Ecommerce site update – after 7 days
October 27th, 2007 by KenricIt’s been a week since my site went live. My current goal is to drive traffic to the site and improve its search engine rankings as quickly as possible. 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. I hope to attain this goal within 6 months.
Keywords
As I mentioned before, my marketplace is a very small niche market. Using the keyword tool from SEO book, I have targeted 4 keywords which are the most popular for my product. Based on this tool, the search volume for my keywords is about 16,000 per month or about 530 times per day.
Last week when I launched this site it was just indexed in Google a few days before. Unfortunately, I did not run the SEO Rank Checker at that time so I don’t have a base ranking but I’m pretty sure it didn’t show up on the top 1000 before that.
Running the SEO Rank Checker on the 4 above keywords yields me these results.
- Keyword 1 – #526
- Keyword 2 – #84
- Keyword 3 – not in top 1000
- Keyword 4 – #54
Keyword #1 is the most important one to rank for. If I was selling “chairs”, keyword #1 would be “chairs.” I will be concentrating on improving its ranking over the next 6 months.
Keyword #2 is an informational request on keyword #1. Its akin to “how to make a chair” or “DIY chair”
Keyword #3 I didn’t expect to see searched so much. I haven’t concentrated on ranking for it but I will begin to this week.
Keyword #4 is basically “cheap chairs.”
Traffic Generation
My plan to generate traffic is based on four methods:
- Pay per click advertising
- Blog
- Article Submission
- Forum contributions
Pay per click advertising: I began running PPC ads on Google Adwords and the Yahoo Publishing Network. I have a budget of $10/day. After one week, pretty much all of my traffic has come from paid clicks. After one week I’ve spent $55 and received 226 clicks, averaging $0.24 per click.
Blog: I started a blog on my product topic and have attached it to the site. I wrote 4 posts on the blog so far. The high ranking keywords #2 and #4 actually point to my blog articles instead of my ecommerce site.
I also started a contest on my blog in which I’m giving away $150 worth of product for simply commenting on my blog articles. I have about 28 entries so far. My plan with this contest is to giveaway product and to create an email list. I hope to send some coupons to these email addresses later on next month for the Christmas season.
Article Submission: I took the articles on my blog and submitted them to a couple free article websites. I hope these articles will get me some backlinks and that they themselves will become ranked pretty well.
Forum contributions: I’ll sign up for forums which discuss my product and begin answering any questions people may have about my product in a non-spammy way. I’ll have my store URL in my profile or sig (if they allow it). I haven’t started this portion yet.
After 7 days, I have had 282 visitors and 925 page views and no sales.
Posted in Ebiz | 8 Comments »
Stumble it!
How many items do you have in your store? What is the price range? Based on what you have posted, I’m assuming that you are hoping to have around $65K a year in sales ($180 x 365). How are you calculating your profit margin? Your advertising budget is less than $4K a year, credit card costs should be around $2K, hosting costs are minimal. Are you basing your sales on doing a lot of volume with a small markup?
If you are planning to do volume business, 300 unique visitors with no sales would concern me – but I don’t know what you are selling, the prices, or anything else – so I can’t really say. If you are selling BMW cars, 300 unique visitors without a sale would mean nothing. If you are selling sunglasses, it means a lot. The cheaper the items, the more you should be getting sales right from the start.
One thing I want to point out is this: Sometimes niches exist because they aren’t easily profitable. The big guys tried them. They couldn’t turn a profit. The other time they exist is because the merchandise is hard to get. If you are using a drop shipper, then I doubt the merchandise is hard to get.
(I’ve often thought being a drop shipper would be a very profitable business since you could rely on others to do all the work of selling!)
By ubu50 on Oct 28, 2007
Hi UBU, I have about 30 items in my store. The items are priced from $30 to $150. However the $30 items are accessories of the $150 items. I don’t think anyone would buy them alone as shipping costs alone would make that inefficient.
My profit margin is a broad average based on my markups. I won’t know until I start seeing if my orders are for 1 item or multiple items. I plan on doing low volume and high markups. I hope I can get 100-150 visitors a day and convert 1 person with a $180 sale.
You can see from the search engine volume that this is definitely a low volume niche.
I’m experimenting with Adwords now, I’m lowering my PPC amount to $0.10 and also doing some site-targeted ads for $5/day. We’ll see how the next week goes.
By Kenric on Oct 28, 2007
Your prices are low enough that I would have expected a sale by now.
If you really have a “low volume niche” there is a point where traffic will start to trend down instead of up. This happens to most mature products/websites. This is because people come, they look, they don’t see anything they want and they leave. Many won’t come back. The time to “catch them” or “trap them” is when they first come. You need to have something to sell that you can sell at a really cheap price that most people want. Collecting e-mail addresses is fine but you need to turn people into SALES to make any money!!!
If you want to, e-mail me your website link. It’s really hard to make constructive comments when I have no idea what you are selling.
By ubu50 on Oct 28, 2007
It’s driving me nuts not knowing your site. I’m definitely very interested in outdoor activities and adventure things. Shoot me an email if you don’t mind.
By Chuck on Oct 29, 2007
I have one other question. Since you posted that your items are brand name, I imagine that when someone asks Google for “Brandname blanks” you are not the first seller shown. Other stores come up before yours, correct?
By ubu50 on Oct 30, 2007
Ubu, yes the brand names come up before mine. But people don’t really search for this product by brand name.
Chuck, I’m not posting the URL because if I do that then I can’t post this type of info on my blog. I can’t have a biz where everyone knows what it is and also have all its numbers posted online. Im choosing to keep it secret and post the numbers on here. If I post the URL, then I won’t talk about it on here anymore.
By Kenric on Oct 30, 2007
Fair enough. Just between Fastlane and here, I’m very curious.
By Chuck on Oct 30, 2007
Another 7 days has past and my SERP rankings have jumped considerably.
Keyword 1 – #526 — now #79
Keyword 2 – #84 — now #68
Keyword 3 – not in top 1000 — now #9 (WOW)
Keyword 4 – #54 — now #61
Going from #526 to #79 for keyword 1 is incredible as its a competitive term. It’s amazing what a little bit of SEO can do for you.
By Kenric on Nov 5, 2007