There's been a definite leap in sales in the last four days across my toy and gift sites, so I think it looks like Christmas is here. No real difference in overall traffic, but clickthroughs and conversion rates are both higher - probably between two and three times higher than the previous week.

I really got the sense that Christmas was here when I went to Bentalls last weekend. There was only a token nod to Halloween with a few scary displays, but there was no mistaking that their focus was all about Christmas.

Last year my Toy site lost its decent SERPs just before the Christmas rush, but this year I have a better site, a better domain and I'm hoping to have a very good festive period. I kind of tied my flag to the Toys R Us mast in terms of datafeed and don't want to make any drastic changes now, but it's a shame because their commission is kind of low compared to others - although it has to be said the conversion rate seems good, for me at least.

October generally was a bit flat compared to last couple of months. The changes to MSN's rankings gave me a bigger hit than I first thought and Adsense was down about $600. I also had a mini-disappointment when I saw my Amazon stats today. The overall number was ok, but I had exactly one order short of moving up am additional tier for the month, which is annoying. Actually the order numbers were in excess of the tier, but because not all of them had been despatched I lost out on an extra 0.5% for the month.

That said, October was decent enough and I'm now looking forward to an excellent Christmas period.

Labels: adsense, christmas, earnings, msn, toys, update

Around the middle of August, I wrote a post which gave an example of a video review I had carried out, so I thought I would do a little update on how it worked out.

Since the review was published, I have sold 8 of the Digital Photo Frames through Amazon links. The commission for each one works out at £7 - hitting the Amazon commission cap on Electronics - which means the review has made a direct total of £56 so far.

Not an tonne of money by any stretch of the imagination, but 4 of the 8 sales came in the last 3 days, and I noticed the page now has a number of above-the-fold search engine positions for related search terms so is generating more traffic, making me confident that the content I created will carry on making money for a while yet.

Did I learn anything in doing this? Well, I guess it re-affirmed to me that making video content is fun and can make money. That video wasn't all that great and I really want to make top quality vids when I buy a new HD camera - almost certainly going to choose the Canon HV20. I decided to opt for a High Definition camera after seeing the remarkable quality even when compressed and uploaded to YouTube. If I can make a product look amazing, I think it's a fair bet that conversions will be even higher.

One thing I am still thinking about is should I go for a dedicated video review site, like Shawn Collins' WeViews.tv, or just drop video reviews into sites I have which are related to the subject matter, or some combination of both.

Labels: update, video

I often think of my approach to site building as being like kite flying. I throw up plenty up in the air and if any start flying, then they get my attention and I then dedicate more time to them. Others fall by the way side and never progress further than the time it took to create them in the first place.

One site which has recently started flying is a site called Toys and Video Games, which I mentioned back in April when I developed it and made use of Amazon's Web Services. It was designed to hook up with the toy inventory of Amazon in the US.

After that initial development phase, which did take a couple of days whilst I got my head round Amazons Web Services and how I was going to make use of it, I've done hardly any work on the site at all except for add in a Transformers toy page and put a link to back packs on the front page for the Back To School period.

But despite it being left to its own devices (which thanks to the live product info through Amazon's Web Services is quite a reasonable thing to do), it has started to generate some very decent sales. Individual toys - and quite popular ones at that - have somehow ranked well within Google and Yahoo! and I've occasionally been knocked sideways after logging into Amazon Associates and seeing how many items a particular toy has sold in the previous day.

Whilst doing online marketing, the prospect of having a .com site, hosted in the US, promoting US products to US customers has always appealed to me (because of the size of the market) and I'm pleased that that's what I've got. So the site has shown me its potential so I hope to develop more actual content for the site before Christmas.

Labels: amazon, progress, update