Ad HustlerConfessions Of A Serial Internet Entrepreneur

I’ve owned a successful ecommerce site since before I even knew what affiliate marketing was.  One thing i’ve always done is offered extremely limited support.  My site has no phone number you can call and only a contact form.  The honest reason for this is that I never thought there was much of a need to deal with idiots asking idiotic questions on a daily basis.  It always seemed like it would be a waste of time since at one point I worked for an ecommerce site and answered the phone calls and saw first hand how idiotic they were.  Don’t get me wrong, we offer excellent service.  You get exactly what you order, delivered quickly and we accept all returns.  We under-promise and over-deliver on every order and that has lead to a very loyal customer base.

I was ordering something from another website and saw a live help popup.  It asked me if i had any questions and indeed I did so I typed my question and got live help.  I was impressed with the service and decided to look into the software that was hosting the live help popup.  It was a company called Olark.  I found it was really easy to install, full of features and cheap so a marketing test was born.  I decided to try this live help app on my ecommerce website.

To make sure things were handled appropriately, i dealt with all of the live help chats myself over the course of 3 days.  If anyone can sell someone something it’s me so I figured having myself handle the chat’s would give us the best chance of success (for a test, i’d never do it full time).

My Process:

1. Got an Olark account and installed the script (very easy)
2. I used a function called the “welcome assistant” which initiates a conversation with the website visitor after xx seconds.  I chose 60 seconds.
3. The “welcome assistant” would send out a random message from a bunch that I entered.  Example: Hi, this is {Name}.  Can I answer any questions or help you find anything?
4. If someone answered the “welcome assistant” i would get the message in my AIM client and chat there.

One of the things that is kind of cool about these chats is that you can actually see what the person is looking at.  Just like if you were a salesperson at a store and guide them towards the best product (or the most profitable).

My test results (this isn’t the most scientific of case studies):

Time: 3 Days (Approx 24 hours logged into live chat)
Chats: 16
Increase in Immediate Sales: 0

Observations:

• The vast majority of visitors have no interest in contact by the site, however, some obviously do.
• Most of the people who want to chat are tire kickers aka window shoppers.
• None of the people I spoke to actually bought.
• A few of the people I spoke to were super appreciative of the help I gave and told me they would only buy from us from now on – but they didn’t buy anything after our chat so either they are lying, or will be buying in the future (this is where tracking becomes difficult)
• People who initiate a chat seem to spend a LOT more time on the site then people who don’t.
• People want advice about what they should do or what they should buy.

Overall, i’d consider this test a fail for live chat.  Olark is a pretty sweet service though.  Maybe it would work better on a higher priced more complicated product or service.

I would like to try another case study in the future where I put the live help on an affiliate landing page and see how it increases conversions.

Have you tested live chat on a site you own?  If so, did it lift your conversions?

P.S. My Favorite Live Chat:

Website Visitor: do you ssuck dick
Me: Yes
Website Visitor: i love yo ass
Me: thanks it is pretty sweet
Website Visitor: i was just wondering since we have some cemminstree can i ha’ yo numba showty
Me: 867-5309

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Disclaimer: NO compensation was received for mentioning Olark in this post

If you’ve been following AdHustler.com for a while you may remember the case study I was doing on DataFeed sites.  Recently a blog reader asked me for an update on this case study so here it is.  If you need to catch up here is part 1, part 2 & part 3 of this case study.

Clicks Through a Product Affiliate Link: 5,988
Click Through Rate: 11.85%
Sales: 26
Conversion Rate: 0.43%
Gross Sales: $909.95
Commissions: $296.43
Ad Monies: $19
Total Revenue: $315.43
Total Cost: ~$27-$30

As you can see traffic has grown significantly since January.  The site gets a surprising amount of traffic considering there is no unique content. 2,680 pages are indexed at this time.

My overall opinion of datafeed sites like this one is that they can be profitable but they aren’t going to make you rich.  It’s nice having passive revenue rolling in but to make a serious income off of these types of sites you are going to need a lot of them.  Not every one is a winner either and there is no way to predict which ones are going to do well.  I did another datafeed site that has about 8,000 pages indexed and gets less traffic then this one and makes practically zero revenue.  An interesting experiment would be to knock out one datafeed site per day for a year but that would be a huge commitment.  I bet you’d find some serious winners if you made that many sites.

What are your results with datafeed sites?

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If you missed part 1 & part 2 of the Building an Audience With Datafeed Sites, make sure you go back and catch up.

After I built the site & got some links I just let it sit around for a while and get indexed.  It got indexed pretty fast.  Initially a couple thousand pages were indexed.  After a bit that fell down to 271 pages.  I suspect there was some sort of duplicate content penalty that caused me to lose those indexed pages.  Regardless, the total number of indexed pages has remained around 270-300.  The site has been online since approximately January 2010.  Over that course of time the traffic has grown steadily month over month.  Below you will find traffic stats since January.

I hope to see this traffic grow continually month over month going forward.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that this site has not converted well AT ALL.  Here are some stats since January 2010:

Clicks Through a Product Affiliate Link: 659
Click Through Rate: 7.58%
Sales: 6
Conversion Rate: 0.91%
Gross Sales: $197.40
Commissions: $29.61
Total Cost: ~$27-$30

As you can see this has NOT been a super profitable venture to date.  I’ve made back around what I spent to create the site.  The positive side is that since this is organic SEO & the traffic keeps growing, i’m sure that more sales will trickle in over time.  The site certainly won’t lose money.  The question becomes can you create more of these sites and scale them?  I think that you can.  Although i’m basing that on theory alone, I believe that if you make a lot of these types of sites you are eventually going to hit a profitable one.

