Frustrated! Discouraged! Help Please!

There is no need to pay for internet marketing ebooks. Most of that information you can find online for free. The biggest mistake with your website is that you don't have many backlinks at all. For a website to do well, you usually need to get some decent organic search engine rankings. The biggest factor that search engines look at when determining rankings is quality and quantity of backlinks.

So find some free tutorials that discuss link building methods. In particular, read up on these strategies:
-article submission
-press release syndication
-blog commenting
-forum signatures...I see you already started on that one, but you need much more posts
-mini websites on sites like squidoo.com & hubpages.com
-directory submission
-link baiting

These are just some examples of link building strategies. There are many other strategies that work well. Find a few strategies that work for your website and regularly build links. Be sure that you are targeting good keywords with your link anchor text.

You may be interested to know that when I go to the prototype site, it is blank. Whereas the code show that there should be something there. Have you taken the time to build up your authority? Show people WHY they should buy from you. Solve a problem that they have by explaining the best way to do so, then they will convince themselves to buy your product. I too did the StoresOnline thing. It cost me way more than it helped. of course no one told me they'd try to charge an arm and a leg for "coaching" either. With the site you have there I can offer you hosting for the year for around $70. There is facilities for payment processing as well. Though in truth you can always take paypal (credit cards) as well. I actually like the design of your site.

I think the thing to do here is to decide on a unique selling position. What makes you different? Who are your customers? and WHY should they buy from you? You may also consider building a list for long term planning. I'm a writer and can help with content. The hosting I mentioned is my own as well. In any case, I hope I was able to help you somewhat. Feel free to PM me with any other concerns. And of course you will find oodles of help on here as well.

Good Luck!
Erik

In my reply I'm assuming you're talking about your jewelry site.

I have a jewelry affiliate site which gets 40 or 50 uniques per day and the only promotion I've ever done is reciprocal linking... There's a lot more I could do, but I have other priorities.

Take a look at Mondera, Szul, Jewelry Basket etc and see how they operate - you can incorporate a lot of their ideas into your site - subscribe to the Szul list and see how they promote special offers - they have a new one every week. They allow their affiliates to send the same offers to their lists which is a great way for affiliates to earn more.

When I first started out with my site Mondera and Szul were the biggest online jewelry stores, and they made most of their sales through affiliates - not sure about now though. So perhaps you should start looking at running an affiliate program.

That said, I recon you should start an affiliate site and learn the ropes with that first and then apply what you have learned to your proper online store.

If any of this is coming from potential customers, shift the mindset - that's not criticism, that's feedback. People are literally telling you what they want... do it, track it and see if it increases your conversion rate.

If it's not from potential customers, still do it, track it and see if it increases your conversion rate.

I see it says "Proudly Canadian" on the right... are the products shipping from Canada? Are you specifically targeting Canadians?

If so, register a keyword rich .ca domain name. If a search comes from Canada, .ca domains will more often than not rank higher than other TLDs on both Google and Yahoo... unless you're competing with a .com authority, in which case you'll have to compete. Of course you'll still have to get links, etc. but it makes the battle much easier... .ca makes you seem more relevant to a Canadian audience.

One other thing I notice right off the bat is the address of the products... they look something like this: /product/YJ249291

From a search engine optimization standpoint, that's kind of useless. You should look into changing each product address to reflect the name of the product... ie: /product/18k-white-gold-plated-unisex-rope-ring

I'd also shorten the title and write something that made sense. Right now it just looks keyword stuffed - search engines pick up on that stuff. I'd also do the same for the description meta tag and completely remove the "meta name" tag.

This is how your homepage is currently displayed:

Custom-Made Jewelry Handmade Jewellery Designer Handbags Fashion ...
Bling Custom-Made Handmade Jewelry Jewellery Designer Handbags Fashion Accessories.

No offense but that's not very enticing!

