One of the biggest problems in running an Internet business seems to be in taking it to the next level. By that I mean that many sites eventually get to the point where they make some money, but profits and sales level off, and the owner can’t figure out what to do to get rich from the site. As an example of stagnation issues, I currently have this problem with my CheapFlowers.com website. It got to the point 4-5 years ago where it started making a profit for me (around $5000/month), but I can’t ever seem to get it to have more than the same 50-100 orders per day. If CheapFlowers.com were my only business, I would just be making a living from it, which is good, but not good enough for most entrepreneurs. Yes, I can advertise it to get more sales, but I at best break even on the ads, and usually lose money. What drives me crazy is that the way I have the site setup it could easily handle 500 orders a day (or even 5000), and almost everything is automated so it would involve no extra work for me, and I would not incur any additional expenses. Those extra 400 orders would be pure profit (I make around $10 per order), so instead of making $5000/month I would make over $100,000/month profit from it. I used to have the same problem when I ran my GetVitamins.com website for 5 years (I eventually shut it down). Vitamins are a huge business online, so you would think a site would have a lot of growth potential, but I could never get past the 10-20 orders a day level. I tried adding a lot more products, but that did not help. I tried adding more product photos, but that made no difference. I made changes to the shopping cart and text on the site, but nothing changed. I was making around $2000/month profits from the site before I closed it, but running it was a lot of work. I was doing the customer service for it myself, and that was taking up a lot of my time. There were constant inventory problems and shipping problems and website problem, and since it did not seem to have the potential to grow, I decided to close it and move on to other business ventures. A friend of mine has been running an online vitamin store at AdvNut.com for almost 15 years and he has had pretty much the same problem as I did. His sales grow slowly year after year, and his store has a loyal following, but he has not been able to go big with it. It is his only business and he runs it full time. For any business, it is important to remember that we’ll all find the method that works best eventually. He makes a good living from it, but the stress and pressure and hassles of running the business sometimes make him wish he was doing something else. He is an entrepreneur at heart, and wants to get rich, not just make a living. I am involved in partnerships with FindRentals.com and BargainPrinting.com, where other people do all the marketing and promotion and advertising, and both these sites have that same growth problem. It took many years to get them to the level they are at now, but the real profits would come pouring in if sales were to double or triple. Just like with my sites, these sites are all setup to handle a lot more business, and much of it would be pure profit, they just can’t figure out what to do to achieve it. I am not sure what the answer to all of this is. I have not found any way to significantly boost traffic to my most important sites (such as Dumb.com and Adoptme.com), or any way to get more orders for CheapFlowers.com. I have tried press releases, viral videos, link trades, search engine optimization, online advertising, offline advertising, adding unique content, and anything else I can think of. The main 2 areas I had big success in were both situations where the industries I was in went to the next level, and I went along for the ride. I bought domain names in the 1990s, and they made almost no money back then. But, in the 2000s the domain market exploded, so my portfolio of domains suddenly became a big business. Bored.com took the leap from being a small site to a big success partially due to the huge growth of the Internet since I started the site in 1997, which led the number of visitors to increase substantially each year, and partially because in the early 2000s the online ad market took off causing ad rates on Bored.com to skyrocket. So in addition to having a lot more visitors, I was making much more money from these visitors. Both of these factors were a much bigger influence on the success of the site than all the various things I did to promote Bored.com or add great content to it. There are of course lots of sites that do all these same things and do take things to the next level, so maybe I am just not good at that aspect of my business, or maybe a lot of it is random luck. The only advice I can give is to keep trying, and that the more websites you have, the more chance you have that for whatever reason one of them will take off.
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I suppose, if you haven’t tried it already, social media would be a good next step for some of those sites. T-T-T-Twitter can’t be beat for bringing an online business (or blog) to the next level. Add in a Facebook fanpage (maybe even Facebook ads) and could be just the thing you’re looking for.
