Website Traffic vs. Website Sales

by Rita
(Portland, OR )

This is more of a response to Kim Isner’s (Galena, Ohio USA) post than a new subject. However, after writing this I surmised that it was much too long for a comment.

What Rena offers in this website is more practical and important information in one place than you may realize.

Within my diverse background I have had a website design business. Note I said “have had”. In the 90’s the web was new enough that there weren’t 400 million websites, getting listed was not a big deal, not as technical.

I was between businesses, web sites were just becoming hot and I had Champion Field Trial Dogs. I bred, trained, and competed Labrador Retrievers for about 18 years as a hobby (?).

I’m telling you this to give you a very short background. I bred a litter about every two years and in my home town the puppies were sold before they hit the ground. People knew me; my veterinarian gave me referrals; and people happily laid out between 500 and 800 dollars for my puppies.

Then I moved.

I had to figure out how to sell the pups living in Northern Minnesota so I learned how to design and publish a website. Man, you can’t believe how much traffic I had and did very little to “market” the website.

All my customers drove from metro areas just to visit. I couldn’t believe it; I’m still amazed. I ended up with about 25 happy website design accounts, it didn’t hurt that a large newspaper out of Duluth owned a bunch of small town newspapers and needed help designing websites.

Ok, now the www is a whole new world and it changes so fast that it is really tough to keep up with.

Rena is right about the social networking aspect. I do a lot of monitoring of the marketing world. I read how the “big boys” are struggling with marketing; but what the bottom line is that they are banding together through their associations to learn new marketing techniques and what keeps repeating over and over is social networking.

Blogs are now really very easy to produce and free!! There are many publisher tools, meta-tag generators, tips, etc. that are free for anyone to use for the purpose of improving their positions on search engines.

And here is the BUT . . . even with tons of traffic, are you going to make sales?

In the case of Kim’s “Gospel Message Bracelet” I personally would go to every large church I could find (many churches have gift shops) and spiritual bookstores I could find, and make a consignment deal with them.

It’s that “niche” that Rena refers to.

I often wonder what the real true sales receipts are from jewelry websites.

I’ve had more luck with selling in stores, but I use the website in different ways to solicit stores and get the word out about my jewelry.

The website is new and the traffic hasn’t been to bad, but most of it came from the blog and the blog traffic is coming from the directories I listed in.

I am under the impression that the traffic is other jewelry making enthusiasts than people looking to purchase jewelry.

It all takes a lot of work and a great deal of time which I have right now.

It still goes back to “never give up” if it’s what you love to do. Read, learn, study and try everything until you find what works for you.

My best to all!

Rita
Private Stock Jewelry
Private Stock Jewelry Blog