Ideas and Thoughts

After selling used laptops and computers as well as AC adapters for the laptops since 1997.  We have tried all kinds of ways to market our products.  So I thought I would pass on some of my experiences that resulted in success as well as some of the failures in advertising that we have encountered over the years.

To give you a quick over view, when we started selling used laptops and computers on the internet in 1997 there was not allot of competition.  So advertising was pretty basic.  Collect email address' and send out sales via email.  Which of course worked back then before the days of SPAM.  Obviously that approach does not work as well.

We also did some pay per click advertising on all of the major website search engines like www.overture.com, www.kanoodle.com and www.google.com.  What we found was that it was like eating soup with a fork -- We stayed real busy with the sales but we were always hungry.  After looking at the year of that type advertising and we found that the gross sales we made did not even meet the cost of the campaigns.

So the question is -- What do you do to improve traffic and sales on your website?  Well we did some experimentation.  Using an affiliate account we set up various web pages with sales links.  This is what we found:

• Banner Ads have a < 0.1% click thru rate

• Straight Text ads work better than banner ads

• Most successful sales came from full page content regarding item being sold.

Here is our most successful experimental page.  This page receives about 30 views per day.  With an average of 15 visitors clicking thru to our main website.  This page has only been up on our website for about 3 months.  Here is the page:

http://www.laptopextra.com/used-laptops/index.htm

Our number 2 producer of good traffic is

http://usedlaptops.cc/prices_for_used_laptop_computers.htm

This page could be better.  We created it very quickly in order to fill a category.  Yet it receives and average of 10 entry page views per day which means that the visitor entered our site on that page.  They were directed there via a search engine.  Keep in mind that these two pages are rather young and in fact have a poor search engine rank.  Yet received the traffic and produced a click thru result.  I encourage you to follow these examples going as far as to copy the text to your own website.

How does this information help your sales?

Which the bottom line here is that success is measured by total commissions paid on gross sales from your website.  So I would like to make the following suggestions and procedures to help jump start sales of used laptops and computers on your website.

The mechanics of the sale on the website is very simple.  The important points to remember is this:

• A cookie is put on the visitors computer which has your MPID code attached.  So if that visitor comes back to the site within 30 days, they are your customer.

• Any visitor that registers on our website will automatically become your customer.  The MPID code is attached to their registered account.

• And obviously if the visitor orders you earn cash.

So we have several suggestions:

• Send as many visitors as possible. (This is obvious)

• Use the Laptop drawing as a draw.  We send out 10 sales emails every 30 days to these people.  So if they order the cookie on their machine will point to your account.  Keep in mind that when they sign up for the laptop drawing they have not setup an account on the website. 

• To register for an account on the website the visitor must fill out this information  Once this is done this visitor becomes your customer for as many orders and for as long as they are a customer.  Earning you a commission on every order placed.

You can have allot of variations on the same theme.  Not only will the pages that you include on your website increase the amount of usable content that search engines will use to rank your website but they should include useful information about used laptops and or different laptop models.  I will be creating some content pages that you can use to implement on your website and help drive more sales to your affiliate account.