Before you set out on your journey of spending money to drive traffic to your web site it is critical that you know exactly how much you are going to need to spend and how that relates to what you are charging and your profits. I launched a niche site once and it ranked very well for its related terms on all of the search engines. This seemed like a good thing at first, but I later realized that the profit margins were too low to continue to serve the people that were paying us for our services. For me it was a success because I was challenging myself as to whether or not I could out rank the current competition, and I did. The problem was that in order to maintain integrity, I now had to try and serve this new clientele and I realized that it could not be done reasonably as the costs were outweighing the income, especially when you considered paying a staff to handle customer service inquiries (even the paying customers were not profitable). So how do you fix a problem like this? 1. Automation. The way to solve a problem like this is to automate as much of the business as possible. Over the past few years, I have automated much of my business activities and recently implemented a software solution that significantly improved the efficiency of one of my web sites - I am VERY happy about this; it is one of my more profitable niche sites. A simple and cost effective way to automate a site is to find a related affiliate program and use the site to market the affiliate program. You will not have to handle billing, sales, or fulfillment, but you may want to handle customer service to make sure that the customers follow through with the sale as the affiliate companies normally dont do this. Also, this will allow you to maintain a relationship with the customer for follow up sales and building your in-house list. 2. Increase your prices. - You need to do some research to figure out whether or not your market can bear a price increase. Keep in mind that not every one needs to be able to afford your services, just enough customers to make your companys numbers work. I hope that helps you in planning your online (and offline) marketing efforts. Remember, its not what you make that counts, its what you keep. |
