Forum Moderators: buckworks
It's largely a content site, with most visitors finding it when looking for certain brands and models of widgets. I also sell full-page ads for retailers who sell these widgets.
Recently I added an online store to sell widgets on my own. I now have a few dozen widgets from five different manufacturers. I average just shy of two orders a day.
A member of this forum suggested that I have thumbnails and Buy buttons on the home page of the site. The problem with that idea is that it misrepresents what the site actually is, or at least that's my thinking.
Is it possible to successfully integrate an online store into a content site and, if so, does anyone have any tips on how to do so?
Thanks for any replies.
You decide where to draw the line of course but may I ask what you had in mind for drawing traffic into the store section? This seems like a plausible way to approach it. If you don't want big gaudy images and buttons perhaps you could simply add "Store" to the navigation or turn the images into spot ads and stuff to one side or the other?
I have "Online Store" as one of the nine main navigation links. I've also incorporated links to the accessories I sell into the product pages that people visit.
For example, if I have an XYZ accessory that goes with an Acme 123 widget, I have a final paragraph on the Acme 123 widget page that says, "Looking for a [type of accessory] for your Acme 123 widget? We have [link]XYZ accessories[/link] for all models of Acme widgets."
From my stats, it looks like a fair number of people viewing the pages for products I'm selling are getting to those pages from inside my site. The visitors coming from AdWords are probably more motivated, but they're not buying at the rate I expected. Also, even though I'm first-page on Google for many phrases related to the products I'm selling, the number of visitors from organic searches isn't that high.
The suggestion from the WW poster I mentioned seemed to suggest that I have an online store that _looks_ like an online store. If that's the case, then I need to redesign those pages without having the visitors think they've been redirected to another site.
Any further replies, suggestions, etc are much appreciated.
I understand and that's not what I was thinking. There are a couple of ways I can think of to integrate the store into the content.
1) Context sensitive block ads in the right hand column. These could be automated to tie into an existing CMS (if that's what you're using), added using a ad package software (several options out there), or added by hand. Adding by hand is a pain if you have a lot of pages. Well the tracking is at least.
2) You can do as you noted - using well crafted text links (choose the anchor text well and you could be well-rewarded by the SEs). These are quite flexible and can be sewn into the copy if you wish. You can make them blatant in the copy like so "...this widget has been rated number one by the independent widget reviewers (get your own widget here)" or less obvious by making the widget name the anchor text.
Re: the Adwords campaigns and conversion. If you're using Adwords, you may want to think about custom landing pages that are designed to sell and look less like a typical cart product page. The reason is that you've spent money to get the potential client in on a particular keyword, I assume directly related to a product or product category, in hopes of selling that one thing to them. Make it as easy for them as possible.
I'm walking something of a fine line with this, as the products I'm selling are products the stores that advertise on my site sell as well. I justify what I'm doing by telling the store owners that: a) the $100/year price I charge them is the most inexpensive PPC advertising they can buy; b) the amount of items I sell is very low, so I'm not in competition with them; and c) they're already in competition with every other store that advertises on my site.
The idea of having products on the right side of every page is great. I'll try to figure out how to incorporate that while having it still look like part of the design.
Looks like I have a lot of re-designing and re-writing to do.
Maybe I'd stay because you're ridiculously under priced for the service you provide.
You might consider picking which revenue stream has the greatest income potential for you- ecommerce or advertising- and focus on improving it.
The stores on my site get anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 views per month, so they're paying much less than one cent per view of their full-page ad. For some stores the $100 is serious money; for others it's petty cash.
So far no store owner has objected to me selling some items on the site. They're getting new customers, so they're happy.
The process of getting stores on the site, creating ads for them, and then getting renewals is very time-consuming. That's why I thought that engaging in ecommerce to a limited degree would bring in sufficient additional revenue to compensate for the time and money I've invested in this site.
I currently have a banner advertiser (another widget store) who's paying me $2000 a month for banner ads on nearly 1400 pages. No store owners are objecting to that.
In this case, you could reap the benefits of ecommerce sales while strengthening your relationship with advertisers-instead of potentially weakening it with direct competition.
You know your business model better than I do-I apologize if I'm stepping out of bounds. As a vendor-I hate it when one of my suppliers starts competing with me ;-).
