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entries for 2001/10/31
the right market
Whoa! I just spent about two hours with the Site Build It Manager. It's a pretty simple app, but already WELL worth the huge price. Basically, you type in keywords, and it goes out to the search engines and investigates the supply and demand for each keyword, and calculates a relative profitability. All my original ideas (even though they were "niche" ideas) came up to very small numbers, rarely beating the generic "web hosting"... But then I started thinking like my target customer, typing in phrases he or she might look for, and
I started getting "profitability" scores in the hundreds.
Anyway, I still want to attract blogs to my hosting business, but since I've already got linkwatcher for that and the site build it stuff says the search engines aren't going to be much help with it,
I'm going to point this conent-site in a different direction... And lucky for me, it just happens to be in a direction I've been wanting to go for a long, long time...
But for the moment... it's a secret.... :)writing to sell
I love writing. I've even written for pay a couple times. I got the
job I just left because of my writing (a post to AJUG and my resume),
got a major policy changed there because of my writing... I've really
come to appreciate the power of good writing.
Now this stuff.. That I write in my blog.. I get compliments on it
a lot (thanks!) but really it's not very good writing. When I write
here it's just off the top of my head. Sometimes I edit. Ususally not.
Real writing takes a lot more work... And I'm finding that
writing to sell is some of the hardest writing I've ever done. Ha!
If my creative writing teachers ever knew. They probably think writing
ad copy is worse than writing best selling novels. (I like best-selling novels, but creative writing teachers generally don't. They especially hate Stephen King.)
Anyway... Looks like I'm going to be doing quite a bit of it. The
new cornerhost site is going to have 10-20 pages or so, and the presell site will probably have over 100. The presell site isn't about selling though. The idea is to inform.
Do I sound too greedy? I hope not. I want my business to succeed, and
that's for sure... And, I'm willing to put a lot of work into
things that can make it succeed... But I don't want to do stuff just to make money. If I were doing that, I'd just buy someone else's hosting business. No, I want to do something cool.. I want to provide an incredible service and teach people how to present themselves on the internet.
I also realize there are a million sites out there that provide how-to information about the web. I don't see any point duplicating what they already do. So, I'll have to take another approach...
Anyway, a whole lot of writing... It's funny.. I expected to be writing a lot of code. The writing took me buy surprise.site build it, preselling, and content...
I just read through the guidebook for Site Build It!, which I bought this morning. It's an entire system for web marketing, including the book, a java application, content management,
search engine submission, and so on. The basic concept is
"building income through content"... You build a site that gets people interested in the product, and another site does the
selling. That makes sense if you're an affiliate... But it also suggests becoming your OWN preseller, so that you can send targeted traffic to your actual business.
It really wasn't the direction I was thinking of going in.. In fact, it really challenged my ideas of what I should be doing, but now
that I've thought about it some, it makes a lot of sense.
Right now, there's a million web hosting pages out there. I can pretty much forget a top 10 listing in the search engines. It's
not even worth shooting for. Instead, I need to work on selling to
a couple relatively small (but still lucrative) niches. This isn't hosting for everyone.. It's hosting for personal sites, and then for anyone else who happens to show up.
approved!
Yes! As I was typing that last post, I got the call from the bank.
I was approved for a merchant account, and it'll be set up within 3-5 days!!! Rock on!my favorite market....
In network marketing, they talk about your "warm market" - friends and family, and the "cold market" - everyone else. The idea is that you practice on your warm market (probably the #1 reason network marketing has such a bad rap, but also why it is so effective for other people) so you learn to be a better salesperson, and then go out and use your new skills on the cold market, which is obviously much bigger.
Well, it's the same with any sort of web based business. I've got some friends and readers who have signed up (and I really appreciate it!).. But I also know that there's a much much bigger market "out there"...
I'm thinking about offering a free month for linkwatcher users, but
I don't want to spam everyone. I figure I'll make the service a whole lot better, let people log in and customize it, and send out an email asking people to update their information... And to say thanks, I'll offer them a free month of hosting. Same thing for new people that sign up.
Even so, people in the linkwatcher database already have a website,
and therefore already have hosting... Linkwatcher readers might be interested if they don't have a blog, but right now I don't know the slightest thing about who uses linkwatcher, other than the handful of people that write me when it breaks... Then again, this customization thing ("show me only my favorite blogs") can help
that too.
But linkwatcher is going to take another couple weeks to get
rolling, and I need to move fast. So it comes back to building
a great site targeted towards people that either have a site and
want to move it, or have an idea and want a place to put it. It comes down to two things: affiliate programs and search engine placement.
But both of these require a web site that can actually sell, so that's job #1.
merchant account...
Haven't heard from the bank about my merchant account since last Thursday. I set up a new paypal account for corporate use, but I
want "real" credit card processing too. Hopefully, I'll hear something back in the next couple days.