It’s Been Over a Month and I Have Gotten 0 New Customers
Something weird has happened over the past month or so. I started a business and was very happy with the success. The very first day I started running advertising, I woke up and saw a purchase for over $1,000 in my PayPal account. At first I thought there was some mistake but I verified it - I had received an order. Eight days later, another $600 showed up in my PayPal account. Awesome. $1600 in 8 days, with almost no effort. I mean, the site wasn’t even done yet. There were products with no descriptions - some of the info pages were completely blank and other pages weren’t even created yet. And I had put together the PPC campaign in about a day. But something weird happened after that. I have not gotten 1 customer since then!
My Initial Sales
I was totally lucky that anyone wanted to buy from the store in the first place. I mean, the site wasn’t even complete. I had given the design specs to my programming company and had my outsourcers put together the product list. I just provided some basic direction so it was not a complete site. It didn’t matter - I just wanted to make it live. And I was too Lazy to fix it. I just wanted to see how some ads would do so I put together a small PPC campaign and directed them to the site.
I think I had a conversion rate of about 0.75% after those first couple sales. I figured that with just a little more advertisement and work, I could make a nice little bit of passive income on that site.
- My gross margin was about 40% and the net margin was around 30%. so I made almost $500 right off the bat.
- I could have $65K a year with about $20K in profits
Some Small Changes to Make Some Big Money
I figured all I needed to do was fix up the site, add content where none existed, clean up the site layout, and optimize the PPC ads. If I did that and started some more advertising, there was no reason I couldn’t:
- Get 3X as much traffic, which would bring up revenues and profits to about $200K and $60K
- Double conversion rate to get sales and profits up to $400K and $120K
I realize that it’s a bit ambitious but anything short of that is still a good thing but something happened.
Actually, Nothing Happened
I haven’t made one sale in over a month. Not a single one. And I’ve gotten almost 2000 visitors since then. What happened?
- Holiday Season?
- Lightning striking with the first sales (twice?)
Honestly, I don’t know. I think I should have gotten some more sales but I haven’t.
What happened?
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3 Responses to “It’s Been Over a Month and I Have Gotten 0 New Customers”
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January 7th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
I started amazon affiliates in late november and in december I had 30+ sales, then after christmas things just dropped off, and nothing.
Maybe people just don’t want to buy in January?
January 7th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Without being able to take a gander at your site and see what you’re selling it’s hard to say…
(it was a worth a shot to ask, eh?)
Seriously though, can you get anything out of your web statistics? This may be obvious questions but nonetheless…. Did the first couple sales come in via a very very different and much more focused PPC keyword? Is your site structured in such a way that you can tell whether people are interested but getting turned away because of price? Did a competitor pop up at about the same time you went live that is undercutting or out marketing you? Is your product line such that you can come up with a hook to get site visitors to sign up on a web form for some sort of free report or add’l information so that you can follow-up with them even if they don’t buy from you immediately?
best of luck,
-jr
January 8th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Sir Jorge - That’s pretty good work with the Amazon Affiliates. Unfornately, I got no sales in December either so it’s not just a drop-off of post-holiday sales.
Josh - I had looked at all the stats I could have and there is nothing that indicates where the problem might have occurred. I appreciate some of your thoughts. You obviously have a good bit of knowledge and experience.