So my initial attempts were fairly unsuccessful, but it was a fun time! One thing I did was to quickly form an LLC for Moenavi. I did this for two reasons. One, to legitimize the business, and secondly, because I just KNEW that sales would be phenomenal, by forming a multi-member LLC and taking guaranteed payments, I could limit my self-employment tax burden. Well, Moenavi did appear legit, but I never had to worry about the SE tax. Oh well . . .
Because I realize I had missed the boat because of the ill-timing of the launch of Moenavi, I figured I would play around a bit with e-commerce and web marketing; areas I was totally unfamiliar with. So I hit the books, opened up a Google account, and started running Adwords campaigns. What fun! But no sales! My goal, at this point, because I realized that search marketing was an art that took a fair bit of experience to do properly, was not really to make sales, but rather to learn about Adwords; how it works, what the possibilities were, what I could do and couldn’t do. In short, to play around with it to learn as much as I could for next fall, when I would be ready to play this game with some intelligence. In in this respect, I was successful. One thing I learned is that it is easy to get sucked into the bidding frenzy and dump a lot of money right down the gutter with nothing to show for it. I learned that I needed to learn much, much more over the coming months. So I am still at it, determined to make this work for me, reading what I can and running little experiments.
I also, during these first few months, designed and re-designed, and re-designed my web site. I’m still not done with it. Again, I neede to learn what was working and what wasn’t. Using web analytics, which is amazingly powerful and detailed, I could clearly see exactly what people were doing when they visited my site. I think the biggest lesson I have learned so far is that there are two layers of content you have to worry about.
One layer is for the search engine robots. If you do this right, you will rank high in the organic search results, which is incredibly important, because if you rank high you can throttle back on Adwords, saving money. So it is important to get this right, which means at the very least you must have a fair bit of text loaded with keywords. But you must do this in a way that anybody reading it does not know that this is not meant for them. It must do its job and be well-written at the same time.
The second layer of content is, of course, for the humans who visit. They mostly do not want to read very much. Give them a nice picture or two and cut to the chase with the text. They’ll stick around. Too much text, or worse, all text, and you will lose them fast. Give them a great picture, something that is professionally done and that is relevant, and you will get most of them to explore further into your site.
Of course, you quickly realize that this is very difficult to do, because not everyone will be impressed by the same single image. For example, with Moenavi’s hats, an adult wants to see casual sophistication, a teen wants to see something daring and rebellious, and parents want to see a cute child picture. You really can’t just put all three pictures on the same page, because they work against each other, presenting conflicting emotions. What do you do?
That is the beauty of search marketing where you can have a campaign targeting teens, for example, and when they click on the ad they are taken to a landing page designed especially for this demographic. If this is done correctly, they will move deeper into the site. With each further step they take, with each new page they see content that reinforces and is consistent with what was seen before. You must do this for each of the groups you are going after. So if there are four different demographic groups, you must design four different sub-sites within your site by altering the text and graphics to suit the particular group. It’s more work, for sure, but it is much more effective than trying to shoe horn everyone into the same generic and blah site.
It’s kind of like when I go into a restaurant I have never been in before. Well, I’m a vegetarian, so I always look at the menu first before I decide to sit down. If I see beef this and pork that all over the menu and only see listed way down the bottom, as if it were just an after thought, “cheese plate” I’m out the door. This restaurant is not really focused on MY tastes. But if, on the other hand, I go into a restaurant and see tofu this and vegan that with not a mention of any meat, well how could I possibly leave? I’m staying — absolutely. If you design your web site with this kind of strategy, it will work for you.
Well, I’ve got to take the dogs for their walk, so I gotta go. Next post I will talk about why I decided to sell the hats strictly on the internet and go the wholesale route. It’s absolutely fascinating, so I hope you will return!
Stay well and be peaceful!
