South West eCommerce

Monthly analysis, April

Here we are again, not as late as usual.  Time to spill for you all in the ongoing soap opera that really is about whether we float to the surface or whether we crash and burn.

First point on that I guess is that we wanted to be better off by now, but the longer we go the less likely we feel that the crash and burn scenario will come to us.  Having said that, the time grows short and we don’t know exactly how we’re going to cope when the cash from some other one offs runs out.  Good feelings are all well and good, but we’ve got families to feed.

The actual cash amount of the report is down a little.  This slipping backward thing has made us depressed and frightened in the past, but right now the problem seems to be with three of our biggest earners, and as we write it, one of those is fixed.  So we’re not doing as well as we should but the mechanisms for success are in place.

Site by site, here it is.

Site A – Down 100%.  Site that made a lot of its money from Adsense.  We lost that and made no affiliate sales for the month.  This still builds as a traffic flow in a good market and we’ll do well enough from it in the future.  No money.

Site B- Down 100%.  This made us feel very bad when it happened.  At the start of the month, we lost our access to Adsense.  The site has a bunch of benefits to us that we can’t measure for this report, but its cash inflows were from Adsense.  We’ve tried to register for a couple of ad serving projects.  One of them hasn’t got back to us and the other approved us but offers ads we don’t want to run.  Traffic, and thus power, for the site is still strong, and we’ve found some marketing people who we expect will help us commercialise the site.  It’s not as bad as it seems, but no money.

Site C – Down 100%.  This sucks pretty badly.  3 months ago this was our biggest earner.  We’ve been aware it’s seasonal and expected it to drop a little but found during the month that a lot of the links on our data feed (from the vendor) were broken, so we’ve been buying traffic that can’t convert.  Work on the site continues and the vendors have been contacted.  Just the same we want everything sorted before the spring/ summer buyers come back into the market.  No money.

Site D – Up about 30%.  Very happy with this.  It’s a site we use mostly SEO strategies with, and the good news is that the work seems to be getting us there.  It relies on key dates, and there wasn’t one in April.  The sales advantages seemed to come from better conversion rates rather than more traffic.  There is a key date in May so we’re very hopeful that the growth we require will finally kick in.  About 13% of a BoM.

Site E – Up about 40%.  This is good too.  A staple for us, this has not done everything we wanted it to, but like the previous site, we’ve had way better conversions  from this as well as an increase in traffic.  We get a sense that our sites, after a number of months, are growing in commercial mass and it gives us hope.  About 8% of a BoM.

Site F – Went backwards.  Lost some cash on this one, though a minor amount.  Conversions down and this site runs on PPC.  We were on no income last month and went to a minor loss.  Refining the processes will see this come good in the long run.  No money.

Site G – About stable.  We could really dislike this site.  It’s now gotten to where it ranks well and as the domain ages we’re sure it’s worth something.  It doesn’t nearly justify its existence and it owes us money.  Knowing there’s a market there though, we keep plugging away.  Some time soon a great product in the same niche will come to market and we’ll be ready to make a killing.  About 2.5% of a BoM.

Site H – Down 100%.  This site was one that just dropped out of the google rankings.  No rankings translates to no sales and that shows how vulnerable this business can be to what really are external events.  Returned to the rankings in the last days of the month, and is now ranking well so we expect a return of our fortunes on it.  No money.

Site J – Up 100%.  It’s nice to have this ticking along, and we’ve used it to investigate another process and spread our risk to possible changes in the internet in future.  Given that, we’re making not a lot from it, and that’s OK.  There are times when the learning experience is the biggest payoff.  About 0.5% of a BoM.

Site K – Stable at no sales.  Still early days for this site, but it’s into its third month and we’re a bit disappointed at the lack of progress.  Relies on special dates and one is due soon.  Rankings are slower to get than we’d hoped.  This will have to perform soon or face being relegated to the “sit there while we don’t work on you” league.  We’ve discovered that aged domains do better than new ones, and the process of letting them sit around is still valuable.  There are also linking benefits to having a site sitting around, so it may survive a little while longer.

Site L – Up about 90%.  Still early days for this one too.  The growth rates at these low numbers look a lot better than they really are, because a small improvement looks like a major jump.  Nevertheless, this is a very young site and headed in the right direction.  This is a Commission Blueprint 2 site, and certainly shows the benefits of early work, giving us income at the beginning, but nothing is going to remove the need for us to plug away at this and build solid income generating sites.  More than 1% of a BoM.

Site M – up 25%.  Another young site, making a pittance but doing it early.  The raft of them inching their way forward gives us hope.  We spent some money on PPC with this site and lost cash there, so it’s SEO performance is better than it looks.  While all of them are small, they’re all growing and we think that if you’ve got a handful of strong sites, it doesn’t matter so much if one of them has a bad months.  The diversity is going to be our insurance.  Almost 2% of a BoM.

Site N – Minor sales from nowhere.  Woohoo.  This site isn’t ranking anywhere,  but we are selling products for the same vendor in another market.  This is a site we had to wait quite a long time for them to get ready with a data feed, now here it is.  Interestingly we haven’t done the SEO stuff, we’re not doing pay per click at present, but someone has hunted us out and bought some product anyway.  This could be a one off, or it could prove that it’s going to be a fairly powerful site.  Either way in a hard month it’s good to take the wins with the losses.  About 1% of a BoM.

Site O – Sales from nowhere.  A site we started a few years back, which now that we’ve got to know the market is clearly going to be really hard to promote.  We hadn’t used it in our reporting because we don’t work on it and we don’t expect it to make much money, but this month a few sales just walked up and we’re happily taking the cash.  It’s interesting to report because while we love getting the bonus from this one, we really expect it to make zero next month and just surface every so often.  With our tools telling us it’s too hard to do well at, this ticks away in the background and that’s all we expect it to do.  Almost 3% of a BoM.

So that’s us for the month.  Actual cash from this is only about 31% of a BoM.  That’s really not exciting but we’re heading toward where we need to be.  By mid year it needs to be at 60% of a BoM, and the growth was always likely to come through in a rush, it’d better be soon we say.  Our target for that improvement was June, but as we grow we use up our reserves more slowly, we've got a little longer, maybe another month.

As we analyse, we see strength in it, but this is soaking up time and energy.  There is more to do, but we haven’t got the resources.  Watch this space.....