South West eCommerce

May was a great month, up a long way.  June was supposed to be a little down, so we were fine with that, but we’re doing the work, July was supposed to be better.  This business is trundling along making a part time living, and we know the trends are in the right direction.  We want more and we want it soon.  We’re still at around half a BoM, and in some ways we think that’s progress, but we were there a couple of months ago and we want more progress.  We’ve always said there is no overnight success, but hard work should be buying us more than this.

So there are a couple of things that we’re thinking.  First is that we are doing the work, and we are making the kind of progress that will eventually get us to where we want, so there’s a sense it’s kind of worth it.

The second is that the greats among us make better cash and do it more easily.  There’s a piece (or pieces) of the puzzle missing.  So our plan has to be to do some serious training and find the missing piece.  We’ve signed on for a major opportunity with the guys from Commission Blueprint, who have steered us this far, and we intend to catapault ourselves into the next orbit, not the guys who slave hard for every step forward, but the guys who get well rewarded for our work and our groundwork, and our knowledge.  August might even be a bit further backward because we’re putting some serious time and energy into the next slab of learning, but it’s right for us now.

In the meantime, we’ve got a series of sites that are doing a bit for us, and you might be interested to see how it’s gone.

Site A    Down about 50%.  This is a little disappointing, because we had one ongoing customer on this who’s dropped out.  Meanwhile, another sale has come through for a product we really believe in.  This site is one that we have run for other reasons that aren’t easily measured in dollars, and sales though sparse, are coming more quickly, meaning that the flagship is kind of working.  Even though the cashflow is down, we’re encouraged by this one. About one and a half % of a BoM.

Site B     Up from zero.  We’ve got an improvement on this one, but it’s a symbol of everything that’s hard about how well we are doing this business.  This site pre dates our affiliate process and we’ve had success of all sorts with it except financial.  We can’t keep working for fun, and so this is a bit tiresome.  Meanwhile, we’ve got one area that brings a particular kind of client in, and we’re working on how to use that to shift product.  No where near the money the effort deserves, about half a % of a BoM.

Site C     Down 20%.  We are selling a summer product, and it’s deep in the heart of winter here.  This drop is still a surprise because we had a drop last month too.  Research on a bunch of tools suggests that in this keyword, traffic is way down in the US, winter from summer.  Numbers for Australia don’t exist, but we imagine that’s at least partly true.  As the summer arrives, we’d expect this to go well, so there’s hope for us.  About 14% of a BoM.

Site D    Down 15%.  Another regular earner, down significantly for the second month.  This doesn’t have a really good reason to be down, but our SEO has been fairly strong and we imagine it’s pretty much cyclical.  There’s no last year’s patterns to refer to, so this is just for us to observe at present.  Is July just going to be tricky in general?  Hard to say.  About 14% of a Bom.

Site E     Down 55%.  That stings.  Again, we had less traffic and less conversions.  We believe the month was just hard.  Ranking is going well and there are some PPC options going with this, so when conversions are down there it stings hard.  This is a good site and a good product, the market still exists, so we just have to accept this is a blip at present and keep the work up to it.  Almost 3% of a BoM.

Site F     Up from zero.  This site runs primarily on PPC and we’ve got it sitting there because we think the market is good, and developments could mean an aged site is valuable to get into gear at some point.  In percentage terms the gain is valuable, but in real terms it means nothing.  This is a good reason for us to be looking to do some training.  In a properly successful outfit, this site would probably exist, but we’d hardly have the time to talk about it, it would be marginal.  Right now, the positives from an improvement are kind of nice.  Stay tuned to see what happens here.  Money negligible.

Site G    Down 40%.  The site we love to hate.  We’ve got a better product on board now and we are ranking well enough.  It’s paying it’s own way and we expect steady if unspectacular growth from it.  Part of our problem is that it’s the kind of product everyone needs, but there are a lot of developers out there who build the type of software for free, they’ll get to where they charge for it at some point, but a new free one will come along.  This makes the paid products, even if proven, susceptible to consumer insecurity.  Kind of OK as it’s still sales and for a time we made none.  Ongoing monitoring required, and maybe a broadening of our product range.  About 1and a half % of a BoM.

