Is it normal for conversions to swing wildly?

[tomswiftjr]

I just launched my first site last Wednesday, selling an info product that I developed. No sales at all for the first two days, so I dropped the price some. Bingo! One sale per day for four consecutive days. I was pretty excited, because I hadn't really optimized my sales page yet or done much with email signups or anything, so I felt like I had a lot of room to grow. But then three days in a row I got nothing...grrr! I'm still getting traffic, but no sales, and few email signups.

I spent most of the day yesterday really cleaning up the sales page, making things look better, getting the email stuff all setup, etc. So I guess we'll see, but the stress of having instant data is killing me. I probably check my email for new sale and email signup notifications 10 - 20 times per day. Is this normal and does it wear off? Does it get better once you have several sales per day on average? Is it normal to see "dry spells" where you don't get many sales for whatever reason?

How do you handle the stress of wondering if the last sale you got was your last sale ever?

 

[HarveyJ]

1) Stop checking your email every 10 minutes. Either get an email client that will simply download email on the fly, or get it pushed to your phone, or whatever the hell it takes you to stop wasting the time of going and manually checking that.

2) 1 sale per day is infinitely better than 0 sales per day, but is not actually enough to say whether something is "fluctuating" or not. You could have just had a really lucky set of days there, or 4 total idiots who would have paid your original price.
Sales comparisons can't really be made until you're getting enough sales to basically give each sale a small percentage of your total over given, but short, time period.
Personally, I say 50 sales a week, averaged over a whole month, is a good starting point at which to start talking about your sales data, and see whether it's fluctuating or not.

3) Yes, instant data IS stressful. Put that shit down.
Don't look at it more than twice per day until you're at the level that you're burning through hundreds of dollars in advertising in a 60 minute period.

 

[tomswiftjr]

Push is the problem...

The problem with the email and other data IS that it's getting pushed to me, so I don't have to manually check it. When I say I keep checking it, I mean that I keep glancing at mail.app to see if there's anything new.

In terms of not having enough sales to be able to gauge things, what should I do now? If I don't have enough data to be able to gauge whether changes are effective, then do I just wait for a week or two?