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Category: Make Money

Helping you at every stage of the process to engineer online income that delivers you and your family financial freedom!
Make Money

Ecommerce Intern Case Study – Month 4 – 76% Increase in Sales

Several months back I had the plan to hire someone with ZERO experience give them 2 of my ecommernce businesses to grow and have them document the entire journey.

The ECommerce Intern Case Study was born. Annie was hired and while attending school she worked part time to learn and grow a couple of projects. She did a great job and has documented everything in Weekly VLogs and Monthly Updates.

Previous Updates:

Introducing the Ecommerce Intern Case Study
https://authoritywebsiteincome.com/ecommerce-case-study-1/
ECommerce Intern Case Study – Month 2 – Day in the Life – Goal Setting and Website Improvements
https://authoritywebsiteincome.com/ecommerce-case-study-2/
ECommerce Intern Case Study – Month 3 – Stamps.com Review Learnings and Growth
https://authoritywebsiteincome.com/ecommerce-intern-case-study-3/

You can view her entire playlist of VLog updates here

VLog 9

VLog 10

VLog 11

VLog 12

Hi guys and welcome to my final blog post!

My contract is coming to an end and so this will be my last post documenting my journey. I have learned so much over the past four months and it has been a really great journey. 

Personal Update: First of all Merry Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas) and happy new year, the last few weeks while I was at home I took some time off from work and spent most of my time with my family. I also had my first white Christmas in many years. I took advantage of the snow by learning how to cross country ski and by going snowshoeing. Unfortunately we were in lockdown in Ontario the whole time I was there so the downhill ski clubs had to close. I was really disappointed as I was really looking forward to downhill skiing.

I am now back in Birmingham, AL, after a nice break in Canada. We are back to full on training for volleyball and have two weeks before school starts to really focus on tuning our skills back up. It’s weird to be back in the United States again after being in Canada for awhile. When I left Collingwood most of the province was in Lockdown and here there are barely any restrictions. I am hoping that I will be able to receive the vaccine when I am down here and can continue to avoid getting Covid-19. Fingers crossed. 

This post will serve as a conclusion for the project; I’ll show you guys the sales results, my thoughts on the project and the grand successes and failures of the project. 

Business A: 

General Thoughts: 

The total sales for Business A over this time frame were just over $16 thousand. While some Ecommerce stores can do that in a few days I think it is a big win for Business A. When I first took over the business we hit a major lull but recently it has been doing a lot better. As I talk about in my vlog quite often this business does not exactly follow the Drop Ship Lifestyle model and it also has a very specific niche market. The niche that it’s in while they are typically loyal customers and interested in new products, as a group the customer demographic had an unpredictable response to sales. I ran a few 4 day only flash sales and some sales that were run were VERY successful whereas others that were basically the exact same sale but just at a different had a completely different reaction. So it was a challenge to put my finger on what exactly consumers would want when it came to marketing. 

Another Challenge: Paid Trafficking was not profitable!

Another issue that I ran across with this niche market and the online store was being able to use paid trafficking to the point where it was profitable. So far the best form of advertising for this niche market has been email marketing and nothing else. I tried Facebook Ads and Google Ads and neither were successful. Jon and I actually made the decision a few weeks ago to shut off paid trafficking for this business due to it just draining money from the store and not increasing any sales. 

Conversion Rate: 

This conversion rate is still really low. A goal for this site is to get it to 1% but a challenge with this site is figuring out which changes will actually make an impact since the usual improvements such as updating the look of the website to be cleaner and more modern might actually be counterintuitive. 

Ideas for future: 

  • Affiliate Linking: A big goal for the future will be increasing the ranking of the site and therefore that will lead to more people finding the site and making purchases. A big measure to improve the site that will be the next step for this website is affiliate linking. Which will involve sending out inquiries and getting other websites to link back to our product and blog pages. I have already done this a few times due to other sites reaching out to us and exchanging links with them. The idea behind this business affiliate linking plan would be to offer a link exchange or to provide them with a product that is relatively inexpensive in exchange for a link to our website and a review/testimonial that we could share on our site. 
  • Add to cart reminder: As you can see on the image the conversion rate for “Adding to Cart” is closer to our goal of a conversion rate of 1%. I think a big improvement to be made after seeing that is setting up a reminder email service for people who have products in their cart that way they will have another contact with us and be reminded to make a purchase if they simply got side tracked or just forgot. 

