Thread: Teaching Dating, Getting Customers, No Bullshit

Hello (Future) Rich People,

I'm going to outline my strategy for internet business creation and you folks can critique it

I started with building a social sharing application. It's very simple - you can post text into a certain category, and you can rate the existing text. This method let's me solve list-information based problems (like compliments). Once I finished that I did the design and threw it up on realcompliments.com.

I'm approaching SEO in a modular way. I'm ranking each sub-category one-by-one until I have all of them at the top of Google. After that I'll work on the main keyword (assuming it isn't ranked already). Once I have 1000 visits/day I'll have enough traffic to do reasonably short-term split-tests. This'll let me build and improve the application and design to be more efficient.

At the same time I'm working on creating my own information products, which have a much higher priority.

Once I have a reasonably high conversion rate (from split tests etc.) and am comfortable with how well it's monetizing, I can scale out the application to 4-5 dating-related niches by copy-pasting it. I'll rank those the same way (category-by-category) using the existing power of my existing web properties to help them out.

At this stage I'll have 4-5 major, high-ranking websites in powerful dating niches. My main product will be on a central website with all of those other large website pointing at it, and all advertising on those sites will also be directed at this central site.

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I'm working on the "marketing" aspect of this first, mostly due to my appreciation of the law of averages. If I have half a million people's attention every month, I have a lot more lee-way RPM-wise than when I only have 10,000 people's attention every month. At that point I can focus on building more valuable products rather than worrying about squeezing every penny out of the people who accidentally come to the website. Also, more traffic means more content on the site (since it's user-generated) and more natural backlinks. It gets more valuable the more content there is just because it filters best/worst etc., and the more content and votes there is the better value there is for the searcher.

Right now I'm working on SEO. I have #1 rankings for two of my categories, and the others are all gradually moving up and are all under rank 100 (and a lot of them are already #1 on Bing), other than the big, one-word keyword which is still #341. In total all main keywords I'm going for on that site represent about 70,000 exact monthly searches.

I don't really know what else to write right now Thoughts?

Just a short, hurrah kind of update. I'm on the first page for 6/7 of my keywords including my main keyword. Traffic today is 275 unique visitors and moving up, and GWT shows impressions going waaaay off the charts. I'm pretty stoked, and I think I'll have 1,000 visits/day by mid-January, but at this point it's kind of hard to tell.

For SEO I used two existing web properties that have about PR2 between them and a white-hat $30 content distribution service, as well as a ton of leg-work. I went to a ton of my friends and my blog readers for help as well with both content and social sharing.

The site is exactly 3 weeks old tomorrow

So now I'll be working on monetization. This will be email subscription conversions as well as product creation and sorting out ad spots and affiliate products that I think are worth-while.

Great work Troy! and good luck, the site looks good and has great potential!

Nice site, some cool compliments.

Best of luck with business.

Thanks JimD and FastNAwesome!

Originally Posted by kwerner

Just noticed this thread. Nice work and strategy on the SEO, but how are you monetizing the site? The ebook?

The ebook is fictional, just testing headlines for email subscription conversions. I'm still working out the monetization strategy, but in short I'll be an affiliate for other dating companies (David D, Love Systems, RSD, etc.) until I get enough data to figure out which product and what price range sells best, at which point I'll put one of those together.

In the meantime I'm improving the program to a point where I feel comfortable extending it to the 4-5 other sites and working on my own social skills consulting course which I'll be testing out when I get back to Canada from China in June

UPDATE: I'm building in cool features for the site that I can see helping out with returning visitors and email subscription conversions. I'm thinking of completely doing away with the free-ebook-as-motivation idea since the program itself can create enough value to be worthy of subscribing to. I'll explain that once I've got the new version completed, which might be a week or so from now. I'm excited!

I think the trick for me is that, in this application, I'm creating a valuable asset. It's extensible for me and will get me customers, but the biggest thing is that it will actually be a very, very high quality answer to the questions being asked.

I guess there is a huge barrier to entry in that there are three big parts to it being successful to the point it is successful... Coding, Designing and Marketing. I had to learn all of that from scratch (enjoyably though) over the course of several years. Monetization and customer support are things I will eventually get the chance to learn too, which is exhilarating. I'm sure it would be faster if I paid people to do this or partnered up, but I'm really having fun with the process anyway. I'm young and I have the time and desire to learn the skills and test them out.

Anyway, I want to get more work done so I'll update you guys on what, exactly, I'm doing in a bit!

I finally got to release the update! Check it out, Compliments | Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Compliments.

If you're just tuning in, "it's different" probably isn't very helpful, but my mind is way past the update phase so I'll just leave it at that

Now I'll be working on 2 related sites and launching them in the next week or so, as well as working on a spending strategy and sorting out my split testing framework and the affiliate products that I'd like to sell on the network.

Updates will get more interesting as money starts coming in

-T