Second Life Forums Archive - Featured Listings - What's the secret/key?

Anya Ristow

Vengeance Studio

Join date: 21 Sep 2006

Posts: 1,243

10-09-2009 11:51

From: Marcel Flatley

My question to you is, what do you regard successful?...I want to be able to cash out at least 100 dollar per month, after tier is payed

What I consider successful is irrelevant. The problem I see is that there are so many vague stories of success in SL that it encourages people to pour more money and effort into SL "businesses" than is justified. I wish everyone with a vague story of success would define what they mean, as you've done.

US$100/mo over tier, to me, is lunch money. It's about two shifts working at McDonalds. From a money-making perspective, it'd make more sense to work at McDonalds. This is the kind of info people need to see to evaluate their chances of success, however they define it.

From: someone

Plus I spend quite some time in marketing. Both getting myself higher in search, as other ways of exposure.

Are you willing to describe "other ways of exposure"?

From: someone

So I am a valid person to give advice about XStreet homepage features, for example, in my own opinion. Because I use it, investigated the success, and I am successful in my opinion. And yes, on XStreet too, I am making a profit. Even while spending 12 to 15K on homepage features.

So, you spend about US$50 per month on listing enhancements, plus tier, and want to clear at least US$100 over your expenses? If you attribute that level of success to listing enhancements you are doing far better than most people. For most people it's a debate over whether the listing enhancements pay for themselves. For me, it's hard to say, but I think for my best-selling object (L1250) it about paid for itself. For everything else it was a waste of money.

For jeans? I don't see how that'd work. Too much competition. How would you get people to click on a tiny picture of jeans? I'd like to see someone else selling jeans describe what they mean by success, and tell us if they think they've gotten it, and if paying for SLX enhancements was helpful.

_____________________

The Vengeance Studio Gadget Store is closed!

Danno Spiegelblatt

Registered User

Join date: 22 Apr 2008

Posts: 12

10-09-2009 11:59

to Anya in case there is some confusion - I am the one who started the thread and sell Jeans..I have about 300 items on SLX and I wanted to get exposure to my whole line and store...

Funny thing this afternoon--I got two sales inworld of the exact model of jeans I have on featured hoempage rotation (GROWL Cargo Jeans DARK LIGHTNING), they both sold one right after the other (within 20 mins) and I asked one where they saw my jeans and they said they saw it on slx and follwed the slurl inworld...

Anya Ristow

Vengeance Studio

Join date: 21 Sep 2006

Posts: 1,243

10-09-2009 12:12

From: Danno Spiegelblatt

Funny thing this afternoon--I got two sales inworld of the exact model of jeans I have on featured hoempage rotation

When your enhancement expires, please let us know if you think it paid for itself.

Edit: And while we're mentioning success stories, I should add that yesterday was my second best in-world sales day ever

_____________________

The Vengeance Studio Gadget Store is closed!

Danno Spiegelblatt

Registered User

Join date: 22 Apr 2008

Posts: 12

10-09-2009 18:46

From: Anya Ristow

When your enhancement expires, please let us know if you think it paid for itself.

Edit: And while we're mentioning success stories, I should add that yesterday was my second best in-world sales day ever

woo hoo - I visited your inworld store when I was almost a noob and couldn't exactly figure out what you sold - lol - It took me a few moments to figure out that you were offering to turn me in to a floating orb...

By the way...On the heels of that custoemr service email i sent in, a Kimi Linden contacted me and gave a pro-rata refund once I canceled and ended the subscription. I am going to revisit it but I will be armed with better info...

Rene Erlanger

Scuderia Shapes & Skins G

Join date: 28 Sep 2006

Posts: 2,008

10-10-2009 06:18

For me "SL successful" are those 400-500 or so people that fall into the 2000+ USD cashout category. That's how i personally measure success here on SL.....everything thereafter are just "degrees of success"....all the way down to covering Land Tiers.

SLEX/ XStreet Sales has always been a very tiny portion of my overall monthly sales...in fact I would say it was better during the SLEX stewardship. I tend to recycle my Sales proceeds to buy other stuff on the XStreet site,.... like Prefabs or Gadgets or Landscaping products or presents for my SL Family.....so its serves it's purpose in that way.

Nowadays my monthly XStreet sales range from 1-4k...so its ideal play money.....I might even take out one of those "waste of money" enhancements because I'm a twonk!

Well I live in hope that they might actually generate extra Sales -it's a bit like buying a Lottery ticket!

