poisonsembrace

I've been building a website over the past year based on a niche specific business here in Australia.

A little about the niche. It's a service the majority of young people or immigrants need. The cost for the consumer is about $500 over the course of the service.

Numerous businesses are bidding on the keyword in adwords. The average CPC is $4.30 for the month of June 2010.

It's been number 1 for the past 2 months and while I'm making $5-10 a day from adsense, I cannot convert any businesses to a premium listing.

I was taking free listings for their businesses while I was building the site but now it has maintained the #1 rank, I've stopped doing that.

I've been collecting their emails over the past 2 months as well and while I get 100% open rate and 90% CTR from my email broadcasts to them, not one of them sign up for a premium listing... even when told the free ones will be removed once anyone takes up a premium listing in that city.

The cost is $197 per 12 months. I think that's a fair price point given they earn it back from 1 conversion.

The website gets around 200-300 visitors a day. Not that many but when the life time spend of a customer is around $500, this can really add up.

Many businesses in this niche are paying to advertise their business in the yellowpages, adwords or paying SEO companies to get their website ranked even though I am #1.

How do I make it profitable? I'm still in my first year of IM so while I understand how to rank websites, turning the site into more than just an adsense money maker is my end goal.

juntao65

Go read some sales material. It seems like you're doing all the technical stuff right but failing to sell your preposition.

But I don't want to leave you hanging, here's two things you can do from the top of my head:
1) Cold call the businesses, and offer the "premium" free for one month. What's crucial is that you need a way to track your leads. So offer customers some type of incentive: call in and say LolWagenheim and get 10% off.

Search for the "200K a year" thread in the wickedfire treasure trove to see more examples.

2) If the CUSTOMERS are high converting you could try to negotiate a CPA deal. There's been a lot of posts on local leadgen so you might want to look into those. But 2bh I'd rather do 1) cause CPA is such a wtf concept for a lot of offline businesses.

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affiliatearmy

Test different price points, call to action, and other service/sale variables. Worst case scenario, sell the site to a competitor..

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poisonsembrace

Well, you wouldn't believe it!

I spent 30 minutes looking at some beginner sales/marketing information, wrote up a sales letter and emailed it out via aweber.

2 sales in 15mins. $197 per sale. Woo hoo!

amanda11

There you go. Congrats bro.

GerardWon

Excellent. Might I suggest investing half of that into a paper and ink sales letter that you mail out to some likely prospects. Sounds like you have crafted a good sales letter that will also pull from snail mail.

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poisonsembrace

Yeah, I'm keen on that idea. Maybe test run 50 or 100 mail outs and see how it goes.

My sales letter wasn't exactly superb, I just pushed the idea of their competitors stealing their customers and that seemed to do the trick.