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Progress Thread: 7 months into an ecommerce site, 15,000 hits/m, $700/m

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

LeoPantero

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So i'm a few months into this project. So far, i have managed to get it to roughly 15,000 hits a month almost 90% from SEO.

The marketing so far

This was done mainly through guest posting on various sites for 5-6 months straight. I tried doing about 1 guest post a day but in the end only managed about two a week. Very hard to get bloggers to even reply to emails nowadays let alone consider a guest submission. This is mostly because they get inundated with heaps of guest posting requests everyday.

An interesting thing that i found though, was that the bigger sites - like problogger.net and Lifehack are an order of magnitude easier to get on, than the smaller sites. So a word of advice would be to dedicate more of your efforts to writing less posts, of a higher quality, to the big sites. Don't waste your time with the smaller ones. It's not worth the trouble.

The revenue

Right now revenue stands at about $700 a month. For the amount of traffic i'm getting, plus the fact that i am bringing in very targeted keywords - it is pretty bad. I should be making more than $5k month atleast based on my seo traffic quality. So right now my focus on is on conversions.

What i am doing now

My main focus over the next month is going to be two things: 1. Getting the site message clear (i'm getting a lot of traffic from less savvy customers, so am contemplating experimenting with the business model to better serve them, but it could cause issues with the messaging). And 2. Optimising the site for conversions i really should be getting.

One of those things definitely has to be clear before the other ofcourse but i'm pushing through.

I'll be making regular updates on progress and would greatly welcome any assistance from people on here who have been in a similar position or even just know a particular thing that could be helpful in some way.

Looking forward to how this goes!

Cheers!
 
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DavidofMN

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Care to share the site? What about buying traffic (PPC)?
I have heard of some people that have sold quite a bit of product by buying traffic.:smxB:
It accelerated their growth big time
 

LeoPantero

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Not going to be sharing the site just yet, it's a small niche. But may do so later on.

PPC is actually what i started off with, and it didnt work out much at all. Ended up spending $60 and no sales. With my current traffic though, i really dont need ppc. I'm getting the same keywords now that i was bidding on - for free.
 

JAJT

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Not going to be sharing the site just yet, it's a small niche. But may do so later on.

FYI - if you buy an INSIDERS membership you will not only gain access to a ton of great information and high-value individuals but that area of this forum is not indexed by search engines. Meaning you can share your site or information without it being searchable on google, and non-paying members can't see.

Not that you have to, but if you want to solicit for valuable, targeted information regarding your site, it's an option.

Congrats on your success. $700 per month in 7 months is a HELL of a lot better than most.
 

1step

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1. Getting the site message clear (i'm getting a lot of traffic from less savvy customers, so am contemplating experimenting with the business model to better serve them, but it could cause issues with the messaging)

I think this should be your main focus. With 15k customers coming to your site per month it would seem you should be making more than 700 dollars. Obviously these people are looking for something that you are not providing, or there is another issue with your website, price too high, too complicated, something is definitely happening.

Without knowing the site it is impossible to tell the problem but I would suggest setting up a system to find out what these people are looking for, a search bar that logs the searches, a survey, something.

Sure, you can spend your time tweaking conversion rates but your issue seems to be something much deeper. Your traffic isnt targeted like you claim or there is a different fundamental issue.

Just my opinion, would love to hear others
 

LeoPantero

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What did you do for SEO other than guest posting?

I think that the main thing has been the fact that i chose to use wordpress. I handle payments and such with the woocmmerce plugin and it all works pretty well.

I also can't praise this plugin enough -> WordPress SEO Plugin. It really does almost all of the seo work for you. Even has a post optmisation section that calculates what you've written and sees if you have optimised the post well enough for your target kw's.

My most popular blog post that i made with the assistance of this plugin has gotten over 5,000 hits from google searches, this month alone.

Another thing i would say i have been doing is making sure that my bounce rate is relatively low (currently 17%) and that users on the site spend a fair amount of time before leaving. The average right now is about 4 and a half minutes.

Google definitely cares about this.

The way i do this is by writing mega posts that target high search volume/low competition kw's and address a clear need. So for example if i was targeting spontaneous holiday goers and found a good low competition kw of say, 'spontaneous things to do in berlin', i would write a megapost of 50 awesome spontaneous things to do in berlin. If the kw got a decent number of searches per month, and the post was very well written (avg of maybe 2000). On a 15k hits a month site, that would go a long way to reducing the bounce rate and keeping the time on site high.

BTW - first update, i just checked my stats and i think that my pagerank has moved up a little bit - it looks like traffic could reach 20,000 by the end of the month and about 25,000 next month at the current rate (it is at almost 700 for today, for comparison, it was at 345 two days ago). So almost doubled!.

Screenshot of todays traffic: http://i.imgur.com/KMkqKXt.png
 
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LeoPantero

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FYI - if you buy an INSIDERS membership you will not only gain access to a ton of great information and high-value individuals but that area of this forum is not indexed by search engines. Meaning you can share your site or information without it being searchable on google, and non-paying members can't see.