Try and keep the title keyword rich, make sure it makes sense and keep it lower than 60 characters since that's roughly the amount that will be displayed on the search engine page results. For the description, make sure it makes sense, throw in a couple keywords and keep it lower than 160 characters.

I like to make the title and description work just like an ad... use curiosity and try and get them to feel some emotion when they read it. What emotion(s) you want them to feel will depend on the market (research!).

Those are just a few simple changes you could make for search engine optimization purposes... another thing you'll want to do is build links from relevant websites.

Everyone above me have shared some great tips also!

Read the replies, apply the replies, track results from newly applied stuff, measure what works and what doesn't, do more of what works and less of what doesn't - and have fun doing it!

Best of luck!

PS: If you're not on a specific contract and can freely cancel your hosting without penalties, I would. It appears you're renting a dedicated server or something similar... you may want to look into shared hosting (you can get a full year for two months of what you're paying now!). I personally use 1&1 but Hostgator is also good.

$35 a month for webhosting are you kidding?
Have a look at my blog and find out how to get your hosting for less than $5 a month with a free domain.
Subscribe and I will send you free downloads each week.
Stop buying ebooks you can get so much for free. I will give you some examples of squeeze pages.

$35 a month for hosting is too much.

I have unlimited sites on hostgator for 9.95 a month.

You can have several affiliate sites for less than $35 a month.

You can make the site yourself, if you don't know how there is software that lets any dummy make a site easily, hire someone to make a site for you, or use a wordpress blog, easy to set up.

I know how it feels to be discouraged. When I started out I got sucked in a lot of stupid things and lost a lot of money without knowing any better what I was doing.

If it's any consolation, I remember losing money online too. Lots of us do, so don't give up.

First, visiting your websites leads me to the conclusion you think selling online is similar to offline retail and that a website should resemble a store. I'm afraid t'aint so.

If you were one of my coaching clients, here's the advice I would give you. It's my opinion, of course, and you can take it or leave it, but this is now the standard advice I give to clients with failing internet projects:

1. Forget whatever you're working on now.

2. Understand you have only ONE priority - that's to master online marketing. You must become master marketers.

3. The fastest, easiest way to do that is to start using an automated online marketing system. The system is there for you (which saves you an enormous amount of time and money) and they train YOU how to do the marketing. You can literally learn more about internet marketing in a month than most online marketers will ever know.

4. Once you customize the system they give you and start marketing, you'll be making money and essentially you're being paid to learn. Not bad, eh?

5. Then, 6 months from now, when you're fully confident and well trained (and financially better off!), you can revisit your old projects with a trained eye.

If you'd like to know more about the best automated online marketing systems, you can PM me and I'll tell you what I know.

Bottom line? 1. Don't give up. 2. It's all about marketing.

Best wishes!

warriorcoach1 can you pm me what you know about the best automated online marketing systems? I would pm you but I'm a few posts short.

Man - there is some awesome advice right in those post above.

Read it carefully and apply it.

Use hostgator for your hosting - it is great value.

One other comment

The blue color as a background to your products makes it very hard to see the products. Use white with color on the edges.

THen you need traffic and lots of it. Go to places where people who buy jewelry hang out - is there such a forum?

Participate there with a link in your signature.

Another tip to succeed is to learn that Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) is your friend. Find the sites you want to be like and then break down their back links. Go get the same links and start down the road of success. What you'll probably find out is that it takes a lot of hard work to build a successful site, which shouldn't be surprising to you. Tune out the get rich quick schemes and e-books and just roll up your sleeves for good old fashioned hard work.

Hi Bill & Marsha,

I couldn't agree with you more! It's a shame huh?

I tell you what...

...give me a few key phrases you would like to get traffic for as well as your competitors site(s). I will look into for you and get back to you within 24-hours. You said you only got 1 sale but that's further along than most but not sufficient and I fully understand how you feel. As for the 0-4 hits per day, let's see if we can improve that.

Send it to me via PM (Private Message) if you like.

