So tomorrow is the big holiday and I want o wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday. With December sales coming to an end and income may come to a slow response in the next couple days, I was wondering and hoping that next month would be December again. During the month of December a lot of my affiliate sales went up as well as some ebay sales.
This is one of my biggest income months and I really had fun with it during this time of year. Now the big question how will I be able to duplicate it next month? January, hmm what is popular in January that users and buyers want to buy? Should I do an early February promotion for Valentines Day? Several things just hit me and I was looking at NeverBlue Ads campaigns and found some good ones, then I went ahead and did more comparison to LinkShare, CJ, and even ShareASale. Most are very similar - now how much will I spend this month? What will be my main strategy? How will I split test? Just so many questions.
December is a month where an internet marketer should be making most of his sales - if you have an e commerce store you should be doing really well right now. December was more concentrated on physical products than digital products or offers.
So December was a really good month for me, I just need to go ahead and gather all my income sources and dump them into an excel file so I can actually see my ROI. This month I did spend more on promotion and PPC ads - also did more split testing than any other months. So numbers looks good when you log into your campaigns but what is your actual earnings, ROI.
But getting back on topic, if next month was December and everybody is in a buying mood, what things would you have done differently? What would you be doing to improve? What others tools would you use? Who would you network with? Would you be more prepared? Would you prep your stats differently?
Again, all these questions. Here are some things I would have done differently:
Build a Niche Store:
- I would have made a better layout and continuously promote it everyday, I only concentrate promotion on a mid weekly basis. Though I was able to get 2k impressions everyday I think I could have gotten more if I have concentrated on promotion everyday.
- Have a finer niche. Right now I have an electronic store and I just threw in categories not realizing all the sub categories were being included as well. This definitely killed the structure of the layout and the design. I had to manually delete the unnecessary sub categories such as old turn tables.
- Fix the load time of the BANS feed and properly place ads and even add in content to get some SEO within the store it self.
Affiliate Marketing:
This is very broad but I will go to the general stuff.
- Compare other Affiliate networks (Per Lead vs Percentage)
- Use/split test multiple affiliate networks on the same publisher
- Grow holiday list more vigorously - I wasn't concentrating on my holiday list as I was last year.
- Use other PPC besides Adwords - I will be researching into Yahoo and MSN
- Have a better excel file to calculate and see over all stats
Adwords and PPC Campaigns:
- Research and get more targeted keywords (long tails vs short non competitive words)
- Better word the titles and ad description - I started reading a little about copywriting
- Figure out what page results my ads will appear on a per click basis ( I realize I was paying big money to just appear on page 13 on Google Searches)
Blogging and the Blogosphere:
- Do more time stamped posts - writing in a busy month stop or drew me a way from my concentration of my affiliate marketing
- Do not discuss strategy - just discuss general strategy
- Better optimize ad spaces
- Basic concentration of SEO on a per post basis
- Better networking with other bloggers - this month I have networked with more bloggers than other months prior
- Concentrate on traffic - I was concentrating more on my virtual store and my affiliate campaigns
eBay:
- Get better drop shippers
- Have an automation between drop shippers and ebay - maybe email redirection?
- Stop spam from other damn drop shippers I never contacted before
- Better discussion on pricing on drop shipment and rush deliveries
- ...do away with eBay?
As you can see this might as well be my New Year's resolution. I would want to improve in these areas and there are probably more that I forgot as well. There are a lot of things I want to improve and hope to improve in the future. I want to be better at the above or specialize in the above, I am a learner and I always want to learn more. Reading others on how they do this and how they do that, it interests me to read about others strategies.
So with that said on my future improvements, I wish every month was December since everyone is in a buying frenzy. Also December is the easiest and most profitable month for me anyways. What would you want to improve? What would you do different? How were your December sales? Do you think you could have done better?
>> The next couple days I may be slow on some post just an FYI
