One Small Step For Man

When I made my last post I had expected my next post to come a week later; I hadn't expected anything significant to occur between then and now but I have been pleasantly surprised!

I am supposed to be back at university right now but unfortunately I fell ill over the weekend and so am still at home. Still, there was a silver lining to that cloud as I logged into the computer for a few minutes Sunday afternoon to be greeted with a pleasant surprise. I had received my first order via my website! Up until now all orders have either come offline or via eBay. It's hard to get people to even visit a new website, let alone have them trust the website with their money so this is a momentous occasion. Orders via my website are preferable than Amazon or eBay since I don't need to worry about listing fees which means cheaper prices for both myself and the customer. That and I would like to recoup the money invested in getting the website up and running, not to mention the amount of time spent working on it. 

On another issue related to the website I'm still having trouble drawing traffic to it. I'm running a Google Adsense campaign and I've given the address out to everyone I know, a few of which have passed it on to people they know etc... Still, according to Google Analytics with the exceptions of a few spikes every now and then I'm only averaging ~10 unique hits so far. The site has been up about 4 weeks so far so I'm not exactly sure if that's good or bad relative to the newness of the site. Still, I suppose getting 10 unique visitors that buy products is better than getting 100 unique visitors that don't. Nevertheless increasing the amount of visitors increases the chances of a sale so I'm working at trying to boost the traffic to the website. 

I'm working on the idea of putting up some posters around town advertising my business and allowing people to pick up the products directly from me when I get back to university. It's a small student town and the only other video game shop is GAME which is overpriced so I hope it can help boost sales, especially in the run up to Christmas.

Going back to university tomorrow to a house that doesn't have an Internet connection yet so I can't be sure when my next post will be exactly, but as soon as I get Internet again I'll post an update.