2 Failed Businesses, 1 Semi-Successful, 1 About to Launch Under my Belt

**Chase** · Aug 2nd, 2012, 11:51 PM

Howdy,

My name's Chase. I'm an ex-Californian currently in China.

Joined this forum after finishing MJ's book. I had a friend recommend it to me on a private forum I'm on, unsure if he's on this one too or not. Probably I ought to ask him.

I thought Millionaire Fastlane was excellent. MJ's a talented writer, and his book encapsulates a lot of things I've thought for a long time, others I can say I intuitively knew, and a few things that were new ideas.

I'm principally on here both to learn and help others learn. I've been a top contributor in other forums in other niches and found them an exceptional place to hash out lessons and solidify one's hold on what works and why. I tend to be better at breaking down and explaining things than most people around, and forums tend to serve as great vehicles for me to do that while bouncing things off other people who are actually out and about and applying these lessons at the same time. It amplifies the learning curve.

Right now my focus is business. I have an online ecommerce business that's doing okay; as of right now, it's getting 400K+ visitors per month, though conversions are abysmal - I'm only doing $4K / month in sales, roughly a penny per visitor. I'm focused on ways to up conversions to sales while continuing to increase site traffic and build my brand in that niche.

I also have a failed real estate venture and a failed education business under my belt. Those failures taught me an awful lot about what you need to make a business work, and though I'm still struggling under the debt I incurred bankrolling them I'm very grateful for the experiences.

My fourth real business is a local networking-type business I'm rolling out in my current city, and so far it seems promising and we're getting a lot of interest. I'm working on getting press for that one, which, if we can get it, largely assures us of a successful launch.

Anyway, great to be on here, and many thanks to MJ both for a great book and a great place for people to learn from one another and build together. Here's hoping I can contribute a thing or two while I'm here.

Chase

**The-J** · Aug 3rd, 2012, 12:02 AM

Welcome to the forum!

Couple of more personal questions, if you don't mind.

1) Why did you move to China?

2) What kind of e-commerce biz are you working on now? If your conversions are that bad, it's probably because (1) you're driving in the kind of traffic that's not looking to buy, but instead to get information or (2) your copy is awful.

**PatrickP** · Aug 3rd, 2012, 11:54 AM

That is amazing to me that you have 400k visitors a week. I used to think if you have traffic you have sales but then again I have never had a website used to get traffic to create sales.

There is another member here, sorry I can't remember who it is, who said they have something like 500k visitors a month to a website they have spent years and years developing.

BUT they only have something like 10K in sales a month. I think this is a great lesson to people who spend so much time driving traffic to their site but with no way to really make money.

This was few months ago, maybe his sales are better now and he will see this thread and offer his help.

**LightHouse** · Aug 3rd, 2012, 12:56 PM

Welcome Chase. Stick around and share more of your experiences here. You mentioned in another thread you blog as well, do you have a personal blog?

**458** · Aug 3rd, 2012, 01:00 PM

Welcome!

**911Carrera** · Aug 3rd, 2012, 05:47 PM

400k visitors to an ecommerce site and only 4k gross sales?
Something's totally wrong. You are either getting a lot of fake visitors if you hired unethical SEOs or your site is not really an ecommerce but an information site that tries to sell stuff but the visitors are only interested in the free info on the site..

Are your visitors from western countries or mostly in China? That could be a big factor as well.