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This is the second article in the series on my experimentation and research into developing a domain into a prosperous business. The first in the series can be viewed by clicking here. I've chosen downwind.com.au as the domain as it's a very recognisable aviation term. The com.au is extremely popular in the Australian market (target market for the site) and so I was less concerned about not having the .com....although I think that Frank Schilling owns it. Frank if you're reading this......
After pondering the SWOT analysis I began to do some additional hands on research. I went to the Avalon airshow and took notice of the way the different vendors used the Internet as a promotional vehicle. What I discovered was that most of them didn’t really use the Internet as anything other than as a brochure. The thinking hadn’t yet evolved in the industry to the next level of online customer engagement. This was great news for me!
I also began researching the potential competition and called many of them up to have a chat about their businesses, cost of advertising with them etc. I wanted to surreptitiously find out if they were going to become a serious competitor to me in the near future. A business is always at its weakest when it’s just born and I wanted to make sure that Downwind.com.au was going to have clear skies for at least six months. After doing all of this research the good news was there were all green lights and no reds.
The next stage was to formulate both an operational and financial plan. As an important consideration, I’m very committed to my existing businesses and I had to make sure that Downwind was not going to soak up enormous amounts of time....it is research!
I already had a clear view of the operational plan and it went something like:
1. Attract users to the site
2. Encourage them stick
3. Sell advertising to companies that want to get access to the users
4. Create relationships with companies where I could on-sell their products with them doing the fulfilment.
When I look at this four stage process it looks like it's a process that could be adopted for almost any site. The challenge though will be in the detail under the four steps.
Attracting users to the site was fairly straight forward. My strategy goes something like this:
1. Buy any domains in the aviation area that have some traffic.
2. Develop a way of tracking all advertising activities (Google analytics is free so it’s a good start).
3. Advertise online and measure results.
4. Speak to my aero club and encourage them all to join.
5. Advertise in the major trade publications about the site.
6. Contact airfields and encourage them to add their data to the system and invite them join.
7. Speak to all my pilot friends and encourage them to tell their own aviation network about Downwind.
8. Scatter messages about downwind.com.au on aviation forums across the internet. You need to be careful that you aren't spamming them but adding value to ongoing discussions. Spamming is a fast way of getting a very bad reputation.
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Another graphic that I put together for downwind.com.au.
The goal here was to inform my target market of a tangible benefit to the site. |
It all sounds pretty straightforward and it’s a good mixture of online/offline so I began with the ones that cost me a minimal amount of money. The results, while aren’t spectacular are growing. I’m now getting an average of about 100 uniques per day. It’s pretty good for a site that hasn’t been going that long.
The traffic's there but it appears that I'm having a few problems on the sign-up side......which means I need to get the stickiness under control. At the moment I'm getting about a 5% sign-up rate and I'd love to double this before spending larger sums of money. This is where you get down dirty with real customers and call a few up and ask them there experience on the site. I did this and found that they were incredibly surprised that I cared enough to give them a call. I also discovered that for one of the users they had a problem with IE6 with the sign-up process.....we solved this by migrating him to Firefox but it still presented and issue that I need to address. Sigh....the challenges of running a real online business.
I'm nearly at the stage of wanting to spend some reasonable money on promotion so I need to make sure that every dollar counts and when I find a successful strategy I can begin mining like crazy. The first "big spend" will be about $1,000 on some advertising in the local Aviation newspaper which comes out each month. I've got 3 weeks to iron out the kinks in the system and continue to add value for users......I really do want them to stick! The next article will cover what systems I decided to use to build downwind.com.au.
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