Don’t forget your housekeeping and remember to smile

HousekeepingMy Adsense has been down the last month but with a domain leased and some new one’s to get ready for next year I am still reasonably happy with how things are at the moment. What I have managed to do seeing as things have been a bit quieter is do some general housekeeping and it pays dividends.

For someone like myself that does actual real product sales and sells a service there are a few things you can implement that can greatly increase your userbase and overall income.

Thankfully my wife has been more efficient & proficient than I at housekeeping she has agreed to help and help manage the online version too :)

1/ For my online product sales I get the user to add the products to their basket and this is recorded in the database, they then add their own details which are stored/saved long before they get to make payment.

- Housekeeping duties now involve going back to all orders that didn’t complete and taking the time to send an email and get dialogue to ensure that we can encourage them back to finish off and pay us the money! On the very first day we started this through sending an email to a discontinued order we managed to get an extra $100.

2/ For services where we sell access to an image library, we get the user to enter their desired username (email address) and a password which is saved in a database, we then send them to Worldpay to create the subscription agreement and make payment.

Cleaning- Housekeeping duties now involve sending an email to all users who for one reason or another never complete payment and get their account activated. I don’t have numbers for this because as soon as we send an email to them their details are cleared so that they can come back and register properly but I believe it is making a difference.

3/ I am also taking a deep breathe and trying to spend one extra minute on every email I reply to when dealing with enquiries, when you get lots of emails with many of them being what I see as silly questions and chancers wanting things for free it is all too easy to give snappy email replies so I have brushed up on my customer relation skills and by taking an extra minute on every email I can come across friendlier and politely lead the potential customer towards a sale.

Taking the time out to really speak to people builds trust that we are a real business and we are in operation but being a one man band (or a one man and one woman band as we are now) it is easy to forget that when customers or potential customers contact us they probably presume we are part of a huge company.

I still get crazy emails but from now on when someone sends me an email like
“I would like to see my name in Hebrew for free”
I promise not to reply and say “We all want things we can’t have!”

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Nice ideas, I find doing a few fairly obvious things can bring some nice rewards. A simple one I did recently was removed the inline Chitika ads from some of my posts about affiliate products and it boosted sales by a lot more than I lost in the inline ad revenue.

    I’m assuming you automated the email reminder service :)

  2. This first one is sweet thanks !

  3. Talking about housekeeping. A lot of pageviews have been coming to my site and going directly to an image instead of through the homepage. Since I had not included a watermark with the site name on it this meant I was loosing traffic. By adding a watermark with my url I can be sure to find future returning traffic, impossible to measure yet effective marketing.

    • Funnily enough I have done pretty much the same as you within the last few weeks, was one of those on the list of things to do for ages and finally got round to.

      • You could check the referring page in the headers and “cloak” a HTML page (a page you wouldn’t normally serve referrals from internal pages) for off-site visitors. This way, instead of just seeing a piccy, you can show them links to other parts of your website as well.

        It shouldn’t be too hard with a little PHP and .htaccess.

        I think your conversion rate would be much higher than simply relying on the visitor to type your watermark in the address bar.

  4. Good tips on housekeeping. Yes, Adsense has been down for me too (almost 50%) as well for a friend of mine who has only one ad per page so it’s unlikely that she was smart priced.

    It would be interesting to hear if other webmasters see the decline in Adsense earnings too.

    • My traffic is down as well so it’s no surprise for me Tomaz - I think overall there are a lot of grumblings about Adsense earings being poor, I think it will continue until we get better options for CPA.

  5. Haha Scott, you made me laugh so hard at the part “We all want things we can’t have.” You really said that to people?

    If so, you indeed needed to change, even though it was very funny.

  6. I really relish the time I spend on maintaining my website, because it doesn’t happen that often. For me that invloves getting new domains for domainleft.com, working on the new design for thewebmasterstool.com and finding products for 99adz.com. I want to send emails to directory submitters telling them to check the website out and see if they are interested in products I am about to release but I am a bit worried about doing so.

  7. It is very thoughtful of your wife to have agreed to help you. I wonder how she balances between home and helping you.

    Yaba’s last blog post..Does Smoking Cause Heart Disease?

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