Once I'm done with my part, I will share with exactly what you must do step-by-step.

Use your frustration to work more towards your website.
Use article marketing to promote your website.

Wow, thanks for all the kind replies. There is some good information to check out.

Now to address some specific comments ...

The corporate site is not blank ... does anyone else have a problem viewing it besides cypherslock? It is a flash-based website. We can see it, hear it and navigate it just fine on all 3 of our computers. The reason it is a prototype is because we have been struggling trying to get various parts of it to work properly ... like some of the links, for example. Marsha took courses on web design, but Flash and PHP were not included in those courses (another rip-off waste of $ 10K).

The corporate site is on a host that allows us unlimited domains for $ 7.95 / month as was pointed out is possible. That's not the problem. We know cheaper hosting is available. However, we have been unable to figure out how to build an e-commerce website like that from scratch on our own (and we don't want to have to pay someone else to build and maintain it), so we bought into StoresOnline so we could get it built and online as quickly as possible using their StoreBuilder interface, and maintain it ourselves. If we ever figure out how to make the Flash-based corporate site work properly, and figure out how to do the e-commerce stuff, we have a very impressive, elegant and stylish Flash-based template ready to go for the bling site. However, we have spent several days at a time trying to figure out how to do one tiny little thing, without success, so developing our own site is going to take a long, long, long time. If there is "software that lets any dummy make a site easily" then please tell us about it, because every site-builder system we found in our research was about the same cost, around $ 35.00 / month (Yahoo, ProStores, etc.). The cost is not JUST for hosting, it's also for the use of the StoresOnline StoreBuilder software interface.

Josh Gould ... the URL addresses for the products come from their SKU's. It looks like we can change those, but then those numbers are the only way we have to keep track of our products, so that when someone orders something, we can cross-reference that number and find the correct product from the correct supplier. Is there another way to accomplish that? Regarding your other suggestion, we have the canee.ca domain for our corporate site, but the bling site is ceebling.com because we are NOT targetting Canadians (our suppliers are not in Canada either). Our primary target market for bling is women age 20-50 in the USA. We have the "Proudly Canadian" tag and the flag on the site because we felt it lets people know exactly where we are based quickly and easily, and also adds a sense of trustworthiness.

Richard Odell, how can you say the site has no meta information? I have personally spent hours and hours and hours putting in metatitles, meta keywords and meta descriptions for each and every product. Ceebling.com actually comes up # 1 in Yahoo searches and # 3 in Google searches on certain keyword combinations.

stsnelson, our key phrases are Handmade Jewelry, Custom-Made Jewellery, Designer Handbags, Fashion Accessories, Bling. If that's not what you meant, let us know.

We don't have 15 posts in here yet so we cannot send anyone a PM. So Warriorcoach1, please send me a PM about this "automated online marketing system" ... providing it's not just another rip-off.

AnneE, in this thread alone there are comments about the colours and background and "no bling feel" and "cheap graphics". There are similar comments (and more) on another forum to do with online e-commerce. We like the colour scheme, and we made the graphics simple on purpose, because we don't want it to be gaudy or tacky or "in-your-face" flashy. We want it to be simple, elegant and classy.

We will be working on some article marketing and try to get some inbound links somehow, if we can figure out how. Thanks again for all the suggestions.

Well believe it or not...you're off to a good start!

We've all started out frustrated as hell when learnign how to make money online. The trick and secret really...is to stick with it and learn as much as you can.

This online biz is just like any other biz...you need to know how to do a lot of stuff and learn so many things that it takes time.

Really..if those people that want to get started online knew that it takes a good 2 years to get going....they wouldn't even begin.

So don't give up....keep at it and learn as much as you can from those online that are already making money..and do what they do.

I remember when I started out years ago...I spent thousands on training products that made me $0 online. They were good learning experiences though and taught me alot.

You have to remember though...that most biz ops you see online sell the end result. They leave out the part where they spent years getting to those $50k months.

