South West eCommerce

I hope you’ve all been waiting for this, we’ve certainly had our work cut out for us and this has sat there, waiting to be written and probably demanding that we do the work, even though we didn’t want to.

The month shows us down in actual cash flow, two of our biggest cash earners tumbled fairly badly.  On the day we did the figures that made us pretty distressed, even though we’d been watching trends and knew the month would end down a little.

As we sat with it a few days and looked at the analysis, and one other of our sites started to come good, things looked a little better.  The number of sites that is making money is up, and a couple of sites are getting better page ranks. 

So to try and give this a simple verdict, a crappy paycheque from a productive month.  We should go through the roster with you so you can follow it.

Site A – Earnings are up for the month, by about 100%.  The actual amount, about 2% of a BoM.  The thing with this one is that it’s kind of a flagship and will take energy from us for a long time, so it’s nice to see cash come in from it.  2% still isn’t exciting on it’s own but it is the right direction and makes us feel we’ll get there.

Site B – Up 10%.  The actual figure is neither here nor there, and indeed the total amount is tiny.  The site is very powerful but we’ve been spending significant cash on this.  We need to work out how to turn our energy into cash, and the ideas are there, we’re just not as clever at business as we’d like to be.  Still persevering to try to find the magic key that unlocks the financial rewards from something that’s pretty useful in other ways.  Almost 2% of a BoM.

Site C – Down about 30%.  This is a site that should be a winner for us.  We’ve spoken in the blog before about seasonal issues and this is a spring/ summer product, so down is where we’d expect it to be, but there are clearly more sales to be had here and we’re ticking along rather than exploding.  More ranking work to do and we expect that in the spring time this will pick up, especially if we get the ranking stuff done by then.  About 7% of a BoM.

Site D – Down about 50%.  Grumble grumble grumble.  This was a site where we got really hurt by google just not ranking us, even though we’d been up there and nothing had changed.  It shows how vulnerable we all are in this game, but with a few weeks of distance on the process, we can see that we’ll always be vulnerable to this, and if we spread ourselves around enough, there will always be enough sites to “take up the slack”.  About 9% of a BoM.

Site E – Up about 20%.  This is a case of doing the right thing and gently progressing.  We’re building links etc and the ranking rise is translating to a sales rise.  The numbers aren’t going to make us millionaires, but they’re pleasing.  About 6% of a BoM.

Site F – jumped from a loss to a profit.  This is a site we use mostly PPC to get sales from, and the profit has come from more efficient use of PPC rather than greater number of sales outright.  We’ve got the same sales from less expenditure, and we’ll see soon whether we can scale that and make more cash by paying for more ads.  Kind of cosy feeling turning a market like this.  Money negligible.

Site G – About stable.  This is a good domain and a good market idea but we’ve found that the product is crap.  In other circumstances we’d probably drop it and walk away, but for now we’re looking for the right product to serve this market properly.  The product we have at present seems not to be meeting people’s needs, and those easily available seem only marginally better.  More market and product research might turn this into a winner, but the information is hard to source.  This doesn’t make us very excited.  About 2and a half % of a BoM.

Site H – Jumped from loss to profit.  Another site that just dropped out of the rankings for no apparent reason.  We had high hopes that this is a good product in a market that will surely grow.  The sales were made in the first half of the month and the numbers here should be better than they are, but there’s a significant loss when something based on SEO completely disappears from the rankings.  Good jump in earnings, and a disappointing finish to what should be a good month.  We feel very vulnerable, and with this being more common than we’d hoped, it isn’t very comfortable at all.  About 1% of a BoM.

Site J – Up 100%.  This insignificant earner is going to be re engineered.  We’ve had a product that in hindsight, we should have known wouldn’t sell.  The work has been done on the site, and we’ve found another way to use that ranking benefit.  Lessons are all worth something.  We expect to see the new process gain momentum.  Money negligible.

Site K – No sales.  Still quite new.  We’ve started to work with this but there are no rankings to speak of yet.  It’s a site that functions around some key dates, and the next one coming up is in May.  That gives us April to work with it and maybe some reasonable results will come by then.  No cash.

Site L – Some cash from nowhere last month.  A few of these early sites have started to make progress.  This one is a Niche Blueprint site and the process is showing its worth as the site is now ranking not at the top, but well enough to have sales trickle in and earn pocket money.  Still plenty to do but it’s enough to make us smile when a newish site turns a dollar before we get tired and jaded from running it.  About 1% of a BoM.  **This is a site that also saw us fall victim to a scammer, so the numbers are quite pleasing.

Site M – New site.  Some sales and again a good result from using Commission Blueprint 2.  The system is new to us and essentially compresses a lot of the things we’ve learned by trial and error into a colour by numbers system.  It appears to be ready to make significant sales as time goes by and offers us some hope.  A bit over 1% of a BoM.

Site N – New site, sales made.  This site has been promising to come along for months.  It’s related to Site C and we’ve been waiting for the vendor to get a datafeed ready for us and do a bunch of internal work.  Their work is done now and this shows how we make some progress as accepted players in a field.  The new site is in a new country for us and as soon as we put it up we made a couple of sales.  These could be complete beginners luck, there may be none in the next month or two, but it’s a good market that will do better in the spring/ summer months so the race is on to get keywords to the top of the search engines before spring springs.  It’s exciting.  Over 1% of a BoM.

That’s us for the month.  We’re on an emotional rollercoaster, feeling completely overwhelmed some days and the monthly total was down again, almost 30%.  The feeling of abject powerlessness that confronted us the day we counted the 30% loss, realised that one of our sites had been missing from the rankings for a month, and two others had just vanished without warning, then opened an email to say we’d been banned from Google’s adsense structure, which is an entire income stream, was almost than a couple of guys could bear.

Looking at the same numbers a couple of weeks later and realising that a bunch of smaller sites are starting to rank and make even small profits, we start to ease up.  Considering the news that aged domains are ranking highly and it’s very hard to rank with new domains (all ours are new), we’re probably doing quite well. 

The race is on within ourselves.  February treated us well in growth terms.  March we gave back pretty much all the progress.  The juggernaut is growing in substance and the momentum that translates to is heartening.  Whether we can keep the commitment up is going to come down not to whether we have the skills to do this, but the heart.  Today is good but two weeks ago if there had been a couple of good job offers on the table, it would have been hard to say no.

All up, we’re out of the darkest part of the woods if we do 50% better than our February.  Given that numbers can bounce around by 30% on a month by month basis, it’s easily do able.  Stand by.