It's an absolute nightmare navigating through the XStreet (and SLEX) search systems/. I have zero clues how it works from a Creator's point of view.
Today, I just took out another "Featured" enhancement. Personally i think it's all a mug's game and might as well have sent that money to the crapper, ....the only blessing is that I didn't actually pay for it,....my previous month's Sales did!.

When i first arrived in SL, i used SLEX for researching products from which i could locate the Creator's mainstore in-world and make the purchase that way. Nowadays i use XStreet less and less for research....it looks gamed to death. I type in the Product in Search and apart from the initial entries.....i see a lot of nonsense displayed because of keyword abuse. (that needs to be stamped out!)

I can't be bothered to learn the tricks or how to game the XStreet system....the return would be too little to worry about. I just treat XStreet as a free form of advertising...a catalogue of Products! Hopefully a few will TP to my main shops and make purchases that way.

XStreet enhancements is a money pit imo unless you create niche or certain type of products that are in demand (e.g Gadgets..reading all the info is helpful). Another form of advertising that has decreased in value imo.....are those Classified Adverts in world. ( I've been recording TPs per advert for the last 2.5 years now...and the cost per TP has been steadily going upwards over time)

_____________________

Scuderia Group

Plush Enigma Shops: https://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Enigma/50/63/22/
Plush Giga Shops: https://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Giga/202/82/22/

Hendricks Tigerfish

Registered User

Join date: 20 Jan 2009

Posts: 1

11-30-2009 02:01

Hi,

This is my first time posting to the forums, but I was wondering if anyone knew about the type of algorithms/rotation schedule used for Homepage featured items? I purchased my first homepage featured enhancement three days ago, and while I'm still a bit of a novice at this, I was under the impression that the item should enter the rotation almost immediately? I've watched the page over continuous periods of time the last few days, and have not only never seen my item -- I've seen countless repeats of other featured items on the page, which causes me to wonder about the methods used for the rotations. Also, I have not seen any measurable increase in traffic. Save for the obvious trollish reponses of my product being a piece of crap not worth selling, I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this for me? I checked the FAQs, and forums but I couldn't see to find a response that specifically addressed this.

Ralektra Breda

Template Painter

Join date: 7 Apr 2008

Posts: 1,875

11-30-2009 04:23

From: Marcel Flatley

Yet this is your mistake. Do put out as much as you can on XStreet, the more you have there the more your sales will grow (I have a lot of work to do in that regard as well).
People find 1 of your items, and if they like it, they might use the "all from this merchant" button. And the chance of them finding one of your items, is bigger when you have 200 items out there, then 20.

This was good advice when it was given, this thread is a bit of a necro tho. Now people will soon be paying a 10L$ listing fee (per month) for each item they list, it just won't make sense to keep items that sell rarely on there.

_____________________

Mainstore: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Phantasm/51/164/501
http://rbzdesign.blogspot.com/
I'm not a designer IRL, but I RP one on SL!

Tarina Sewell

Just Browsing Thank you

Join date: 20 Jul 2007

Posts: 2,180

11-30-2009 05:45

From: Danno Spiegelblatt

Today I bought a Homepage Feature Listing (2899) for a pair of my GROWL Jeans. They are very popular in-world but I felt they could use more exposure on SLX. I was urged by a fellow creator to use the Featured enhancement.

I sell 56 variations of the style of jeans I have on SLX..some of the items haven't had sales but the jeans line overall doesn't do bad at all here one SLX. The jeans are high quality and have a beautiful texture and great listing copy, very thorough.

I picked my personal favorite pair of jeans and decided to promote it and in effect promote the entire line. But the only exposure it really gets is in the Homepage rotation. Support got back to me on it but I was under impression the Featured enhancement would actually cause me to be 'featured', push my item to the top of pages where say, 'jeans' was searched on. Instead I can't even find my listing, I gave up after going through page after page. Support basically told me that Featured would place me at top of pages where I would normally appear. Therefore if my listing is buried on page 46, buying Featured places me at the top of page 46 (what???).

The jeans are high quality and I was willing to pay a premium to get it more exposure on a search so people could see it more...they are no longer NEW so I can't get in that rotation so other than Homepage rotation am I to understand correctly that Featured Listing really doesn't do anything for you?

Search on Growl Cargo jeans to find the listing--I am not saying this as a cheap attempt to get hits or views but I want you to see what I am trying to promote and possibly benefit from any advice of those who have had experience in this area of selling on slx.

