Case Study: First Week of a New Business

Last Friday night, after 3 months of planning I launched my next online business venture. I don’t want this to sound like an advertisement so I’ll only mention the name once: it’s called GetWithSocial and I describe it as “a marketing company that ‘social media experts’ don’t want you to see”. The idea of the website is to sell social marketing services such as Digg votes, Facebook likes etc. Disregarding your view on these sorts of services I’m here to talk about how it is going, any revenue it’s generated, how I got customers – basically behind the scenes sort of stuff.

I launched the website at around midnight Sydney time on the 5^th of this month which was a Friday night. I think it was a bad mistake to launch on the weekend, if you spend a lot of time on the web it seems as though weekends are dead online. Have you ever been on Twitter on Sunday? It’s like a Blockbuster parking lot. It should have gone live first thing Monday morning, ready for when people got into work. We ended up sending out an email to our subscribers that night as well and Dan granted me permission to put a bit about the new site at the end of the email.

52 of you came to the website through the email. Of course I would have liked all of our subscribers who opened the email to visit, but never-the-less it was a decent percentage. Aside from an email, a few tweets from my own account and a small advertisement on the Sitepoint Market, we’ve done literally zero paid advertising. With that said, our traffic is obviously pretty low. For the past 7 days we’ve had 308 visitors which resulted in 726 pageviews. I’m actually quite happy with that number. From those 308 visitors, 53% came directly to the site, 44% through referring sites and 2% through the search engines. What’s surprising is that my $39.00 paid advertisement on Sitepoint Market only resulted in 19 visitors which equal a cost per click of $2.05 which is pretty high considering majority of the keywords I’ll be targeting in an Adwords campaign hover around the $0.70-$1.10 mark.

I think most of you will be looking forward to the sales numbers the most. Alright, so in the first 7 days we’ve done $765.00 in revenue. I’m not going to divulge net profit – sorry! I had pretty high expectations for first week sales figure and unfortunately it didn’t hit them. What I am proud of is the fact that we only spent $39.00 in advertising – although it didn’t really work. What did work are forums. Our top referrers include: 6 webmaster forums, Facebook, Twitter, Sitepoint Market and a few classified sites. Plan on launching something similar? Head to forums!