Lowcountry High Style

There are a few days left in August, and we are at 270 product clicks, 26 ordered items (more than double last month), $45.92 in affiliate revenue, and our conversion rate is 10.05% for 'basic products'. This is just measured by the number of people who buy something on Amazon after clicking on our main shop affiliate product links, but not any blog post text links. We have experimented with our first blog post to embark on some content marketing, but we are a little hesitant to go down that path as it is much more time-consuming. Next, we are going to create a freebie digital print download to encourage signups and start putting out a weekly product digest email to our users to increase our return usage.

In the month of July, we got 211 clicks, 12 ordered items, and $53.99 in affiliate revenue. Before we reached that very first sale, I wasn't entirely sure the whole system was even set up properly, so you can imagine the relief and excitement when you watch something you build start working! We are continuing to add 5 - 10 new products per day. Since we are focusing on the best possible UX, we're editing images for every product we import, and it can be around 4 to 6 minutes per product (depending on how well-structured the product descriptions already are from Amazon). We made a big overhaul to the main drop-down menus to the 'megamenu' style with some more engaging visual elements. We also got 2 subscribers to our mailing list, which is exciting but scary since we've haven't optimized that flow yet. Here's to a positive August!

Last month we have finally started getting our products clicked on and sending users to Amazon with our affiliate links. We got 65 clicks that were all generated from Pinterest Pins that have been optimized with the proper keywords, hashtags, and board titles. It's hard to say which clicks are being registered from our own testing and building. In any case, it's exciting to start getting some traction.

It took a little bit longer to feel comfortable releasing LCHS to the public, but after showing it to a few friends and family, we received some really positive feedback that gave us the confidence to start our digital marketing roadmap. The model itself has a built-in marketing system that 'Pins' every product we put on the site automatically to its corresponding Pinterest Board. We essentially have a duplicate of our site on Pinterest and get to immediately reach our ideal target market (Pinterest general audience is 18 to 34-year-old females interested in fashion, home styling, and creation). Since we automated it this way, it was difficult to say when we technically launched, but we are officially starting to get in front of the eyes we want.

Successful e-commerce shops require a well-thought-out taxonomy and with the potential quickness that products can be added, we spent a lot of time getting this part down. This started with deciding which categories of products interested us, would be of interest to other users in our demographic, and that would fit our mission/vision statements. The goal is that we surface comparable Amazon products that typically go for 10x or 50x the price on storefronts such as Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, and any high-end fashion store, but at a fraction of the price. I have a side web-building business as well, so the theme, VPS hosting, etc. were already in place and so it was finally time to build!