» Business

To help focus my energies on revenue generating activities (the corporate world did have it’s mark), I’m doing a bit of a cleanup and offloading redundant and low-value projects.

All my spare domain names have been listed for sale and I’ve stuck a few up for auction on Flippa (the de facto marketplace for buying and selling online properties). Hopefully I can get rid of the lot, or I’ll just leave them fizzle away into non-existence.

I sold the TopInterviewTips.com site in an auction a couple of months ago. The idea was was to build a niche content site from scratch and see if it could be a scalable model for building a portfolio of small earners. Well, it didn’t really pan out too well in the end, but I snagged $250 from the auction which just about covered the development costs and time I had invested (circa 4-hours).

FixMyFloors.com (the awe-inspiring ebook that generates a small amount of fan mail) is currently up for auction, and I’ll be letting others go soon. The aim is to get rid of pretty much everything and leave myself with just the core cash-cows (BuSongs.com and Just-Pooh.com) and provide me with the capital/head-space to invest elsewhere.

After a 4-year stint in Dublin, I’m back in Blighty and free from the shackles of the corporate world. It’s refreshing, yet a tad overwhelming. I’ve been rather quite likely to have been employed by two of the most prestigious Internet companies and to have worked alongside some pretty impressive folk. It was a pretty tough decision to make; the time taken to make it is a testament to that, and I’ll miss it more than I’d like to admit.

The plan of attack? For now, the aim is to continue building on my current websites and also look to build/acquire some more, whilst enjoying the benefits of not being restrained to be physically located in any particular place (location independence). Progress report to come.

The inspiration:

Traffic to BusSongs.com is on the up, thanks to the ever popular collection of Christmas and Halloween songs. Wishing to captialise from the increased activity, I’m stepping up efforts to improve monetisation.

I embedded an AdSense Link Unit into the navigation last May and, foolishly, haven’t really touched it since. About a month ago, I went nuts and rolled out a test to see if I can tweak the performance of the ad unit. I’ve now tried an assortment of different colour palettes, positions, titles, and behaviours. The below swatch shows all of the test candidates:

Each incoming visitor to the site is assigned to see one of the above, and they continue to see that version for the following 30-days (as to remove bias resulting from a constantly changing style). Thanks to AdSense’s Custom Channels, one can easily track the performance of each version and compare that to the original (aka the control).

I’ve now run the experiment for about the month, so the data should be pretty reliable by this point. Here are the results:

It’s pretty incredible to so clearly see how a relatively minor change can have a significant effect on performance. Test #17 was born from trying to take the best features from other high-performing ads (ie. the best of breed). I need to extend this further and run a few final tests to see if I can iterate any further.

One problem I’m facing is that it isn’t necessarily prudent to strive towards finding the best performing ad as measured by CTR. An ad that generates the most click-throughs may also be alienating users and altering their usage on the site. Therefore, I ideally want to track the behaviour of the site’s users for each of the ad versions. This doesn’t appear to be possible in Google Analytics; does anyone know how this can be best accomplished?

I’ve finally started to lift my finger a bit with Mafia War Secrets, the info-product site I acquired a couple of months ago. It’s performed far better than I had anticipated, yet it’s fate is far from certain. The Mafia Wars game is likely to fade into non-existence as quickly as it has risen to stardom, and five competing products have suddenly hit the market, all trying to attack the same niche segment. For these reasons, VRE veterans typically opt to build upon evergreen sites – and I’m starting to see why. Nevertheless, there is plenty of opportunity for me to squeeze more potential from the site.

Therefore, it’s pretty imperative that I maximise the site’s potential while times are good. I see this being best achieved pursuing two goals; seeking out as much ROI-positive traffic as possible (I’ve made good inroads here already), and improving conversion rates to make the most out of the inbound traffic. I now intend to focus my efforts on the latter. As previously discussed, it’s incredibly easy to develop and roll out simple A/B tests and steadily increase conversion rates through continues iterations on the sales page. I’ve kicked off by testing the title copy that appears right at the top of the sales patter:

Version B was the original copy (the control). Conversion rates are shown first, followed by the percentage increase relative to the control. Versions A and C performed less favourably, but version D proved to generate an increase to conversion rates.

The impact is staggering: 5-minutes of labour gave way to a 3.86% uplift in the conversion rate. Annualised, the absolute value of this roughly equates to say, a return LHR:JFK flight, not bad at all.

What next? There are zillions of variables that could be tested, but in truth I seem to lack the mojo to make any real inroads. Hiring the services of a professional copywriter could prove expensive and risky. That got me thinking; why not run a risk-free contest whereby I award anyone who can provide demonstrable results? And so I will.

