Selling Products on a Busy Site
March 18, 2007 – 9:01 pm
Things have been quiet around here a lot. Besides my business work, getting the garden ready (yes I grow my own!) and trying to really take some time to relax, I've finally managed to start putting some hours aside each week to work on one of our current sites. I figured it would be a good idea to document what's being done and how. I've no problem talking about this site as we have a unique product (well besides the owner selling it too!) and an established site.
To start with, the site is about Tattoos. The original content for the site came from an NPB site which we paid for someone to do. This gave us the core keywords/phrases and about 600 pages - no we never put 600 pages online! We then knocked up our own design, checked with a friend whether we could sell his Tattoo flashes for a cut, and set up the web site. I took the the best pages from the NPB generated site for our links directory, added in a few articles, some Clickbank eBook links, the Tattoo flashes (each flash contains around 5-8 tattoos) and finally, last year we got 4 Text Link Ads.
At first, the adsense pulled in over $100 a month but it's now died down to $30-40 a month. With the visitors almost doubled now, it's a pretty poor return, however Tattoo adverts are exceptionally low payers. Our main selling point is to be the Tattoo Flashes, yet we've sold very few of these. My own conclusion is that this was due to each Flash containing between 5 and 8 Tattoo designs on. So after a chat with the designer, previous postings on here, and a bit of planning, we're now working on setting up the site to sell the complete group flash and the option of just individual tattoos.
We'll start the site with the original tattoos, which come to 76 single tattoos plus 12 group flashes. Of course this has meant planning it so that it's easy to navigate, allow people to use a basket to hopefully encourage buying of more than one design, and then a better reporting system to us so that we know what they buy (I messed the current script up so I have to go into PHPMyAdmin to find out the order details!). Luckily we've already got another 2-3 flashes to add, one of which is the signs of the zodiac (so that's 12 more alone!), so a further 20+ to add over the months.
Okay that's the background on what I've been doing. I'll start posting up as I go through things, a bit of documenting on the site, questions I may also have and so on. I'm trying to concentrate on one site at a time right now so I hope it doesn't go too boring 
3 Responses to “Selling Products on a Busy Site”
Sounds like a good plan, particularly with the site being already established and promising traffic levels - good luck.
By Tom on Mar 19, 2007
Cheers Tom. There's a lot of bits to run through, hopefully the work will pay off
By Sarah on Mar 19, 2007
Best of luck. btw, you need targeted traffic for selling products on that site, if you don't know already.
By Timberland on Apr 17, 2007