A Question for Veteran Authors...

I am seeing a trend, with my sales at least over the last 2 months, that the first half of the month is generally more lucrative than the second half of the month.

Veteran authors, I’m wondering if you experience the same thing and if this is generally to be expected. Do companies get most of their files at the beginning of the month for their work for the rest of that month?

I’m still relatively new here (just over 5 months). That’s why I wanted to ask authors who have been here for a while. I understand there are probably a lot of different factors involved and each marketplace probably sees slightly different results, so saying this is generally true may be far-fetched. Just want to know some of your experiences with sales trends.

Thank you!

My account on TF is also “new”, but I have an older account on AD and for me it’s the same thing on both accounts, I get more sales at the beginning of the month, and then the number of sales goes down, however there were exceptions when the end of the month produced more sales than the rest of the month.

My tip, just release new files on a regular basis.

This is totally a guess because most of your files are on AJ and it’s a wildly different marketplace than the others – but from my experience that’s probably your release cycle more than anything else… New products and frontpage exposure will create spikes during the 1-2 weeks that you launch new stuff. So if you release more early in the month, even just one popular file can make things seem uneven.

That, and normal fluctuations or outside blog exposure can create artificial peaks and valleys until you get enough products up to even things out (edit – with 64 products this isn’t likely the case where it might be a valid argument for a TF author with just 3 themes).

The only trend that I can really set my clock to is that Monday – Thursday always sell about 20-30% more per day than Friday – Sunday

Edit 2: this isn’t an official staff response btw despite the badge (I work with WPTuts, not the marketplace) – it’s entirely based on my personal experience on here.

Heya Phil,

As with most of the questions like this one, it is not an exact science. There is nothing you can really ‘hang your hat on’ in regards to cycles on AJ. Front page exposure is about the most reliable way to cause spikes that you can ‘control’, other than good ol’ fashioned well placed marketing efforts. If you can try to get yourself included in other peoples’ collections, especially the AJ collections Scott manages, you will see things become more consistent (as long as they aren’t holiday specific).

Your activity in the forums is no doubt getting you some good internal traffic. If you want to generate more visits regularly, you need to devise an external campaign to drive traffic to your portfolio here, most likely from a well thought-out website that can be a vehicle for communicating with and enticing new and existing customers alike.

Time is the great equalizer, and with more of it you will find that repeat visits from a few loyal customers will result in more custom and freelance work. This too, will grow over time. It’s what AJ is really good for with the longer term relationship customers. Seriously. A good 95% of transactions related with AJ actually take place outside of AJ for me. My portfolio is riddled with ‘scrap’ but it’s a good showing of capabilities and spurs people to reach out and ask for what they’re really after.

Feel free to hit me up sometime for a chat. Always happy to share some tips.

OhmLab

For us it generally depends on the time of week and time of year. Tuesdays/Wednesdays are high sales, weekends are sometimes horrible sales. If there’s a public holiday sales also die.

I’ll see if I can do up a graph showing average weekly sales over the past few years to see if there are any trends.

i cannot say much about my sales trends as I am an author on a different marketplace and I am also new, but I can say the same as most everyone the beginning of the week (monday-wednesday) is the highest sales volume. Other than that I can just say keep releasing new items consistently and eventually if your portfolio is built up enough you should be able to get sales daily and never have a drop at the end of the month.

Best of luck!

PS: thanks for all the tips @dtbaker, @epicera, @ohmlab, @cosmincotor!

Nah, sometimes I’ve had 10 files on a day at the end of the month, sometimes 10 on a day at the beginning of the month.

The only drops that I ever see are during the summer holidays, and the Christmas period, that’s it.

Consistently releasing files means this is something you won’t even notice down the line.

Hey guys,

Here’s some graphs I’ve just put together.

Basically: most sales look like they occur in week 4 to 10 and on Tuesdays for us.

also, we get too many support tickets. lol

Wow, this all really interesting information. Thanks for your input! Would be interested if anyone else had anything more to offer. Thanks for joining the conversation and sharing your experiences, all!

Phil

Thanks for sharing Dtbaker!

Also, unrelated but: did you manually put your graph together? or do you use any specific software