Archive for the ‘Ecommerce’ Category
Derek Cladek on May 28th, 2010
Over the past few months I have learned what it takes to rank any website on the internet, mainly in Google. I remember the days where I would see a really competitive market and thought to myself “how I could never get involved because how could a small guy like me take on an empire of a site?” Then recently something struck me and I have had more confidence than I have had in the past eight months! I feel like I can do anything and the truth about it is, I can! We can do anything we set our minds to. I might sounds a little over confident, but its true, we can do anything and I know that failure will still be in my future, but its failure that will help me succeed. Failure is just lifes’ why of teaching us what works and what doesn’t work.
It’s really about who links to you and the process of getting those links. Many people will post content on a blog, do article marketing, or have their friends link to them, but what else is there? It seems like Google is changing almost every week and things that used to work in the past no longer work today. The stuff that works today, probably won’t work tomorrow. Its about finding what works today and going after that as much as you can, but at the same time finding other things that work. Getting links to your site is the biggest way to rank online. Google also loves new and fresh content, which is one way they say you can rank better online. For instance I created a blog post talking about pig farms in Uganda and that page ranks in Google for many terms about pig farms in Uganda and I never got a single link to that page. This shows that Google loves new content.
It is amazing to me when I see a small site out ranking another site we see as ‘too big to beat’, but more and more I see it happening. Over the past month I have gained a confidence in myself where I feel I can do anything or beat anyone (except a friend who I’d rather stay far way from and won’t disclose who he is.. you know who you are!)
Search Engine Optimization is just one of the many keys you need to out rank a website. We give the term SEO which encompasses a lot of what we do, but do we realize all of the little pieces that it takes to beat our competitors? I don’t find beating a competitor as the hardest and biggest obstacle anymore. The biggest obstacle I find myself in is finding the best or right markets to get in. Its about finding what sells online that you can’t really get anywhere else. That is why wedding favors is so huge! Where would you go to buy wedding favors in a store near you? I live by some pretty big cities and I couldn’t tell you a single place I could go.
Owning an Ecommerce store is a great way for anyone to make money online. I started my first online store in 2007 and haven’t stopped since. One of my biggest problems right now is finding that perfect niche, were its always going to be there and is not affected by a falling economy. I also would love to take on a few clients and do SEO work for them, but its a struggle finding those people. Most people create an SEO firm so they can find clients easier, but there are people like me who could probably do more for a company than those large SEO firms.
That’s enough for now. If you have questions don’t hesitate to ask or leave comments. I know my blog is pretty bare, but I hope to continue writing on what I have learned and am learning about SEO, Ecommerce and anything else I want to post!
Derek Cladek on July 14th, 2009
This post will give you a little background information on how I started to make money online. I started back in the day when “Paid To Surfs” where king of the Internet. Those all failed during the Dot Com Bust back in 2000. Some lone survivors changed their programs to incentivized paid programs, much like affiliate marketing today.
Fast forward to December 2006, I created an Adsense site in the niche of tattoos. The site was horribly designed and basically thrown together. I don’t have the programming, website building skills needed to create a great website. So I hired a guy on Elance to create a template for me. The site actually has 2 different designs an old design and a new design as I kept on creating pages to the site but used the new design.
- November 2006 I had 27 visitors, but ended the year 2006 the site had 561 unique visitors to my newly formed tattoo site which created $14.75! (Grand Total For The Year 2006 = $14.75)
- By the end of 2007 I had 331,856 unique visitors to the site which created $2,534.67 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2007 = $4943.80)
- By the end of 2008 I had 618,781 unique visitors which created $4,630.25 of income! (Grand Total For The Year 2008 = $7668.54)
- So far this year the site has had 401,901 unique visitors and created $2,405.92 of income all from Adsense! (Total Up To July 14th 2009 = $4159.78)
The site also sells a few Clickbank items and did $3038.29 in 2008 and so far in 2009 has done $1,753.86 from commissions. (2007 it made $2,409.13 from commissions).
I tell you all of this to show that making money online is possible even if you have no skills like me! I did not know how to make a website. I basically bought the articles for the site and put it all together myself. I did have a little knowledge of how HTML works but nothing too extensive. I do know something about ranking well on the search engines and if you can get traffic you can make money! Its really as easy as that.
What if you had a website that brought in 500,000 unique visitors a year, or even a few hundred a year? You could put a few ads, Adsense, Kontera, Affiliate products or programs, create an email list, Clickbank or sell ad space on the site. With a large amount of traffic you are almost guaranteed to make money. The tattoo site was never supposed to be a huge earner for me and it really isn’t. I basically use that site to pay for my 2006 Lexus LS 430 and it pays each payment for me. My online stores make loads more money than that site and I know if you were to get into affiliate marketing you could make TONs more than me, just like Jonathan Volk (who is my new hero! Seriously though, he’s a highly successful Affiliate marketer and someone I look up to).
It All Started In 2006!
My first month of making money started with the first 27 visitors to that tattoo site that I created. I remember making $0.09 my first day and how excited I was, because I created something that WORKED! It was just a matter of making it bigger and better, because if it worked, why would it stop if I made the site bigger.
Now today its pushing $20/day and over 4,000 visitors/day. That’s only because I spend the past month making changes to the site and getting it to rank better in Google, and now its paying off, just check out my screen shot below.
