[Man2u2uk]

Hi,

my website & shop is not earning any money and not alot of traffic.

i have been thinking about the following ideas of how i could solve this:

1. Ebay Shop.
2. Exapnd my website to include all types of fishing.
3. Sell advert space on my website.
4. look into use adwords and/or adsense.

you ideas would be helpful on this one.

do any of you have the same problem?

do any of you know any other ways to increase traffic?

Thanks once again

[Karl Buckland]

The best way to increase traffic is just to add more content, but you need to be aware that different types of content will attract different types of traffic.

Adding an ebay shop would add cheap content, but none of it would be quality content and it wouldn't necessarily draw the kind of traffic you want.

If you want new traffic quickly then advertising is an option, but the best way to generate new visitors and maintain interest is to add quality content on a regular basis.

[Man2u2uk]

is adwords and adsense a good way?

i tried googleing it, but there are so many peoples views i am not sure about it?

[Karl Buckland]

There's no certain answer to that. Obviously it'll generate you traffic, but whether that traffic is any good for your website will depend entirely on the terms you target.

[Man2u2uk]

Ok thanks for your help.

do you have any tips?

or any good links of interest for traffic gaining.

[James Mitchell]

Before I can help answer what you can do, I'd need a few more questions answered.

• Is your site indexed by google (and other search engines yet)?
  
• What is your current approx. unique visitors per month?
  
• How many sales have you made from (non family/friends)? [this will give and idea of your conversion ratio from search engine traffic]
  
• What keywords do you presently target?
  
• How competitive is the fly fishing resource industry?
  
• If advertising is a viable option, how much are you willing to invest? [this can be an approx. amount]
  
• Who is your specific target audience?

Now a few more site specific questions.

• Is your cart easy to navigate? [i.e. how easy is it for a visitor to find exactly what they are looking for] - it took me over 3 clicks to get to a products description -- see below * for a tip/suggestion on this.
  
• Is the design of your site/cart appealing to the target audience mentioned in #7?

Now the hardest question of all.

• Why should they buy from you instead of somewhere else?

* - my suggestion would be to keep the categories on the left side of your shop (where they are presently) and in the main content area put some "top selling products". Utilize the home page to have one click product description availablity to some items and if possible even have a one click add to cart option for them too. That way you aren't double listing categories on the main page.

Once you reply with some of the answers to those questions I'll have some traffic generation suggestions/ideas for you (I hope ).

This post has been edited by JPMitchell: 24 April 2007 - 09:10 AM

[Man2u2uk]

JPMitchell, on Apr 24 2007, 03:08 PM, said:

Before I can help answer what you can do, I'd need a few more questions answered.

• Is your site indexed by google (and other search engines yet)?
  Yes both are indexed on quite a few search engines. the website can be found alot more then the shop. the website is on dmoz whereas the shop is not
  
• What is your current approx. unique visitors per month?
  by looking at my tracker about 200 Unique visits per month
  
• How many sales have you made from (non family/friends)? [this will give and idea of your conversion ratio from search engine traffic]
  Only 5 sales from about 2000 unique visits
  
• What keywords do you presently target?
  the website and shop both target the same keywords, but mainly we focus on "Fly Fishing"
  
• How competitive is the fly fishing resource industry?
  Very competitive, thats why we mainly tried target uk mostly
  
• If advertising is a viable option, how much are you willing to invest? [this can be an approx. amount]
  well really we would like to gain maoney from advertising? we were looking into getting adsense, so that we can earn money for other peoples fishing ads
  
• Who is your specific target audience?
  mainly fisherman, but anyone who wants tackle and/or fishing information

Now a few more site specific questions.

• Is your cart easy to navigate? [i.e. how easy is it for a visitor to find exactly what they are looking for] - it took me over 3 clicks to get to a products description -- see below * for a tip/suggestion on this.
  apart from looking like our website the shops content has not been customized
  
• Is the design of your site/cart appealing to the target audience mentioned in #7?

Now the hardest question of all.

