Eds online adventures

I have recently been trying out marketing the SimplyWholesale (aff) affiliate program. The simply wholesale site is a great place to find wholesale leads for eBay and personal websites (i have found a few leads on there that look very interesting).

I have been looking at trying to market this on MSN Adcenter - as i thought it would be a good way to get cheap clicks (if i get clicks for 0.05 pence and the site converts 1 in 50 i’m onto a winner). The first few days looked promising - however then the site seemed to stop making sales (when i fiddled with the keywords a little). Presumably this is because i included keywords for people looking for specific wholesalers - who weren’t interested in a simple generic website.

So - after £20 worth of testing (not much i know but 200 clicks at least) i have decided to pull the ads. However i did get £10 worth of monthly recurring sign ups. I am going to look at the drop out rate for next month and if i don’t get any drop outs (i.e. i get a consistent £10 a month) I may look at going back to the program.

Whilst sitting in my kitchen eating a snack and drinking a lovely cup of tea today i get a knock on the door. As i am expecting a delivery of stock i opened it without even looking through the spyhole.

There was a young chap with a card from ipsos mori (a large market research company). This man asked me rather quickly whether i would do a 3 minute survey. Now, i have got a lot of work done today - so i thought - why not help another guy out. I soon realised to myself however that this man was rather unpolite - not saying please - and being prompted to say thank you.

It really annoys me that when you help people out (especially in this case - where the guy probably gets the door slammed in his face half of the time) they don’t realise that by not being polite they are shooting themselves in the foot. Now in the future i will probably be less helpful to them…!

These last two weeks have been the busiest ever for MP3Extras.co.uk ! Turnover the past 2 weeks was well above average, i’m looking forward to a very profitable Christmas and new years.

Unfortunately this comes with its down sides. It means i am spending more time packing parcels. Giving me less time to mooch around with my other projects. One which depserately needs to be tweaked is the oscommerce site. Adsense has slowed to a crawl the last few months. I need to rejig the site and i am considering taking adsense off completely, replacing it with affiliate ads for the eBooks instead.

I also purchased Garys smarticle software. Something else i haven’t been able to properly use to try and increase my twindling adsense earnings. I really need to manage my time better in order to use the hours more wisely.

So how is the website doing now ?

Better than ever ! I have now added quite a few new products - such as batteries, stands and new cases. Total products in the shop are now 17 and i have had a total of around 70 orders go through the shop - which is great considering the minimal effort put into setting it up - this has more than paid for the store.

However, more excitingly, i have been contacted by a manufacturer in the far east who specialises in producing MP3 Player cases meaning i can now get hold of the same great cases at a fraction of the cost ! I am saving around 50% on each of my cases - which equals profits are boosted and i can offer more competitive prices.

To Do:

• Set up google adwords ads for every product
• Add further products to the website
• Add category descriptions for the search engines
• Try again to integrate the ship in cart contribution
• Get more incoming links
• Set up newsletter (more on that)

Today i was contacted by a company asking me to participate in some market research for eBay - I think they must have got my details off of eBay. Anyways it was £45 for 2 hours worth of research work with 8 other eBayers - not shabby pay and a good opportunity to network possibly and learn from others.

They asked me a few questions about what i sell, volumes monthly and what my current status is etc and they are going to let me know by next monday. For the whole 1 of you readers who is interested i will update when i get any more information. Hopefully they will say yes - would be very interesting.

Firstly - anyone using eBay to sell seriously, if you aren’t using selling manager pro you need to be. This great little £4.99 subscription from eBay quite frankly has saved me hours every month. Now using eBay in general is great, but the fees and competition are ridiculous. So you want to maximise the return on investment from your eBay ad spend. One way to do this is by having an upsell after your eBay items sell to try and get people to buy another product from you. The benefit of this is you are able to offer reduced prices, due to lowered postage costs and no eBay listing or final value fees. So heres how i do it.

Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible if your eBay account gets banned from doing this. I am not sure if it is against eBay terms.

So firstly - we need to create our upsell page. I have set my upsell page as a time limited offer, to be able to offer the savings i need to be able to combine postage. So i quickly knocked up a page in dreamweaver - i used a little bit of PHP code to make things quicker when generating the paypal buttons.

Then we need to simply change eBay automated email notifications. First go to the automation preferences page in selling manager pro and make sure you are automatically sending a winning buyer notification.

Then we need to edit the winning buyer notification as such:

I personally use a subject line that is different to the normal one to get a hopefully better open rate. This is because in my opinion and from experience a lot of people simply don’t open winning buyer notifications - they contain information that is basically useless.

Statistics from using this method:

After about a month i have had 47 visitors to the eBay special upsell page from 108 items sold. This has provided me with two upsell transactions for totals of: £16.98 (two extra items) and £28.98 (also two extra items) with a profit of around £20 on these two transactions. For a page that took an hour or so to set up i will be happy if this continues.
Of course - i will be tweaking the page in the future to try and increase the sales rate. However considering before i implemented this i was gettin 0 upsells 2% upsells a month is ok. Its an extra £240 income a year - which isn’t bad for a small change.

I have decided to start writting my blog again. I feel it is a good way to channel my efforts and remind me what i am actually doing at any given point in time. Also as a reference to look back on in the future and see what i did - what worked and what didn’t.

If that sounds like something that may possibly interest you in the future - then bookmark the site or leave me a little comment. Would be greatly appreciated.

