I’ve been finding a few quite nicely designed websites the last few weeks and it’s made me want to renovate my own.
I think today might be the day to do it. I’m over client work for the week and I think having some new freshness to the site would be nice, not only for me, but for the visitors.
I’m not going to re-do the whole thing, just make some changes hopefully for the better, it’s going to be a renovation, not a rebuild!
I think of this site over at SitePoint as a good investment.
It’s a celebrity gossip forum, good base of members, lots of posts, been around for a long time, and has stable consistent traffic.
Makes $2k a month, the BIN is $45k, a little high for the revenue, BUT, it has potential.
Just like a rundown house that you could buy, renovate and then sell for a profit, this site could really do with a massive makeover, it’s a bit of a mess but it’s popular.
You could really make this forum a centrepiece for a larger community, mesh in a blog, celeb photos and videos, and some social aspects and it would go crazy.
Just needs some love and development.
I’m even considering buying it! It’s the kind of thing that if you know how to renovate, you can really make this site go well, you don’t have to be a marketing professional, or even know heaps about celebrity gossip, you just need to know how to renovate.
Look around at what else is popular, find some active posters from the forum and talk to them, ask what they would want to see, and see if they want to be involved in blogging or something, and go from there.
It’s pulling 350k unique a month, the hard work is done here, the traffic is there, all you need now is some development and hard work.
I have no good reasons why you would want to do that, but apparently the people who are trying to offload their site to someone for a 6 month lease think it’s a good idea.
The lease is up for bids over at SitePoint, and the site in question is called Frooler.com
Frooler.com is a social networking site with no niche; it’s just another generic random social site that’s never going to go anywhere. It’s a very average site, with traffic that would be very hard to monetise (Mostly from Asia), and its Alexa rank is 500,000.
The person who’s offering this lease is boasting 6m monthly page views, and as you can tell with the Alexa rank, it’s defiantly all foreign traffic, mostly western countries run the Alexa traffic tracking, also Compete which does traffic analysis like Alexa is measuring next to no traffic.
So aside from the fact that the site is pointless, paying them to ‘lease’ the site for 6 months for their asking price of $2,000 is absurd (from a business / let’s make a return on investment point of view).
To even start to make your money back you’d have to lay down even more cash for marketing, and if you do make it back then after 6 months you’re out with nothing, nothing to sell, nothing to push the traffic to that you’ve spent all your money and time on, you’re left in the gutter with nothing.
However the person who owns the site has done real well, they’ve made a cool $2k from you, and meanwhile they’ve spent their 6 months working up a bank of cash from other projects, they would have just taken ownership back of their site that you’ve built up for them with fresh new traffic and even more revenue from before.
If you’re going to spend 6 months doing something, it’s defiantly better spent building your own site and promoting it. I have no doubt in my mind you could build a site comparable to theirs within a week, and with your $2k lease cash and some time, build an equal amount of traffic and members, if not better.
At the end of it all, at least you own it, you can sell it, develop it some more, or whatever. I think if the lease was more like a building lease, like 3+3, 3 years plus 3 more optional, and you can re-negotiate terms and prices after that, it could be possible, maybe not for this site, but for others, still, would have to be a really good site and good deal.
Since I’m busy and haven’t discussed the topic for a while, I’m going to revive some old posts about PPC marketing.
I actually have a fair bit of knowledge in the area, I just never get around to talking about it!
Will try in the future, but for now I have clients and a dying laptop battery to deal with!
When it rains it pours, I’ve been light on posting over the last 2 days, and probably for the next couple because it seems like every client I have, and some I don’t have are hitting me for last minute things, with next to unrealistic deadlines.
At first they weren’t unrealistic, but as the days went on, more and more came out of the woodwork with more and more urgent things to do, such as fixing down servers, and getting applications back online from server moves that had nothing to do with us.
What makes it even worse is that we can’t do it all, right now I’m neglecting a client who isn’t my client, or my responsibility, I know if I call them I’ll spend an hour on the phone, and I really don’t have that hour, or any answers for them.
And I really don’t like them either, so it’s not really motivating, the other reason I’m neglecting this client is that they aren’t even my client, I’ve never billed them for anything, they are coming to me through someone else and expecting me to do the work for them because someone else said so.
So what do I do? Well I know what I should do, I should at least call and say no time, sorry, but the other person who told them it’s mine to deal with is pissing me off, and they are their client, so I think I’ll delay the call some more so they take some of the flack.
I love good web apps, and last week I found a really good app for tracking my time.
It’s not about tracking time for customers, but more about tracking my personal time, what I do during the day, how much time I spend working, playing, surfing and blogging.
I think it’s a good idea to track these kinds of things; you can really work out how much time during the day is going to waste, and set yourself goals to make improvements.
Anyway, the app is called RescueTime, you don’t have to manually log anything, it has a windows or mac background process that tracks the apps your using and when you’re using them and it sends the data to their server and you can login and check how much time you spend in the day doing certain things.
You can also tell it what apps are productive and what aren’t, so for me, business based apps that I use I mark as productive, and games I play I mark as not productive, and you get stats on how productive your week is compared to previous weeks and you also get breakdowns on where your spending your time, playing games, working or blogging etc.
It’s great for people like me who have a tendency to not want to work at times and get sidetracked easily on new things, it makes me accountable to me, I can check WTF I was doing and think to myself, okay, stop it, get into doing work.
I think that’s a big thing when you work for yourself, you’re not really accountable to anyone but yourself and a tool like this really helps drive that point, you can look at it and say, as an employee of my own business, my time spent during the day was good or bad, and reward or discipline yourself depending on what you’ve done.
