More traffic = More earnings

Yes, it’s that simple.  When you are operating a website that is monetized with CPC (cost per click) advertising, or any kind of advertising, the more traffic you get on the site, the more money you will make.  Let’s face it, if you get 100 page views per day and earn a certain amount from that, you will certainly earn more if you suddenly get 1,000 page views per day!  No way to deny that.

So, there are two tricks that you need to pull off.  One way to get more traffic is by bringing more people to your site.  Another way to get more traffic, and the one I will talk about in this post, is by having those same visitors look at more pages on your site.  The longer they stay on your site, the bigger the chance that they will respond to the advertising present.  Also, if you are doing some CPM (cost per thousand views) advertising on the site, the move pages they view, you will automatically earn more money!

So, how can you get them to view more of your site.  Most people who surf the web will come to your page, take a quick look, maybe skim over your latest article on the site, and quickly move on to another site.  I have found a way, though, to get a few more page views, and keep people on your site longer.  I started doing this a few months ago, but I have found a way to revolutionize it and make it much easier!

On one of my sites, I have a blog, which is the main part of the site.  I also have a photo gallery that you can click over to if you want to view photos.  But, I never made a huge amount from the Gallery.  I knew it had potential, though.  I started putting links to photos from within my posts.  For example, let’s say that in one of my posts I mentioned something about Cebu City.  I would link the words “Cebu City” to a Photo Gallery of Cebu City.  Or, if I mentioned a race car, I might link to a photo of a race car that was in my gallery.  The more opportunities that I would give people to look at something else on my site, the more pages they would view, and the more odds that they would act on the ad that happened to be on one of those pages.  It also kept them surfing my site longer than they would have if I didn’t link over to that race car that they wanted to see.

All of this was OK, but it’s kind of cumbersome to have to keep putting in those links every time you write an article.  Sometimes you forget to put a link to something, and that blows the whole concept.  Well, luckily, I found a plug-in for my wordpress blog called “ALinks” which does this automatically.  What you do is that you make a list of keywords that you want to have linking to other pages.  After you have done this, every single time you type that word into your post it will link over to the page where you tell it to go!  It’s all automatic.  For example, if you enter the term “race car” into the list on ALinks, and tell it to go to a certain URL that has that race car photo, then every time that the term “race car” appears on your blog, it will link to that photo!  No need to manually do the hyperlink any longer!  Cool, don’t you think?

I just set this up on one of my blogs two days ago, and my advertising earnings on my Photo Gallery are now 10 times what they ever have been!  I consider ALinks a great success on my site!  Give it a try.

To sell online, you need a shopping cart!

When I visit any of several e-commerce forums that I check out from time to time, one of the hottest topics is always about shopping carts.  I am not talking about the physical carts that you see at your grocery store or the hardware store down the street.  I am talking about software that you will need to install on your website if you want to sell items.  Basically, the software version of a shopping cart is just the same as a physical shopping cart, hence the name.  One is just “virtual” and not physical.  But, it serves the same purpose - it allows customers to purchase a number of items all at the same time, then take them all up to the checkout to pay.  It’s that simple.

Now, there are literally hundreds of different shopping carts to choose from.  How will you know which is best for you?  Well, trial and error will play a big role.  Try a few carts out and see which you like.

I have a few tips, based on my 7 years in the e-commerce business, so let’s have a look:

• If you are selling just a few items in your store, your payment processor will probably offer a simple solution that you could take advantage of.  If you use Paypal to process payments, they have their own shopping cart, and it works OK for a small store.  I use a company called 2Checkout to process credit card payments, and they also offer a cart that works well for stores with only a few items.  For larger stores with hundreds of items to choose from, I do not recommend these simple shopping carts.
•  For stores from small to medium sized, there is a service online called “Mal’s e-Commerce” which is a shopping cart software.  This service (often called “Mal’s E”) is a good alternative.  I used it for a while in the past.  If you get too big, though, I recommend going with your own, self-hosted shopping cart.
• You can purchase shopping cart software from a multitude of suppliers.  I have seen shopping cart software ranging from $100 to $5,000, and they do all kinds of cool things.
• You can choose a free shopping cart that is competitive to the “for sale” ones mentioned in the last point.