I have been looking at ways of making my site seem more proffessional and one of the easier ways i have thought of personally is to hold a large array of stock - even if it is very niche and will be a slow seller. For example on my site there is a whole load more cases i could add which are readily available however i haven’t gotten around to it and simply don’t know if they will be a good seller or not.

However as part of my goal for the next month i am going to try and actively introduce new product lines into my stock range.

I have decided that to help market and get my eCommerce store found i will write (or get written for me) a few articles that i can submit to the main ezine and article directories. Whilst this is a very common way of small website owners getting their website found - im not sure if many eCommerce site owners also utilise this FREE technique. I am hoping to get an article written today and then i will post it up on one or two of the main article sites.

Will make a post when i have any nice results in - I am hoping this will help my site get listed in the search engines .

Also to do today - sort out the checkout on my store to make it more streamlined - currently its just the default horrible osCommerce one. This is far too long and i am hoping if i streamline it and make it more customer friendly i may get a better conversion rate.

The website i entered into Burts business challenge is:

http://www.mp3extras.co.uk/ > Formerly ArchosExtras as you may read below.

The site in the challenge time turned over the following amount:

£209.88

With a total gross profit of:

£65.96

This is not taking into account my Domain costs of Around £15 (twice !) and my advertising costs of about £7. So all in all i made profit of around £30. Not too bad.

Unfortunately as i sell a large number of items on eBay separating the osC items from the eBay items would be a nightmare so i can offer any screenshots of the orders at the moment - you will have to take my word for it.

I set the website up as i already had the contacts to buy the items and setting up a website was only a natural next step.

What does the site do ?

Sells items that are addons for MP3 players (more specifically Archos MP3 players).

Was the site worth it ?

I would say almost definately yes - i can definately see a potential for product range and sales to increase.

I recently joined the KWA website - mainly for the forum - which is ranted and raved about. I have found it to be a great place where there are a lot of very clever people - all making black hat scraper sites ! This to me seems like a waste. All of this talent in a constant battle with the search engines to keep their spam sites in the SERPs. (I am pleased with my subscription at the moment though - it is a very informative place and I have learnt a lot)

Some of these people have made scripts which allow them to churn out thousands of pages a day ! I think to myself what could these people or person have done/created if he made a legit program with this sort of skill ? He could well make a lot of money rather than churning out pages which the search engines will inevitably just ban and he will just have to do it all again.

SO as you may have realised by the tone of this entry - scraped sites are not something which particularly interest me - for the main reason that it seems far too much like a JOB - to succeed you have to make a minimum amount of sites every day - day in day out. This truly is not what AIS is about. Fair enough - every AIS site has a lifespan, however these sites are lucky if they earn money for 6 months before they are banned.

A true AIS is an eBook site or a site where visitors want to return (and earn you money through adsense). These are the sites that interest me more personally as i like the challenge and thrill (I know - a bit sad) that someone is benefitting from something which i created.

No more sales but an email from the big boys :O !

I recently purchased a domain and set up a store (as detailed in previous posts) - no names mentioned however it was similar to the following:

brandnameAccessories.co.uk

Selling items from the brand along with third party items. All is going well until today I get a phone call telling me i am in breach of their trademark and i must shut down. No ifs or buts - they wouldnt even agree to allow me to put at the bottom of every page:

“This site is in no way affiliated with Brandname.”

Now after checking it out i *think* but am not sure that i am in the wrong - as it would be too similar a name for me to have my own trademark on it . Very annoying though as i have only turned over quite a low amount and therefore it has it the small websites profit margins considerably.

I am planning to offer the domain name to them at the cost of the registration - hopefully they will accept.

Since my first post the website has been fully set up and i have had my first 3 orders coming in at 2 £40ish orders and one £20 order meaning i already have almost grossed £100 from the website within the first 2 weeks of trading.

Advertising spend: £0

So how am i getting traffic to the site with 0 costs ? I have advertised using:

1. A Press Release
2. Using eBay
3. Froogle
4. Making posts on targeted forums

On the eBay auctions which i run i have now changed my username to the web address of my new store and the template also now has my new website store address on it. Visitors to the site has only been around 100 so the conversion rate seems to be pretty good at the moment.

I added the store to froogle by downloading and installing the easypopulate contribution for osC and then downloading the feed and submitting to Froogle.

So i hear you ask how much profit have i made from these sales ? Well so far i think its around £18 but i havent totalled it or calculated it yet.

Hi my name is Eddy Barrett - and i am the owner of this website/blog. I aim to update as frequently as possible and document my progress truthfully. I own the following websites which i earn a recurring income from for doing very little work:

http://www.oscommercegraphics.co.uk/
http://www.mobilelocksmith.co.uk/
http://www.yoursonypsp.com/

Mostly the revenue is generated through googles adsense program and i am currently at about $300 per month.

I also sell items in a very small niche on eBay and have recently opened a web business/ecommerce site to try and operate in this niche also. I have created it using the popular osCommerce software. For the immediate future this blog is going to be dedicated to its progress. Firstly id like to state the costs of opening the store incurred to me.

Costs:
- £15 Domain names .co.uk and .com from GoDaddy
- £9.99 Template for oscommerce from oscommerce-templates.co.uk
- £306.05 Stock for osCommerce store

In total - £331.04

Whilst this is a large amount of money to gamble - i am quite confident i wont lose it all as i know i can always just sell the items on eBay.

For now over and out.

Ed