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Ebiz1 – One year later

November 3rd, 2008 by Kenric

Dollars

Last year I wrote, “My goal of this site is to get one sale a day with an average checkout total of $180.  If I can achieve this goal the site would net about $15,000 to $18,000 per year. ”

It has been just a bit over a year since my first store opened.  In just a year my store has met 2 out of 3 goals.

1 year Goal	1 year Actual
1 sale/day	1.3 sales/day
$180 checkout/day	$179 checkout/day
$15k-$18k/yr	~$12k/yr

My profit margin wasn’t as high as I would have liked but I had to stay competitive. My gross sales per day was where I wanted it, but my profit per sale was 1/3 less than I thought.  I expect the 2nd year to be much better profit just due to volume.  I spent about $3,000 on adwords over the year which should drop to zero for the second year.

Traffic

Traffic for my store has been steadily increasing with last month going over 10,000 visitors for the first time.  I thought my sales were pretty good last Xmas season with 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a month!  The key to traffic is good content.  As I look at my data, I can see that many people stay for 20-30 minutes on my site and browse many many pages.  I really feel that I have the best information about my products on the net and people have told me that with emails.  Many stores just throw a standard picture and standard description on their site.  I rewrite all my descriptions and take my own photos.  It’s definitely helping!  Traffic for October was 100% organic.

SEO

And to top it all off, my site is starting to rank very high for main keywords.  This may be a fluke for today only but the site is ranking #3 for the main keyword.  It has never ever been there before today.  It has been struggling at 7-10 for the past 2 months.

In Google the difference between ranking #3 and #7-10 is huge.  On Google, the #3 ranking gets 8% of the clicks, whereas 7-10 get about 3% of the clicks.  Therefore, this jump should in theory translate to 2.6X more traffic from the main keyword.

Honestly, I didn’t really think I could ever break the top 3.  However, now that I popped up there, I believe that I become top 2.  Top ranking I think is untouchable based on its age, links and the fact that it is the manufacturer!   But you never know!

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