$150 + 40Hours = Fastlane

[7digits]

This is the first chance I have had to give back to the forum. I have been leaching ideas off the Fastlane Forum without joining for quite some time.

In this post I am going to outline the elements of my first website based membership content delivery business start up.

The concept is to deliver market driven content (needed/wanted) on a weekly basis for a monthly fee. The price point tested so far is set low at $9.95 per month.

I was inspired by something I read that said to figure out where and how to get your traffic first, and then query that traffic to find something that they wanted and sell it to them. I chose to figure out a way to find affiliates to sell to this market first. Then I tested to find out what would sell by survey. After that I created a way to find it and deliver via a website.

After reading James Altucher's book, it really seems like this is a great time in history to be doing these kinds of activities to generate income. All of the tools you need to do this stuff are readily available on the net.

Here are the basic elements:

Domain Name (Namecheap): $9.95

Web Host (Hostgator Reseller): $24/m

Autoresponder (Aweber): $19.95/m

Wordpress: Free

WP Template: Free

S2Member (WP membership): Free

JVZoo (payment/affiliate): Free/%of sale

Paypal (payment): Free/% of sale

Call Fire (phone/IVR): $30 $3/hr-10hrs+

Skype: Free

VA’s: $40 $5/hr-8hrs

Search/Compile
Proof read/Edit
Format content-PDF

Misc-paper etc.: $15

Laptop//headset/ internet

Personal Time ~40hrs so far


Total costs to date: $123.90



Let’s look at this business model from a CENTS standpoint.


Need:

I asked the market directly via a survey to find out what things they needed/wanted to deliver to them. I found the market by first finding a way to get to it via affiliates who do the sales work. In this case it is information that is being sold.


Entry:

In this case what I am really delivering is convenience. The information is available but not so easy to find. The way the market is contacted and sold is the entry barrier. That’s why I’m not telling you what it is.


Control:

I pretty much have control of all elements of the process. Each vendor is swappable. The website is backed up. I control the marketing, sales price, content, the website, the affiliates, etc. I guess even in the case of the internet going down on a global scale, I could still send out the information old school via paper in the U.S. mail.


Scale:

This business model is fully scalable. The primary task is to expand the number of affiliates who sell the product. For now I am doing this manually by phone contact. The affiliates get 50% of the sale. This will eventually be handed off to outsource workers. The content sold is created via outsourced affiliates. The website membership software and the affiliate software are capable of handling thousands of people. There is a bit of a merry go round however, because as in all membership models, members drop out. It has not even been a month, so I must find out what this will be. The low price point should help. Even so, I just look at it as a $X sale. If it turns out to average 3 months, then it’s a $29.85 sale. Not to mention the pool of members to sell future products to via email etc. This content is only good for the U.S. so that’s the limit of the market. I am also limited by my pool of potential affiliates of which there are about 50,000 potentials. This however is a market large enough to give the project a pretty good rating on MJ’s LOE scale.


Time:

From the start the model is optimized to be automated. The outsource workers create the product delivered. The affiliates do the selling. The website software does the delivery. The affiliate/payment software keeps track of sales and information. The Help desk software automates complaints etc. My large time involvements are now at start up and creation. So far I have about 40 hrs in. Over the next few months I will have more until the transition of affiliate acquisition to outsource workers. After that it will be just coordination and monitoring. I guess when it’s at that point, a transition to a full time manager can occur and only monitoring can take place. So there is not a real sticky time attachment with this model.


So there you have it. At this point I only have gathered 5 affiliates who have made a few sales each so there is a bit of road to go before break even. But I thought I would get this out there.

I believe this is a great business model if you can find something that can be sold to a market you can approach in some cost effective way.

It's how you get into a market and how you structure your delivery mechanism that are the things you need to put your creative energy on. All of the other stuff to get it done is out there. There are multiple vendors to get tools from to accomplish each part of the equation. It’s just amazing that most of these tools are cheap or even free.

You have to do your homework to put the pieces together. I hope this helps or inspires some to take action.

 

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[Tom.V]

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[Cosmicgirl]

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