Whoa!

Every once in awhile, you get hit with something that leaves you stunned and unsure about what to do next...

That's where I am right now.

In the last few blog posts, I've talked about the incredible (apparent) rise and fall of my relationship product. Until this point, I had theories about why the sales suddenly disappeared but I didn't have any concrete information. My suspicions ranged from blocked emails from my autoresponder to broken sales links. It was not until today that I actually sat down and compiled the data from Clickbank and did a real analysis from that end.

It's amazing what happens when you have data in front of you and the tales that it tells... Data just does not lie.

According to my Clickbank sales and my Aweber info, from 2/1/2012 to the present:

• 50% of the sales came from people who opted into my list from content on the website
• 33% of the sales came from non-subscribers (basically 1st time exposure to my product)
  
• Only 2 sales came from paid traffic subscribers!
• No sales were generated from 7Search or Bidvertiser
• Sales were coming in every other day until 2/18. This date coincides with a drop in rankings for content across my website and also a change in the optin pages used for MSN adCenter traffic.
  

This information leaves me a little sick to my stomach, literally. It means that there has suddenly been a shift and traffic from MSN is no converting as well as it used to. From 10/1/2011 to 2/1/2012, only 42.9% sales came from organic traffic. Since 2/1, we are looking at 83% sales from organic traffic! While some would say that the silver lining to this is that organic traffic is free, the reality is that organic traffic from the biggest search engine is completely unreliable.

I'm left to contemplate what can be done about this situation. The first thing that I will do is switch back to the older optin pages. While their optin rates may have been lower, I believe the videos actually worked to pre-sell prospects on purchasing the product later. The current optin pages do not pre-sell at all. I will watch this to see if it starts to bring sales in from MSN. Something happened to make MSN less profitable. I'm hoping that it boils down to the change in optin pages. I changed the optin pages around the same time the sales evaporated.

The next thing is to figure out how to get traffic to the site without relying on the search engines. The traffic is good and it converts but I can't base whether or not I can pay my bills on how Google feels from day to day. That's a fool's game. So far, efforts to get affiliates have not panned out. However, I have started looking into doing guest posts on other blogs. We will see how that goes. As mentioned in a previous post, I am also creating a new product specifically for getting JV traffic and sales.

Meanwhile, my employees will continue to work on the SEO side of things to hopefully get the site's pages back into the top of the rankings.

Oh, the frustration!