South West eCommerce

As you know, we’ve been doing this seriously for a few months now.  We have looked at the idea for a lot longer than that, and before we dived in, we’d started to look at some training.

Like a bunch of other things, though, we started at it before we knew exactly what we were doing.  In fact, we’re not great yet but we continue to learn.  Day in and day out, there are tiny tweaks we can apply to how we do things and every so often we learn another major thing.

One of the long lessons is that there are products out there that’ll sell, but turning them into major conduits for traffic and income takes a really strategic view.  We’ve got a site which has fairly smoothly taken a deal of work, and in return has fairly smoothly grown to about 3% of what we are calling a BoM.  That’s a monetary unit referring to a Bag of Money, and refers to what it takes to keep each of us alive and trading.  The costs to run our business then, are a BoM each for us, and about half a BoM in overheads, 2.5 BoM in all, each month.  You can see then, that if the site makes 3% of a Bom, we’d need about 40 of them each to make a reasonable living.  If each takes an hour a week to maintain, there’s no fat or profit in it.

So as we do, we sat and looked at the progress a few days back, and the question came up about what we can do.  Can we get a better product?  Not really, it’s not a bad product at all and it does sell.  Can we promote it harder?  Not really, there’s kind of a limit to the amount of traffic that’ll come our way now that we’ve reached the top of the rankings.  Can we cut our commitment to it?  Well yes, a little bit, so maybe there isn’t an hour a week required, but be clear, it’s soaked up more than an hour a week getting there.

The outcome of this is that we will start to promote the site in another search engine term and we will hopefully get to where we double our traffic, but it’s months away, and even then, let’s say it makes 6% of a BoM, we’re hardly setting the world on fire.

Turning this over and looking at it, an interesting phrase was uttered.  Basically as we considered why we were working with a site that is always going to do “well enough”, we noted that it was pre Market Samurai.  The implication didn’t need to be spelled out for either of us.  With tools at our disposal now, we could look at an opportunity and understand the value of it to us, and if we don’t see the probability of a site making good cash once it’s risen to the levels we know we can achieve, we’ll keep looking, thanks very much.

That brings us to the question... are we sorry we played with this site?  Definitely not.  This is going to make quite a reasonable cashflow for us and will one day keep the employees ticking over while we’re off on holidays.  You’ll note from other reports that even the good opportunities at some stage will fall over for a time.  A raft of reasonable ones are always going to be welcome backups.  Making something that offers reasonable, ongoing money in our learning phase isn't bad either.

It’s an assumption though, that some of you will read this post, and over time will come to decide you’ll have a go at affiliate marketing.  The tools we use will allow you to trawl through the opportunities before you and select those that should, over time, contribute to a better than average income for an easier than average workload.  For us, Market Samurai is one of those tools and we’d recommend you have a look at it.