This post is a follow up to the story I wrote in August of last year. It’s about my first Internet marketing website which is codenamed DET and is about “dubai employment”. I put 100s of hours into it and I continue to work on it until this day. The previous post detailed the beginning of DET and the phases that it went through.
In that post I talked about how I spent several weeks intensively redesigning and revamping DET only to realize that I was actually killing the business with my new ideas.
Today, I’ll share with you what I did to revive DET, get it to generate $1,000/month in sales, increase its potential, and what I plan to do to realize that potential and multiply the revenue…
Professional vs Personal
Part of the plan of revamping DET was to make it look more professional. My assumption was that: more professional = better conversions. As I explained in my earlier post, I was wrong. Filling my website with corporate imagery and speak killed conversion. I decided that it was time to look into creating serious, visitor-converting sales copy.
So, I picked up the best copywriting book I could find, Advertising Secrets of the Written Word by Joe Sugarman. I studied the book for a few weeks and finally produced the new sales copy.
The new sales copy is very personal. I talk to the visitor in a one-on-one tone. I also changed all the plural pronouns to singular ones, i.e. we, our, and us changed to I, my, and me.
Luckily, this did the trick. Sales volume was restored to a level that was even higher than the previous $700/month average.
Suicidal Thoughts Despite This Moderate Success
Improving the sales copy and changing the tone of the website back to a personal one helped the business a little. But DET isn’t exactly a “set it and forget it” type of business. I have a constant stream of comments and customer service issues that need attending to. And I don’t want to dedicate myself to that. I have other more interesting concerns.
I also felt that I don’t deserve this website. It gets loads of traffic but I’m not intrinsically interested in this niche. I felt that someone else could get a lot more mileage out of it.
So, I decided to sell it. The amount is $7,000 x 10, i.e. the annual revenue for last year multiplied by ten. It’s a straightforward and fair way to valuate a business. I bet if someone bought it at this price and then paid the proper attention to it, they’d recoup their investment in 5 years or less. What a better deal you want, right?
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find interested buyers. So, I’m stuck with DET. What next?
I contemplated letting DET die a slow death. I decided that I won’t moderate comments and I will only provide customer service support to paid members. No pre-sale support whatsoever. That’s actually what I’m doing right now. But I can’t stomache it. I always feel that it’s a shame to let this successful website die. So, I always go back and look into ways to streamline the business.
You might think that I should just hire a virtual assistant. But for an arrangement with a virtual assistant to be profitable, I’d need a really good virtual assistant and at a cheap rate. The challenge is, where would I find an assistant that knows about this “dubai employment” niche? I’d have to train them a lot.
Increased Traffic and Renewed Interest
DET used to get about 7,000 unique visitors per month. Lately, the traffic has been steadily increasing. Last month DET got 11,000 unique visitors. I don’t know what exactly caused the traffic increase, but it excited me. Additionally, I’ve recently discovered using blog reviews to get backlinks, drive traffic, and increase SEO ranking even further. The thought of applying this new technique to DET also reignited my interest in it.
Realizing DET’s Potential
I honestly think DET could make $10,000 a month. It just needs the right kind of attention. So, here is my new theory. DET’s future success depends on the following pillars:
- Continue to generate content
- Publish user’s comments and interact with them
- Provide proper pre-sale customer support
- Follow up with users that register but not pay
- Continue to work on SEO ranking
- Improve the sales page further
Building each of these pillars in an efficient and desirable way is a challenge, but I plan on solving these challenges. Doing this right will finally get DET to reach the success that it deserves.
I will try to keep this blog updated as I continue on with this…Stay tuned!