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It’s been very interesting to chart the course of downwind.com.au as a developmental project and to see the results of the efforts to date. I have found that so far as a research project in managing risk it’s been quite a journey. This is the third in the series on using downwind.com.au as a developmental case study. You can view the previous articles by clicking on the following links:
Part 1 - Development - business model
Part 2 - Development - getting users
Part 3 - Development - building the site
For example, one of the unforeseen dangers that I’ve found with developing a site is the fact that you end up with a personal stake in it. Users become friends and the fact that time is money can potentially vanish into the ether. Graphics become works or art and coding is just a beautiful experience that provides a warm fuzzy feeling all over.
Never ever forget that the purpose of developing a site is ultimately to make a greater profit than if you had left it parked. Get your warm fuzzy feelings from sitting on a beach sipping a nice drink and start focusing on the business aspects of your new website development.
So where is downwind at? I’ve spent $400 on Google adwords and have 138 users for the effort. That is a total cost of $2.89 per registered user. That’s not so good so my guess is that I need to work on that a bit more.
Over the last few weeks I’ve had over 200 people per day coming to the site. Although this is good news I would say that the conversion rates need to be worked on big time. Traffic is great but returning traffic is much, much better.
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| Google Analytics graphs of downwind.com.au and it's progress as development continues to move forward |
So that’s the bad news....what’s the good news? There is increased activity in the forum and community area and it’s clear that a number of individuals have really been excited by the site and have started inviting their friends. This is great news as it will mean that downwind is starting to grow virally.
I’ve also noticed that a number of people have started adding their home airfields to the airfields directory. To date I’ve been having a couple of kids uploading data so it’s great to see that users are finding that the Airfields directory is of a benefit to them. A few users have also requested if they could publish some of their aviation experiences.....from a business perspective this means free quality content.
I’m just about to write an article explaining the virtues of different aspects of the site and I hope that this will get some members motivated to begin to contribute for the benefit of the community. There are a lot of hidden features in the system that really needs to be made more visible.
I’m just finalising the next stage in the business plan which involves the deployment of an Aviation Directory. The goal of the directory will be to provide a single place where users can find every aviation company in the Australian market. Think of it as the Google of the aviation industry. The users will also be able to rate and review the businesses so that over time members will be able to know which are good and which are not so good to deal with.
My business goal is to then up-sell these businesses into higher visibility options in the directory and on the website as a whole. It has the potential to be quite lucrative while at the same time I want to see if I can engage the members in assisting in the selling process. Crossed fingers there I think.
What I would really like to do is open up both the airfield and aviation directory so that anybody can access them and use the content on their own site. I think that this will be one of the next developmental challenges as I continue to increase the value associated with downwind.com.au.
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