South West eCommerce

There is a bunch of trial and error in this game.  We use some tools and they improve our hit rate really significantly, but I don’t believe you can get a guarantee of a site/ product/ market combination that’s going to hit it right every time and make you good cash.

That being said, and admitting that we went into this without getting all the knowledge and tools in place first, we have some sites that just don’t do as we’d hoped.  With some of them, work will make them pay reasonably, it’s just going to take more than if we’d planned ahead.

With others though, it’s time to take some wisdom from the Dakota people and recognise that when riding a dead horse the best strategy is to dismount.

Like another American Native people (forgive me if I’m Aussie and I don’t know which ones), it’s worth noting that there’s some use in every carcass.  The use of every part of a bison is legendary, and we find that when a site is of no likely value, we can still find something to do with the carcass.

First thing is Adsense.  We can always put an ad space on a site and leave it there.  This will trickle along and certainly isn’t going to make anyone wealthy, but if you have the site already, and it’s got it’s role, $20 every so often is going to be a helpful input.

Occasional sales.  To be honest, this is how I got inspired to write this post.  One of our sites has been a very occasional seller, and didn’t actually rate at all in our regular monthly analysis, until last month it made a single, fair sized sale.  It made us put it on the list, and you’ll probably get a lot of no income reports from it, but we’re doing no work to get what comes.  In a bad month, a sale from an occasional site, or two or three sites, is maybe going to make the difference between making your costs and not making them.

Links.  Still the most important component of the ranking process is the number of links to your site from another domain.  If you control a website, if it has good page ranks, if you know that it isn’t going to do something to get it banned or taken down, you have a good source of links to your working sites.  You can play with content to do whatever you wish the site to do and you can wait as it ages, which will give it better page rankings and make it easier to fire up if things change in the marketplace, but right now, it’ll help your working sites rank, which is important, remember every place you climb on the search engines is more traffic and ultimately more sales.

So when you have a run at this affiliate process, it’s worth keeping an eye on what’s working and what’s not, but when something isn’t working, a clear look at the review process will probably suggest that the old sites still have some value.

Anything else any of you do with your old ones?