Don’t dump your failed projects, spare them for later and make money when the time is right.
Posted by: nuaeman / Category: Money making, SEOWhen I started out as an a web designer I had a lot of lessons to learn. My first website was a real flop in spite of the great business idea and decent traffic I was able to generate for it (thanks to my dear friends from one Canadian SEM and SEO company). Although the visitors kept coming I had no luck converting them, no revenue, so I went down after a year.
Looking back at it with the knowledge and experience I have now I clearly see the mistakes I had made. The basic thing was that I cared too much about the “design for the sake of the design” incessantly adding almost baroque beauty to my web pages and completely ignoring the functional and usability side of it.
I never took the site down after I went out of the game and it had been hanging there until I got back to it and revamped it shortly after Thanksgiving last year. There were just three basic changes that I made but those were big ones. First off I put my ajax web development skills into practice and created a highly interactive yet very clean and simple user interface (and cut all the unnecessary decor out of there).
Now you could find any product with just a few clicks and I added some structure to the product categories as well. Next I changed the product pages, spruced them up a bit and smoothed out the checkout process in my x-cart shopping cart.
After a few months of hard work on regaining my old rankings and building some new ones (by that time the domain was well aged and brimming with Google juice – that same Canadian SEO company helped me develop a new SEO and SEM strategy) I started getting some visitors. The sales started coming right away but the conversion rate was still pretty low. I took some time adjusting my products and sales funnel based on the insights I got form my web analytics and over the next few months the sales quadrupled. Not bad, huh?
I’m still working on improving the site as there’s always room for improvement. My suggestion here is don’t dump your unsuccessful projects right away, just put them off and maybe one day (when your are ready for it) you’ll be able to make some dollars on them.
