other sites is doing fine on it), but it’s a departure from how we generally do things.  Action for the month, follow through on where we are, maybe learn a lesson, maybe just treat it as a lesson and try another one soon, nothing ventured, nothing gained.   

Another value in  site J is that it adds  another kind of website (ecommerce) to our portfolio, which spreads the risk, and we see a lot of value in making more of them, but making sure they perform.  If Google wakes up one day and bans or penalises all affiliate sites, this kind of site would escape the ban because according to Google it is an every day ecommerce site which contains no affiliate links whatsoever.  It’s pretty much a Niche Blueprint 2.0 site, but wholesale instead of dropship, and  it would be healthy to develop a number of varying kind of ecommerce sites , spreading our risk over a range of site types.

So there we are... nothing to be too discouraged about, and reason for some real hope.  The post was a long one, but thanks for reading if you’ve got this far.  Check in about 3 weeks and we can let you know what happens in the world of an internet marketer straight AFTER Christmas.