I agree, I should do more of that. I have tried it for some sites, like Adoptme.com, and I automatically post my impulsecorp.com blog postings to my twitter feed. But, I am not really much of a web 2.0 guy so I don’t do as much as I should with it.
first of all, thank you very much for sharing your experiences b/c not a lot of people would do that with the candor that you just did… i found it refreshing and educational b/c you provided us with real world experiences you’ve had with a few of those beautiful names you have. as a fellow entrepreneur who is much newer to the online world it’s hard to make suggestions to someone who has been there/done that and who has already enjoyed some modicum of success. i do think the social media aspect that Chris mentioned might help. in addition, something that i struggle with on a daily basis is to pick one project and completely focus on that 100% until it is where i would like it to be. not sure that you have ever had the same problem (?) and while that sounds good in theory, i find it hard for me – especially b/c i am an “idea” guy. i also run a service business with 15-20 employees full time – so time is also of the essence.
Yes, I find all the time it takes just to run a small business (bills, phone calls, emails, accounting, employees, etc.) leaves not nearly enough to do all the things I really want to do, like work on new projects or think of new ways to make money. The only solution for that I have found is working way more hours than most people, 7 days a week. But, once you are married with children, it gets a lot harder to do it all.
I would go with the Social Media route. You can drive a lot of traffic from it and find targeted people to interact with. You can also do things like discounts and that.
Eric,
I’m not sure of everything that you’ve done. Here’s some other ideas to get it to the next level:
Hard emphasis on building out your affiliate network. You’ll have to court some super affiliates the same way you’ve pursued domains names you’ve really wanted. The bigger the splash the bigger your network will grow. Relationships are everything here.
Have you read Perry Marshall’s adword’s book? Did you measure the hell out of everything? Try buying the “swipe file” he’s referred to.
Do you use a “sales funnel”? Do you know where the breakdown is? What is your visit to order ratio?
Have you “dripped” on your previous customers with automated email for additional sales? If you send out a bonus “thank you” of some kind by snail mail especially to female customers, they’ll order from you forever…
Need someone to brainstorm with you – just contact me on my email, I’ll try to help you out…
John
unplain dot com
Thanks, those are all good ideas. No, I have not done much with my CheapFlowers.com affiliate program, other than just having the link on my page. The main reason is that there are lots of flower affiliate programs out there that probably pay better and offer much more than I do, so I am not sure why somebody would choose mine.
No, I have not heard of Perry Marshall’s adword book. I will take a look. No, I don’t measure anything other than the sales conversion rate. I tried setting up the sales funnel tracking in Google, but I was not able to get it to work with my shopping cart, partially because my shopping cart is on a different domain (yes, they have a work around for this though) and partially because I have a custom built shopping cart that is very complicated.
No, I have not done any emails to previous customers. I worry that it might be considered spam, and if anybody complains to my web host then I might lose my hosting. Yes, sending something out snail mail is a good idea.
Okay, let’s work on a USP (unique selling proposition) for CheapFlowers.com. If we can get this nailed down, you’ll have something for affiliates and customers thats says “This is why CheapFlowers.com is the site to promote, tell friends, to buy from” – Your USP will separate you from the rest of the pack. Maybe, tie the site to something other then just price. Remember, there are others with sharper pencils then you.
Here’s an example: I used to resell long distance plans to residentials and businesses 15 years ago. The thing is I couldn’t beat AT&T, MCI (remember them?) and sprint on cost and the $100 bucks they gave out for switching. You know what I did? I affiliated myself with churches and pointed out all the charities those companies were giving money too. When they found out some charities were “against their beliefs” they promptly switched to my services regardless of cost…
PR realeases with a good back story is one thing to do. You can also emphasize ties to a charity with a percentage going to it. You can work a deal with a large organization to give a percentage of sales in which they could promote Cheapflowers.com in a fund raising sort of way. Try to get away from just prices. Thats a losing proposition.
You’d be suprise what you would find out if you had a little poll on the front page that give a discount or coupon for future purchase if they took it. Ask questions like: Do you use CheapFlowers.com because of:
price
reliability
reputation
charity
and so forth, you might find out it’s not the price, but something else which you may be able to emphasize harder on.
Yeah, Perry Marshall is a genius. He basically teaches that the better your Ads are, the cheaper each click becomes due to the way Google sets it up. That means in a interesting way, the more clicks you get , the less they cost. Google cares about highly relevant ads. There’s loads of room to operate in that arena.
Don’t worry too much about spamming. I’ve never had a problem with that. Just be sure they check box something when they order, giving you permission to send emails with “awesome upcoming promos” to entice them to say “yes”.
