Name:
Location: Stroud, Glos, United Kingdom

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Where did everyone go?

Yikes,

What a flat 24 hours. We took the sum total of zero orders on the internet lastnight. First time in months that this has happened. Took a couple of orders today during the day, both on the internet and by phone but they have all been exceptionally low value. And this after an excpetionally good start to 2006 - we have already banked as much in February as we did last year, so I was hoping to at least double the months turnover.

I sincerelely hope that this is just a minor blip and not a taste of things to come.

Adsense let me down too, I didnt even make my usual 10-20 cents!!!

Plus, there have been no posts to any of the blogs I regularly visit.

Man its quiet out there in cyberspace.

I guess everyone was enjoying a romantic night out (or in!) with their Valentine last night. :) - I had to settle for a rather unromantic meal at pizza hut with the darling wife and the little lad! Ah well, its the wedding anniversary at the end of the month, maybe we will be able to persuade someone to babysit then.

Cheers,
Rich

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

We are at an interesting juncture in the history of online advertising. look around, and you can see signs of change slowly emerging. bloggers cribbing about adsense, models like word of blog, MDHP and adbrite - definitely, something is changing.
We launched The Web2.0 Million Dollar Homepage
and have been surprised with the results so far.

Time will tell, which model will work.

6:17 AM  
Blogger JavaRoasters said...

Hey Rich,

I think it is a combination of being that time of the year (winter blahs) as I don't feel like working too much. I have also been concentrating on getting a few new pages up on my site and scratching my head trying to figure out what Google is up to as my site is not well listed with them. Also trying to get prepared for "when" I am ranked #1 for the keyword coffee. As if that will ever happen. :(

Febuary for us has always been a quiet time of the year. Use your "free" time to make sure everything is working and spend some time in working on links or something like that.

1:43 PM  
Blogger richandzhaoyan said...

Anonymous:- I reckon you picked the wrong post for this piece of spam - had you have chosen to place your comment in my previous post, The Power of your Blog, it would have been an ideal illustration of how to use blogs, both your own and others, as a way of marketing - of course, you could have disguised your blatent spam by actually replying to the correct post!!! Anyhow, as I am in a good mood this evening, you get to stay, for the time being.

Pete:- I hear what you are saying - the post xmas run down has been slightly delayed for us this year as January was very good and the first two weeks of Feb continued to pull in a lot of good orders. Really I am never happy, as I have been complaining since xmas that I have not had any time to do any improvements to the site, just been working to complete the orders. Now things have dropped dead, it is going to take a little while to get back into the different routine of actually having to plan the improvements I want to get done, as opposed to just being driven each day to complete orders.

With regards to your google rankings - I know this may not come as news but be patient and keep just plugging away - This time last year, my site was loved by MSN. They have now shied away and google is really embracing me. Not really sure what has brought this on apart from time and general good seo practice.

A point in case concerning inbound links arose today when, just our of interest, I did a search for richandzhaoyan. The last result in google was Heritage Gifts. Why? There is absolutely no reference to richandzhaoyan on the site at all! Take a look at the google cache and you get the response,
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: richandzhaoyan
A search on MSN gives the Heritage link on page 1 and a search on Yahoo lists Heritage on page 2.
Kind of strange how your site can list in a search engine result without even having one single referance (not even in the code) to the search term.

I appreciate this is not really alot of use to yourself in ranking for Coffee but.....

My equivalent to "coffee" is gifts - The holy grail - costs a bleeding fortune to advertise for and there are some gazillion sites listed in the results. I have finally made it to the top of the tree and I put it down to two main reasons - firstly, having gifts in the url. Secondly, having literally thousands of links containing the anchor text gift from pages containing the text "gift" - Now, I am in the lucky postition that I have never pursued a "link strategy". The vasy majority of my links come from within the site - the beauty of having a large product base.

Knowing your site Pete, and knowing that you dont have such a diverse product base and therefore not so many internal links - I would be thinking, as you are I believe, in more article type pages.

I get the impression you have a genuine interest in the product you are selling,ie. coffee, so maybe this will not be too much of a chore for you and the more you can convince your potential customers of your knowledge of coffee, how high quality it is, the wonderful coffee producing regions you source it from, etc, etc, the more chance you have of not only progressing up the search engines but also converting sales.

Yikes, I have gone on a bit - just a final point, having inadvertantly reached one of the top spots for gifts, its actually not alot of use. People searching under such a generic term have no real idea of what they are looking for and are therefore not very likely to buy. - That doesnt mean I am not proud of the position though ;)

Cheers,
Rich

1:03 AM  
Blogger JavaRoasters said...

Hi Rich, thank you for the response. Right now I am trying a few different avenues. I just put up about 50 pages of coffee content on the site. This summer one of my projects to keep myself busy on my long weekends at the cottage is to get Burt's PRL Manna program and get content from a lot of sources and rewrite it for my site. I think by doing this I can easily come up with several hundred pages of quality unique content. Then submit the content up on my site currently to artilce sites provided I get the link back.
Another avenue I am going to be working on now is try and generate as many links to my site as possible. If you look at the top sites for "coffee" excluding the big chains they have 1,000+ inbound links. This will have to be a long term stategy but I it can only help if the links are quality.
Third thing I might work on is a forum about coffee and trying to generate or purchase traffic for it.
This is all along with keeping a good quality site that I think is pretty well optimized, might need some minor tweeking at some point.

I think that you have to try new things to expand and grow your site and see how different things affect your ranking over time. I agree that "gifts" is a very generic term and might not be as useful for you as "coffee" would be for me. There are not a lot of quality search terms for "coffee". I will keep my blog updated with what I do for SEO and gauge the effect over time.

Enjoy your relaxing time of the year although I am sure you will find enough projects to keep you busy. ;)

Peter

1:47 AM  

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