I have a very large inventory, and I track the inventory of my drop-shipper every day, so I can see what products are “moving.” There’s a lot – over $1.5m/month, just for the top 35 products, and there are many thousands of products. Among other things, I can with difficulty track how much interest my retail site is attracting, as I list with Google Products – “with difficulty” because I can view only 50 products at a time, and downloading page-after-page to view in Excel is…well, tedious. So the task of finding successful keywords, for a beginner, is Herculean at its simplest. Any thoughts on how I could bring this Himalayan mountain range within scalable bounds would be very welcome.

Ah, I wish. As far as I can tell, there’s no “download” option, only an upload, and a page-by-page review of what’s been uploaded. I can page through my products, 50 at a time, and convert HTML into Excel, which adds up to several hours’ work. Since I upload product descriptions every day (Google actually requires that), a process which can take an hour or more, you can see that I don’t have much time to spare for the hours’-worth of down-loading. Of course, someone else might know better about how to use Google Products… 

So, if I focus on the top 50 – 100 products, that’s about 20 categories and about 40 sub-categories. Any thoughts on how I might go about tracking down useful keywords? “Seasonal” doesn’t really play into it, when I’m selling radars and sonars and underwater lighting and electronic navigation systems that run into the thousands of dollars and are rarely replaced – boatyards and chandleries don’t care much about such emotive occasions. But the real puzzle, for me, is this: with 50 to 100 products, I might find around 400 keywords using Google tools, if I knew how; what kinds of blog am I going to write that result in keyword-rich “conversational” text embracing so much, without hopping around the landscape? How I’ve been tackling it so far is to find what’s on sale from my drop-shipper, and writing about that – a continually-changing target set. BTW, I have absolutely zero experience in writing blogs, and tons of experience in writing technical articles.

Using social media to create a stable audience, from customers who might want to buy a power distribution panel today and a replacement outboard engine propeller tomorrow, and then nothing until their life jackets need replacing, appears to be a pipe-dream. I don’t for one moment suppose that it’s impossible, but equally I’ve no idea how to do it. Should I just ignore the real goal, of selling stuff, in favor of just promoting an air of nautical competence? My bottom line is to “Sell or Die,” in a market where the very nature of the product mitigates against repeat orders – few people buy more than one radar, in a life-time. How do I set about creating an odor of competence to improve that bottom line? More particularly, how do I use social media and SEO to shepherd would-be purchasers to my site, rather than others?

Lots of rhetorical questions…

With your “Sell or Die” motto, I would take a look at which products give you the best profit margin – start with say the top 10-15. Then hop into Adwords, and see the estimated search volumes for those. Find yourself a good niche where the searches are decently high and the competition is manageable. Then, focus all your energy on those to start. You can always branch out from there.

Make those first phrases the main topics of your blog. If you were a potential customer, what information would you find useful in making your purchasing decisions? What common questions do they have? This is a great place to start with blogging too.