You can also set yourself goals, like I want to spend 6hrs+ a day on work tasks, or spend 1hr a day or less on playing games or blogging, and you can track those goals. It’s always good to set yourself goals, you need to reward yourself and feel good about what you do.
On top of that I have employees, so I’m now tracking their time using the app too, I don’t have to watch them so close, I can monitor them online to what they are spending their day doing!
I don’t usually run ads on my blog, mostly because I’m not blogging to make money, and I’m not blogging about how much money I make to help you make more money online, this is a blog about business - most of the time.
But in saying that I’m not against giving away traffic or to get some traffic back in return!
So, I might come up with a competition or something to give away a few 125x ads for a month in exchange for a link back…
Thinking about it, let me know what you think, should I give some ads away? How should I do it?
Back on the Amazon story a little…
It’s extremely important in business to keep your customers happy, a happy customer is a repeat buyer, it’s cheaper to have an existing customer buy again than it is to acquire a new customer.
It typically costs 30%+ more to make a sale from a new customer, than it does an existing.
How so?
Simple, to acquire a new customer alone it requires marketing, and most of the time sales support. Both cost time and money.
Something people don’t often factor into their marketing spend is the time that it takes to produce the marketing campaign as well. Even though say your cost per click is $1, and you get 100 clicks a day – total daily spend of $100, you might have spent a week designing the campaign and the landing page for it etc (collateral).
Your time for the week is worth say $1,000. So your monthly spend on the campaign could have been 30x$100 a day ($3,000) + the 1 week setup and the additional 1 day a week for monitoring the campaign ($1,500) which is a total for the month of $4,500.
So your monthly cost per click which in theory was $1, is in reality $1.50, a 50% higher rate than expected.
So you’re spending in theory, $4,500 a month on brining in new customers, a small portion of which will actually make sales, but to make a sale of an existing customer, who’s not an active buyer already would only take a phone call, or an email, either a personal email or a newsletter, these things only take minutes to a couple of days to achieve, and if you have a database of say 3,000 names, you could drum up a higher conversion rate than your CPC campaign is achieving, mostly because these customers have dealt with you before, they know and trust you and should be happy to buy from you again.
In theory you would have only spent $500 to make more sales than your $4,500 from your CPC campaign with a higher profit margin since your profit from the sales aren’t having to cover marketing expenditure.
In saying that, it doesn’t mean you should stop marketing to attract new customers, it means your new customer acquisition marketing should be just that, targeted at new customers, not everyone.
You should have different marketing strategies, one for new and one for existing. Your new customer acquisition marketing should be competitive with your competitors and offer something more, and your existing customer marketing should offer them reassurance on customer service and a comeback and buy again deal, maybe a discount for being a loyal customer.
CSSMania is for sale over at SitePoint, if you’re unfamiliar with the site, it’s a CSS gallery with a blog basically.
The Bin is set at $500,000, but the site’s only making $10k a month.
Sure the site is popular, and it’s got great traffic, but that buy price is 50 months revenue…
The site costs money to run, servers, marketing, and staff. Even if you ran it yourself, it’s a fulltime job, your own wages would easily be $5k a month + server and marketing, we’ll assume $2k a month.
After those simple expenses, you’re only bringing in a $3k ROI every month, that’s 166 months before you get your $500k back, over 13 years.
Not only would you have to expand the revenue from the site somehow, but you’d have to really take on a lot of risk, anything more than 5 years to pay off your investment in a dot com is a huge risk, the industry changes daily and 5 years is a long time, let alone 13.
CSS sites only became popular a few years ago, what’s to say there won’t be something new in 2 years that’ll kill that market? I’m sure it’ll still bring in revenue, but the $10k+ a month you were expecting? Maybe not.
Not to mention that the market is saturated with other CSS sites that are all pushing in on the traffic that you have to the site, and if you don’t update the blog correctly you could start turning away traffic. The visitors are expecting a certain standard of blog posts and sites in the gallery, if you don’t have an eye for it you could end up hurting the site more than anything.
Realistically, $200k is what I think it should BIN for, I’d never pay more than 2 years revenue for a site, typically I try for no more than 2 years profit, I think most sites are fair priced at 1 – 1.5 years profit.
The internet changes so fast, your site could be hot this year, cold the next.
Amazon has done the right thing here, they put a public apology on their front page of their site, not any old small apology either, it’s huge and it’s designed to really push the point across.
Why? Well its good business, actually, it’s really good business, happy customers are customers that are repeat buyers, on top of that happy customers also give good word of mouth referrals, as opposed to unhappy customers that do the opposite.
On top of that by putting the message out there publicly they are also taking a load of support.
Amazon are having a real issue manufacturing enough of their kindle book readers to keep up with demand, rather than dealing with a large number of support questions every day from customers wondering where their kindle is, they have put out the message to their existing customers who have purchased one, to everyone else who might buy one and to the general public that they are aware of the issue and are committed to doing the most that they can to fix it.
It’s a win for the support team – inquiries will go down.
It’s a win for people waiting for their kindle, they have some news on what’s going on and they know Amazon is working on the issue.
It’s a win for Amazon – it shows potential kindle buyers that even though there’s no stock right now, that Amazon are committed to increasing their output and are committed to supporting their customers.
And It’s an additional win for Amazon, even though that large image took away every product on the front page that would generate tens of thousands in sales typically it shows that Amazon cares about their customers more than making sales, it shows that there IS support, where most other companies really lack support and it shows that Amazon isn’t afraid to tell their customers the truth, not make up BS stories to buy more time.
I doubt that it would have hurt sales anyway; people would still search the site and do their usual shopping.
recent comments