Christmas: It chuffing pays the bills

Well I've been out for a ruby with some mates and generally talked about work and women etc. However, the important issue that came to light is .... Christmas only comes around once a year and thank fook for that!

We all put too much pressure on each other buying presents and the expectations from your family and friends can be a bit too much.

But my take on it is that Christmas pays my bills, without having Christmas to work for this job would be a damn site less interesting.

I start planning Christmas SEO and PPC back in February / March of that year. I sit down and work out what domains I've got hanging around and which I could make something of. I also look at what products are coming out that year and try and match a decent domain to match. I do a lot of research and do buy a few too many domains for them - but I don't mind taking a risk with a couple of quid per domain and maybe spending a day setting up a basic site that I could do a bit of test ppc on.

If the product converts during that test then I'll go for it and spend a couple of days refining the PPC, design, really get to grips with the merchant and try and get some simple linking in done.

Perhaps I won't share my successes with you just yet, but I'll show a failure. A site like "Pink iPods" has shed loads of people looking for that product but far too few actually interested in buying. I thought about it, I've got some decent merchants on there, I've got Amazon which converts like a dream on my other sites but nowt much happened. After wasting a couple of hundred quid on ppc, I decided to pull the plug and see if any natural traffic comes along. Even with my "red ipod" site, it ranks chuffing well, but still very poor conversions.

Learnings:
It's all well picking products to build sites around and/or ppc. But at the end of the day it's all about conversions and how much each sale will earn you. Most electricals pay poor rates so unless you've got the rare ability to convert high searched on terms with relatively high costs into loads of sales - choose something less competitive and with decent commissions. Trust me those products exist!

What I'm listening to: Big Love, Fleetwood Mac