[bluechip]

I just joined YoungEntrepreneur.com and it has a lot of good information! Great job!

I have been in business about 6 months now with my site www.HealthDevices.net. It has done well for the most part as far as revenue is concerned but my costs have always been high due to advertising mostly through pay-per-clicks on Google & Overture. I ran the numbers and it seems I spend more than I receive so I have stopped all advertising and am sort of sitting back and trying to figure out how I can get out of this cycle of spending more than bringing in.

I decided that I need to do at least the following to succeed:

1. Majority of my sales is through one category that I have that seems to be amazingly well (around 90% of all sales). I am dependent on those sales and I need to find more products equally popular. Any suggestions on what products to sell would be greatly appreciated!

2. I need to break the chains that Google & Overture have on me. I need to find other avenues (less expensive) of marketing & advertising. Any suggestions here would be helpful also!

Please check out the site (www.HealthDevices.net) and let me know what you think. I've designed and coded the whole site as my real job is a web developer. I am very proud of what I have created so far as I think it is very user friendly and easy to navigate. It has been a great experience and I have learned a lot not only about the technology side of it but the business side as well.

Please e-mail me if you have any questions about setting up your own e-commerce business. I would love to trade battle stories to help each other out.

I'd like to thank anyone ahead of time who respond to my questions.

-bluechip
www.HealthDevices.net

[Hostegrity]

1. Majority of my sales is through one category that I have that seems to be amazingly well (around 90% of all sales). I am dependent on those sales and I need to find more products equally popular. Any suggestions on what products to sell would be greatly appreciated!

What category is this product in? I would look for compeditors of this particular product and offer it as well.

2. I need to break the chains that Google & Overture have on me. I need to find other avenues (less expensive) of marketing & advertising. Any suggestions here would be helpful also!

1) Advertise in a local newspaper (preferably one in a major city). I know for my needs, this is alot less expensive than the big O and Google.

2) Optimized your key words. Change them up a bit. Try placing the text "inexpensive" in front of your current key work or something to that effect. Also monitor your key words performance. High click through does not guarantee a high sign up / purchase ratio.

3) Offer your current customers discounts for every referral that they send to you. To make it more appealing offer a 5% discount to both the referral and the person who so send him / her, that way there is something in it for both parties.

Best Regards,
-Darrell

[Alex Singh]

Never underestimate the power of partnerships and strategic alliances. Consider what groups require your products the most, write a proposal, and present it to them. Apart from increasing your sales, if you have good customer service and leave a positive buying experience in their minds, then their word of mouth advertising can be very powerful (its also free.)

Consider researching some affiliate programs and joining those, that could be a good way to increase traffic to the site. Finally in regards to the products, market research could also work well here - Find out what people really want, or dont want.

Hope that helps, I can't give too specific information without knowing more information unfortunatly. Also, great site - really professional!

[bluechip]

Thanks guys for the the comments! Both of you make very good points.

Points I got from your comments are:
- Advertise locally via newspapers (specifically in major cities)
Response: Definately will give this a try and update you guys on how it goes.

- Optimize key words used in search engine
Response: I have tried this but I think I can eliminate many that dont work as well.

- Set up referral programs where everyone is the winner
Response: I did have this set up originally but for some reason didn't implement it. I will get it going ASAP.

- Join affiliate programs
Respone: Haven't joined any yet. Definately need to explore more. Any ideas would be helpful *

- Market research
Response: Sort of in the dark to how to really go about doing this. Specific examples would be helpful *

- Partnerships & strategic alliances
Response: Yes, I will consider this a high priority.

- Great customer service!
Response: So far I have been giving great customer service but I see room for improvement (ie. faster shipping, more choices of shipping method, faster response to queries by customers).

-bluechip
www.HealthDevices.net

[Alex Singh]

1) You should research the costs of different forms of advertising. A colour ad in a magazine can cost 700 dollars, where an ad on the back of a bus costs 340 for a MONTH - Whats the best value? (That was an Australian example so it may differ in the States)

2) Market Research is EXPENSIVE - I'm talking $5000 minimum if you're lucky - usually anywhere from 5k to 25 or 50k. Its big business. Cheapest option is to do it yourself. Start by writing out objectives you want to achieve from the research, then write appropriate questions that will see those objectives reached. I think the best option for you would be to implement a survey for a month, that asks people these questions - Offer them a 10% discount guard or a gift voucher at one of your partners websites.

Another thing you could do is after someone orders a product, ask them to give you some information on certain areas - the questions should also be used to achieve your objectives. Give them free shipping if they answer it - Its ALL about incentives for giving you the information. One example is mail outs - Usually 10,000 have to be mailed out because of the very low response rate (10% is usually the average) but when incentives are included that rate has been known to increase to 50% or more.

3) Can't help you with the affiliate program thing since I've never looked into it myself, but searching for Affiliate Programs on Google should see you coming up with something!

[ChrisB]

Why is one category doing better than others?

Is it because of the product or the promotion? Perhaps you have one good search engine listing and it happens to be for this category? Don't assume that its the product without first doing some research.

Google can be relatively cheap at 5 cents a click, if you're not converting enough to make money you either need to find a way to make your site more "sale-friendly" or you need to do something to decrease the amount of clicks you're getting.

One thing you could do is list prices in your AdWords ads. That way people who can't afford your product won't waste your money and their time by clicking on it.

[ericesquire]

Bluechip,

The site looks amazing! I'm very impressed and you have every right to be proud of it.

I understand the problem with Google and Overture. I think the best thing to do with that is stick with one or the other and just budget it out - get as much as you can from what you are going to allow yourself to spend there and when its used up, move on to something else. It's good publicity to have so many web visitors and you don't want to loose that and be in idle while you figure something out. Even if you're breaking even right now, consider it free publicity. You can break even and have people seeing your site or you can spend no money (aka break even) and not have anyone see it.

eBay - sell some of the unique products you have on eBay. Make sure to do research and find out what products are already on eBay and are getting bids. When people ask you questions via the eBay form about the product you can pitch your site at this time. I have seen a huge turn around from customers that see my site because of advertising i've done to them directly in E-mail. They are already interested, they already know what they want, and they have the money to spend - that's why they're on eBay. They are a great customer to have and if you can perfect a way to tap into that, you're on easy street.

That's just something I have done in the past and it works wonders. Let me know if you're interested in discussing this matter further - maybe we can brainstorm together. Best of luck.

[bluechip]

ericesquire: Thanks for the great compliements! I am in the process of streamlining my google & overture keywords. Ebay is also a great idea and I will be looking into how I can utilize it more than I have.

ChrisB: I think you maybe right about why one category is more popular than others. I think I've been giving certain products more attention than others. I only do that because I feel I can corner the market for that particular product. I have thought about adding prices for the title of the Google Adwords but I want to prevent an all out price war. That is why I have stayed away from it.

Alex Singh: Thanks, I will look into providing a customer questionaire in exchange for free shipping and discounts.

Let's see how this goes!

-bluechip
www.HealthDevices.net

[Steve]

If you add prices to ad-words you will get less clicks! Costing you less MONEY!

[bluechip]

Good point Steve! Having $ amounts in the Google-Ads sounds like a good way to filter out the non customer with the customer that is actually considering buying. In the end you save a lot of money on the per per clicks.

-bluechip
www.HealthDevices.net

[ericesquire]

Steve that was excellent advice, thank you!