Forum Moderators: buckworks
I have an information site on a certain widget that has a good niche market and is well positioned in the search engines.
It currently has around 300 articles on the site.
The site currently has adsense on all its pages and this is currently the only source of income from the site. The income helps pay a good chunk of the mortgage but I think it could be increased if I cut out the middle man and start selling directly off the site.
I am looking to start selling off the site soon and would like to hear your views on converting from an information only site to an information / retail site.
I want to keep the 'credibility' I have developed in my niche market as an independent, knowledgeable authority on the widgets but will want to be encouraging more purchasing, how can I do this?
How should I redesign the navigation? Should I have a different navigation systems for the two areas of the site (i.e. articles and shop).
Should I drop all article article category links from the shops user interface? Should the shop category links be more dominant than the article category links?
Will simply replacing my adsense blocks with blocks that point to items in my product catalog be a good way to drive traffic to the shop part of the site?
I will be selling to only European countries, how can I generate some income from American visitors?
thanks,
Nick
Instead of morphing your existing site into an ecommerce site, you might consider developing an ecommerce site of your own and linking to it from your articles.
In this case, two might be better than 1.
I would like to use my established site reputation as an incentive to users to buy.
I would agree with akmac that you should build a seperate entity so as to allow at least a perception of independence.
In general, brand stretching is a bad idea, as consumers no longer are able to recognize your product for its main characteristics.
Your review site will loose credibility, and your products will not truly benefit from the name recognition, since the brand is now tainted. Additionally, your new product or old product/site may be hurt by bad publicity to either.
Heres a decent read on the subject [www01.imd.ch...]
How about directly approaching the advertisers, cutting out the ad middle-man? Suggest you put up some sort of ad click tracking code so you can target the sites which get the most traffic from you. They will have a greater money saving incentive to deal directly with you.
How should I redesign the navigation? Should I have a different navigation systems for the two areas of the site (i.e. articles and shop).
Depending on the presice nature of your products you might think of inserting separate order-forms on each of the relevant article-pages instead of establishing a complete shop system with shopping cart. In other words substitute your ads by such an order form.
Quite often people are only seeking for one special item and are not interested in surfing around just to save traffic-fees. We make the best conversions with those special landing pages that enable the surfer to finish their orders already on that landing page, because it comprises such a complete order form. Very user friendly.
I also offer links to the relevant shop-category-page, but hardly anone seems to use them. If you are informing about e.g. mobile phones and other electric gadgets, I doubt anoyone who wants to buy a phone is interested in being informed on ethernet-cables as well.
You might also carefully try this strategy with least effort on one or two selected pages and see if/how much it damages your authority status. You might add a visitor vote on what they think about this idea at all.
Do you intend to sell/send these products physically yourself?
> how can I generate some income from American visitors?
Traffic fees from europe to US are tremendous, if you're aiming at b2c-deals. You'd need a partner or wholeseller over there.