Well as far as the sales funnel goes just find a away to track your sales conversions from your adwords very very carefully.
CheapFlowers.com has phenomenal potential.
I know working alone (I do the same) can make it very difficult to think outside the box and become more creative. Partnering is good but that has its own problems. A brainstorming friend with give and take is better without all the messiness.
John
unplain dot com
The selling point for CheapFlowers.com is that it offers the cheapest prices for flowers online. But, that does not leave me room to pay a big commission like the other online florists do. The bigger issue though is that I have found it very hard to target flower buyers, other than from a search engine. No site I have ever advertised CheapFlowers.com on gets any significant sales, even ecard sites or a site about birthdays. So, although I do get some sales from affiliates, I don’t think any big site is going to make much money from a florist affiliate program.
Yes, I used to do discount long distance phone service from 1995-2000 and I had some deals where I gave money to the charity for signing up members. I did try something similar with CheapFlowers.com where I tried to get schools and charities involved, but I did not get any extra sales from it. You can see an example at http://getflowers.com/charity/redcross.html . Also, I tried seeing if I would get more sales on the website by having 10% of all sales go to charity (the customer chose a charity from the drop down list), but that did not lead to increased sales either, at least not enough to cover the money I was giving to charity.
I have not done any surveys on CheapFlowers.com, but I have used Amazon Turk to have people go to the site and tell me what they like and don’t like about it.
Hi Eric,
Like you, I’d be worried about my customers getting upset that I was spamming them. On the other hand, I’m hearing over and over again how powerful a good email list can be. Coupled with a great offer, an email to your former customers that included an opt-in link probably wouldn’t be too offensive. From there I would think it would about offering specials, maybe once a month. But perhaps at that point it would be smart to consult with an email marketing super-pro.
Best,
John H.
One problem with offering specials is that my profit margins are so low (because I really do have the lowest prices of any florist online) that if I offer a special, I make no money on the order. Unlike when Best Buy or Amazon offer a special just to get you to their store, almost all my customers just order 1 item, so it does not work for me to lose money on the sale item but then make it up from the other items the customer buys like the other stores do.
Could it be that your customer dynamic is off the mark? I haven’t seen your customer profile but could it be that the word “Cheap” is the probbo?
Most flower sales occur around highly emotional events… weddings, funerals, true love. The last thing people want at those times is cheap. They want to express big emotions with something wowsa and beautiful and classy, traditional. Cheap? uh uh.
Have you ever received a gift of flowers purchased over the internet? Nine times out of ten the arrangements are so damn CHEAP. You know the sender got ripped off.
1-800-Flowers? More like 1-800-Crap-In-a-Vase.
People have gotten wise to internet flower buying. Cheap? Hell no. I wouldn’t send “Cheap” flowers ever. Never, ever. When I shop for flowers online I look for something that says ‘individual attention to your special order’ and we make sure you get “only the very best”.
I think you should say in very large letters at the top of the screen…
ONLY THE VERY BEST.
Cheap is a death word in the gift business. You’ll have to work around that handicap. People want cheap of course… but they don’t want others to know they’re a tightwad.
Your picture of the delivery guy with the vase su…ucks. That is one cheap-ass floral arrangement he’s holding. I wouldn’t send that for even five bucks. You need a way better image and a good tag line
“So cheap your Mom would be proud — flowers so nice she’ll never know.”
CheapFlowers.com is a fab name — must be handled with care. Lucky you! and best wishes for future sales.
mary mary
ochplace.com
Before I bought the CheapFlowers.com domain (I paid around $35,000 for it 5 years ago), I ran my flower site at GetFlowers.com for 3-4 years. When I bought CheapFlowers.com, I made it an exact copy of GetFlowers.com and found it had just as good a response rate when I advertised it, but a slightly better repeat purchase rate, probably because the name is more memorable. I now run both GetFlowers.com and CheapFlowers.com but I focus mainly on CheapFlowers.com. The vase majority of traffic to CheapFlowers.com is from people searching for “cheap flowers” in Google, so I don’t think they are too put off by my domain.
I will try some of your wording suggestions though, to see if it generates more sales. I will also change the picture of the flowers on the main page, since you are right, they look bad.
