Going Fish

So, what are we up to this month?  We have moved from the highly technical area of thermal imagers to the fairly low tech field of fishing.  But we haven't gone completely away from technology.  In fact, we're bringing as much technology to fishing as possible by creating a site to sell fish finders. 

I was pretty surprised to discover the size of the market for fish finders.  It was really just a random thing where we were going through products that we were considering selling and we ran across them.  A little bit of research showed tens of thousands of searched for fish finders each month.  Now I have no clue how many actual sales there are for fish finders but it seems like the market is a lot larger than I would have ever imagined.

The other pleasant surprise with our fish finder research deals with specific models.  Many of the individual models have relatively low competition.  What I mean is this: we know that there are a lot of searches for a product like cars on the internet.  But there are also searches for specific models like say Ford Explorer.  While there may be only 500 searches a month for a specific model of fish finder, most should be relatively easy to land on the first page of search results.  This isn't a big deal for one product but if you can do it with 20 products, then you're getting somewhere.

It's looking like we may spend the month of June promoting our existing sites.  It's not a very exciting thing to do but it's important.  It doesn't matter how many sites you have if you don't get traffic on any of them.  I'll be sure to update everyone on how to promotion goes and if it goes to plan.

Seeing (infra)red

I haven't posted too much lately because of a crazy month of April with Easter and spring and planting flowers and all of that stuff.  But I thought I'd share how our latest project has been going.  In March we worked on creating a site to sell lock picks.  I mentioned before how that didn't work out as planned.  We've actually seen some success with this site and we've made some sales but we learned that lock picks aren't that expensive so you don't make much in affiliate income. 

So, April's plan was to find a product that was expensive and would earn a considerably higher amount of affiliate income for each sale.  We considered a big ticket item like televisions but decided that the competition was too high for that.  What we finally settled on was thermal imaging equipment.  This equipment isn't cheap (actually it's more expensive than an HD tv) but there are a number of uses for it and there are many different kinds of thermal equipment.

Because we all fell behind in April, we're just finishing up our work for April so there's really no telling how successful this venture will be.  But we are bringing in traffic right now which is a good thing.  In time this will hopefully translate into sales but for now it's just eyeballs.  The first sale will be exciting because it will be worth our investment in time and money and provide proof that we're moving in the right direction.

Dealing with a Lull

So, we hit kind of a lull in our website projects.  This would be both a physical lull as well as a Google lull for lack of a better term.  Easter and spring weather brought about a lot of difficulty in keeping people on the computer to do their work that was required.  So that has set us back considerably and only halfway through May are we finishing our projects for April.  I'm not terribly surprised by this as we're all still learning to pace ourselves and figuring out what is the best schedule for the group and individually.

The other problem is with Google.  It doesn't seem as though the group projects have had this problem as much but my individual projects are having trouble with Google.  From everything that I've read, you really go up and down in Google during the first few months of a site's life.  Google has never officially acknowledged this and it may not actually be policy but rather a quirk in the search engine algorithm.

Whatever the case actually is, I had a couple of keywords that I was feeling pretty good about and then they dropped considerably.  I'm hoping that they bounce back soon obviously and I suspect that they will come back within a week or two.  But I can say that even knowing it was a possibility, it is insanely frustrating to be near the first page of Google only to drop back a couple of pages abd watch your meager traffic drop off completely while you wait things out.

My other issue is with Google, particularly Adsense but it is not Google's issue really.  Instead it has to do with the fact that less people shop online in good weather.  This means less affiliate sales and fewer clicks on ads.  And fewer people are advertising which means that the ad clicks that I do get are worth less money.  I've seen the phenomenom year after year so it's not a surprise, it just sucks because making more money is better than making less money.  My revenue is down about 30% from last month right now which is a big hit.  But on the bright side, it's still about 10% more than it was in May of last year.  The other bright spot is that I used to see a significant dropoff in April and now it is pushing later.  I don't know if this is coincidence, strange weather, or a change in consumer patterns but it has been evident for the last couple of years.  I can't guarantee that it's a trend but I'll take what I can get.