Thanks for the keyphrases. Will get back in touch with you within 24-hours.

By keeping at it and changing what doesnt work and doing more of what does.

Suggestions...

1. Invest some money and get a professional site created if you keep it. It looks cheap which translates, to many people, not trust worthy.

2. Try and run eBay auctions/classifieds to funnel people to your site. And this will also allow you to build a postal mailing list for special offers.

3. Build more back links. Write articles on what to look for when buying jewelry. Maybe tell about diamond clarity. What a good fake diamond is. Lots of possible topics.

4. To sell specialized jewelry, like the dolphin ring, setup a site about dophins. Have info, photos, videos, etc. Then of course you have a dolphin jewelry shop. I buy lots of crap from sites doing that type of stuff. I'll be looking at a site about X and notice something cool dealing w/ it. Its normally something I would never search for.

Garrie

Hi Bill & Marsha,

Here's my 2cents ... to sell anything online, you need:

1. Quality products
2. Great and Compelling Offers
3. Traffic

Your site ceebling.com competes with hundreds (possibly thousands?) of other e-commerce sites. Many of them with hundreds of backlinks and possibly more professional design and graphics.

So why be just another e-commerce site?

Why not use direct marketing techniques?

On the main page, I see:

"Romance with Stylish Affordability. If you are looking for that special something for a special person, or just something to treat yourself, don't look any further. We have all kinds of custom-made jewelry, fashion accessories, and other assorted kinds of bling"

1. Quality products
------------------
You already have these. So, not a problem

2. Great and Compelling Offers
-----------------------------
Instead of being just another e-commerce site, write a persuasive long copy and sell the benefits of "giving special something for that special person"

Use sentences such as ....

"Do you recall the fond memories of _______

"Do you remember the look on her face when you gave ______ when you first proposed to her? "

This will set the mood of the reader and put him or her in a receptive state as he recalled the sweet memories :-)

You could then follow-up with a few suggestions that would fit the occasion (eg. anniversary, birthdays, valentine, etc)

"Imagine the look in her eyes as she sees her name on the beautifully hand-crafted ring, and the words 'I love you darling' ...."

A well crafted story (sales copy) will help your prospect 'relive' those memories, and re-ignite the passion/romance ... and more sales for you :-)

This will set your site apart from all those e-commerce sites selling 100s of jewelry under the sun.

* If you want to learn more about persuasive copy, Jo Han's "The MasterWordsmith Recipe to Riches" is an excellent book.


3. Traffic
----------
Write a few articles on how to buy custom jewelry for re-igniting romance and submit to a few directories.

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,
Adrian

You should work on the following sources for better results:
* Check what your competitors are doing
* Submit to all the relevant Internet directories
* Join relevant Shopping Malls,
* Something new on the homepage every week
* Run a message board or discussion group
* Organize links from other sites
* Get an endorsement from these other sites
* Banners on other relevant/appropriate websites
* Product reviews in other websites

Wow, that hosting company is really ripping you off. The first step I would take is to find another host. Dreamhost is great one considering it's value for about 24 dollars for a first year subscription with a promo code that you can find anywhere. As for your sales, generally you should be spending your money not on listing your ebooks and etc, but rather add your products to affiliate networks like clickbank and pray that a good promoter choses your product to promote and offer them a high percentage incentive for them to be motivated to promote your product. The least of your spendings should be on web hosting, but rather on Adwords and targeting people who are looking for what your ebook is exactly selling. Have good looking squeeze page, which can be done in minutes, and your set.

Good niche! I think you have a passionate niche to target, which is great, but the marketing for it is 'wrong'. I think you need to 're-think' what you want out of the site. Do you want 'sales' or 'a business'. Yes, there is a huge difference.

A lot of people go crazy about trying to make 1-sale... but think with the end in mind. Build the whole sales funnel first. Create the opt-in pages, the sales letters, the OTO offers etc... BUT ONLY AFTER YOU HAVE TESTED FIRST...