It’s simple: suggest a small change to a title, some additional text, new images, or a completely new design altogether – whatever really. I will then pit your entry against the existing page. If your ideas produce a >10% increase in the relative conversion rate (ie. 2.69% to >2.96%), you’ll instantly win $100 via Paypal. This winning entry will then become the new control which would need to be bettered by future contestants.

I’ll be happy to provide a log-in to the conversion tracking software so that you will have full transparency on how your entry performs. Reverse A/B testing will also be used to verify results.

To take part, just jot me an email with your entry and I’ll get it going within a day or two. Be sure to spread the good word!

Update: The one and only Mr. Zilic has entered the ring with 6 different tweaks to the sales letter. Despite best efforts, he’s yet to push me out of pole position – although one or two are in with a running chance. Anyone else up for the challenge?

Update #2: I’ve taken the plunge and hired two professional copywriters to see what they can muster together. Risky procedure.

Update #3: Danny has pulled off the impossible and beaten me. $100 is now winging it’s way to him. Nicely done sir.

I’ve acquired a new site that peddles another informational product, although this time it’s not cleaning related. MafiaWarSecrets.com is geared towards fans of the popular Mafia Wars game that has taken Facebook and MySpace by storm in recent months.

For a mere 20-bucks, I can tell you a few tricks to get the edge in the game and become the don. You have to wade through the sales copy first, of course. Competition is fairly non-existent and there is already a small but strong band of affiliates taking the brunt of performing promotional activities. Fingers crossed.

As an experiment, I wanted to try my hand at creating a niche-content from scratch. I grabbed one of the domains I registered a few months back, outsourced the research and creation of the content and after around a week I have TopInterviewTips.com, a site providing advice and tips to help prepare for an interview.

The site cost a grand total of $95.15 to create ($88 for the outsourced content writing & $7.15 for 1-years domain registration with GoDaddy) and took around 2-hours to project manage. Admittedly, I did also spend some 5-hours to fiddle with the site’s design. However, this would be a one-off task and additional sites could be launched with the same template in under 3-hours in total.

My goal is that the site might earn $1/day in advertising revenue. I suspect that this is overly ambitious. But if it can be done, then this could be a profitable model; whereby sites could be quickly churned out (a site a week would be certainly feasible) and bring in lots of small amounts of revenue.

Update: I couldn’t help but give the site another aesthetic update. A gray colour scheme is a bit easier on the eye than the lime green. Do you think it’s better?

If you’re in the affiliate game, I highly recommend that you take 20-minutes and double-check your links every once in a while.

I finally was able to debug an anomaly in recent site earnings to discover that I was using an invalid affiliate link. A wee mishap that has left me missing out on ~$575 of revenue. Very sour experience indeed, but a valuable learning lesson nevertheless.

Update: The amazing folk at Glispa were able to do some of their own investigating and reassign some missing sales to myself – an amazing service. Special thanks to Brian & Andre.

Feast your eyes on another oddball addition to Mander Enterprises. FixMyFloors.com offers an ‘information product’, a posh way of saying a paid-for PDF.

For a mere $9.95, I’ll tell you how one can remove the nasty residue left from cleaning products such as Orange Glo. However, you’ll first have to navigate through the multi-colour/font wonder that is the 1,500 word sales letter.

Traffic is purely organic and sales continue to trickle in. Interestingly, it has a tendency to pick up on Sunday’s – the holy day for DIY.

I’ve long fancied to operate one of these sites as it requires two essential tasks: buying as much traffic as possible that can provide a demonstrable ROI; and improving conversion rates through split-testing techniques I’ve previously talked about.

There are bargains galore on site-buying marketplaces such as SitePoint and as the good man Buffet says: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful”.

I’ve decided to have another punt with the purchase of MafiaUnit.com. It’s an online Mafia game, one of these MMORG things where you, well… actually, I haven’t quite figured out how to play the game yet. Here is what the game looks like (after you’ve created an account):

By my last count, there are around 40 other Mafia-themed games that compete head-on with Mafia Unit. However, over the coming months I plan on radically transforming the UI and feature-set to make it simply the best Mafia game in existence.

Interestingly, I just read that a similar game on Facebook called Mob Wars has some 2.5 million active users and is cited to be one of the most profitable Facebook apps. Mafia Unit has some 3,000 users, so we definitely need to catch up a little. My stretch goal is that by February 1st, we’ll have 30,000 users and 1,000 7-day active users.

Introducing a spanking new version of Race Card Generator; a tool for UK bookmakers to create and print race cards on-the-fly. Data is dynamically pulled in from an external source and mashed into a template. Looks simple, but it’s incredibly smart.

Here’s the main screen which pulls in racecards available for today: 

And here is an example of a produced racecard, in PDF format:

Access to the tool is available for a modest service charge, drop me a note if you want to find out more. Props to my man Jack for his superb website development work.