For me, after many years in the business, I have settled on a shopping cart software called “OS-Commerce.”  OS-Commerce is a very robust solution, and I value it greatly.  I will warn you, though - the learning curve for OS-Commerce is very steep.  You can learn it, though, if you are willing to invest the time required.  One of the great things about OS-Commerce is that it is free, no cost, nothing, nada!  You can download it directly from the Internet and install it to your web server and start using it immediately.  OS-Commerce is a widely used shopping cart system, so if you need help it won’t be hard to find somebody who you can hire to help get it going.

One of the things that I love about OS-Commerce is that it is open source software.  You can go in and tinker with it, and customize it to do things that you want it to do.  It is community supported, and when one person tinkers around with it and adds a new feature, they will often offer that enhancement free to the community as a contribution so that everybody can take advantage of the new feature, if they choose.  I have been using OS-Commerce for 3 years now, and I have been very impressed with it.

When you are ready to add a shopping cart to your website and start selling things to make some money online, you should shop around.  Find out what shopping cart will best fit your needs.  And, even after your store is open for business, always remember that as you grow, your needs will change.  I upgraded to different shopping carts a number of times while my businesses grew.  Now, with OS-Commerce, I don’t think I will ever need to change again, as OSC can be customized to do anything that I may need.

Let’s face it - almost everything is seasonal

No matter what kind of business you are into, most likely it is seasonal, at least to some extent.  The e-commerce business is really no different.

Even though, I know that certain seasons mean that business will be down, when the downward trend starts showing up, I worry.  After I’ve been on the low end for a while and it’s time for things to start picking up again, I worry more.  Will my business just stay down this time, or will it come back as it always has?  It’s something you can’t take lightly.

I’ve been in business on my oldest e-commerce site for about 6 years now.  Basically, the same trend has always been followed.  I have extremely busy times for Christmas and Valentine’s Day.  By the end of May, things start moving slowly, and generally come back pretty strong in late August or early September.  That is the trend.  It’s been like that, with slight modifications for 6 years now.  So, why would I worry?  Well, when this is the way that you feed your family, worrying is human nature, I’d say.  When things are slow, you certainly wouldn’t want them to stay that way!  When it’s a busy season, you certainly hope and pray that things will keep moving just as busily after your peak season.  But, things always ebb and flow.  The river is never straight, it always has bends.

I’ll tell you one thing, though…. regardless of the seasonal ups and downs, the general trend is up.  My valleys are never as low as last year’s valleys.  My peaks are always higher than the peaks from last year.  How do I do this?  Well, the key is to always do your very best to make your customer happy.  I find this to be the case especially during peak times.  For example, my main e-store sells gift items that are given by boyfriends to their girlfriends.  In this type of business, Valentine’s Day is probably our best selling season of the year.  Well, we break our butts to make sure that we do our very best job at this time, because we want to impress our customers.  If the customer makes a mistake and forgets to order on time, we do everything humanly possible to make sure his late order is delivered on time.  If it is order too late and can’t be delivered on time, we will even tell the recipient that the lateness of the delivery was our fault.  The customer really appreciates something like this, and he knows that we will take care of him.  Because of this, he tells friends, and we pick up new customers.  So, next year, we will do even better than this year.

These days, our very slow times of year are probably matching our peak periods from a few years ago.  Our peak days now match maybe a week’s worth of business five years ago.  Growth is a good thing, and it’s an excellent measure of your success.

I keep spreadsheets that compare today’s date with last year’s same date so I can see how our sales are trending.  If you want to push yourself to be more successful, I think that would be a good tactic for you too!