“No great thing is created suddenly”
- Epictetus (A.D. 200)
Well that is what is keeping me going at the moment. The knowledge that it takes time and effort to build a successful ‘anything’ – in this case, a successful internet marketing business.
I don’t know what went wrong this month. It was my worst month since the terrible month I had in February – for both income and website traffic.
And to add insult to injury, I was ‘hijacked’!
Someone decided to use a robot of some sort to click on every link on three of my websites. This resulted in my Amazon.co.uk click through results looking absolutely terrible – with just a 5.71% conversion at Amazon and an incredible 26.77% click through rate from my UK websites to Amazon.co.uk.
The picture to the right shows my Amazon clicks for one of the effected websites. On 24 and 25 July the clicks skyrocketed. When I checked my website traffic reports the visitor numbers were normal indicating that some sort of robot obtained the links from the website – i.e. the website wasn’t actually visited by 29 unique visitors who clicked on 105 of my links.
Anyway, I am feeling a bit despondent at the moment.
I am way too busy with my day job to focus much effort on affiliate marketing, my website traffic is down, my income is down, an idiot is causing me problems with my analysis by stuffing up my Amazon click ratios, and right now I am about ready to put this whole thing on hold.
But, like I said at the start of this post, and have mentioned previously, building a successful online business will not happen overnight, but it will happen if I keep working at it.
So I will be back again next month with another income report. But due to other pressures I don’t expect to be putting too much time into this over the next month unfortunately.
A quick summary of my July income:
Amazon.com:
$4.00 from one sale which was actually made in June but despatched in July. No orders in July.
Amazon.co.uk:
As per the following summary, after eliminating 140 Amazon clicks from the analysis table:
Amazon.co.uk income analysis - July 2011
Footnote:
The purpose of these Amazon Income Reports is for me to one day look back and remind myself how far I have come, and how hard it was in the beginning.
If you, as the reader of this report find benefit from it, then that is an added bonus.
Until next month,
Richard
Hi Richard,
First of all, don’t be beaten down by the fall in income. There are probably many reasons for this – but I would imagine a high percentage of the reason can be attributed to seasonal/annual sales variations. you can check this using the google insight tool for your products or product categories. Plus, if you are not ranking in the top 3 on the first page for the google results page – (that’s where 80% of the monthly search traffic place their click) then your backlinking efforts are not complete!
Also, I don’t think your amazon conversion rate is particularly low, but do see it as an invite to make sure you are truly helping people to decide to buy on your products. I know your style of site is mainly NOT review sites, so this is harder for you I guess though.
You clearly have the correct “systems” in place – ie you know how to build sites, you know how to backlink, and most importantly you are monitoring what is happening.
I am a great believer you should spend most of the time at the front end of a web site creation – ie spend ALOT of time ensuring you are choosing to sell the right products on your sites:
a) do your products have a lot of 4 or 5 star reviews left on amazon
b) are they in a best seller list for their category on amazon
c) is the commission worthwhile for each sale? your average commission per sale is low! If you were selling products 5 times the value of the ones you are selling, you would have 250 uk pounds per month right now….. suddenly things would feel a lot better!
d) what are the PR and backlinks shown (using something like SEO quake plug in for firefox) for the top 10 results for the keywords you are targeting in the google serps? – are these first page of results mainly less than PR 4 and backlinks shown less than 50? if yes, then you can beat these within 3 months with effective backlinking practices.
e) how have you been doing your keyword analysis/product selection with google keyword tool? – do you have the keyword tool set to “EXACT” matches, and the locale set to USA (or UK as I know you have sites/hosted servers in both of these territories).For your USA sites, you really want to be targeting exact match keywords where they are 1500 or more LOCAL exact monthly searches for your keywords (products), or 3 products (where one of these 3 have a monthly exact search of 1000min or more, and the other 2 contribute to at least 1500 total for all 3).
f) are you targeting “buyer” keywords. for example – someone ready to buy a car would put in “Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano on sale”, but someone at the beginning of researching a car would put in “what is the fastest car?”. You obviously want to be targeting keywords for your website which indicate people searching are finally ready to buy the product and that usually means a specific product name.
As for the bots – unfortunately this happens from time to time – just see it as part of the wild wild west that is the internet!
I don’t like to see you despondent. I don’t think you should be at all. Just keep plugging away at it, and don’t rest until your sites have their keywords in the top 3 of page one – anything else and your backlinking efforts are not complete!
Seasonal variations are a huge factor, and people across the world(USA) are on vacation, and worried about spending money at the moment (again!).
One day you will look back at this report and see the results inspired you to do more, not less!
J
Johan
What a massively long comment!
Thanks for your thoughts. I know that my backlinking is far from complete and rather than building new websites my intention is to focus on just two things (when time permits). One is backlinking to my existing sites and the other is writing some unique content to add some substance to the sites that I have built using WPZonBuilder as I am wondering whether that may help to improve my rankings.
It is hard not to feel despondent at times though. I know how much effort I have put in to this whole exercise and I also know how much I get paid per hour in my day job, and the two are poles apart. But at the same time I am enjoying the internet marketing thing. I have learnt heaps since I started in late October last year, and I am still learning. Learning from people such as yourself – from the comments you leave here – and also from a few other people who have blogs similar to this one.
I am not about to give up, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing an improvement in website visitor numbers and corresponding income as Christmas approaches, and also hopefully, from the website I created late last year that did so well post Christmas promoting a seasonal product in high demand over winter.
Cheers
Richard