www.powdermagazine.wordpress.com
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My site (Snaps) was created in 2014. It has charged into two formats, but both are struggling to make a profit. Questions:
1 How can I drive more paying customers to it (I have already tried most recommendations).
2 A few days ago wordpress compressed the site and changed it into a blog. I am sill getting Visitors and Views but Downloads have ceased ( my primary source of income). How can I resolve this impediment.
Here in Australia I have found a huge resistance to buying from my website. If this does not significantly improve, the effort is not worth it, -
Hi there – I looked into your site’s monthly stats here: https://wordpress.com/stats/month/powdermagazine.wordpress.com
I notice there that your site traffic has been growing steadily each month this year since April. Nice work!
You mentioned you have already tried most recommendations to bring customers to your site. Can you share a little more about what you have tried? Were you following a guide or specific instructions to do that?
And can you tell me more about how your site has changed into a blog? I suppose this means your site layout has changed. Can you provide a little more detail? For example, are you wanting your home page to look different but are unable to accomplish it?
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Thanks for your assistance.
1 Yes Views are gradually increasing month to month, but this seems to be very slow.
2 Despite getting Referrers, my Visitors number stays at 1. This does not seem to be related to anything – is it an ‘encouragement’ award from WordPress.
The ultimate stat is money in the bank. Generally, wordpress stats are not accurate enough to make daily decisions. A good example was last Sunday I deleted a number of articles form the site, BUT today ( Wednesday) WordPress is still reporting Downloads for them.
3.1 I am not following any one person’s marketing plan. I have a Masters degree ( Marketing major) and have been reading many articles on e-commerce marketing. The original version of the site (2014) was to sell specific stories by ‘key words’ . This ground along for 6 years and finally costs outweighed revenue and I changed it into its current format. Strangely, the best Views ever came from the original version.
3.2 I can easily get 1,000+ Twitter Impressions a day ( with very high Engagement Rates) BUT this is transferring to very low ‘click throughs’ to the site. Some strategies used have been; reduce other ‘click’ options e.g. @ & #, use an eye catching picture ( with text, colour and the site URL). Even if they do not ‘click through’ hopefully the URL will stick in their minds ( classic higher profile advertising). My best time of the day (for Views) is 12 – 2.30. I have used tandem Tweets ( three tweets in a row) to reinforce the message.
3.3 I subscribed to Facebook to join SCA and found I was accumulating a lot of other ‘friends’. Facebook kept offering me ‘friends’ and I accepted all of them until I got to their maximum of 5,000. They even gave me a ‘business’ account and reminded me when I slowed up. When I started driving them to powdermagazine Facebook ‘disabled’ me. This included Instagram. I did not mind as these ‘friends’ did not buy anything.
3.4 I noticed Tumblr ads on the site and started to advertise there two months ago – again with little success.
3.5 I have a small email list which I do not want to flog too much. My conclusion, so far, is that the traffic I have has largely come from this list, and that social media is very hard work ( unless I can implement some kind of automatic posting).
3.6 The site has a number of referral systems in it, but this is hard to measure.
4 I cannot see that having ‘followers’ is much assistance. This may be OK for a politician but my ‘followers’ are return buyers. Neil Patel says he has 200,000 ‘followers’ but the alternative is to Tweet more often ( generic Tweets).
5 I have thought about subscribing to various ad programs ( Google, Twitter, WordPress etc) but another source says these largely have a very low ROI.
6 On the ‘blog’ issue; my home page was changed ( without advising me) –
it was condensed to continuous text, ads were dropped, updates were added in simple text at the end of the site. The site is still in its original state in Edit mode but is published in blog mode. This is consistent with a blog I created a few months ago for my family history. These changes are OK for this blog but are unattractive for a commercial site such as powdermagazine. My sister is a graphic artist and she says this condensed format is not modern, clean and fresh. She says that even if people click through, they will be deterred from buying by these changes. I notice that a new editor has arrived – are these changes caused by this?
7 I have red a number of success stories from USA but ( in my case) there is a strong resistance to buying from websites. My son is an IT security expert and he says their advice is NOT to buy from websites. I have proven this resistance on a number of occasions. One such case was ‘Get the Great Stories for Free’ this got top Downloads but when they found they had to provide an email list they bailed out. Lucky Lottery Numbers ( for free) has always been the top Download but when viewers found they had to pay $2.99 for these ( included in MINIpowMAG) they bailed out. Perhaps I have been providing too may articles for free.
8 The original corporate objective was to sell short stories worldwide. The social media platforms are limiting me to Australia ( Twitter is one of the top 100 and only 19% of its customers are Australian), so here is a major impediment. WordPress stats support this with the majority of Views being Australian.
9 I have considered upgrading my plan ( e.g. to Pemium), but I am still not convinced that this will solve these impediments.
10 I have no preconceived ideas on how the homepage should look, as the articles are varied and will change, so it should not be specific e.g. Rugby League.
I therefore work with what the Snaps theme offers. What would be required to change to another theme? ( that must solve my problems). My other partners are ejunkie and Paypal. I have the same issue with ejunkie – I have to stick on their lowest plan until revenue increases ( i.e. limited to the existing number of articles)
11 Another option is to make everything on the site free, but then I am limited to gaining revenue from wordpress ads. At a workshop I was told that this option is unlikely.
12 Another added cost is since I replaced my laptop a few months ago, it seems to come supplied supplied with a virus that causes some kind of ‘repair’ every week. As it is now 90% used for this site, site revenue has to cover this new cost.All up, since 2014, the time I have put into the various permutations and combinations, has not been worth it. This is a stand alone e-commerce site and if it does not turn a profit, I will have no option but to close it down ( despite all the articles that say e-commere is the future).
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