From 0 to 25 Sales a day in 3 months experiment.

[mushy9999]

First of all I want to say Hi to everyone on this board. This is my first posting on here so forgive me if I do something wrong (hopefully I won't).

The purpose of this thread will be to show you my plan for getting from 0 sales per day to 25 sales per day within 3 months. For this I have set-up a new site (the link in my signature). Please note that I have other sites selling and profitable, but the one listed below is a brand spankng new site.

I have already started to promote the site, but only started 2 days ago and already up to 100 uniques a day with no cost (except my time). I will go through how the site was put together and will share my knowledge which has been built up over many years. I will attempt (time permitting) to post here a few times per day and hopefully show you the things that don't seem to work also, so that you don't get scammed or waste your time on useless things. For now, have a look at my draft site which was built up from scratch and only went live a few days ago. There are still a lot of things to change on it, but we'll do it together over the weeks as I type.

Here are a few points:

1.) I want to promote the site to start with using no money and only use free techniques. (Paid will come later on)
2.) I built the site in a language called Python, using the framework called Django (more on this later)
3.) The design of the site is not from a template. I made it in Photoshop (also more on that later).

Anyway, have a look and feel free to ask any questions as I go along. So long as it doesn't compromise my business in any way, I will be happy to reveal all.

Regards,

[mushy9999]

Ok, 1st real post:

Frustrated with many of the off the shelf shopping sites out there, I decided that enough is enough and I'd learn how to create one. After having many discussions on programming languages with many developers out there I settled on Python with the Django framework. Many reasons for that but the main ones being:

1.) Speed (Extreemly fast and beats almost any other framework out there)
2.) Ease of programming (The framework was originally designed for a newspaper site, but has grown and grown into something quite special and supports all manner of things like rss feeds, sitemaps etc,..) - all the things which are needed also for a good shop.
3.) MVC based (model , view, controller). This means that the design of the site is kept seperate from the code and makes for very clean operation and management.
4.) Already in-build admin available with no programming needed at all.

The site took approx 3 months to build from scratch as has full functionality of quite a lot of shops out there and any additional features take only a day or so to build in now.

I started with no plan except to start with the product selling page and then work backwords building the rest of the site.

So my thinking and programming was in this order:

1.) Page that sells a product.
2.) Pages to display the products.
3.) Other pages such as "about us", etc,..
4.) Finally the front page.
5.) Add google analytics to all pages (including feeding it your sale value on the sale confirmation page) - More on this later.
6.) Go Live.
7.) Marketing.

If anyone wants to see the language used and a resouce on it, you can do a search on google for "django project".

If you want to know any more details on the programming side, then please stop me.

I'll now start with the Marketing section and will add to this as the days move on. By the way, the site is now selling products and today has been a good day already. (Thanks to Google).

Step 1: I would say that Google is one of the most (if not the most) important search engines to get listed in first and there is a great way to do this right off the bat...... Google base. The site I produced has a google base feed which dynamically updates with every sale on the site, so the feed is always current and accurate. It has been setup that Google calls a url on my site and automatically retrieves the feed on a daily basis. This is very easy to set-up, but can also be uploaded manually with a spreadsheet. I would reccomend that anyone with products uploads a google base feed as their very first action. Google will list your products within 1 day and you will start to get traffic by day 2 (although small at first). After I added my feed to google, I got 30 uniques on the second day, rising to 50 on the 3rd day and it continues to rise.

Step 2: It is a good idea to post your site on MarketingProfs website asking for opinions on your site. This serves 2 purposes. Firstly, you will get a good idea as to what things you should change (I have a list of around 10 things to do). Secondly, you get your first link-back to your site from a very well known and indexed site.

Step 3: Yahoo and MSN both have the ability to upload a feed just like google, however it takes an age for those search engines to use the feed, so it's best to do this as early as possible in your marketing effort to ensure that a month or two down the line you are also getting traffic from these sites.

Step 4: Either use a submission service or use your own tool to submit to as many directories and search engines as possible. Even though you will not get traffic straight away, it will begin to trickle in over time.

More steps to come soon.... at this point my site is getting 100 uniques per day, just from the above actions and sales are coming in.

Watch this space.

[JimmyDuke]

hi mushy9999.

First off, good idea posting on forums to build up your marketing (although I think your user name sucks under the circumstances - why not cutestyledotcom or something linked to your business/brand?).

Anyway, another suggestion is to tap into the offline marketing to drive traffic to your website. Ever heard of Stef Passantino? I blogged about him on my proNetBusiness website. He once offered Pete Doherty (lead singer of a UK band) £5,000 to do a photo shoot for him because he thought he "could do with the money". Needless to say when Doherty's management team came back with a £30,000 minimum counter offer the ensuing publicity did Stef's business no harm at all! Brilliant!

Maybe you could do the same with a fashion icon. Its just a matter of googling to find their managers and then a few letters to write. You cant lose. Either they accept and you get the publicity or they kick you in the teeth and you give the story to the tabloids.

Good luck with your new venture

[mushy9999]

Ok,

Part 3:

It's now been 5 days since my launch and let's see what I've achieved.

Google : 146 pages indexed in main site.
Google Base : 1960 items indexed. Not all are reachable from the main site yet, but are from Google Base.
Yahoo : Now indexed in yahoo and getting traffic from them.
MSN : Not indexed yet....