I changed the photo of the flowers and the delivery person now so it looks better.
I also changed the intro text on CheapFlowers.com to use some of the higher class wording that you suggested.
migraines guy,..
I just took my ecommerce site to another level, Facebook works wonders with customer retention and new customer acquisition, …btw a site thats a generic like migraines.net gets most of its traffic from the search engines, by parking it you killed that, throw a nice ad for migraines.net( because it happens to appeal to a more general public) on your low paying ppc high traffic sites and bam! you made more than just parking it.
Reiteration – Do Not underestimate the value social network sites can provide to your business,..not just marketing but more importantly building and reinforcing your brand, thats what you need to take up a notch. The big guys spend a tremendous amount of money on branding. Good luck
Yes, I am working on developing mini-sites on 200 of my domains, including migraines.net.
you know how you hear its better to have ten good pr links to you than 100 low ones, or how one master affiliate is worth more than a thousand average ones, 200 minisites, you better have some other forms of generating revenue from them, like lead generation, marketing your other sites, wait let me see something,..wth, your asking what you can do for your flowers site and you don’t even put an ad on all your online properties. Flowers are general you don’t need a niche site. I would love to hear your results if you placed a nice banner for the flower site on all your properties, and hear the results ! What would u lose , ad revenue, very little I Think,.. umm ok not sites that have a high ppc and ctr.
The minisites are for getting listed in the search engines. Once the sites have traffic, I can make money from ads on them or from affiliate links on them.
As for linking to CheapFlowers.com from my other sites, I have tried that and it leads to zero sales, so it is not worth it. Plus, those links have no search engine value because none of my other sites have anything to do with flowers.
Your fan page is like a glamorized newsletter in a way, once a user becomes a fan he gives you permission to contact him anytime, And theres many ways to go about interacting with them. AND its alot easier to get fans than newsletter subscribers.
Some newsletters give users information they want or enjoy, and then the soft sell or ad links. You don’t push flowers on your fan page you have pages full of poetry, babies, stories,animals,or whatever ..and ur interactions with them should be about strengthening and growing your base ,,
Facebook in the end is just a tool its how use it that makes it powerful.
I like to going to my .com site and clicking the facebook logo that takes me straight to my fan page so i can see what customers and people are saying on my page without logging in 🙂 Sometimes i have to login to answer a customers questions, I don’t mean to ramble, just sharing.
p.s. I glanced at my posts and wow didn’t mean to talk soo much. This may sound stupid but if i bought a girl flowers from a store called cheap flowers, umm i wouldn’t, flowers are too impress arent they ? Hosting companies are known for selling hosting under the umbrella of a few brands,..I would say try that but i think you may have, at least im thinking it was you, at least 50 geo keyword domains if memory serves correct,.. but then again i may be thinking of someone else. Well I notice i left you too many posts feel free to erase a couple of them. oh and sorry don’t mean to sound like an asshole in my posts.
The customer’s credit card bill says “GetFlowers.com” not CheapFlowers.com, so nobody ever sees the CheapFlowers.com name. Yes, I have around 350 geo flower domains (like nyflowershop.com), and they are all used to drive traffic to my main flower site.
Very minimal traffic I’m sure from those geos unless they each have at least one page optimized on each domain for seo. I own nyvehicles.com, nycvehicles.com, and newyorkvehicles.com, i made a quick page for nyvehicles.com awhile back so when i start developing on it it won’t be a new page, .
What are you conversion rates for you different marketing campaigns and I don’t just mean ppc, but they are the easiest to measure. If your advertising with google or yahoo is your quality ad index high, if not that’s your first priority, .also find out how you compare to those in the industry in regards to conversions. How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer, if you can’t answer this question then you need to find out.
i just went to your site for another quick look and HELLO ! you don’t sell chocolates ? Isn’t the markeup nice on them, and I’d figure as a package people would buy it, maybe a picture of a big heart chocolate say i love you with a red rose, or a chocolate made of a cat, you know girls like cats,..ok I Like cats 🙂 Anyways you know what I mean. Put a nice size picture of it in place of the Delivery guy, thats soo 2000 🙂 you don’t have to let people know you deliver theses day. bye
Right, I get very little traffic from the 350 geographic flower domains. I did not individually optimize them for the search engines.