Here is my response to support:

"Today I bought a Hompage Featured Item Listing. I have jeans I am trying to promote and I thought by purchasing the listing I would be at the top of the search listings when someone searched on Jeans or even Men's jeans (the category where the jeans are located). But When I search on either I cannot even find my listing. I see multitiudes of featured and NON-featured listings that appear for pages and pages.

I received a response earlier but according to what was sent me I guess I needed to learn more about how items are displayed so that I can make a more intelligent purchasing decision for this kind of listing. I thought when someone searched on 'Jeans' my listing would have been pushed to the top of the pages. I am now told that if my listing is buried on say, page 20, it wil be placed on the top of THAT page, essentially it is still buried. Other than home page rotation I don't know what paying all this money really does for you.

I'd like to know if you could cancel this for me and refund me until I can figure out the best way of using this feature. I have hundreds of products on SLX and they sell fairly successfully... I have variations of some products that haven't sold any product but their associated products have, this is why I was promoting the others and to get general attention to my line of apparel. Paying 2899 may have not been the best way to do this on an item that doesn't have a high popularity rating and to be honest this is wrong I feel. If it is popular then it doesn't need a featured listing. I purchased the advertising to try to push it up and get that EXPOSURE. As I found out I am still buried."

Danno

I do fairly well without any listing features.....

I tried one outfit I had as a feature, not the 2899 but a lesser 199. I wanted to see if it made a difference before I plunged into the abyss... It didnt't to be honest I sold more of this one particular outfit when I didnt pay... sooooo Not a chance I will do the feature homepage.

on another note, all the home page features I see have on the bottom of the page.. Keyword: then list a bunch of keywords.. Which I thought was not allowed but... there again it is just who sees it and who decides it is or not. And I doubt they would take em down if they rackin up L$ over em. (I mean LL)

This is the same for ebay... BUT ebay results come on over about how well you are rated.. which kinda sucks in itself.. I do a hell of a good business on ebay and its so very different searching ebay from xstreet. I cant find anything I need in xstreet. What i do get is pages and pages of the same thing in different colors... Or I type in men's jeans for instance, and get pages of stuff so not related to men's jeans I get frustraited... and so why my partner runs around bare assed.

It would be nice if search results displayed 1 item matching, then if I like it and want more colors I can click through that page to get to more colors.... Not 15 pages of the same thing in different colors.

I dont wear alot of jeans in SL myself, I like dresses and girly stuff but.... this is a great way to promote your growl jeans posting in the forums.

