South West eCommerce

Sometimes I look at science and understand in broad terms what’s going on, but don’t understand the detail of it all.  Then there are practical things I do every day and I can’t really be clear about why they work but I know they do and I trust them.

As an example, I’ve finally got to where I drive an automatic car.  I like a “real” gearbox, and there are a number of reasons for that, but when I was buying my car, I knew what I wanted and in that model, I just couldn’t find a manual, so I took what was available and have driven an auto for three years.  I don’t understand how a transmission works, except that I hear about the belts slipping so I know it uses belts.  I know there’s some hydraulic pressure involved, but by comparison to a fairy clear understanding of a gearbox, I’m really not aware of what’s going on.  Nevertheless every morning I go out to the driveway, put my key in the ignition, select R, and back out into the street for my journey.

We’re a bit like that with regard affiliate sales.  There are principles we have grown to trust, because people who’ve been doing this longer than us have explained them.  The forces at work however, are pretty mysterious.

We’ve got one domain that was soaking up time and energy, as they do, and gently but consistently climbing in the rankings, making a modest but reasonable income.  This is the kind of site that isn’t ever going to make us millionaires, but if we have a number of them, it’s fairly reasonable to see a steady and comfortable income in it.

Then about 7 weeks ago, doing regular checks as we do, we found that the site had vanished from the rankings.  No explanation, no reason, just not there.  For about a week we understood that this might happen, so there was no real panic, but then after a couple of weeks we began to ask around and see what others in the forums might make of it.  Consensus about the issue was that we were in a bad place, but sometimes after a few weeks these things just right themselves.  We should keep doing the work to rank the site.  So that’s what we did for a few weeks.

After about a month, we were really beginning to worry about this.  It’s a part of our income and we didn’t want it not to exist.  We spoke to our friends at Commission Blueprint, who suggested we be a bit philosophical about it.  We’ve done nothing wrong and it might all be alright.  It might not, but we’ve done nothing to suggest that the work we’ve already put in shouldn’t get us some value.  Without a lot of experience in this, we were sitting in a place where the next decision was what to do with a defunct investment.

Eventually we decided that there was nothing for it but to wait.  We stopped new work on ranking the site and we left everything in place.  The site, the links to products, everything.  Then about a week ago we did the same regular checks as always and not only was our site back, it’s ranking number one in our search term on Google.  We’ve lost a month and a half of sales and income.  That’s no good, but we’ve been through a tunnel and what we’ve learned from it is that there is generally value in the work we do.  We don’t understand it, it’s based on the rules of human psychology and market forces.  They’re strange sciences indeed but we’ve got some good mentors, and that’s what this is about.  Without someone who knows a little about what’s going on, we could easily get to where it all becomes too harrowing, or where we try a new exciting strategy every month.  With the benefit of some theory to tell us it’ll be alright, it doesn’t seem quite so dark.