Man what a week! I have been working hard this week, and I have lots more work to come. The last 2 months I have been thinking of taking one of the products I am pushing and start selling the products myself instead of using the drop ship method (which I have been using forever). That has been keeping me motivated to work hard and get shit done so I can move onto that stage of the business.
Right now, as you all know, I use SEO to rank sites and then I sell shit on them. I focus on low traffic and low competition niches. Right now I have 3 main drop ship sites and then like 7 or so little guys (like survivormanfans.com). The 2 products I am looking to move in-house will need at least 1 person part time just for shipping/returns because I probably sell 20-30 units a day, and I am expecting to triple that once I get the term on the first page of google (for the terms I am currently working on).
I will also need to hire someone for support, its getting a little out of hand, right now all I do is support and not enough of the real business stuff. My main problem with this is that I want to micromanage everything, I am a perfectionist and a little OCD and I get frustrated when shit is not going right (happens daily). I did hire someone in-house for support, but she didn’t know SEO so I basically ended up doing all of the support. I then got on freelance and hired a call center company to manage the phone and email support, I then made a script which would let the call center forward me the emails that they didnt know the answer to, well guess what happened…. they forwarded me ALL of the support emails. They did that for 2 weeks so I said fuck it.
So the support work is back to me, what I need to do is hire someone that knows the basics of SEO and have them in-house, that way I can train them on how I want it ran. But to get to that point my backend needs to be working good and the backend needs to be able to manage every aspect of the business. I need it so that I can work just fine from my laptop, but right now I am still using myphpadmin a lot to get certain orders. I have been busy updating that code and getting it all sorted out so I don’t need myphpadmin anymore.
I have also been updating the sites order pages and making it very easy for customers to find information about the products, I had my content writer make up very detailed instructions on each product, you can see that info here. To goal is to cut down on some of the customer support for that site.
I also got my other e-commerce sites PCI compliant and I will now be working on getting developerhuts code all secure this week, its gonna be a lot of work because of all the small mistakes, but after I get that done then I dont need to do it again heh.
And I also launched a new product called “Sales Letter Posting“. Basically, my forum writers will take a sales letter (either written by you or my writer) and post it on related forums to your niche. No one else offers this product, only me. I use this all the time so that is the main reason why I wanted to make it a product, just last week when we did a test run, I had them post a sales letter on 5 niche related forums which cost me like $25 (your price), I made $375 that day from posting the sales letters on only 5 forums. Its a great product and I know a lot of people that can use it, if you are interested in helping us test and get all the tweaks out then let me know.
Throughout this week I will be tweaking that product, along with updating developerhut’s code, adding another e-commerce site, adding 5 new products to an existing e-commerce site, and researching hiring a packager and someone for customer support…. lots of work….. has anyone here set up a warehouse, know any good resources?
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this is why i love to read your blog.. you share a nice tips about seo and i’ll need this to bring my site to the top of “uncle google ” page
Yeah, the “I use SEO to rank sites and then I sell shit on them” is the coolest sentence I have ever read on a blog! But you are right that is the way it is. I appreciate the honesty of your blogging!
Hey Jon,
Solid post, but wanted to leave a comment because it’s an idea that might help you out! You said the people you have hired are good but need to learn seo or stuff like that. I purchased an seo product last week that was all videos and was great for beginners right up to experts.
It might be worth your while to “train” a person in the basics of seo. Like that lady you hired for instance, maybe purchase this video set and sit her down for a few hours. They learn and it makes your job easier. Video is always easier then reading too.
Anyways just my 2 cents! Great post, shoot me an email if you want the name of that product. Cheers
What’s your take on ecommerce apps like oscommerce and magento?
Jon – do you have a live example of a successful sales letter posting?