This site is getting traffic so i’m going to work on getting a better conversion rate and figuring out other ways to monetize the traffic and report back to you with what I find.

Please post your thoughts in the comments.

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In Part 1 of this case study I discussed what I did to setup this datafeed site.  Part 2 is what I did to promote it.

I’m going to be honest with you.  I don’t have crazy blackhat methods.  I just have some simple, straight forward things I do to try to get a site to rank in the search engines.

The first thing I concentrated on was simple on-page SEO.  I made sure that every post had appropriate title tags & meta data as well as H1 tags (using a plugin).  I also made sure that no affiliate links were visible, everything was cloaked.

Next I needed to get some links.  I like social bookmarks as i’ve had a lot of success with them.  I almost always use Amit aka Red_Virus for social bookmarks.  You can order his services HERE.  Tell him Ad Hustler sent you and I guarantee you’ll get awesome service (no, i’m not making a commission).  I sent all of the social bookmarks to the main domain.  Ideally, I would have liked to get a few social bookmarks to each interior page but I haven’t been able to come up with a good & easy way to do that yet.

I decided that I want to diversify the links a bit so I went over to Fiverr.com and ordered an edu link package.

That’s it.  I didn’t do anything else to promote this site.  After completing these steps I still wasn’t indexed and had not received any traffic yet.  I decided to just leave the site alone for a little while and see what would happen.

Excluding the datafeed script because i’m using that on multiple sites, my total investment in this site so far would be around $32

Part 3 will discuss whether or not I got any traffic or sales.

Any questions so far?

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I like to keep things diversified so i’m willing to try anything that can run on autopilot once it’s setup.  I started thinking about playing with datafeed sites when Nick Mattern put out Review Plugin For WordPress.  I consider him a friend of mine so I bought his software and started playing around.  (Please keep in mind that even though this is the software I used for this case study, Nick no longer owns the product and I’m not sure about the quality of the newest versions).  Here are the steps I used to build a datafeed site:

Step 1 – Pick A Niche

The first thing I chose was the niche I was going to use to build out this site.  I considered different affiliate programs at CJ, Linkshare & Shareasale. Part of my consideration was how many items they had in their datafeed as well as how much information the datafeed contained.    I eventually settled on 1 affiliate program that had about 3,000 products in their datafeed and the niche was based around fashion with a decent commission rate (20%).

Step 2 – Buy Domain

I bought a domain with the main keywords related to the niche located within the domain name.

Step 3 – Setup WordPress & Datafeed Plugin

Setting up wordpress is pretty self explanatory.  I used the “Review Plugin For WordPress” as my datafeed importer.  Quite honestly I only wanted the software for this feature.

After I cleaned up the database file that I downloaded from the affiliate network I started the import process.  The process of importing a datafeed to wordpress is pretty simple.  You need to setup a template which grabs all of the information out of the database and places it in the correct place on the page.  Here in the post template I used:

Title of Post: [PRODUCT NAME]

Body of Post:

[PRODUCT NAME] – [$PRICE]

[PRODUCT IMAGE LINKED WITH AFF LINK]

Product Description: [PRODUCT DESCRIPTION]

[PRODUCT NAME] is currently in stock at [MERCHANT NAME]

For more information about this item please click here. <—AFF LINK

If you have already purchased [PRODUCT NAME] please leave a review below.

This post template would allow all 3,000 products in the database to have the same look when they get published to WordPress.  Rather then publishing everything at once I opted for a drip feed.  I let the posts feed into the wordpress site over a period of 6 months rather then all at once so that it would look more natural to search engines.

Tip:  Since i’m hosting this particular site on a crappy shared hosting plan, I found that the import process would continually freeze up.  I guess the process takes a lot of resources on the server.  The fix I found was to break the datafeed file into smaller files and import that way.  I just wanted to mention that in case you hit a glitch like I did.

After this step my datafeed site had posts and new ones appeared throughout each day.

Step 4 – Find a Decent WordPress Theme

I used SkinPress – Simple & Free

Step 5 – WordPress Plugins

Here you will find a linst of the plugins I used & why:

Review Plugin For WordPress – Used for importing the datafeeds

Akismet – To keep the Spam under control

All in One SEO Pack – To auto-create appropriate SEO tags.

Link Cloaking Plugin – This allowed the tons of affiliate links all over the site to look like internal links ie domain.com/goto/1 – I thought it would be better for SEO then rogue affiliate links all over the place.

Scheduled M.I.A.s – I was having an issue with the scheduled posts actually going live when they were supposed to.  I kept getting the error “Missed Schedule” so this plugin fixed that issue.

WordPress Suicide – To get my post template correct I needed to try it a few times.  To retry I needed to remove everything that got imported into the database.  This plugin can clear your posts database.

WP Super Cache – Speeds up WordPress when you have tons of posts.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Allowed each product listing to show several links to similar products.  Kind of like an Amazon cross sell.

———————–

That’s everything I did to get the site online.  Next was promotion which will be Part 2 of this case study.

Any Questions?

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