• Why should they buy from you instead of somewhere else?
  very cheap prices for high quality goods
  free delivery
  discounts

* - my suggestion would be to keep the categories on the left side of your shop (where they are presently) and in the main content area put some "top selling products". Utilize the home page to have one click product description availablity to some items and if possible even have a one click add to cart option for them too. That way you aren't double listing categories on the main page.we host our shop from ekmsystems, the shop is very customable so hopefully we should be able to add what you said to the home page, change fonts etc

Once you reply with some of the answers to those questions I'll have some traffic generation suggestions/ideas for you (I hope ).

[sypher]

Its to do with how many people are linking to your site:

www.ukfishersonlineshop.co.uk
Total - 50 Google - 1 MSN - 0 Yahoo! - 49

You need more people linking to your shop site.

[James Mitchell]

Man2uk2uk,

I'll be replying this evening, thanks for your answers.

James

[Man2u2uk]

Thanks JP

[James Mitchell]

Ok here goes my shot at answering your question and giving some advice.

• It would appear from your answer that your website NOT store is more indexed. It likely has more traffic than the store. If this is the case you have a few options. You can number 1 put more emphasis for the store throughout your site. Or number 2 you can work on the search engine optimization of the store (keywords, etc...) so that more of the desired traffic is hitting your site.
  
• 200 unique visitors is a great place to start. You'll likely want this number to increase significantly to generate sales on your shop.
  
• This is where increasing more relevant visitors will help. Presently your visitor to sale ratio is %0.25 (5/2000), that is not a very good turn on sales. I would be doing exactly what you are doing. Congratulations, recognition is half the battle.
  
• Your keywords are too broad. You need to start targeting some long tail keywords. Get more narrow, the people who will be ready to buy your products will not be people typing just fly fishing. People who are ready to buy a Gold Head fly will likely search for things like: "UK Hand Made Gold Head Fly" or something like that. So target lots of specific long tail keywords, so those people who are ready to buy something specific - your site is the most relevant and you should see your visitor to sale ratio rise the more effective.
  
• Similar to above, for you to compete in such a broad and competitive keyword grouping is like any of us trying to compete in the keywords "web design". It is just too broad. You said you are targeting specifically the UK. That is a great start. How about starting even more local. You could start targeting cities "Fly Fishing Bristol UK", "Fly Fishing London UK", etc. Part of the beauty of Long tail keyword targeting is that the more local you target the less competition there is for those keywords and the more strength it eventually gives you in the "broad" category as well.
  
• Adsense is really out of the question until you reach around 10,000 unique visitors a month. I can't remember where I read this or who told me this, but you need to have a rather high traffic site to receive any benefit from things like adsense or affiliate marketing. Large amounts of traffic will bring in the opportunity to sell advertising spots to companies and individuals too. The more traffic your site has the more people will want to buy advertising (either directly or through an exchange) for your site. The only exception to this would be if you have a relationship with a "brick and mortar" company locally who would be willing to advertise (and a very minimal rate) on your site for a little exposure. You could offer such companies a small fee that will not go up within xxx amount of time. This allows them to take the benefit of the price while the traffic is low, and then ride that benefit when the traffic is high.
  
• I asked who your specific audience was, because this is key to creating keywords. And targeting every aspect of your site to them. What do they like, what tools could draw them to your site (gallery, blog, etc...). Is there anything that this audience would love that your site could offer? If so you may have found another traffic generating niche to drive more of them to your site.

Site Specific Reply:

• You'll want to customize this to give you the best result. This may be doing my suggestion of having "top-selling" products right on the main page. This may mean moving things around until you see an increase in purchasing.
  
• Eventually if you have say 3 times the number of visitors (600+) coming to your site and you still have a very low sale to visitor ratio, there might be a design issue. The site might not be appealing to your audience, a redesign may be in order. It may also mean that your cart isn't easy to navigate, or the products they are looking for are hard to find. Searching may be flawed or non-existent, etc. It may also mean that the people coming to your site are not the right kind (as mentioned above, those ready to buy).