Business B: I’d say that Business B has been kind of like my baby for this time. In comparison to Business A it did not have a lot set up and was very unestablished as a business. I feel as if the work I’ve put in now has turned it from a good idea to an actual existing business. While the numbers for this Business are still not super impressive they are a grand improvement from how they were when I initially started. 

Wins: 

  1. New Product Line: During the course of my work on this project I looked into sourcing many different new products but nailed down two new products that are both selling pretty well. It’s been awesome to be a part of the whole journey of sourcing a product and then watching it getting a sale for the first time. 
  2. New Website: We completely redesigned the website for this Business and it has been a huge contributing factor to the increase in sales and increase in conversion rate
  3. Large Increase in Sales: As previously mentioned the sales have drastically increased. In the past two weeks we are having a sale every day which is a huge increase compared to barely getting a sale every two weeks before all the changes. 
  4. Launch of eBook: A big success of this project was a monster how to article finally being completed and then turning that monster article into an eBook. 

Conversion Rate: 

Sometimes looking at this number without any other context makes me feel a bit dejected but as you can see it is also a 66% improvement from the previous time period. The conversion rate is still quite low but due to our website ranking well and the Google Ads that are running we are still able to get good sales numbers. 

Future Ideas: 

  1. Improved Social Recognition: I think increasing the social media presence will be key to improving the conversion rate. Having real customers writing reviews and posts will increase customers’ desire to make purchases. 
  2. Improvements to website: While the website went through a great improvement process there is always room for more improvement. I think there should be ongoing research on what the top landing pages are with the highest conversion rates and to continue to model the site after those super successful sites. 
  3. Research on Competitors: During this process I have been mainly looking internally and figuring out the website in order to get it to a point where it could even be considered a competitor but now that it is making sales I think a good idea would be to start doing competitive research and figuring out what other similar companies are doing better or worse than our business and what changes we should make. 
  4. Expanding the product line: Any website with multiple products seems more legitimate and I think a good idea for the future for this product would be to source a few more high quality products that fit in with the current product line. 

In conclusion, it has been great to see both businesses improve over the time that I’ve been running them and putting a lot of work into them. I’m excited to see how big Business B can become and watch Business A grow more consistently and slowly over time. Overall I feel as if I am very well versed when it comes to Ecommerce and feel very competent handling all different types of situations. I hope that you guys enjoyed reading my blog. Until next time! 

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Jon January 10, 2021 0 Comments
Affiliate

How To Make Money Online Through Affiliate Marketing Program In 2021

These days the competition to secure a job has increased tremendously. On top of that government jobs are hard to secure.

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Jon January 1, 2021 0 Comments
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Top 5 Best Affiliate Programs That Pay Per Click [Updated]

Affiliate marketing targets real traffic to merchants or advertisers.

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Jon January 1, 2019 0 Comments
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Building an ebay Based Niche site

As those of you who read my articles and updates on a frequent basis know,I enjoy building out niche sites on various topics.  The makers of EasyAzon, a plugin I use on my Amazon based niche sites, introduced another plugin recently for eBay called EasyBay.  I thought I’d try it.  I ended up building a whole new niche site for it…

Building an ebay Niche Site

In 2009, I had some great success with ebay building out niche stores, but Google all but killed off the whole niche store concept by deranking and penalizing them.  So I moved onto other things.  I was earning around $1,500 – $2,000/month in eBay Partner Network and Adsense income from one single niche store for a good 6-8 months, the the bottom fell out.   But there’s one thing I learned: what works one day on the internet, doesn’t always work the next – but take advantage of it while it’s working.