Profit margins within my niche are very slim. My prices are on the lower end of the spectrum, and my profit is usually about 10% of the total transaction. On a few items it's 20%.
That's the case with most of the stores on my site. One of them had an affiliate program that I tried, but it only paid 2-3% of the profit. There were days when I would make no money at all, days where I'd make $5, and there was one day when I made 65 cents.
I guess I'm going to have to see how this shakes out. If I turn the site into a full-blown ecommerce site, I could see the advertisers getting upset. If it's less in-your-face, I wouldn't expect most advertisers to object. Most of the advertisers are not doing online sales; they're advertising on my site to get additonal foot traffic and phone calls.
If I can reach a point where I get an average of five orders a day and keep increasing the number of paying advertisers, I'll be very happy.
I wonder if there might be an opportunity here to sell them "exclusive rights" to a page for advertising? Certain pages on your site might be big converters for them. If they really want that traffic/visibility without competition from you (or others) then they may be willing to part with extra $$ to have space exclusively to themselves. Just a thought.
A possible solution to this could be to direct adwords to a seperate onlineshop you setup under a new domain name. Then you hopefully have sales from visitors coming via adwords and you can link to the shop from your content site (using ad space like your paying advertisers). Also the relationship to your advertisers could be bettered as you now compete on the ame level.
It's true that the AdWords campaigns have not been doing well. But the sales from within my site have been doing fairly well, especially considering that I only offer a very few products.
It may be that the visitors coming through AdWords are confused about what the site is. I asked some customers yesterday how they found the products on my site--search engines, browsing my site, AdWords, etc--and one told me that he found it while searching. His comment was that my prices were great, service was exceptional, but that I didn't have enough products.
If I start a whole new site, I start all over. My idea now is to have the content site pages contain one link to the online store in the navigation menu, and some anchor text within individual content pages where applicable. I still have to think hard about something as in-your-face as product thumbnails on every page, as lorax suggested.
Once the visitor is at the product pages, the look of the site will be similar (so they don't feel like they've been taken to a different site), but have different navigation links, have product thumbnails, and in general have the look of an ecommerce site.
Maybe I'm spitting in the wind here, but I've spent four years building this site to this level of traffic. There has to be a way to make money from more than just one avenue.
Or maybe I'm just pigheaded.
Perhaps sacrifice a 100X100 area of each of your page for:
1) a 80X50 product image
2) name and price (perhaps +category) of the product
3) wrap these 2 in a box, with the header of the box as "related product".
Do it for each of your 15 of your products, and place it across the top 120 most read article page. You don't even need to alter it if you have to. Just mysqlexport out the 120 article content area, and slot them in, and jot down the 120 articleid so you can remove them after the trial period.
Test to see if you can achieve your sales goal in 1 week time. If it is successful, I would suggest you spend 2 weeks doing very little, and spend the majority of your time to expand from 2 dropshippers to about 20.
Some of your advertisers may be upset. However if you are bringing more products, it will create more revenue stream for you in my opinion.
I can't say for certain, but in my opinion, your regular visitors that don't like this feature, would probably shut off your product add mentally, as you have great content for the site.
Urban
The advertisers I have on my site now for the most part realize the value. My frustration lies with those who sign up for the free trial I offer, get those page views, but expect new customers to tell them precisely how they found the stores. Few people remember the name of the website; they just remember that they saw the stores on the internet.
There's a certain limitation to the amount of revenue I can bring in from the ecommerce section. Given the small margins on products, it doesn't seem worth it to me to spend a lot of time adding $20 items to my site.
I'm going to continue to push forward with the online store as well as the advertising ends and see if they can't coexist.
I'd be interested to know how you tackle the problem of your existing or potential customers confusing ad content/links with your own services
I was wondering, for all your advertisers, does any of them have service products? (SEO, for a broad example). Or can you brainstorm up some pay-per-leads idea in collaborations with them? If a customer from your website register on their store, you get $5 for example, or if a customer orders 20 usb flash drives with their own custom logo, that you get a 3% cut, or $20 leads?
Mass-email your advertsiers and see what idea they can come up with as well would be my suggestion.
With that many page views a month, there must be other good ways to monetize it!
Urban
