December 27, 2006

Tis the Season

I hope everyone's holidays were bright, calm, peaceful. My cats and I played ribbon toss for a few hours until they got bored and refused to let me play in their reindeer games, but other than that, things were nice and quiet. I enter the new year armed with a much wiser and circumspect attitude toward affiliate marketing, including the sad wisdom that enthusiasm does not equate success. So much hype, so little reality.

Note, though, that I am not giving up or giving in.

December 14, 2006

Caveat Emptor and Other Latin Warnings

So, someone asked me the other day why I chose this particular approach to affiliate marketing, as opposed to taking a safer approach - single stores, single products, single ClickBank drop-downs. I don't think there's an easy answer, to be honest, except the one that makes no sense. While a single store per affiliate would make more sense, and it might be the route I take after the first of the year, to me it doesn't seem logical.

When I shop in real life, I tend to aim for malls, for lots of choices, for the freedom to decide where I am going to spend my hard-earns. Why would I want a different approach online?

December 10, 2006

When Failure Looks a LOT Like Success

A few sleepless nights later, and the store reaches a much more usable state. It's ironic - the design is quite similar to the original approach, with the goldencan content feed at the very top of the first page, but with a great deal more polish and professionalism. It resembles the first attempt but it works.

Why?

Because my visitors are telling me so.

December 5, 2006

To Suceed You Must First Fail

A wise man once said, 'To succeed once, you must fail ten times.' Which brings me to the topic of the day, daring to fail in order to succeed. Success, such a solid yet evasive word. So relative to the state of expectations, nebulous, difficult to quantify, yet so sought.

I have found hesitancy to be my own worst enemy in much of this venture. I tend to analyze the heck out of something before taking the leap. This tends to ensure that I get very little done, and certainly don't fail as often as I otherwise would. Well, even that proclivity has its downfall. As those of you who have been reading along may know, I discovered fatal flaws and logistical nightmares with Fern's General Store - errors which I should have picked up on immediately but didn't as I was standing far too close to the tree to see the forest. Or the other way around.

To make matters worse, or better as the case may be, this is not the first failed design the store has labored under.

Failure 1 - The first attempt was ugly, top-heavy, poorly set for navigation, and was missing several critical components including search. That got tossed in favor of a store directory approach which was, in the eyes of some critics, worse by far. So I scrambled to make things less focused on the store directory and more on the store itself.

Failure 2 - A benevolent visitor clued me in, said it did not motivate her to shop, and pointed me to a site that did, the clue sunk in. I scrambled to restructure the place, ditching everything in the process and moving to a .php setup which could be more easily updated. The result was declared 'better' by quite a few folks. I rested on that laurel happily.. right up until I decided to do some shopping myself.

Failure 3 - I tried to use the site. The laurels toppled away into the abyss. It was unusable. Irredeemably difficult to navigate since there is nothing to navigate to. I scrambled to restructure the place, then stopped dead in my tracks when I looked at the data made available from the affiliate partners. Almost without exception, their product item scripts contain no prices. NO PRICES. Who shops at places and pushes Buy Now buttons without knowing what they're going to have to spend!?

Nobody sane, or very few, that's who.

So, at this time, wishing I could climb into a WayBack Machine and rewind three months worth of fruitless labor, I am once again in analysis paralysis mode, trying to figure out a way to do this right, or at least do it well, or at least not face Failure #4 of the ten I have to achieve before making it work.

December 3, 2006

... and then it hit me

There ought to be a law of the universe that declares thusly: If you build a website, you must be forced to use the website, just like a real user, a real visitor, a real non-owner, a real victim of said website, for a period of several days before said website goes live.

The whole reason for this journal of progress is to admit to my mistakes, that others may learn, nod wisely, assimilate the errors and avoid them in their own works. So I admit it, after having tried to use my own store to go shopping... I made some grave mistakes. Huge errors. Highly counter-intuitive maneuvers that make the site impossible to use, even for a licensed psychic.

At this time I am standing back from it and trying to identify just exactly what those errors are. It's difficult to reach the keyboard from that position, lemme tell you, and even more difficult to admit to the problem, much less find a rational solution. But, it's post-mortem time. Learn from it, please.

1 - Failure to think like someone who has never been to the site before. Number one error in judgment, in this case, is familiarity. I know where things are, therefore everyone else should just intuitively be able to find them. Bad mistake, and it's a lot easier to vote with feet and go find a website that isn't as difficult to navigate.

2 - Failure to make design follow function. On-the-ground shopping is not the same as web shopping. We go to a store, we find a department, we hunt through the racks, we buy, we leave. Web shopping requires a bit of a twist in the wind-up and approach. We search for what we want and find the store, we go to the site and search for the product, then we buy, then we might browse the racks if our curiosity is piqued. But browsing the racks is rarely the first thing on our minds.

3 - Finish the site before waving your arms and attracting traffic. Granted, I thought I was done before I actually tried it myself.

Here's what happened. The other night, sitting back and sipping a last cup of coffee before retiring, I thought - Gee, I should get started on my own shopping, now that I've built this nifty big store. And I want some more of these oh-so-comfortable microfiber poodle ped socks I found and got last month, now that it's getting so chilly. Surely one of these 200 stores will have them. So I searched. And I searched, and I hunted, and I poked into corners and I peered behind counters, and found.. nothing.

But as I was searching and hunting and poking and peering, I found myself getting more and more frustrated at not finding what I wanted in the requisite 2.025 seconds. There was just no way, even given the site-wide search, to do so. Why? Because the site is incredibly product-light and store-heavy. By process of elimination I was able to find the logical stores for this purchase, but only because I already knew which stores were the most likely to have the product. A visitor won't know this, and I was asking them to dig and search and poke and hunt and peer. Unfair.

So I, like so many of my erstwhile clients would, gave up, voted with my feet, went back out of the store to Google, performed the search, did not find the product in my site nor any of my stores, and ended up going back to the original source (only to find that they don't have them anymore either).

Lesson learned, the hard way, and many weeks of midnight oil and well-intentioned efforts is being ripped out today in favor of a much more product-oriented layout set up so that any visitor can find what he or she wishes without being a member of Psychic Friends Network.

December 1, 2006

Less is More, or is it just Less?

I'm beginning to fear I have made a rookie mistake - a very blatant and obvious one which I am not sure how to cure at this stage of things. I went from having one affiliate to about 200. I am swamped with emails and to-do lists to keep each of the presence conditions fresh and nifty, and have had precisely one sale, yielding a commission of $2.84.

The site looks good, I'm told. Crisp, fast, easy to use - yet something is missing (besides the obvious sales). What is it? I'd appreciate feedback.