Not that you have to, but if you want to solicit for valuable, targeted information regarding your site, it's an option.

Congrats on your success. $700 per month in 7 months is a HELL of a lot better than most.



JAJT Thanks!

I plan on joining as soon as i get the site redesigned and am clearer on what exactly i'd be asking. I'm still very confused about which direction to take the business so i wouldn't want to go in there without a slightly better grasp of my business first.
 

TK1

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no it's not difficult if you know the rules the way this PR game is played - read ryan holidays book to figure out how it's done.

congrats on the progress :thumbsup:

So i'm a few months into this project. So far, i have managed to get it to roughly 15,000 hits a month almost 90% from SEO.

The marketing so far

This was done mainly through guest posting on various sites for 5-6 months straight. I tried doing about 1 guest post a day but in the end only managed about two a week. Very hard to get bloggers to even reply to emails nowadays let alone consider a guest submission. This is mostly because they get inundated with heaps of guest posting requests everyday.

An interesting thing that i found though, was that the bigger sites - like problogger.net and Lifehack are an order of magnitude easier to get on, than the smaller sites. So a word of advice would be to dedicate more of your efforts to writing less posts, of a higher quality, to the big sites. Don't waste your time with the smaller ones. It's not worth the trouble.

The revenue

Right now revenue stands at about $700 a month. For the amount of traffic i'm getting, plus the fact that i am bringing in very targeted keywords - it is pretty bad. I should be making more than $5k month atleast based on my seo traffic quality. So right now my focus on is on conversions.

What i am doing now

My main focus over the next month is going to be two things: 1. Getting the site message clear (i'm getting a lot of traffic from less savvy customers, so am contemplating experimenting with the business model to better serve them, but it could cause issues with the messaging). And 2. Optimising the site for conversions i really should be getting.

One of those things definitely has to be clear before the other ofcourse but i'm pushing through.

I'll be making regular updates on progress and would greatly welcome any assistance from people on here who have been in a similar position or even just know a particular thing that could be helpful in some way.

Looking forward to how this goes!

Cheers!
 

JasonR

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It sounds like most of your visitors are reading your content rather than buying.

And $60 isn't enough to spend on PPC to call it a failure. You will likely lose money on PPC at first. If your margins aren't high enough to run PPC ads, your business may not work with SEO either.

Good luck!
 
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LeoPantero

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I think this should be your main focus. With 15k customers coming to your site per month it would seem you should be making more than 700 dollars. Obviously these people are looking for something that you are not providing, or there is another issue with your website, price too high, too complicated, something is definitely happening.

Without knowing the site it is impossible to tell the problem but I would suggest setting up a system to find out what these people are looking for, a search bar that logs the searches, a survey, something.

Sure, you can spend your time tweaking conversion rates but your issue seems to be something much deeper. Your traffic isnt targeted like you claim or there is a different fundamental issue.

Just my opinion, would love to hear others

You're right. The problem for me is twofold. 1. I designed the site myself, and i am not a designer. 2. My customers can't really trust my site yet because i don't have much of the standard social proof.

I would also that i am probably not getting the messaging right, it is not a simple product before you understand it or know you need it. The few who buy, know exactly what they are after usually. The rest seem to vaguely have an idea and my job is really to give them a better reason as to why my product is the solution that they are looking for.
 

1step

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1. I designed the site myself, and i am not a designer. 2. My customers can't really trust my site yet because i don't have much of the standard social proof.

I doubt this is the main problem

I would also that i am probably not getting the messaging right, it is not a simple product before you understand it or know you need it. The few who buy, know exactly what they are after usually. The rest seem to vaguely have an idea and my job is really to give them a better reason as to why my product is the solution that they are looking for.

I bet this is the main problem, this is also where a search bar would be great, log the searches and then you will see exactly what topics you need to address.
 

LeoPantero

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It sounds like most of your visitors are reading your content rather than buying.

And $60 isn't enough to spend on PPC to call it a failure. You will likely lose money on PPC at first. If your margins aren't high enough to run PPC ads, your business may not work with SEO either.

Good luck!

The niche is so small that $60 was pretty much a week worth of ppc spend. The reason why i havent really gone more into ppc is that i get most of the same kw's words now, for free.
 
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LeoPantero

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read ryan holidays book to figure out how it's done.
Funny that you mention that, i've been meaning to read his book since i saw his interview on Mixergy about a year ago.

Thanks for the recommendation
 

Tom.V

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The niche is so small that $60 was pretty much a week worth of ppc spend. The reason why i havent really gone more into ppc is that i get most of the same kw's words now, for free.
All I can say is don't give up on PPC. The key here is to optimize for conversions PRIOR to running paid traffic, then test after you get the numbers in.

Aside from that, if you want some real direction, share a link. As JAJT said, the INSIDERS forum would be a great place to get some quality feedback. Or you can PM me and I'll take a look personally. Just trying to help you out :)
 

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