Financial & Travel Musings

When people first start out with their plans to make a fortune online one of the first strategies is to maximise the traffic to their site.

Fair enough, but no matter how high the traffic to the site may be, it doesn’t mean that you’ll actually make any money from it simply because the high traffic doesn’t equate to high conversion of viewers to customers. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.

That’s a big term for a big area. What’s entailed is a very full analysis of your site to ensure that it’s properly planned, the text is professionally written to maximise the impact for potential customers combined with analysis of how well it’s all working. Even small enhancements can mean quite substantial improvements in the effectiveness of your site in terms of converting views to actual customers.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Although these days we’re all used to buying books and booking our flights online, there’s a massive amount of other stuff that you can also get online which often surprises.

Garden and household furniture is one of the most surprising that I’ve come across lately which are a whole class of item that I’d never have thought would have been economic to ship any kind of distance (which goes to show that we’re getting ripped off by the house movers!). At the other end of the scale there are Christmas cookies which sound like they’d be that little bit fragile to arrive in one piece but then again my last backup drive arrived in just that way with minimal packaging so either stuff is a lot more sturdy these days or the mailmen don’t handle the packages nearly so roughly as the joke assume.

Anyway, whatever you’re looking for at the moment, it’s worth having a look online. Large, heavy and fragile no longer seem to be showstoppers for shipping.

Popularity: 48% [?]

Knowing whether or not your product is popular is a very important aspect of marketing, but how do you find out if it’s “popular”?

Consider a car for example. Whilst the car companies try to create a sexy image for their cars to sell them, most of us in reality are looking for a car that works, keeps working and which seems to give us a lot of car for our money. So, if you saw an average car priced at a price well below average that was from a manufacturer with a reasonable reputation then chances are that you’d buy it and so would a lot of other people too.

That would obviously create a backlog of orders for the car which might be taken by the manufacturer as an indication that it was very popular. They’d be right in this instance, of course. But what if they doubled the price? They might still have the backlog of orders but few people would actually buy it when their turn came up.

SocialSpark are doing the exact opposite of this at the moment and seem to be living in some other world divorced from reality. They’re advertising opportunities to write sponsored posts at quite good rates and thereby ending up with a waiting list on, seemingly, all of the opportunities that they offer. Their system is using the length of the waiting list as an indication of popularity (fair enough) and reducing the price paid based on the popularity (not a good move). So, for example, they had an offer on at $27.50 a couple of weeks ago (quite a reasonable payment for 250 words). Two weeks later when that queue was cleared the price was now $5.50. Thus, a lot of people who were interested at $27.50 were offered $5.50 for the same work (and, like me, turning it down).

Yes, you can use the waiting list as an indication of the popularity of your product, but don’t forget that one key aspect of that popularity is the price. Change the price significantly and the popularity can change dramatically.

Popularity: 43% [?]