Do you know that people buy? If not, don't do all the other stuff, it's a waste of time.

Are people buying more than one thing? GREAT, if not... Why?

Ask yourself these things first, test them with PPC and direct response... And when you got a confirmation that people WANT this and are WILLING TO PAY for it... Go ahead and unleash the full-blown-business, with products upsells, coaching etc, etc.

- Chris

First, to help you get over your information overload, I would suggest you find a mentor who specializes in affiliate marketing. In my opinion, getting a mentor will help you reach your goals much faster than doing it alone or asking questions on the forum where you'll get a million questions to the same answer.

And, please do not buy anymore books, plan. You are right, most ebooks will not provide you with a step-by-step plan. Why? Because, most internet marketers aren't experienced with writing school manuals.

You can search for some mentors in the WSO section, of the forum, to see if one resonates with you. Or, just ask and watch them come out the wood works to offer their assistance.

A couple more comments ...

Auriana, thanks for the offer, but we have a gmail account that has 2500 unread emails in it now because we signed up for way too many autoresponder lists.

Adrian, that is interesting. We pretty much agree about appealing to emotion. However, the advice in the other forum (which specializes in e-commerce) said to get rid of most of the text on the home page because supposedly nobody wants to read text, they just want to see pictures, and they will click off to another site if there is too much text on the home page. LOL We did our best to compromise on that.

Christie, we tried to find a mentor to help us out to get started on affiliate marketing, but couldn't find one willing to help us get going without being paid a substantial amount of $$$ up front. We offered several people $ 5000.00 payable AFTER they help us make our first $ 10,000.00, but nobody took us up on that ... which only tells me they had no confidence in their own hyped-up schemes.

Back before we created ceebling.com to sell bling online, we got hosting for unlimited domains with CPanel support, found a couple of affiliate products in a couple of niches that we thought were good prospects, but then we got stuck because we don't know how to create a "squeeze page" and put it on our host, or build an e-mail list. Is there a way to build a list without paying $ 20 / month for Aweber or GetResponse or similar autoresponders?

Anyone want to help us get started with affiliate marketing without wanting to be paid up front? *grin*

In truth, none of them ever will tell you exactly what to do. Some information serves as good guideposts, other information is purely theoretical and does nothing more than take up your time.

FOCUS! Develop a business plan. If you are jumping on something for the pure sake of "making money", you're already in the losing corner.

Your statement: "So instead we decided to try to sell stuff online."

Not very inspiring. You are basically speculating without the benefit of due diligence. Find something that interests you, research it and see how many other people share your interests.

If you are looking for the "$21,000 in 2-weeks action" - put your face closer to the monitor and let me slap you back to reality ! Sure, it happens - and people win multi-million dollar lotteries too. Sadly however, you have a better chance at getting struck by lightning !

"THEY" are your customers and prospects...better listen to them or they'll take their business to someone who is listening. Think they REALLY care what YOU like?

1. By establishing solid business plans.
2. Performing meaningful research to discover what their selected market
wants, needs, and/or desires.
3. Employing focus, persistence and perserverance until they either
succeed or fail. The quicker they fail the faster they can move on to
the next and possibly successful stage.

And the kicker is...sometimes even this is not enough. For whatever reason, some business endeavors fail regardless of planning and preparation! But you don't have to fail with it. Hit your best lick and move on the the next challenge.

Please don't take this personally or in the wrong spirit. I truly hope this is helpful to you. It's candid truth that you will not find in many sales letter.

Calvin

Or they had no confidence in you. People who "get now and pay later" are normally more trouble and never follow through.

There is some good advice here. And keep...keeping on!

I would say not to purchase any software right now. Pay close attention to what I am saying here.

Learn about organic traffic. I have started all over and can tell you that you can get lots of free traffic. You do not need PPC or anything else right now.

