It would be interesting to find out what factors people think have been successful in gaining or growing sales for their products. One factor might be time, another advertising and so on.
For me, my sales have grown almost directly in line with the number of visitors I get via search engines. I usually find there is a step change in the number of visitors and a corresponding rise in the number of sales every 3 months at around the time Google exports its PR values.
In the early days I used Google Adwords. This did attract traffic and some sales but only enough to break even - organic traffic has proved much more profitable.
In more recent months - say the last 3 - I have also begun to see a rise in repeat sales, i.e. people wanting more than one copy, and also word of mouth sales. I’ve put this down to achieving a certain critical mass of sales, i.e. enough sales for personal recommendations to be sufficient to encourage a few more sales.
One thing that did slightly dent the rise in sales was the UK school summer holidays, particularly the last 3 weeks before children went back to school. During this period, website traffic was slightly down, though it seems to have recovered this week.
by ML
A few days ago I said I wanted to code a backend/ customer management interface for my site. I’ve decided I need to do this fairly quickly as I’m getting more and more customer requests for lock codes, custom templates etc. I also need to quickly find out who’s purchased when I get a query. I get lots of similar questions that could potentially be answered by a semi-automated reply. Also, some questions would be better answered by a website than a more personal email.
The key to this is keeping a database of purchasers on the site. I did do this in the early days but it mysteriously broke after a few weeks and I simply by-passed it since someone wanted to purchase ASAP. I need to resurrect the database and redo the sales page and Paypal IPN to register attempts at purchasing as well as successful purchases. I’ll also want a protected admin area and also a user area where they can log in and ask for new codes etc.
I’ve decided I simply don’t have the time to code this myself so I’m going to put together a spec. and place a project on RAC as you’ve suggested in the past.
by ML
Ideaspad is a sort of personal information manager, it has a lot of different uses and have comprehensive functionality. Unlike other similar programs Ideaspad allows you to create your own structure for your information by using HTML forms.
Therefore, you could design your own data entry system over night.
Ideaspad - An Award winning information manager for home and professional use
by JM