Really anyone can do this stuff, whether you make 1 Adsense site and go from there or create a Yahoo Store. It just takes time and effort. Start learning today and tomorrow you will see the rewards. I will post more about the ‘how to’s‘ to creating a successful site that will make you money day in and day out without doing anything more to the site. The tattoo site that I created runs itself with zero effort on my part. I only put time into it when I want it to do better.
Also you have to be careful on what niche you pick because really, there isn’t too much money in the tattoo market online. There are not many products to be sold online for tattoos since its mostly an offline business. I will go over more on how to pick ‘more’ successful niches and what to look for in the future.
The large jump in traffic is because I made changes to the site to help it rank for some keywords that get loads of traffic daily. The site hit the first page for one of those keywords and you can see the results. It also caused a jump of about $8 extra in Adsense income daily. If you look at the ‘Hits’ column you will see the jump. This shows how many times its been ’seen’ in the search engines, not necessarily bringing traffic to the site. It takes about 14 Hits for the site to get 1 visit.
Derek Cladek on July 13th, 2009
I usually wake up around 8:30 on Monday mornings because I know that we have a lot of catch up to do with our online stores. When you are running 5 Yahoo Stores things tend to get hectic. Multiple orders through each store can add to the stress of any busy work week. One problem that can arise for any entrepreneur is that with so many yahoo stores running at the same time, you can get ‘too’ many orders to keep up. This past week has been one of those weeks!
Finding the time to do ‘everything’ such as SEO, Article Marketing, Social Marketing, Phone Calls, Emails, Order Processing and Shipping and then doing that for 5 businesses becomes a rather large task! That is why it is highly important to start off any week right. Mondays are our days we get the ‘tedious’ jobs done. From my earlier post about our credit card processor calling you can see how many orders we have to deal with and that was just for 1 of our Yahoo Stores. Building a yahoo store is actually really easy but maintaining the store is what gets even seasoned veterans in trouble sometimes.
It’s very important to keep your cash flow moving from credit cards to product purchases. For us, we use American Express business cards because the minute you pay the bill online, you can use the credit. There isn’t a waiting time for the payment to go through, so it allows us to max our credit cards about 3-4 times each week. We try to put all of our purchases on the credit cards because our business debit card can only do 37 transactions each day, so if you are doing 40-50 sales/day there would be no catching up, ever.
Why would we use credit cards?
Well that my friend is an easy answer! We get a load of points usually used for airline tickets or hotels. If I could start over I would have signed up for an Alaska Airlines Credit Card. (If you get the business credit card you can have a limit of 1 Million miles/year rather than their low 100k limit on most of their cards).
We also have to use our debit card to process orders but try to only use the credit cards to get the points.
Derek Cladek on July 10th, 2009
So it was a crazy day in the ecommerce world this past week! I started a new online store with a friend of mine back in February 2009 and we had a new product launching this past week. I saw this coming and we prepared the product page, got it to rank number 1 on google and had a list of just over 400 people interested in buying with a 10% off coupon. Things were set and all we had to do was wait for the product to be officially out. When the date came, the product was available we started taking orders around 4pm PST. By the end of the day we had done 70 sales! For any ecommerce store that is pretty good but since we had only done about $4,000 in sales the past few months it was a shock to our Merchant Provider for the store.
We processed the sales and now were waiting for the money to be dumped into our bank account so that we could buy the products and have it shipped to our customers. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well then crap hit the fan! Friday comes around the day our money is supposed to be dumped into our bank account and our merchant processing bank calls… These calls never go well because they only call when there are problems. They never call to just say, “Hey, thanks for your business, you really make us a load of money!”
“We noticed there was a very large volume and unusual transactions for your account”, well no duh! Is that wrong that we made 70 sales in 1 freakin day? Now they are planning on holding our $8,500 until we can provide tracking numbers on 10 of the sales we took.. Hmm.. do you see a problem? I do! How can we send them 10 tracking number if we don’t have the money to place the orders to get the tracking numbers? Well its not that we didn’t have the money, this was a new store for us and so we didn’t have the cash flow built up to sustain a large volume like that. I am just trying to show some problems that may come up for new store owners.
This brings me to ask a question. Would you be able to survive if you were new at ecommerce and your credit card processor decides to hold a substantial amount of your money until you can provide documentation that they require? Most newbies would not be able to make it. This has been a problem for me twice. The first time I had to eat into my own credit cards just to keep the business alive. You cannot run a business if you do not have the cash flow.
This is the point I want to hit:
Do you have a great relationship with your merchant account manager?
Do you have a great relationship with your credit card processing bank? -Most likely not, even if you are a seasoned veteran at ecommerce.
The point is, you must find a good merchant for any store you start. I am very grateful for our contact Bob Bryant. We got that phone call around 10 a.m and I emailed Bob to call me ASAP. Within 3 minutes he was calling me, how cool is that? I told him the problem, what the bank wanted and my issue with it. He said he would talk to the president of the credit card processor and would get them to release the funds. By noon I received another call from Bob who said they released the funds and would still want to see 10 tracking numbers from 10 of those orders. Now that is what I can live with. We get the money and can process these orders without going into our own credit cards, they get their 10 tracking numbers and our customers get their products and the world goes round and round.
Here is a quick screen shot of the store’s volume for the day just so you don’t think I’m full of crap.