What I would say is to pick a niche that you like, get a simple landing page also called a squeeze page and offer a free report. Start bulding your list and build relationships. Stay in touch with your list and do not start bombarding them with offers right away. You will be bulding a solid foundation and you can then make offers and they will be responsive because you have kept in touch and shown that you care.

Take this advice from someone who has been to the expensive seminars and bought more junk than I care to admit. As far as getting a landing page... I am not technical so I pay to have things done. You either will have a learning curve to contend with or pay someone.

I highly recommend hostgator for hosting, go daddy for domains...both give great customer service. You will also need a good autoresponder service...I highly recommend aweber. There are free ones but you get what you pay for..as the saying goes.

So you will spend $9.95 for hosting and $19.95 for aweber...monthly. But this will be the backbone of your business.

You can still work on your website. I would get some good copy written..something exciting and compelling...not long winded. And pay attention to website keywords as mentioned in one of the posts.

I did a test with a youtube video I recorded and was in first page of google in 48 hours. My daughter recorded vides, wrote articles and press releases and kept a no. 2 position on first page for her keywords for weeks. We did this for a an affiliate product...a so called system. But there were issues with it and we stopped promoting. So read up on Web 2.0...it absolutely works! And organic traffic is free.

If I can help or you have any questions, pm me. Remember...if you do not have a responsive list you do not have a business...and it does not have to be a big list. There are some people who have small lists of 200-500 and they do very well because they have built relationships with the list members.

I wish you success!

Sonia

I used to buy ebooks,paid membership to marketing site's gurus and so on.
No need to say I didn't succeed! And I can say now:
Why someone will waste his time to teach you how you should earn money, will make ebooks,courses and so on? If it works for him-he could easily hire people and to multiple his success without telling the secrets. But, I think all thouse people who 'teach' you just wanted to tease you and to make upsell to you.
Also their tactic maybe worked, but when it don't work - THEY START to teach others...

More responses to comments ...

hotlinkz / Calvin, we do have a business plan. We have been following it as best we can. We wanted to build 2 other websites in 2 other niches but ran into roadblocks that we have been unable to get past with those 2 niches. For one we have extensive knowledge of the best computer components for online gaming, but we cannot find a legitimate wholesale dropship supplier for computer components after over a year of searching (the best we have found so far is a small discount off retail, like 5% profit margin, ugh). For the other we cannot find local artists willing to do more than procrastinate (all we want is for them to send us pics and descriptions of stuff they want to sell, but we can't find anyone willing to put in the work to do that). We created a WordPress blog site for the computer gaming niche, but since we could not find a wholesale dropship source for computer components, we have not pursued that further as of yet. Not much point in blogging if we have nothing to sell.

Garrie & Butcherboy, wow, yeah, why would anyone want $ 5000 to teach us how to make $ 10,000? CRAZY thinking! LOL But seriously, we are smart and talented, we just need to focus (hence wanting to find a step by step plan) to do one specific thing (such as put up ONE affiliate page for now), rather than getting distracted by hundreds of possibilities.

twocolor / Sonia, now I suppose I will have to look up what the heck "organic traffic" is ... sheesh. But seriously, part of why we started out with retail e-commerce is because we got way overwhelmed with all the different ways and means there are to supposedly make money online. Information overload! Too many different people telling us too many different and conflicting things, and always suggesting "go check out <whatever>" (eg. "organic traffic") and getting us even more confused than we were before. I will look it up at least briefly. We know nothing about making videos, though, and frankly we have no interest in videos. The list-building thing may be of interest but we don't want to sign up for yet another thing that costs us more money every month unless we can be pretty sure it's going to MAKE us some money within a reasonable time frame.

Jenni Mac, we already changed the colour scheme because people complained they didn't like the previous one. BTW it is NOT blue, it is teal (bluish green), and teal is supposed to be appealing to most people, or so our research said. What would make it compelling to you? (We have never heard of a woman who didn't find jewlery and designer handbags at least slightly interesting).

