Posted: Wed May 19, 2004 4:05 pm Post subject: Getting visitors, but few sales.
Good morning everybody!
You all have such great advice in these forums. I have been looking up different subjects that I have questions on and have tried to use some of the suggestions to improve my site. However, though I am getting a lot of visitors (over 500/day) in less than one month of having it up and running, I am making very few sales, and so far losing a lot of money in PPC advertising, and have been lending my advice in dating forums to advertise for free. I am getting an average of a 20% CTR, to the merchants I represent, from what I can see by networks that show impressions and clicks. I am hoping one of you experts, can give me tips on turning more of those clicks into sales. I appreciate any suggestions you have and can take the criticism.
I started this after leaving a very stressful job as a 911 dispatcher that I had to leave due to harassment by a boss. Now I am praying that I can make this and further sites work so I can be a stay at home mom and never face an atmosphere like that again. I got the information on the career from Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook and just printed her February newsletter to go through today as I had seen suggested in another posting. Any time you can share with me to give me a little helpful boost is greatly appreciated.
Can you give us an idea of the average page views your visitors are viewing?
You may also want to check into the Google Adsense for your site, as it may be a popular and financially productive way to see some quick turnaround for your site.
Do you have a sitemap that lists all the pages on your site? I could only find two articles, I would recommend more content to help build free traffic so you don't have to rely so much on PPC as well.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
First I would like to thank you for taking the time to take a look at my site. At this point, the stats from my webhost state that viewers are viewing an average of 7.81pages/visit and that I have 1.44 visits/unique visitor. You are right, there are only 2 articles so far since I just started the site in the last couple of weeks. However, I do intend to take your advice and add much more. I am working each day to come up with things to ad to the site. I do also have adsense already running on most if not all pages of the site, but I just started that 2 days ago after reading information in these forums about it.
Thank you again so much for taking your time to help.
With an average of 7.8 pages per visitor, and visitor repeat ratio of 1.44 it sounds like you are on the right track. What you may want to consider is to write reviews, in depth, on each of the programs you are offering, and take a strong recommendation as to why you recommend one over the other and why. This may involve some investment on your part to get inside each of these programs to write a really good review, but it would be worth it.
I noticed you have categories for your merchants, so you can keep the recommendations within each category, making it easier to fit merchants to what your visitors want.
Once you do this, I think you will see a decent return on your PPC investment as well a better conversion overall. BTW don't forget to ask them to sign up for those highly recommended merchants, and stress the ease with which they can cancel at anytime. Making your visitors comfortable with the merchants on your site, will make them more comfortable on the merchants site as well.
Debs _________________ Learn how to turn keyphrases into quality, well-targeted articles your visitors and SE's will love with Gary Antosh's new ebook "Web Content Made Easy!"
Thanks again for the information you have provided me. I have already written two more articles to add more content to the site as you suggested and have many more ideas outlined. By the end of the week, I intend to have at least 10 articles added. I know I need to give my visitors more information to keep them coming back and to get subscribers to my newsletter. I am still holding out hope that some of the visitors who have clicked through to my dating service merchants will eventually subscribe. I am hopeful and I have a lot of drive to make this work. I am sure I will asking more questions in the future and will always welcome your input.
Joined: 02 Apr 2004 Posts: 30 Location: North Carolina
Posted: Thu May 27, 2004 2:14 pm Post subject:
The way your page is set up, with the list of top ten recommended internet dating services and their brief reviews as "content" on the home page is very conducive to inducing clicks on the service.
However, when I was clicking through on the service's name, I was interested in getting more information, being sold, or presold on the service, not wanting to immediately fill out a form. You'll note that when you click through your links, there isn't any sales copy there, just fill-in-the-blanks forms.
Presumably, that means you can't rely on the affiliate to do your selling for you, you'll have to do that job yourself with a deeper content-rich page to warm up the seller to the point of being ready to buy and just asking "Where do I click to be able to participate in this wonderful service?"
My sense of the visitors that you will be attracting to this site is people who want more information to help them make a decision on which dating service to select. What information can you give them to help them make this decision?
I think Debs gives good advice.
I might back off on the PPC advertising for a month and use the savings to sign up for the services. Write the articles, and then once your site will convert better, experiment with paying for ads again.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
Your host: Allan Gardyne. Earning a good living from affiliate
programs since 1998.
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Private Messages
Log in
