Journal: Authority + E-commerce

Insaint

Insaint

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Jan 8, 2012
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After almost a year of IM it's time to face facts: I'm not achieving anything. I'm reading too much, doing too little and taking shortcuts that end up biting me in the ass. Hopefully starting this journal will light a fire under my ass, by making my inaction/failures more public.

A small list of my failures for some quick laughs:

- Bought a site in a niche I wasn't really interested in. Result: Recovered roughly half of my investment before a series of penalties dropped my traffic by 90%.
- My "authority" site gets 3k visitors and brings in €20/month. After almost a year and ~60k words of unique content.
- Bought an EMD list, only built three websites and got two of those penalized. The third one is my only (small) success story and brings in ~€25/month and rising.

So, it's time to get serious and start building something worthwhile with long term viability.

My plan of action is to build a real authority site this time. At the same time I'll start one or two small e-commerce sites to bring in money in the shorter term.


Authority site:

Taking lots of cues from Grindstone's epic thread: http://www.wickedfire.com/enlightened-members/152480-how-create-authority-site.html

- Main homepage keyword has 65k/30k exact global/local searches per month
- My two silo's/categories will both be focusing on a 100k+ exact local searches/month term.
- Pages will be focusing on keywords ranging from 1k-100k local searches.
- Keywords that don't really fit with the general style of the site will get their own post on the blog.

Done in the last few days:

- My old domain was an informational longtail .net with ~300 exact global searches a month. So I bought a new domain, keyword+noun.com where the noun is directly related to my monetization plan.
- Got Genesis + a premium theme and customized it. Still need to get a header/logo made.
- Currently I'm in the process of condensing and rewriting my old posts before moving them to the new domain. There are almost 200 posts and some of the earlier stuff is pretty bad so it's taking a while.


E-commerce:

Following the great advice in Thuxen's thread: http://www.wickedfire.com/products-...-make-money-tangible-products-e-commerce.html

Researched a number of niches and settled on two promising ones.

The first one is a single product with ~1k local searches. It's a small market and the competition is pretty bad with a SerpIQ in the low 30s. Depending on which merchant I decide to buy from, the average profit/item will be €50-€100. That includes free shipping, two free accessories and still undercutting the cheapest competitor by 10%. Ordered samples from three different manufacturers through Alibaba. One has arrived and is looking good, but it is by far the most expensive option. Another sample is in transit and the last will take a week or two as it wasn't in stock.

Second niche is a line of ~10-15 products with ~2k local searches. Small niche within a fast growing market. Competition is non-existent with a SerpIQ in the low 20s. Net profit is ~50% with the items ranging from €30-€300. Found a great merchant for the second niche, but the initial investment will be 3k+. So I'll be focusing on the first niche to get my feet wet.

For now I'll be focusing on building the authority site while waiting on all the samples to arrive.

I'll try to update this journal at least once every one or two weeks. Hopefully these updates will be shorter, less disjointed and have working urls.
 
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Condensed 150 posts down to 40 pages with a length of 1-2k words. The last 50 posts should be fun, because I'm getting in horrible posts territory now.

On the E-commerce front not much has happened. The second sample has been sitting in a sorting facility for 7 days now. Pro-tip: If the merchant charges 20 bucks for shipping, don't assume they will use express delivery. Turns out they took the cheapest option possible and it will probably take another week before it arrives.
 
Done:

- Last 50 posts have been cleaned up. Condensed into 20 pages and 15 blog posts.
- Blog/Contact/About/Privacy.

To do:

- Build out homepage/several overview pages to tie things together.
- Interlink articles.
- Linking to sections of pages (most pages are 1k+ words).
- New header/logo (though I might launch without and spring for a professional logo once things pick up a bit).
- 301 old site/launch.
- 40 new articles between the two silo's.

On the E-commerce side of things: The second sample has finally arrived, at a new sorting facility, still on the other side of the world...
 
Check out the free account on Microsite Masters. You can track up to 20KW's on one account. And even if you need more, it's only $20/month to upgrade to 150KW's.
 
Louey37 said:
Check out the free account on Microsite Masters. You can track up to 20KW's on one account. And even if you need more, it's only $20/month to upgrade to 150KW's.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that looks pretty good. Eliminates the main thing I hate about Traffic Travis, you have to run it every day to get proper results.

Free account is now 10KW's unfortunately. Still giving it a go, took only a minute to set it up, so that's a plus.
 
