Need Realistic Numbers From Expert

How Long Does It Take New Site To Do Well

[JoeHouse]

Hello All

I have a new website about 5 weeks old (meaning submitted to engines).

Assuming that this site has done all the things necessary to give it the best opportunity to succeed, realistically (in real time) how long does it usually take to start seeing extremely good traffic and several orders a day?

I would love to hear from those of you who have had experience in ecommerce sites that can appreciate what I am talking about as well as share in the frustration of owning a new site and having to wait.

I thank you all in advance for your response.

[PatrickDeese]

> how long

It very much depends on your niche. The simple fact that you've said that it has been "submitted to engines" tells me that you haven't done your home work.

I haven't submitted URLs to search engines for years.

You need links. How many links depends on your niche, big difference between trying to sell web hosting via an affiliate program or trying to sell $smalltown widget wax.

If you are in a less competitive niche, you could start ranking within days and get sales right away. If you want to rank for web hosting, you might need 15,000 links and 3 years.

[Essex_boy]

Thats a difficult question to answer depends on quite a ot a lot, dont expect many sales with under a 100 a day coming through though.

[anar]

Our website is called <snip>.com

Took a few weeks of hard work, swapping links with other sites, to be the rank 1 for the search term - <snip> - on google.

Definitely, not simple.

-Ana

[edited by: Woz at 12:41 am (utc) on May 25, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs or Specifics please, see Tos#13 [/edit]

[robjones2]

its also more than your search engine position, the design/useability of your website, and adequate product/service information.

commercial issues such as the online demand for your product/service, your pricing, your delivery terms etc are all factors that consumers would use to determine whether to buy.

[JoeHouse]

Why is it when ever we discuss links, traffic, sales, roi it always appears the reference is google? What about high ranking in MSN, Yahoo and all the others? Has there been proof that Google makes or breaks a website's success?

[mblair]

It's mostly because Google's marketshare of total searches is so high in comparison. I have keywords top ranked on MSN for example that generate almost no traffic.

It is possible to succeed in an online business relying on jsut Yahoo and MSN traffic but you'll need a really nice conversion ratio of whatever visitors you get.

Thankfully Yahoo traffic seems to convert well for many things. MSN -- sometimes its hard to get enough to make a good judgement statistically :-)

Hopefully it gets more balanced as the healthy competition would be good for all and create more options for the search engine optimizer (as well as more work to do because some ignore everything but Google now)

[iloveu]

For our site, Yahoo is no use. Most traffic and sales comes from Google and Froogle, some comes from MSN and other sites. We have a Yahoo Store registered with Yahoo Directory ($$$), its sales comes from Yahoo Shopping, but the traffic is slim.

[otc_cmnn]

Work on getting relevent incoming links that will generate clicks as well as passing pagerank. Until you have many incoming links you won't be on the googlebots regular crawl.

Get your products into Froogle and other comparison engines.

Start selling stuff on eBay. If you do it right this will also generate traffic to your site - but beware the TOS, bend the rules but don't break them.

GENERATE MORE CONTENT! Always find new ways of generating more content for the googlebot to eat up. You need to get 10000+ pages saturated before you can start dreaming about luxuries like a day off.

Start buying some traffic. It will get you started with some sample data to insure things are converting. Do buy the expensive keywords. Focus on the 3 word combos for 10 cents until you know what you are doing.

Read read read. Knowledge is key.

If you are new to the game, I'd say you need to work hard at it for at least a few of months before you'll start seeing significant sales.

Hope that helps, good luck with your venture.

[abertone]

Are you doing any PPC until your natural listings kick in?

-ABertone

[meg8]

I think it depends so much on your niche. My product sells a little all year round but goes off the charts at Christmas. I think you will need a year, or maybe two years to look back and judge whether you were doing well, for your market, or badly.

Also a busy time of year seems to give me a boost in the rankings and adds loads of people to my email list.

I made my website, pretty much ignored it for a year and then spent a year making it better and am happy with the rate of growth. Don't give up for the first two years.

[jweighell]

Trying to think back, I think it was about a year before my site started to do *well*.

PPC click really helped me get started though - this gave me a stream of well qualified traffic right from the start.

Experimenting with PPC for different keywords also gives a good idea of which things sell well and are easy to promote, and of course, which things aren't!

[hfwd]

Getting back to the original question of how long it takes a website to do well:

in our experience, it always take 3 to 5x longer than you expect, so be patient! It's funny that sometime it just takes a long time for something to "percolate" through people's minds. Magazine ads didn't help either - however, cpc ads and some cpm ads did help.

[Rugles]

If you follow many of the recomendations you find around here, spend a thousands dollars on directories. You are talking 6 to 12 months before you can expect decent traffic and good rankings for some fairly competitive terms.

[abertone]

With PPC, I can usually see sales immediately. It takes 2-3 months or more to learn which key phrases convert and refine the site. For natural listings, we have experienced success in as little as 3 months and as much as 12 months.

When we first start a new site and are dedicating a budget to PPC, we generally run a promo to collect email addresses. Even if they don't buy on the first visit, if we get them on our mailing list they can become a customer in the future.

-ABertone

[jsinger]

Many sites never turn a profit. I see plenty that don't have a chance. Dumb products, too expensive (or more often, too cheap), terrible navigation. Many categories are just overpopulated.

Often nowadays the newbie is competing with brick/mortar people who have immense advantages.