2nd Year on my online business

bytommo1968

3.8K followers

Updated 8 years ago

Hi guys I did a post last year when my site was one year old...you can check it out here if you missed it. In it I showed how I had built my site and managed to get indexed ranked and traffic. All good so far. I also put down my proposed plan for the next year. Well that time has passed and now I will tell you how I got on.

Before giving you the stats which I know is the only reason some of you are reading this lets look at what obstacles I had to overcome, the directional changes I made and overall business changes.

Shortly after I had written that post I was approached by a local tackle dealer and asked how my eBay shop was going. Which I replied "OK but its tough keeping on top of it with working full time". He looked at me and said "there could be something in that". After a discussion we decided to go into an online business together, him with the access to a multiple supplier base and me with an established eBay shop and the know how to build the business online. I asked him to match my investment already built into the inventory and we would proceed from there.

So last September we got started and we spent the next several months adding new products to the inventory I already had on our eBay store. Things slowly started to build in relation to sales and over the last few months we have been making a reasonable profit from the shop. We are still working on building and getting the right products to sell profitably. Currently all the profit is going straight back into the business and building the inventory further.

This way we are not stressed out looking for money to pay suppliers as all stock is bought up front. With the bonus of him having a physical shop any purchases we make that don't sell can be moved to the physical store to move on at cost to recoup our money. The hope is continuing to build the store so we can make enough monthly profit to get to the point where we can take a monthly wage each. Currently we have almost doubled our investment in ten months which is not a bad return I think. I know we have a lot of work to do and I have loads of ideas to help promote the shop and products.

Now back to the website.

With the focus being put on the eBay shop the website had to take a bit of a back seat for a while. I did manage to continue periodically and add more content etc but not as much as anticipated. Currently I have 44 posts which is an extra 21 from last year just short of 2 per month. I also did a re-branding of the website in January after I noticed the original exact match domain was slipping in rankings. Possibly down to the low number of posts I was doing but I felt I wanted to brand the website anyway along with putting in a premium theme.

I changed from howtotroutfish.org to chuckingfluff.com (throwing wool and feather as in fly fishing) its a Yorkshire term and one I liked. I purchased DIVI theme from elegant themes and started to change the layout of the site etc. After a complete drop off the rankings and traffic things started to climb a month or so later.

One thing I would suggest to you is try and come up with a domain name you are going to stay with as the extra effort in changing took too much out of me to be worth it. I lost all my social markers except G+ even with the 301 redirects in place and had to start building them again. I had webmaster errors with pages not indexed or missing. It took a few weeks of tweaking and sorting things out to get it back on track.

Anyway after an initial slump things started to climb nicely until I was getting over 100 sessions a day. I had changed some of the money links to go to our eBay shop and I feel the extra traffic there helped them rank better too and making more sales.

For the stats

1)traffic made is up to 3000p/m so under my 5000 guess.

2)the blog posts was under with only 44 out of 72 estimated.

3)Adsense is making $15 p/m under my guess of $25

4)Amazon really tanked mostly because I removed a lot of the links

5)traffic to eBay has increased but I have no way currently of knowing by how much.

Looking at these you may think that I failed and I suppose I did but overall my online investment has doubled and is in the form of a wheelbarrow (as its in front of me) still to come back. Overall I feel the last year has been successful and I learned a lot about marketing but there is loads more to do.

Plans for the next year.

1) Continue to build eBay store purchase a store front template and write better descriptions and listing titles to help with conversions.

2) Look into purchasing items direct from suppliers via Alibaba etc.

3) Possible addition of Amazon store time dependent. (want one working properly before adding another store)

4) Website writing product reviews for products on eBay store.

5) Getting brand banners for website and store.

6) Setting up an email marketing plan. Having 3000+ email addresses and doing nothing with them is not productive. I must get started with working that list.

On the things I learn't thins year I think the most important was not to try and do too much. I had to drop a few things to get the others to work.

Anyway another year on and I think I have put myself in a better position to succeed going forward. Hope to be here in a years time to to provide another report. For anyone starting out take some advice concentrate on one project and give it all your time before moving on. I know that has hampered me.

All the best, Mark