Unpredictable Sales?

I measure visitor value rather than sales or conversion rate and I find that it's fairly stable and predictable over a month or so.

And of course, you need to allow for seasonal variations.

Cheers,

Neil

Great post. Sums up the world of online sales pretty well. It's not consistent, predictable or boring...it's kind of like the stock market... If you've been in internet marketing for a while then you'll know this well.

The marketing will fluctuate in trends. That's why one month something works great, and the next it's dead in the water. But, one thing that will remain consistent is that more and more people are coming online for their spending/shopping/buying/pricing/investing, which means, there's a fairly consistent increase of buyers for your niches. You'll need to stay on top of the methods for reaching those buyers, but you're not going to run out!

Continuity is tough, but it can be consistent. If you can find a niche that will continue to buy your products or services, and you have the time and energy to continue to produce for them, then you'll do just fine!

EC,

One other thing that isn't talked about a lot, although it is common knowledge if you are experienced, is PPC siphoning off of traffic over the organic results.

Most organic search results are not optimized to make a searcher click through to the website. Website owners find they are ranked well and just assume they will get the clicks.

Now compare this against PPC advertisers whose only chance of getting a click will be through shrewd wording of their ads and deliberate placement of the ads through intellegent bidding strategies.

If you really want searchers to click on your organic listing you need to be every bit as calculating as the PPC players. You have control over what Google will display for your organic listings and you need to test different verbage until you get to where you are getting consistant results from the SERPs.

A good rule of thumb is that if you are not seeing consistancy then you haven't found a decent control yet. A control being the verbage that draws consistant clicks. This is why testing is so important.

Once you have your organic listing stabilized then you can use the data from your web stats to analyze the traffic for any variances. I can tell immediately when something is out of kilter because of the regularity with which the SERPs send me traffic.

What I can't predict is when a customer will buy, or how many times they have to visit my website before they make a purchase. What I can predict is my daily traffic within +/- 10%. That is almost as regular as clockwork.

If you think Google is turning your traffic off and on then I encourage you to forget about any conspiracy and just keep testing until you reach equalibrium. Don't be like 90% of most folks and start sucking your thumb with glee once you get a decent ranking.

Once you get a ranking is when the work starts. Only then can you begin to get meaningful results relative to conversions that the testing for your organic listings is headed in the right direction.

Ironically, the best school to go to to learn the skills necessary to create organic listings that draw clicks is the school of PPC. If you haven't ventured into that world, by all means do yourself a favor and get good at that skill. It has a lot of carry-over into the organic world.

KJ

Yep that's why having a way to capture the lead while they come to your site is important. Email marketing is still as effective as ever if done right. The mistake many people make is not doing email marketing outside of the internet marketing realm.

Truth be told doing email marketing outside the IM realm is actually more effective more often than not because people aren't used to the same routine etc. Thinking outside the box and getting the people to read your emails more is a different story... but a solid start is to at least start capturing the emails, build a funnel the worst that can happen?

They leave your list. But, you'll find a solid core that will be more than just one product (or affiliate product from you if you don't have your own).

Again, at the point when you have email funnels into everything it becomes a traffic and numbers game. If you get "X" amount of people to come to your site every month, you'll expect "X" amount of conversions - give or take. You can of course work on improving your campaigns etc and testing overtime. The idea would be to tweak things to where your conversion rates go up. Then you can start estimating that you'll make $xxx month to month.

But this is how you can take shaky sales and turn them into more concrete sales, monthly. The other nice part is it's on autopilot. One of the hardest things to do is make someone buy - that's why you see people consider a 10% conversion rate very good. So obviously the more times they can see your offer/offers the better.

This works in any market and should be used in any market.