As a result of this little lesson, I made a strategic effort to diversify my income sources.  I decided to try out EasyBay and bought the plugin.  My initial intention was to add some eBay listings to the end of posts on my current niche sites.  But my experience with mixing income sources on Amazon sites has shown that it decreases Amazon revenue, and the decrease isn’t offset by the new income source.

Instead, I decided to try it out by building an Ebay based niche site.  While I’m not going to go into specifics on the niche just yet (I will later, once is ranks), I will walk you through the process I used.

This will be the fifth niche site I’ve built in the past year or so and part of my overall strategy to build out 10 sites earning at least $500.00/month.  I would then build an 11th site, grow it to $500.00 and then flip the lowest earning site of the 11.  Then start another one.

Building an ebay Niche Site

Before you go any further, for this strategy to work for you, you’ll need to be a member of the ebay Partner program.  If you aren’t already a member, you’ll need to apply.  ebay’s partner program can be a bit difficult to get accepted into.  If you aren’t already a member, I would suggest building out the site with content, then once you have traffic and a good amount of content out there, then apply.

So I’m ready to build out a new niche site, using eBay as the product source … Now what niche should I target?  

This is always the tough part.  Once you decide on a niche, building out a site is really pretty easy.  The trick to finding a topic is really just to pick one that you think you can do well with, pull the trigger, and don’t look back.

For those of you that have used ebay, you’ll know that the product options there are generally larger than Amazon.  Why?  Because eBay not only sells new products, but used and handmade products as well.  As a matter of fact, finding used items is one of the big attractions with using eBay.   Thinking through that actually narrowed down the options for me a bit.  I decided that for new products, Amazon worked well, so my new ebay niche site would promote used or handmade products.

Next, I skimmed the product categories on ebay, along with taking note of some of the more popular items up for auction.  This led me to remember the ebay is a popular place for collectors to both buy and sell collectable items, and that collectors items, especially rare ones,  can sell for a lot.   But what collectors items would be good?  This is where keyword research came into play.

I like to pick niches that I have a personal interest in.  I’ve found that if I don’t, I lose interest and I’m guilty of not keeping the site updated like I should.    Now part of that is due to me doing most of the writing on my sites.  If I outsourced all of the writing, it probably wouldn’t matter.

With keeping my personal interests in mind, I wrote down a list of collectable items I like.  The list included old photos, Nascar memorabilia, coke products, cigar boxes, old computers, and a bunch of other items.  Once I had a decent list, I moved onto keyword research.

Keyword Research

I don’t care what all of the “experts” say about “semantic web”, keywords are still a huge factor in how successful your site will be.  In the past, I’ve focused on finding one keyword phrase that gets around 3,000 – 5,000/month US search hits per day.  The site is built focusing on that keyword phrase, and then finding lots of longer tail key phrases that are used to build supporting content.  What I’ve found is that those longer tail keywords often add up to be larger amounts of traffic that the primary target keyword.

Given this, I decided to take a little different approach with this eBay based niche site.  I decided to focus on 5-10 lower volume and longer tail keywords.  I looked for keywords in the 800 – 1000/month global range.  I’m not really sure if this is a better or worse approach, but I wanted to try so I could learn and find out.

I pulled up Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro and began researching.  I like using both tools, as they each provide a little different data.  Although if I had to pick just one tool, I would go with Long Tail Pro.

I spent a considerable amount of time doing my research over the course of a few days.  I ended up choosing a collector’s niche that met the goal of having 5-10 keyword phrases that get 800 – 1000/month searches.  They are also “buy keywords”, meaning they should convert well.

With my niche selected, I began building out the WordPress site.

Building out my ebay niche site

I first chose a domain name. I kept it simple and directly related to my niche.   I’m not going to disclose the domain name or niche, but as an example, let’s say I elected to go with Nascar products, a good name would be something like “nascarcollector.com” or “thenascarcollector.com”.

I checked and the domain was available, so I bought it for 2 years at MyDomain.com.  Namecheap is also another great domain registrar.  Fortunately both the .com and .net were available, so I booked both of them.  Never hurts, considering how inexpensive domain names are.