I get around a 2% conversion rate from Google ads, which translates into a cost of around $50 per customer, and I only make a profit of $10 per customer. That is when I pay around $1 per click. If instead I only pay 10 cents per click, it makes a profit, but Google shows the ad so infrequently that it results in less than 1 order a day so it is not significant. I have also tried online yellow page ads, offline yellow page ads, and banner and text ads on other sites, but none have ever made a profit. The 50+ orders a day I currently get at CheapFlowers.com are almost all from free search engine traffic (I am #1 for the search Cheap Flowers) and from repeat customers.
I do sell chocolates at CheapFlowers.com, but only as an add-on ($15 extra) when you buy flowers. I don’t sell orders of just chocolates because only mail order flower services sell those. It is not something I can have a local florist deliver. As far as I know no online florist offers that, unless they are a mail order florist. I do though offer candy and junk food gift baskets at http://cheapflowers.com/Gift-Baskets .
I have two words that I don’t want to make public although it very much already is just not to the little guy,. If used properly you will pay less for higher quality traffic,…The Most successful affiliates have gravitated away from ppc to this…..MEDIA BUYING !
That may be true for most types of sites, but I have found media buys for my flower sites to be totally ineffective because other than through search engines, it is very hard to target people at the time they are about to buy flowers.
Your right, you would have to catch them when they’re looking to buy. There is a large customer base thats always looking to buy and not just on holidays, birthdays, or special occasions. And thats the hospital space, everyday people buy flowers to give a sick loved one from the gift shop, ..What if you put a big sign outside the hospital, maybe not right outside there doors, I’d guess they’d have a problem with that,you can research where, anyways maybe focus your marketing on after the patient goes home. Something like : Patient Discharged ” It’s never too late to give flowers” .
I think most people who are local enough to visit somebody in a hospital would use a local florist to send flowers to the sick person. The only advantage of using an online florist to send flowers in the area you live is that you can place the order 24 hours a day, but other than that you are better off contacting the local florist directly.
I was just glancing through the posts and noticed you didnt answer the most important variable in regards to your search engine advertising. What is your google quality ad score for your keywords ? Each keyword has its own score. The better your score the less you pay for the same keywords. If your score is low thats great news for you, that means all you have to do is raise your score and you may be rolling in those .10 ads 🙂
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215
I think this may be it !
I took a look now at my keyword quality score (I had never heard of this before) and found they were mostly 7’s and 10’s. I don’t think the table from the AdWords report will copy very well into this blog posting, but here it is:
Campaign Ad Group Keyword Keyword Matching Keyword Status Est. First Page Bid Quality Score Current Maximum CPC Keyword Destination URL Impressions Clicks CTR Avg CPC Cost Avg Position
GetFlowers.com Flower(s) Only flowers Broad Active $0.60 7 $1.01 default URL 57,158 292 0.51% $1.04 $303.26 5.9
GetFlowers.com Bouquet(s) Only bouquets Broad Active $0.25 7 $1.01 default URL 5,869 143 2.44% $0.88 $125.60 4.1
GetFlowers.com Flower Delivery free flower delivery Broad Active $0.40 10 $1.01 default URL 1,166 110 9.43% $0.84 $92.08 3.6
GetFlowers.com Gen. Flowers – KIT wedding flower bouquets Broad Active $0.40 7 $1.01 default URL 1,600 63 3.94% $0.86 $54.07 2.0
GetFlowers.com Gen. Flowers – KIT flower wedding bouquet Broad Active $0.50 7 $1.01 default URL 1,347 52 3.86% $1.00 $51.77 3.9
GetFlowers.com Flower(s) Only floral Broad Active $0.45 5 $1.01 default URL 2,662 49 1.84% $1.00 $49.15 4.6
GetFlowers.com Gen. Flowers – KIT flower arrangements Broad Active $0.55 7 $1.01 default URL 1,919 44 2.29% $0.96 $42.17 4.6
GetFlowers.com Gen. Flowers – KIT discount flowers Broad Active $0.80 10 $1.01 default URL 938 41 4.37% $1.00 $41.05 5.0
GetFlowers.com Gen. Flowers – KIT white flowers Broad Active $0.25 6 $1.01 default URL 1,752 32 1.83% $0.99 $31.67 2.9
GetFlowers.com Gen. Flowers – KIT buy flowers Broad Active $0.80 10 $1.01 default URL 1,290 31 2.40% $1.01 $31.23 4.7