I have 1 .org domain pointing to my site on djangosites.org as my site was programmed in django, I qualify to have my site listed from them. I have getting 25 hits per day from them too.

I have many other sites (Yahoo Answers, Linkreferral, Stumble, Delicious etc,..) all with linkbacks.

Traffic is increasing day on day and now we are having steady sales, but still a long way from the 25 sales a day target.

The visitors that have bought have bought landing directly on the product pages and typically bought with only 1 pageview. In other words they found the product they were looking for and found it easy to buy straight away, which is a very good sign. We have also had some very good feedback on the site which will go on as testimonials very soon.

Google has been the most profitable medium which seems to reflect what I've found on all my other sites. Trafic from AOL tends to be a close second with Yahoo third.

By the way, FFA sites tend to bring in no useful traffic, except for loads of spam, so I wouldn't bother, however relevant directory listings are useful and I've submitted the site using a tool to various directories but have changed the Anchor text to four different versions to ensure that all the links don't appear identical.

One very important thing still to do on the site is to take care of the grid view meta description text which is blank at this moment in time as Google is flagging this up as duplicates / too little text. Meta keywords are in there, but the descriptions need attention. This will be done later today and we can check google in a month to see it the problem is cleared. Although this won't affect Google rankings, it will affect other search rankings and also help to gain clickthroughs when a proper description is displayed.

More tomorrow.....

[nipplecharms1]

Do you find google base to be really that good?

thanks and great looking site.

Michael

[mushy9999]

Michael,

Yes, google base is essential and it can work VERY well if your descriptions and headers are done correctly, but you need a LOT of products in the feed for it to send decent traffic. Also, the really good thing about google base is it's conversions. The people that are using google base are already in a mindset to buy and I've found them to convert much better than most other forms of traffic. It's no good getting loads of traffic but no conversions,... for example:

Any traffic from a forum like this to a shop selling handbags is VERY unlikely to convert if at all, however if you have a site talking about marketing you stand a better chance.

So for instance if you get 10,000 visitors from a site like this to a handbag store it might only convert 0.01 percent of the time and result in 1 sale.

However if you get say only 20 visitors a day from google base but they convert at roughly 10-15%, then that equates to 2-3 sales per day. And that's why it's very important to have something like google analytics in place to track the effectiveness of all your traffic sources and then work out the value of each visit. Then concentrate on improving the traffic from each of these channels. Don't dismiss the others, I'm just saying prioritise your tasks. Also, being in google base means that your item will appear in the results ABOVE the normal searches in some cases. Also you have to make sure that you are targeting the right country. In the webmaster settings google.com/webmasters/ you set the location of your store to match customers local to your store (they tend to convert better) .

Regards,

[MaineWeb]

How's it going? I was enjoying the post very much and sorry that it ended..... .

[mushy9999]

Hi, Sorry for taking so long to post back here again. I had to change laptops and ended up loosing all my bookmarks etc,.. It was a pain to upgrade and also then had a lot to do for promotion and christmas, but I'm back and have lots of new information to give. Thanks for letting me know you want more as I was a little surprised there was not much feedback on my topic. It helps if people join in as then I feel more willing to keep it alive. Anyway I will make a new post now with all the updates so far.

Regards,

[mushy9999]

Ok, firstly I want to say that as my sites are all UK based, I have focused on getting listed in Google.co.uk rather than Google.com although I also have sites registered for Google.com too. If you do a search in google.co.uk for the very generic term "handbags" (without quotes) you will see that my new site is now in 10th place and on the first page of Google out of a total of 55 million sites. My other site for the same term is in 7th place, so I'm surrently occupying 2 spots on the first page, but it doesn't stop there, I also rank 1st or 2nd for a LOT of 2 phrase keywords such as "funky handbags" (without quotes again) - currently in 2nd place and with no keywords on the site that state "funky handbags" and no link backs with that text in the anchor text, so you may be asking how I achieved that and I'll go into that later (its not easy or quick to do but it works). I'm using something that I discovered and no other marketing guy out there knows about it yet and it's something I can do for any keywords. These rankings mean that I am now getting a significant amount of traffic and sales are going well, but still a little short of the 25 sales a day target (but not far behind). I have so far spent next to nothing on advertising apart from my time and effort.

The next stage is to optimise the site a little (yes, it is not currently SEO optimised for Google!!) and it is here I will go into detail as to what you need to take care of.

At the moment, although my rankings are high, they can be a lot higher and can certainly get to position 1 for most of the handbag related keywords but there is a lot to do. The first thing to do is to optimise the code of the site (now I know that most people can't do this effectively so I'll try and discuss a little), but basically, you need to ensure that the site is W3C code compliant. If you check online there is a tool from W3C that will inform you of all the errors.

On my site currently, there are font, center, div, etc,.... errors and lots of them, so that is something I will be contentrating on. Google likes sites that are very standards compliant, you get extra points for that.

Secondly, google also likes sites that are accessible (for people with poor eyesight).

Thirdly, google likes sites that take care of SEO to some degree.

All of these points have not yet been addressed by me so far as I was concentrating on getting the site working first. Tweaking comes later.

Lastly, some news. eBags has closed down in the UK and are no longer a competitor. If you visit their site, they explain it's due to the current economy, but I guess its not cheap bidding on 22,000 different adword combinations either

I prefer to stick to the free methods.

I suggest that everyone here starts with getting their site W3C compliant. It will help a lot. I will give the other tips soon.

Paul.