Next I followed my standard process of starting a blog.  Blogs and niche sites are very similar under the covers, the difference is the content and layout.  I elected to use a new favorite theme of mine, Jarida.  I’m pretty decent with Photoshop, so I did my own logo and color scheme.  If you aren’t good at graphics, just use Fiverr to get an inexpensive logo done for you.

Creating Content and Adding ebay items using EasyBay

With WordPress set-up and running, I began creating my content which consisted of:

  • An About Page, Contact Us page, Privacy/Disclosure Page and a Blog page
  • A Main landing page which provided and overview of the topic and why collectors enjoy it.  I also overviewed all of the various items in this niche that are popular with collectors.  These will link to my pages.
  • I picked the top 6 traffic keywords, and created a page for each.

I added each page to the menus, and began writing the content.  I spent about a week, off and on, writing and researching content.

I then installed EasyBay and EasyAzon.  I added a list of 20 “most watched items” to the sidebar along with a few Amazon related products.

Here’s a tip for using EasyBay.  The widget it comes with only lists the text names of the items, and doesn’t show a picture.  Text listings don’t covert well.   After a bit of trial and error, I figured out how to get around this.

Install a plugin called the short code widget.   Create a new post, and generate the EasyBay short code by pressing the EasyBay button at the top of the post editor.   You can use whichever output type you want.  I general use “Most Watched Items”.  Copy the generated EasyBay short code, then add a Short Code Widget into your sidebar.  Paste the EasyBay short code into your widget, press save, and your items will now be listed with pictures.

One feature I really like about EasyBay, is that their listings contain a realtime countdown of time remaining on auctions.  This creates a sense of urgency for the browser/buyer.

My plan is to add ebay item listings into the content pages as well. But I plan to do that later once the site starts ranking.

Facebook Page

I also created a Facebook page for the site using my recently published Facebook page strategy.  I share 3-4 photos related to the niche each day.  Fortunately this niche is very photogenic.  I’ve been using FPTraffic to find and publish the photos.  I add the site’s URL to each of the photos.  I also:

  • Joined a few groups dedicated to the niche, and have been active and have included posts in the group I shared on my Facebook page.  I also share group posts on the page as well.
  • I feature a “Collector’s Daily Pick” each day or every few days that highlights a really good buy I find on eBay.   The link I share is an eBay affiliate link.
  • Using FPTraffic, I also throw in a few videos and Amazon items.

The Facebook page has grown quickly (almost a 1000 likes), and is the primary source for the website traffic right now.

Current Status

Right now the site isn’t ranking for any keywords.   The site has been in the Google sandbox now for almost a month.  Prior to this site, I was ranking with other sites in as little as two weeks.  Definitely a sign of the new Google Sandbox changes that are in place.  I’m really hoping it doesn’t take 4-6 months to rank like I’m seeing some experts say.

Currently I’m getting clicks on the eBay items, but no buys just yet.  Not surprising considering the low level of traffic.  I have received commissions for a few Amazon items, but only small change.  Again, not surprising considering the low levels of traffic.

I have about 10 different blog articles I’m going to write, and plan to start on those this week.  I might end up outsourcing some of this content using iWriter.  Depends on how much time I have this week and next.

My goal is to get the site to about 15-20 pages of content, and then just let it sit until it starts ranking.  Then I’ll begin building some back links using my PBNs to boost the ranking.

In the mean time I’ll continue to grow the Facebook page, as honestly it’s kind of fun and I’m enjoying it.

I’ll keep you posted on how the site’s doing.  If you decide to try out an ebay based niche site, let me know and keep me posted on your progress.  Oh, and let me know what you think of EasyBay.

 

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Jon August 18, 2014 4 Comments
Affiliate

Best Web Hosting Affiliate – Learned From 100 Sign Ups in 1 Weekend

This post is going to look at over 100 affiliate web hosting sales I generated to multiple hosting companies and answer the question of who has the best web hosting affiliate program.

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday web hosting promotion I ran gave me a unique opportunity to review multiple hosting affiliate programs at one time. (more…)

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Jon December 16, 2013 15 Comments
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Recent Posts
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  • Building an ebay Based Niche site
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