Done:

- Build out homepage
- Interlink articles

The interlinking took a lot longer than expected as I did it by hand. Tried a few plugins first, but didn't like the way they worked. Usually links ended up clumped together with some pages only getting 1-2 links. Doing it by hand allowed me to add a few sentences here and there to get an extra link in. Plus I got to link to well ranking/high value pages (on my old site).

I'm planning to launch without ads. Hopefully making it easier to get natural links and get some good connections in the niche.

Does anyone have any experience with that or is it a stupid idea?

On another note I'm using a new rank tracker. It is clean, fast and free: http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-content/163023-free-rank-tracker-sgw-folks.html
 
mwbyrd said:
What platform are you using for your e-commerce site?
Click to expand...

I'll be using OpenCart. My main reasons:

- Free
- Nice community
- Doesn't hog resources
- Easy to customize even if you have no programming skills

I will be buying a paid theme for it though, as out of the box it looks too plain for my taste.
 
Good luck on the e-commerce, probably one of the most difficult things I've done online, but the result has been rewarding. Just a bit of advice, put trust seals and "trusted" logos all over the place (Like visa/mastercard logo's, ssl cert logo's, etc ...) and advertise free shipping everywhere, really big. Also make sure you have a toll free number listed big at the top. If you provide fast email support, and live chat support you won't get any calls.
 
cheshire said:
Good luck on the e-commerce, probably one of the most difficult things I've done online, but the result has been rewarding. Just a bit of advice, put trust seals and "trusted" logos all over the place (Like visa/mastercard logo's, ssl cert logo's, etc ...) and advertise free shipping everywhere, really big. Also make sure you have a toll free number listed big at the top. If you provide fast email support, and live chat support you won't get any calls.
Click to expand...

I'll be sure to advertise the logos/free shipping.

Almost all of the calls will be international, so I'll have to look into the costs of a toll free number. If its reasonable I'll try it out for sure.

Thanks for the advice!
 
you need to be aggressively studying conversion optimization if you want to succeed with ecom, start here and read literally everything: Conversion Optimization Blog | ConversionXL

Read Cashvertising, Influence, and anything marketing/psychology related.

It's one thing to get traffic, it's another to convert it. I'd argue the second is the more important and more challenging task...traffic is trivial to procure once you've got a system down.
 
dchuk said:
you need to be aggressively studying conversion optimization if you want to succeed with ecom, start here and read literally everything: Conversion Optimization Blog | ConversionXL
Click to expand...

Now that's a blog. Read the first 5-6 articles and it has already changed some of my views on how to present my products.

dchuk said:
Read Cashvertising, Influence, and anything marketing/psychology related.

It's one thing to get traffic, it's another to convert it. I'd argue the second is the more important and more challenging task...traffic is trivial to procure once you've got a system down.
Click to expand...

Already heard good things about Cashvertising so I just ordered a copy. I agree on the conversion part, the traffic shouldn't be that hard to get as the competition is very low. Thanks for the tips/advice.

---

The second sample arrived yesterday, taking a whopping 17 days. The good news is that the product itself is as advertised and that for 1/3rd of the price of the first sample. The bad news is that it is a completely blank product. No packaging, no branding and no instructions. In its current state it can't be sold at the pricepoint I have in mind.

I'm hoping the last sample will prove to be the best of them all. Because I'm not looking forward to getting my own packaging/branding done.
 
Another great tip, I didn't even know something like that existed. Going to try that out for sure. I planned on using a one-step checkout, but getting their email first and hitting them with a reminder and/or discount if they abandon their cart could work pretty well.

Certainly worth testing, thanks again!
 
Are you dropshipping? Make sure your dropshipper can communicate with you on stock levels, updates, shipping info, etc. With ecommerce, you have customers that will file a dispute with Paypal and they deduct your money instantly. You have to go through leaps and bounds to get it favored on your side. I would ensure that the supplier uses delivery confirmation and that they provide you with tracking numbers. This will be essential. You will have a headache of a time answering customer service emails and complaints if they take too long. Hopefully, they ship faster than the time it took for you to receive your sample. Hit me up if you need any more tips.
 
I won't be dropshipping as I haven't been able to locate a good dropshipper in these niches. Also the products are small enough that they can easily be stored at home. My location is far better for shipping and less reliance on a single merchant seems like a good thing to me. If at some point I can't be bothered shipping products myself I'll get a fullfillment company to do the work.

Thanks for the tips on Paypal I'll have to keep that in mind.
 
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