The Value of Search in a Product Oriented World
For the last few years I’ve been staring at stats and analyzing them to no end. I know everything about stats a person could want to know. Some of it makes entirely to much sense to me. I get to know ‘readers’ by how they click around on my site. I have mental analogies for how a reader peruses through my sites. I watch how long they view articles and I get to know what type of reader they are. A great tool for that type of analysis is Pmetrics. Yes I work for in some capacity the parent company SplashPress. Still I believe it’s an above average product with a lot of potential.
Over the last few years I’ve analyze the value of a reader over the course of time. From the time they initially found my sites — until the time they no longer continued coming back. The value of an average reader to one of my average blogs was around $1.75 a year. The average reader acquisition was via Google. That’s the world of publishing. Our product is our content. Our value to the universe is in ad sales.
Let’s step forward. I’m a rookie at eCommerce. But even with a new site. Let’s take an average sale of doors from our door website. If we sell 10 doors at retail cost of 200 dollars that’s 2,000. The average door purchase so far is not nearly that high but the potential is there. Let’s take a pending sale. We sold 5 doors at 200 a piece that’s 1,000 for one search. One acquisition brough 1,000. Minus out costs and the value of this search is around $100.00 to me and $500.00 to the other parties involved. All of a sudden the world of SEARCH just got a whole lot more appetizing. However not every search becomes a buying customer thus bringing down the value a bit. But so far I’m very intrigued and excited to learn more about Ecommerce. I see a lot more real world value to having a product and a lot less reason to resort to tucking my tail between my legs and spending more time in publishing online again.
To me products are a far better way of monetizing your time than ads. But hey that’s just me. And I’m a newbie in this brave new world.
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David,
This is something to take a long hard look at. I mean wow. But at the end of the day, it really comes down to total return on search;-)
And if an entrepreneur has a good product (or even service) to sell, I would recommend product over content any day. The key is identifying a non-saturated product market to sell in.