W Revenue dot ComDouble Your Site’s Revenue - Scott Wainner on Web Business

Q&A: The Answers

Q: After you sold your businesses in the 90s, did you get bored? Did you wake up every day and wonder “What do I do now?” I’m launching my new internet startup at the blog world convention in Vegas, and I think there is a really good chance this one could get bought out one day. Its fun to entertain the idea hypothetically, but sometimes I think if I sold, what would I do with my time?

A: This is a great question. Short answer, absolutely! After I sold my sites in 1999 and was hired as an employee to work for the buyer, I lost nearly all of my drive. I had no perspective on how much or how little money I had, but I thought it was a lot (turned out later it wasn’t), and I was also no longer working for myself. This was a huge motivation killer. Before, I knew that all my efforts were going into building a business that benefited me directly. But working for an employer, with a fixed salary, made me depressed and lazy. I started playing a lot of online multiplayer games like Quake and Unreal Tournament and became a slacker for several months. It wasn’t really until I started seeing my money evaporate (due to the stock market crash) and until I got laid off from Internet.com that I got my butt back in gear again.

But nowadays, I actually do have quite a bit of free time or “optional work time” because my business is setup to run by itself with the help of a great (small) team of people. If I don’t work, the business doesn’t grow, but it doesn’t fail either. I spend my free time relaxing, traveling, getting out on the road on my bike several hours a week. After you sell a business I think you have to get your head back into something rather than just not doing anything. Even if that means starting a local bakery or coffee shop business or something, anything to keep you occupied, or take risks and start that cool business that you always wanted to try but never had time for. I’m no longer in a survival mode where I absolutely have to work to live, mainly because my sites do run themselves so well, but I enjoy working to increase the company’s profits and overcome challenges. That continues to be fun and fulfilling for me.

Q: I was wondering, let’s say you do find a niche, need, or whatever as a business. Where do you find the developers, business partners, resources necessary to get it off of the ground?

A: It doesn’t cost a lot of money to launch most websites. There is a plethora of prepackaged software out there, for instance. Even highly customized sites with complex applications and custom backends are not all that costly to setup. That said, the more you know how to do yourself, the less it will cost you to launch. That’s why I recommend that all Internet entrepreneurs learn how to code – if you don’t have cash to hire coders, you can create the site yourself, it will just take a bit more time than hiring several developers to do it.

If you have a killer idea and absolutely need funding to get it off the ground, hire someone to help you write a business plan and go pitch it to VC’s in Silicon Valley and SIGN NDA’s. All they can do is say no. If you only need like $100k though, VC’s are much more likely to bet on you. There are lots of small startups getting funded, even though you only read about the $3M, $5M funding rounds. Look for college kid coding wiz kids wanting internships or who are willing to work on a revshare basis, too.

And I really can’t overemphasize learning to code yourself, learning to do everything yourself, really. In my business, I know Perl and MySQL inside and out, I know server administration, HTML, web design/PhotoShop, I understand SEO, etc. I really don’t need to hire anyone to launch complex custom websites because I know how to do everything myself, though there are more talented coders/designers/SEO specialists out there than myself – those folks are “great” at their niches, while I am just “good” at everything. An SEO expert or a developer may be excellent at what they do but they probably don’t know how to launch a website from scratch, monetize it, and make a living from it. If you don’t have money to hire people, you just have to know enough about each of these areas to be successful, even though you may not be the greatest at each area.

Q: I have a PR2 blog which i am operating for little over a year now. I am looking for ways to monetization other than Adsense. The problem is, my blog has a narrow range of audience and it has a niche “Software Testing” for which it is very hard to find direct advertisers or relevant ” affiliates” program. Could you suggest something?

A: You might want to try connecting software testers with companies that need to hire testers. You could charge companies to put job postings on your site, Craigslist style. You could also use the blog as a way to market your own services, if you provide software testing yourself. As for affiliate programs, look to market tools, books, software, anything that your audience needs to get their work done, and handpick the products that you market. If you know how to code or can hire a programmer, sign up with Shopping.com and use their API to promote specific products on your site that would be of interest to testing/QA people (see the right side “Deals and Real Time Pricing” products at ResellerRatings, which are generated using the Shopping.com API and earn a per click fee – much more targeted than Adsense, and a higher CPC as well). You may be able to use Shopping.com’s shopping widgets program to accomplish nearly the same thing without coding anything with their API (but keep in mind that the widgets program links to a cobranded shopping site and you only get paid if the user then goes on to click through to a merchant, the widget ads don’t link directly to the merchant - you have to use the API to custom code your own ads that link directly to the merchants for the best results).

Q: Do you ever invest in other people’s start ups?

A: Not usually but I am open to anything. I would be more likely to buy someone’s site, especially one that runs itself like a forum or other user generated site.

Q: I’ve got a niche, a presence, a book, and a web site - and am trying to figure out if I need to move into fulfillment. My question - should I stay away from the fulfillment activities (receiving an order and shipping), allowing me to put my efforts into the sales, web and marketing side; or should I bite the bullet and do it all so that I can setup the program and affiliates how I want.

A: If I understand the question correctly, you’re asking if you should process orders and ship them out yourself, or farm those tasks out to a third party. That really depends on how efficiently you can do the fulfillment yourself, how much time and money it will cost you, vs. a third party. If you’re a one man shop and have no plans to hire minions to do your order processing and shipping, then those tasks are going to seriously cut into the time you have to run the more important/higher level aspects of your business. I am a big believer in outsourcing those kinds of things – the key is to shop around and find an outfit that will do it cheaply and reliably. You might want to even consider outsourcing to a foreign country like India or the Philippines to get your costs down, depending upon how much interaction there will be with customers. Try to calculate how much it would cost you to do it in-house or to hire someone to do it in-house for you, vs. a 3^rd party.

If you dropped Amazon and brought your book/e-book fulfillment and marketing in-house, wouldn’t you lose a huge amount of exposure that Amazon provides organically? People find your book now by going to Amazon.com and searching, right? That’s freebie marketing that you will have to recreate on your own, right? Or, were you planning on continuing to make the book/ebook available at lulu+Amazon and adding a third distribution source, being your own in-house promotion and fulfillment?

If you can, I’d suggest keeping your book available at lulu+Amazon and adding a third cheaper fulfillment for PPC campaigns and other marketing tests to see if you can generate a more positive ROI due to the third fulfillment method offering lower overhead and more profit per sale. You might be able to find another 3^rd party out there that can do it for you, or you could bring it in-house and maybe hire a person to process orders and ship out the books if your volume is low.

Q: I’m not actually selling a product, or technically, even a service at Jetwhine.com. I’m really after raising awareness about portions of the aviation industry to people who need to know. How direct is the correlation between some of the traditional marketing techniques you mention to sell widgets that will work well with awareness?

A: I create sites that meet a need, I monetize them, and they almost always promote themselves. I do a small amount of niche advertising and I don’t do PPC campaigns. I’m also not trying to promote awareness. That said :), I think viral marketing would be a good angle for awareness – probably better than buying traffic. You’ll want to think along the lines of linkbait articles, getting stories promoted at Digg and other social media sites. Instead of a title like “The Safety Data is Already Public!”, how about “NASA Reports: 500 Near Crashes in 2007” (or whatever the fact is). There are lots of linkbait hooks that you can use.

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Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 at 3:26 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.