Hardest Question Reply:

• Of those three things only one is displayed on your main page (a discount). These three reasons should be evident at first glance on your page. Maybe a callout in the upper right (in a star or something) saying FREE SHIPPING. The discount is there so nothing needed there. Then you're tagline "All your fly fishing resources in one place" isn't really as relevant as "Great products at affordable prices". I would give that some billing somewhere too. Now your current tagline is good and I do not suggest changing it, but I bet you could tighten up your categories a bit too. For example instead of having all of the pattern groups listed first (5) and then media products and then other products. Maybe you could have just three categories listed on the left. Then when they click a main category like patterns they get a list of sub categories (nymph, lure, buzzer, dry, etc..) and then you could drop the other sub categories like (goldhead nyphm 1, nymph 2, etc..). Or something like that. That way you can have more real estate on the main page to display products, discounts, deals of the months, hot sellers, or anything else you can think.

Those are just a few thoughts and some of my ramblings. Hopefully, you can gather some ideas from that.

I should mention there are other ways to generate traffic. Here are a few more ways.

• Get lots of relevant backlinks (quality ones - high PR sites) - like fly fishing sites
  
• Spend some money on adwords and "pay" for traffic. You'd be surprised how much this'll help if done correctly.
  
• Make sure your site is Standards compliant, Accessible, and has very clean code (search engines love sites like this)
  
• You could print out fliers and see if local tackle/fishing companies would let you put them in their stores, or if they'd stick them with every order, etc..
  
• Spread the word to everyone you know.
  
• Be diligent, keep trying things until you see a trend for the positive. Continuously tweak look, layout, content, keywords, and monitor them everything closely (watching for trends)
  
• Maybe start a newsletter on your site (where more traffic is?) and then in that newsletter push things from your store, give informative information and always be quick to provide links to your store - in your site, forum, and anywhere relevant.
  
• And of course be proactive and patient - things don't turn around overnight.

Good luck!

This post has been edited by JPMitchell: 27 April 2007 - 10:34 PM

[sypher]

Great post Mitchell

[James Mitchell]

sypher, on Apr 27 2007, 11:51 PM, said:

Great post Mitchell

You taught me well Master Yoda

[marcamos]

Holy smokes James. Great reply!

[Man2u2uk]

Thank you very much for your great post

i think this will be very informative, hopefully over the next month i will try to make all of the changes you said and then look into adwords....

i don't know if you viewed my website and shop last night... but i changed all of the headings to a different colour and font.

i also changed the colour of the <hr> tag that can be seen throughout my site.

but the main problem for me will be the converting to XHTML.....

my shop is half XHTML

another thing.....

on my http://www.ukfishersonline.com/ website, the right column of every page is really wasted..

would it be a good idea to put a shop advert, a discount advert, a delivery advert and the maybe 5/10 top sellers?

then on the left hand side detach the shop link from the menu so that it sits on its own, then maybe style it different so it stands out?

This post has been edited by Man2u2uk: 28 April 2007 - 02:36 PM

[Ryan Fait]

Thanks for the link to the long tail keywords. That is very informative.

[sypher]

Thanks, i wrote it

[Ryan Fait]

Nice job! It's in my bookmarks

[Man2u2uk]

i think this will be very informative, hopefully over the next month i will try to make all of the changes you said and then look into adwords....

i don't know if you viewed my website and shop last night... but i changed all of the headings to a different colour and font.

i also changed the colour of the <hr> tag that can be seen throughout my site.

but the main problem for me will be the converting to XHTML.....

my shop is half XHTML

another thing.....

on my http://www.ukfishersonline.com/ website, the right column of every page is really wasted..

would it be a good idea to put a shop advert, a discount advert, a delivery advert and the maybe 5/10 top sellers?

then on the left hand side detach the shop link from the menu so that it sits on its own, then maybe style it different so it stands out?

[James Mitchell]

I would certainly take advantage of the space on the right column. I would list them in priority order as well. I would also try to intermingle some product adverts within the content pages of your site as well. That way you have internal promotion. So when an article is written or appears on your main page for Rods & Reels, maybe add a banner image or something of one they can purchase in your shop. It gives relevant products to the articles, relevancy = increased sale potential.