Featured Listings - What's the secret/key?
Anya Ristow Vengeance Studio Join date: 21 Sep 2006 Posts: 1,243	10-09-2009 11:51 From: Marcel Flatley My question to you is, what do you regard successful?...I want to be able to cash out at least 100 dollar per month, after tier is payed What I consider successful is irrelevant. The problem I see is that there are so many vague stories of success in SL that it encourages people to pour more money and effort into SL "businesses" than is justified. I wish everyone with a vague story of success would define what they mean, as you've done. US$100/mo over tier, to me, is lunch money. It's about two shifts working at McDonalds. From a money-making perspective, it'd make more sense to work at McDonalds. This is the kind of info people need to see to evaluate their chances of success, however they define it. From: someone Plus I spend quite some time in marketing. Both getting myself higher in search, as other ways of exposure. Are you willing to describe "other ways of exposure"? From: someone So I am a valid person to give advice about XStreet homepage features, for example, in my own opinion. Because I use it, investigated the success, and I am successful in my opinion. And yes, on XStreet too, I am making a profit. Even while spending 12 to 15K on homepage features. So, you spend about US$50 per month on listing enhancements, plus tier, and want to clear at least US$100 over your expenses? If you attribute that level of success to listing enhancements you are doing far better than most people. For most people it's a debate over whether the listing enhancements pay for themselves. For me, it's hard to say, but I think for my best-selling object (L1250) it about paid for itself. For everything else it was a waste of money. For jeans? I don't see how that'd work. Too much competition. How would you get people to click on a tiny picture of jeans? I'd like to see someone else selling jeans describe what they mean by success, and tell us if they think they've gotten it, and if paying for SLX enhancements was helpful. _____________________ The Vengeance Studio Gadget Store is closed!
Danno Spiegelblatt Registered User Join date: 22 Apr 2008 Posts: 12	10-09-2009 11:59 to Anya in case there is some confusion - I am the one who started the thread and sell Jeans..I have about 300 items on SLX and I wanted to get exposure to my whole line and store... Funny thing this afternoon--I got two sales inworld of the exact model of jeans I have on featured hoempage rotation (GROWL Cargo Jeans DARK LIGHTNING), they both sold one right after the other (within 20 mins) and I asked one where they saw my jeans and they said they saw it on slx and follwed the slurl inworld...
Anya Ristow Vengeance Studio Join date: 21 Sep 2006 Posts: 1,243	10-09-2009 12:12 From: Danno Spiegelblatt Funny thing this afternoon--I got two sales inworld of the exact model of jeans I have on featured hoempage rotation When your enhancement expires, please let us know if you think it paid for itself. Edit: And while we're mentioning success stories, I should add that yesterday was my second best in-world sales day ever _____________________ The Vengeance Studio Gadget Store is closed!
Danno Spiegelblatt Registered User Join date: 22 Apr 2008 Posts: 12	10-09-2009 18:46 From: Anya Ristow When your enhancement expires, please let us know if you think it paid for itself. Edit: And while we're mentioning success stories, I should add that yesterday was my second best in-world sales day ever woo hoo - I visited your inworld store when I was almost a noob and couldn't exactly figure out what you sold - lol - It took me a few moments to figure out that you were offering to turn me in to a floating orb... By the way...On the heels of that custoemr service email i sent in, a Kimi Linden contacted me and gave a pro-rata refund once I canceled and ended the subscription. I am going to revisit it but I will be armed with better info...
Rene Erlanger Scuderia Shapes & Skins G Join date: 28 Sep 2006 Posts: 2,008	10-10-2009 06:18 For me "SL successful" are those 400-500 or so people that fall into the 2000+ USD cashout category. That's how i personally measure success here on SL.....everything thereafter are just "degrees of success"....all the way down to covering Land Tiers. SLEX/ XStreet Sales has always been a very tiny portion of my overall monthly sales...in fact I would say it was better during the SLEX stewardship. I tend to recycle my Sales proceeds to buy other stuff on the XStreet site,.... like Prefabs or Gadgets or Landscaping products or presents for my SL Family.....so its serves it's purpose in that way. Nowadays my monthly XStreet sales range from 1-4k...so its ideal play money.....I might even take out one of those "waste of money" enhancements because I'm a twonk! Well I live in hope that they might actually generate extra Sales -it's a bit like buying a Lottery ticket! It's an absolute nightmare navigating through the XStreet (and SLEX) search systems/. I have zero clues how it works from a Creator's point of view. Today, I just took out another "Featured" enhancement. Personally i think it's all a mug's game and might as well have sent that money to the crapper, ....the only blessing is that I didn't actually pay for it,....my previous month's Sales did!. When i first arrived in SL, i used SLEX for researching products from which i could locate the Creator's mainstore in-world and make the purchase that way. Nowadays i use XStreet less and less for research....it looks gamed to death. I type in the Product in Search and apart from the initial entries.....i see a lot of nonsense displayed because of keyword abuse. (that needs to be stamped out!) I can't be bothered to learn the tricks or how to game the XStreet system....the return would be too little to worry about. I just treat XStreet as a free form of advertising...a catalogue of Products! Hopefully a few will TP to my main shops and make purchases that way. XStreet enhancements is a money pit imo unless you create niche or certain type of products that are in demand (e.g Gadgets..reading all the info is helpful). Another form of advertising that has decreased in value imo.....are those Classified Adverts in world. ( I've been recording TPs per advert for the last 2.5 years now...and the cost per TP has been steadily going upwards over time) _____________________ Scuderia Group Plush Enigma Shops: https://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Enigma/50/63/22/ Plush Giga Shops: https://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Giga/202/82/22/