To those who have send us PM's, THANK YOU! We are unable to reply until we have 15 posts on here, but we will reply as soon as we can.

I'm looking at your Jewelry site and I think the design could do with some tweaks. The overall colour scheme is a little drab and the content on the description page is quite hard to read being close to the colour of the background. Have you tested different designs? I guess not as your problem seems to be lack of traffic with a maximum of 4 hits per day.

How much time and effort have to you put into actually getting targeted traffic to the site? It quite a competitive niche you are in here, it's going to take work to crack it. SEO alone will not do it.

If I were you I would set up a blog and use it to build traffic to the site. If you do not have the time or willing to run a jewelery blog yourself, contact authors writing articles in the niche you are targeting and ask if they would like to publish their articles on your blog. Most will say yes and write unique articles for you and the ones that do will be good "JV traffic partners". (Of course, they will want a link back to their site in all the articles they write).

If you do not know how to set up a blog, (or anything else) search YouTube and you will probably find about 500 videos of people showing you exactly what to do... for free!

Once you have the blog set up, it will be a lot easier to get traffic to the site. There are lots of ways to drive traffic to a blog that you cannot use with a standard webiste or shopping cart, but you can use that activity to drive traffic to your store.

Linking from your blog to your shopping cart and using a "deep links" plugin link alinks will help you better optimise the shopping cart for more search engine traffic.

There are people looking to buy what you are selling, you just need to help them find your site and convince them to buy from you. What are your competition doing?

Dan

Is it really worthwhile to have and maintain a blog? Running a blog seems to be the "in thing" these days, but are they REALLY all that helpful in getting traffic to your sales site?

Does anyone have any statistics relevant to a retail e-commerce site (ie a site selling physical products such as ours, not affiliate squeeze pages or e-book sales pages ... those markets are quite different) comparing traffic generated from SEO vs. traffic generated from a blog vs. traffic generated from PPC vs. traffic generated from an opt-in mailing list vs. traffic generated from articles & forum posts vs. traffic generated from other methods?

Take the advice from people in this forum, i kind of like the first comment.

Go watch Ed Dale's 30 day challenge. It's free and teaches great SEO and social marketing.

Boy, I know the feeling of struggling to get something going, while trying to learn how to do it. I was computer illiterate when I started online and got taken several times and bought way to many how to guides. I think I had an ulcer the first few months.

While you are struggling with this, it sounds like many people have given a lot of good advice here.

Do I understand you correctly that you do have some money to spend? You talk about offering $5,000 for mentoring. Why not hire what you need done if you have money to spend?

Since you are looking at having more sites, something I have not seen mentioned is the idea to buy a site that is allready up and running, making sales. ( Of course, you do your due diligence. ) This would be set up properly, seo optimized and basicly it would take care of a lot of your headaches.

You would just have to have it set back up on your own hosting, and make sure you understand the system. Make sure you build a list and continue to work on backlinks.

Hiring someone to do what you don't know how or want to and buying a business that is allready making some money sounds like your best options.

Jeannie

Hello Canee,
My name is Joseph bka WorkingClassEntreprenuer,
The Internet Marketing Business is very vast and there are millions of differnt kinds of opportunities out here..so please don't get discouraged I learned the hard way too but kept networking and researching the internet with google till I found the perfect system to help me a beginner or just new to Internet Marketing...As any of the experienced Internet marketers in this forum will tell you you must have 3 Things to make it Work..(1) Mindset..You Must believe in the Opportunity you have choosen..(2) Patience..You must never give up because your break thru could be right around the corner and to give up you would miss it ...(3) Persistance...Yes you must be willing to work hard and stick with it..be a regular in forum like this and take the advice given and work it.To be truthfully there are thosands of ways to make money online but really it depends on what your niche is..If you have a plan or a way you want to make your money then 50% of your work is done..But if you are new to this Internet Marketing then you have to do research and find what you want to work with or try because there are a lot of systems out there that work but remember Patience is the Rule and Mindset also..To make money online you have to be persistance and really work at it once you find what it is you want to work with...
Try to find a Niche you like and a system with tools that can help you automate your business...I have been out here for a while now and have seen and met alot of people in these forums ..Are you on twitter yet if so look me up I would enjoy helping you figure it out ...If you have some ideas about what you want to do try google out it can be a big help
Hope this will help you out and look forward to seeing you here again

