Day 4: Guess who…

Remember that childhood game guess who? Where you have to guess what character your opponent has chosen by asking questions about them. We are playing the marketing version of this game today, and I will take you through how I apply this technique to bestfootballgoals.info.

Once we’ve played Guess Who IM we then need to play IM Snap and match these to a monetization method. We will look at how we can make money, and then start to apply this.

After all this we will look at the easiest way to get started with these on our site. This will be in part 2 which follow in an hour or two…

Guess Who IM Edition

Yeah I know the name sucks, but that is basically the game you are playing here. I have a list of 10 questions that I personally use when looking at a new site, and this is the first (and probably only) time I will reveal it.

  1. What is the Subject/Niche of the site?
  2. Does it attract a majority of Male or Female readers?
  3. What is the estimated age range of my readers?
  4. Will my usual reader have a Credit Card?
  5. Will my usual reader have a PayPal account?
  6. Do I expect the majority my readers to have their own computer, or use a public computer?
  7. What other interests are commonly linked to my Subject/Niche?
  8. What social networks do I expect my readers to belong to?
  9. How do I expect my readers to find my site?
  10. Does the user have a specific pain or problem we may be able to solve?

After answering these questions I usually have a good profile of the people I expect to be using my site. You have not got write essay answers and brainstorming/mindmapping is totally appropiate here. For the profile of bestfootballgoals.info see the video or download the file here.


Snap IM

The next stage is to use our target profile to match what we are going to be able to do “help” our users. One of the biggest problems I find here is that since the Made For Adsense period (where you wanted your site looking ugly so people left it as quickly as possible by clicking an adsense link) quality seems to be at the back of most people’s mind. It’s ok to make a quick buck occasionally, but that is not what we are doing here!

It’s easier to get your users to do the advertising for you, than to spend days doing SEO. Because of this I invest heavily in content for all my sites, not just keyword targeted but aimed at giving something important to the user… Once you do that the user actually starts to trust your website for delivering what you promise, may tell friends about what they’ve found etc.

It is at this stage we moneytize that user, not by selling them the answer to the question they asked to get to our site… But instead by upselling them into something related. For example for bestfootballgoals.info depending on the profile of our user we can upsell them a goal scoring training program, a football betting system, football ringtones, football screensavers…

The posibilities are endless, generally the only time any of my sites will show adsense is if I have nothing better (aka more profitable) to show the user.

Lets make a list of things we think the user may be interested in for bestfootballgoals…

  • Live football streaming
  • Football betting strageties
  • Football training guides
  • Football screensavers/backgrounds for phones
  • Football books and DVD’s
  • Football Merchandise