Site H    Up 110%.  We’re not really hippies in this office, but we think that anyone with any foresight has to think things that are good for the environment are good in general.  With the money so low, this improvement isn’t everything it seems, small changes look huge in percentage terms.  Meanwhile, it’s another month of going forward and it’s a fairly competitive market we’re in.  So we like the product, we like being part of it, and we see a future for it.  And it’s making a little money.  All good.  About 2 and a half % of a BoM.

Site I      Junk Leagued.

Site J      Up from Zero.  This is a marketplace we know pretty well and we’ve branched out a bit.  The site is performing and the model has both strengths and weakenesses.  In its favour, we are dropshipping these things so we’re actually selling something we own (at least nominally), and that makes us different from affiliate sites.  Google have been known to do outrageous things in the past, and so having a different model up offers a level of security from diversity.  Our margins are OK, if not spectacular, but there may be a way to improve on that with a different supplier.  On the downside, we have seen a number of sales come through on this that the supplier has “out of stock”.  We still have the client, but we can’t conclude the sale.  Again, another supplier might be an answer.  Anyway.  Interesting times, and encouraging traffic.  Money negligible.

Site K     Down 60%.  This is a site that suggested a great success from scratch but has turned out to take lots of work, just as we’ve always expected from everything.  We did make a few mistakes early, and so it’s been a learning process, and it’s still very early.  A site to watch.  Money negligible.

Site L     Up from zero.  This is a site that did well from day one, and so to say it was at zero sucks pretty badly.  Supplier problems (see Site J report), and fraud have made it a challenge, but we are seeing traffic and we know how to turn that to cash, so we still see this as a good ongoing thing.  Money negligible.

Site M   Down 3%.  The drop is neither here nor there, and in a month when a lot of things dropped significantly, this feels OK.  We want growth and we think it’s there, so we’ve just got to keep plugging with SEO stuff and refine the PPC.  About 3% of a BoM.

Site N    Down 70%.  This site is there to do other things for us.  It’s inclusion in the roster is pretty much all about relationship building.  It made some pocket money and that’s all but it’s teaching us things about the market and it’s a good link to a good supplier.  We don’t expect a lot from it financially, and at present it’s  - Money Negligible.

Site O    Down 10%.  This is a site we played with a long while ago, that isn’t worth spending time SEOing, according to Market Samurai.  That alone makes Market Samurai worth the purchase price, we could pour hours into this and get no payoff from it without their information.  Google has trashed it from a PPC level, and so it just sits there as a reminder of things that we should have learned earlier.  With what seems a lot of drama, it’s done its duty by us, as a learning aid from before we were really a business that did affiliate sales.  It takes no real energy, and so it gets us a pretty good hourly rate at – 2% of a BoM.

Site P     Up 100%.  This is one that makes me smile.  It’s a product I’d never imagine buying.  It seems a narrow market.  Another early experiment, it had sat around doing nothing and achieving nothing until one day, out of nowhere, a sale arrived.  Then the next month, another sale.  There is obviously something to be had from the market now, in a way we couldn’t achieve when we started it.  Time passing and our improved knowledge had turned a loser into something that might win.  Some SEO goes into the project now, and we might well see some real progress over time.  A hopeful 1 and a half % of a BoM.

Site Q    Up 300%.  That sounds insanely positive, and indeed we should be very happy because it’s the first fully functional month for the site.  A year ago to be able to achieve this level of success in a month would have seemed outrageous, and I guess we have to see that as a measure of real progress.  But this has been hard, daily work, and it’s still less than a great hourly rate, so whether we can keep the income stream growing remains to be seen.  A cautiously happy 3% of a Bom.

And that’s the roster for the month.  Some big drops, some holding steady, and some growth. Total about 48% of a BoM.   As we said, we’ve signed up with Commission Junction for some major training and we’ve put our faith in them to date.  It’s got us to a place where it’s solid enough and we should be happy with that, but watch for a while and see how phase two grabs us.