Coming from an e-commerce background, I would highly recommend that you read this thread carefully.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum22/461.htm

Ecommerce 101

As far as sellling physical products are concerned, most merchants rely on SEO followed by PPC. In contrast, affiliate sales and e-mail marketing usually make up a very small percentage.

Most of what I want to say have already been covered by others. I agree that "Proudly Canadian" is a very dangerous banner to put on your homepage as it may deter US buyers.

Jewelry is very personal and is notoriously difficult to sell on the Internet since many people would prefer to look at and handle the items first. It would be easier if you sell branded jewelry. Therefore, it is completely possible that you have choosen an extremel tough niche.

StoresOnline appears to be a hosted shopping cart solution. It means that you will probably not be able to move your shop to another host. I think you should consider using PPC to test out your conversion rate before taking things further.

Good luck

Derek

Almost everyone has struggled with the own business, online or offline, at some point. Don't forget that if you weather the hard times, you may not realize it but you have gained a great deal of knowledge already that can be applied down the road. Even if it is just learning from mistakes at this point, it is valuable knowledge that can benefit you in the future.

I don't know the extent of the options you've tried, but a classic mistake that many people make when trying to make money online is not focusing on one or two things. By jumping around from program to program they are never giving one strategy a chance to succeed. Succeeding in any business, again online or offline, takes both persistence and patience.

Good luck with your future projects.

A few more replies to comments ...

Jason, sorry for your negativity stemming from bad experiences attempting to coach/mentor people. Yes I agree that lots of people won't do anything even if you give them examples and step-by-step instructions. That's unfortunate. However, these places trying to sell us "how-to-get-rich-online" courses are NOT colleges or universities. They offer no diploma or degree. All most of them want is to get as much money out of as many "suckers" as possible while barely telling them anything useful. There are so many scams and cons out there that it is nearly impossible to trust any of them, and so that's when I came up with the "help me make $ 10K and I'll give you $ 5K" offer. It is a serious offer, but in most cases it was my way of turning things back around on all the high-pressure sales pitches wanting me to spend $ 10K up front on the "hope and dream" of making $ 50K a year online ... basically my way of saying "Well if your method is so sure-fire fantastic, then prove it!".

As far as listening goes, just because we are not jumping to do everything everyone says to do, doesn't mean we aren't listening. We are listening. FYI the VAST MAJORITY of people who have seen our site like the layout, colour scheme, theme and product selection. A few people have said they don't like the colour scheme, especially the contrast, and that is likely due to poor vision rather than the colours themselves. That being said, we will be experimenting with other layouts and colour schemes.

Jeannie, we appreciate the idea to go buy a website that is making money. Not a bad idea at all. However, we are nearly broke, nearly maxxed out on credit, and our income is near-zero now due to cutbacks and layoffs from our day jobs. The website was supposed to be our chance at financial independence, to give the royal kiss-off to managers and bosses in the traditional J-O-B (Just-Above-Broke) market, but so far we have spent about $ 8K on getting it going and made ZERO! If we don't find a way to MAKE some money soon, we might be homeless a couple of months from now. We really don't have ANY money to spend right now, including on credit. We are both desperately searching for traditional J-O-B's again right now too because the website isn't producing any income.

Joseph, we have mindset, patience and persistence galore ... but success online also requires a huge learning curve and substantial financial ability to ride out the 2 years of next-to-nothingness that most people say comes before a decent income gets going. I have been learning all this stuff as fast as possible, but we are pretty much broke right now so we don't know if we can survive long enough to get to the decent income part.