GetFlowers.com Cheapflowers.com – new cheap roses Broad Active $0.60 10 $1.01 default URL 719 27 3.76% $0.99 $26.75 5.0
GetFlowers.com Cheapflowers.com – new discount flowers Broad Active $0.80 10 $1.01 default URL 2,067 24 1.16% $1.01 $24.29 6.3
GetFlowers.com Gen. Flowers – KIT floral arrangements Broad Active $0.65 7 $1.01 default URL 814 23 2.83% $0.98 $22.57 5.1
I am very surprised not just you but there alot of people who have never heard of the quality ad score, when its the most important factor when google determines how much to charge you for the keyword. Remember A couple years ago when people noticed that keywords they were bidding on all of a sudden shot up to $5 and $10 thats because google implemented their ad score, those rates were for people with a very low score on the particular keyword. I remember when I first saw it I was like wtf ! Now googles working with da man ! but no they wanted a more relevant experience for their users and this would be a way to effectively curtail irrelevant ads. Although the founders will be selling off his shares in the next five years, That will mean they will not be soo nice in how they conduct business.
I notice your MAIN keywords are 7’s, which is a good thing cause that means you will notice the difference when you raise those scores to 10.
7’s are good, but ten’s are better of course, and as long as the keywords your advertising are relevant to your site then its a piece of cake, for an seo guy that is. I would think it would cost you less than $500 for the one site. Don’t do it yourself, unless you don’t have the money. And when your looking for someone make sure he knows how to raise your score, and experience raising them on other sites he can show you as examples.
After you raise your scores, Your keywords costs will be lower no doubt about it !
I’m soo pleased with myself 🙂
If I start adverting again I will do that, but right now I am not running any Google ads. Those stats I showed you were a test at Christmas time to see how profitable it would be. I spent $1900 over a few days at around $1 per click and only made back income of about $200 from it, for a loss of $1700. I would have needed to cpc prices to be 10 times cheaper to make a profit from it, so raising my quality score would not make nearly enough difference to make it worthwhile to keep advertising.
A quality score of 4 and 10 may mean the difference between a dollar click and a 10 cent one, but from a seven to a ten, I doubt u will pay ten times less, anyways keep the ad score thing in mind if you ever decide to advertise on google or yahoo in the future,..oh yeah ctr helps your score.
Well unfortunately its not a quick fix, …imo then you need to make as much money as you can from each customer, and thats where the facebook fan page can help…….
..Im going to check out your names really quick…ok took a 5 second look and chose to take a look at what you have for filebankruptcy, ok let me ask you what do you think someone that buys that domain will do with it,..First I will tell you what they won’t do, and that is rely only on pcc ads, you have lawyers paying twenty a click, whats google giving you ? Do you have an idea how much a bankruptcy lawyer would pay for those leads , especially if they are good.
Put a simple contact form on the site for people to get more info , you still get the ppc revenue but now you have leads which will make you alot more than your ppc revenue.
I remember reading that when you first implemented adsense you were like wow, imagine if you never did, same with leads, and it wont hurt your ppc and takes very little space.
I agree, leads would pay better than Adsense, but I don’ really want to deal with the handling advertisers directly. But, I am testing some domains with this service: rootorange.com , which handles the leads for me.
Design, design, design…
What’s your conversion ratio? it’s hard enough to get users to your sites, but when you get them there, what are you doing to convert them into buyers? I’m sure you’re aware that a solid conversion focused user experience goes along way to increasing the way users interact with your site. The decision to spend money on your site, or not, is most of the times made in the very first 5 seconds the user spends on that site. This is not done by reading your content, but by a sense of confidence that good design instills. A website that sells any product must make the user feel confident that they arrived at “the” place to spend their money.
It’s not just about getting traffic, it’s also about converting traffic. This is something we do not worry about as domainers and developers.
Around 1 in 50-100 visitors converts to a sale on CheapFlowers.com.