Hendricks Tigerfish Registered User Join date: 20 Jan 2009 Posts: 1	11-30-2009 02:01 Hi, This is my first time posting to the forums, but I was wondering if anyone knew about the type of algorithms/rotation schedule used for Homepage featured items? I purchased my first homepage featured enhancement three days ago, and while I'm still a bit of a novice at this, I was under the impression that the item should enter the rotation almost immediately? I've watched the page over continuous periods of time the last few days, and have not only never seen my item -- I've seen countless repeats of other featured items on the page, which causes me to wonder about the methods used for the rotations. Also, I have not seen any measurable increase in traffic. Save for the obvious trollish reponses of my product being a piece of crap not worth selling, I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this for me? I checked the FAQs, and forums but I couldn't see to find a response that specifically addressed this.
Ralektra Breda Template Painter Join date: 7 Apr 2008 Posts: 1,875	11-30-2009 04:23 From: Marcel Flatley Yet this is your mistake. Do put out as much as you can on XStreet, the more you have there the more your sales will grow (I have a lot of work to do in that regard as well). People find 1 of your items, and if they like it, they might use the "all from this merchant" button. And the chance of them finding one of your items, is bigger when you have 200 items out there, then 20. This was good advice when it was given, this thread is a bit of a necro tho. Now people will soon be paying a 10L$ listing fee (per month) for each item they list, it just won't make sense to keep items that sell rarely on there. _____________________ Mainstore: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Phantasm/51/164/501 http://rbzdesign.blogspot.com/ I'm not a designer IRL, but I RP one on SL!
Tarina Sewell Just Browsing Thank you Join date: 20 Jul 2007 Posts: 2,180	11-30-2009 05:45 From: Danno Spiegelblatt Today I bought a Homepage Feature Listing (2899) for a pair of my GROWL Jeans. They are very popular in-world but I felt they could use more exposure on SLX. I was urged by a fellow creator to use the Featured enhancement. I sell 56 variations of the style of jeans I have on SLX..some of the items haven't had sales but the jeans line overall doesn't do bad at all here one SLX. The jeans are high quality and have a beautiful texture and great listing copy, very thorough. I picked my personal favorite pair of jeans and decided to promote it and in effect promote the entire line. But the only exposure it really gets is in the Homepage rotation. Support got back to me on it but I was under impression the Featured enhancement would actually cause me to be 'featured', push my item to the top of pages where say, 'jeans' was searched on. Instead I can't even find my listing, I gave up after going through page after page. Support basically told me that Featured would place me at top of pages where I would normally appear. Therefore if my listing is buried on page 46, buying Featured places me at the top of page 46 (what???). The jeans are high quality and I was willing to pay a premium to get it more exposure on a search so people could see it more...they are no longer NEW so I can't get in that rotation so other than Homepage rotation am I to understand correctly that Featured Listing really doesn't do anything for you? Search on Growl Cargo jeans to find the listing--I am not saying this as a cheap attempt to get hits or views but I want you to see what I am trying to promote and possibly benefit from any advice of those who have had experience in this area of selling on slx. Here is my response to support: "Today I bought a Hompage Featured Item Listing. I have jeans I am trying to promote and I thought by purchasing the listing I would be at the top of the search listings when someone searched on Jeans or even Men's jeans (the category where the jeans are located). But When I search on either I cannot even find my listing. I see multitiudes of featured and NON-featured listings that appear for pages and pages. I received a response earlier but according to what was sent me I guess I needed to learn more about how items are displayed so that I can make a more intelligent purchasing decision for this kind of listing. I thought when someone searched on 'Jeans' my listing would have been pushed to the top of the pages. I am now told that if my listing is buried on say, page 20, it wil be placed on the top of THAT page, essentially it is still buried. Other than home page rotation I don't know what paying all this money really does for you. I'd like to know if you could cancel this for me and refund me until I can figure out the best way of using this feature. I have hundreds of products on SLX and they sell fairly successfully... I have variations of some products that haven't sold any product but their associated products have, this is why I was promoting the others and to get general attention to my line of apparel. Paying 2899 may have not been the best way to do this on an item that doesn't have a high popularity rating and to be honest this is wrong I feel. If it is popular then it doesn't need a featured listing. I purchased the advertising to try to push it up and get that EXPOSURE. As I found out I am still buried." Danno I do fairly well without any listing features..... I tried one outfit I had as a feature, not the 2899 but a lesser 199. I wanted to see if it made a difference before I plunged into the abyss... It didnt't to be honest I sold more of this one particular outfit when I didnt pay... sooooo Not a chance I will do the feature homepage. on another note, all the home page features I see have on the bottom of the page.. Keyword: then list a bunch of keywords.. Which I thought was not allowed but... there again it is just who sees it and who decides it is or not. And I doubt they would take em down if they rackin up L$ over em. (I mean LL) This is the same for ebay... BUT ebay results come on over about how well you are rated.. which kinda sucks in itself.. I do a hell of a good business on ebay and its so very different searching ebay from xstreet. I cant find anything I need in xstreet. What i do get is pages and pages of the same thing in different colors... Or I type in men's jeans for instance, and get pages of stuff so not related to men's jeans I get frustraited... and so why my partner runs around bare assed. It would be nice if search results displayed 1 item matching, then if I like it and want more colors I can click through that page to get to more colors.... Not 15 pages of the same thing in different colors. I dont wear alot of jeans in SL myself, I like dresses and girly stuff but.... this is a great way to promote your growl jeans posting in the forums.

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Featured Listings - What's the secret/key?