Come for the Ride…

Things have been super busy here for the EasyAutoSales team - so busy that we skipped our April update. However, the good news is that we’re finally starting to see some fruition from our hours and hours of hard work.

Top 5 Highlights for the Month:

- We squashed about 99.5% of all major bugs on the system. We have scoured and removed dead links from the website. The data displayed on the website should be correct barring any fancy marketing tricks from dealers sending us extremely high or low prices to get special attention.

- SEO and XML efforts are finally paying off. Right now we average about 5,000 to 7,000 visits a day with the majority of our traffic coming from two primary sources. While this is great news compared to no traffic, it is also pretty scary. If any one of the sources decide to stop working, our business would crumble pretty quickly. It is my goal to eventually even this out so we don’t rely on any one particular source for more than 15% of our total traffic - Google included.

- More SEO and more expansion! At my previous startup, I paid for the majority of my traffic due to my inability to change asp.net code to fix our SEO. Even though my old budget was only $2,000 a month, we still managed to make a viable business out of the few referrals we did get. Unfortunately while good money was made, Google Adwords ended up getting most of it.

Our current efforts in SEO has propelled the website to get a LOT of free traffic from a few sources. Current projections are at 200,000 visits in the next 30 days (and growing!) Thanks to our team’s hard work, I feel like I’m actually getting a refund from Google through Adsense. Our goal now is to see how far we can push our SEO efforts to get free traffic before dropping another dime for paid traffic. I guess not having money for marketing has its benefits. Instead of just throwing money at the problem, we’re definitely using our noodle more and learning a lot more about optimization which is helping with our bottom line.

- We can cover our hosting now! We’re not ready to throw any profitability parties just yet but at least we can now pay for our own hosting without needing to dig deeper into our own pockets. We started this venture on the assumption that photo hosting should be cheap or free for our sellers. While we’re still keeping the motto, it’s really not as cheap as I had hoped. Even using Amazon’s S3, our AWS bill for this month was over $700. Yikes! On the bright side, we can now afford to pay it without selling our bodies.

- Partnerships! We’re now working with a couple of famous brands like CARFAX to help make our results more relevant. Not only can you search for the car of your dreams, you can also make sure it’s safe to take home. We plan on doing a few more of these deals to help make our results more useful and relevant.

In June, we will finally be able to start tackling some more fun stuff instead of just fixing bugs and making sure mundane features work. I’m actually looking forward to some of the cool integrations we have in planned with a number of popular web 2.0 websites to get our name out there. Our goal is to move the needle up to 350,000 monthly visits so I look forward to seeing how things play out.

When we decided to make advertising one of our revenue sources, I always knew we couldn’t stick with AdSense forever.  While it was great at targeting ads based off of content, the payout simply seemed a lot lower than joining ad networks and selling ad spots directly to advertisers - but is that still the case?

When I left the agency world, advertising CPMs still hovered between $3-$11 depending on who you are trying to target and who you’re working with.  However, with social networks effectively destroying CPM’s for ads (many times at sub-dollar CPM’s), is it actually a better deal to be running AdSense instead?

Right now, my AdSense dashboard is telling me I have an effective CPM (eCPM) of close to $4 based on impressions and click-throughs.  If I joined an ad network that sold auto ads at $4.50 and then only take a 50% or 60% split of that, my eCPM would only be around $2.25.

Am I missing something here?

A friend sent me this link over today and I thought the video had many great points. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re looking to start a web business.

Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv

I received an email from MarketingProfs today that I just had to repost.  I think it hits on some key points that defines whether you are an entrepreneur/business person vs. a technician that is self employed.

Delegation - the key to growth

There are plenty of reasons not to delegate. Maybe you can complete a project more quickly than those working beneath you,  or you’re convinced you’ll achieve better results than your subordinates.

But do you take work home on a regular basis? Or are deadlines an issue?  Jane Schulte, author of Work Smart, Not Hard!, says these are sure signs it’s time to delegate, whether you like it or not.

Here are some of her pointers for successful delegation:

• Start small, then increase delegation as skills develop.
• Define clear goals, deadlines and criteria for success.
• Provide all the needed resources and information.
• Give your subordinate full authority over the project.
• Offer guidance and advice without interfering.
• Focus on results, not the process.

If the project is successful, credit the person who got the job done; if there are problems, Schulte advises shielding the responsible subordinate from blame. “Learn from the experience so you can delegate more effectively, provide more training or delegate the next project to a different person,” she says.

The Point from MarketingProfs: “Work should always be done by the lowest competent level,” says Schulte. Go down the  chain of command,  find the right person for the job,  give them the tools they need to succeed and refocus on the high-level issues that demand your expertise.

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As someone who is known at my last job for never being too shy to share the work load and the credit, the above points are dead on if you want to be a good manager.  Why do people insist on doing everything themselves anyway - don’t they trust their team?

The month of March has been a big month for us. For the first time in awhile, I feel like all pistons are finally running at full speed. I wouldn’t say we’ve been slacking off prior to this month, but now that the site is in beta and people can see it, we are definitely getting a warmer reception from our potential partners who had insisted on seeing something on the web.

So what did we do this month?

We launched our beta on March 21st. In order to get to that point, we had to shave a bunch of features off the priority list (including advanced search). If you had asked me 4 days prior to launch if we’d be ready, you would have found me sitting in a corner pulling my hair out. Thankfully, my team pulled through and now even I’m impressed.

Within a week of launch, we loaded 50,000 cars on to the site. For people in the autos industry, this probably doesn’t seem like a big number. However, if I were to view this holistically, we’ve just beaten about 95% of the online classified sites out there in terms of available vehicle inventory. Not only that, we’re on par with AJCCars.com who also has about 50,000 cars.

Within the first two weeks of launch, we also realized our hosting was inadequate for what we needed. Right now it’s a mix of unoptimized code + tons of data and updates on a small, limited VPS server. After much thought, we have decided to take the process in house and hope that it pays off in the long run as the cheaper option. For anyone whose trying to create the next YouTube, Flickr or banner ad network - Good luck! Bandwidth, hosting and serving media is a huge issue for bootstrap startups.

Obviously with the site sitting at low traffic volumes, I can’t quite claim we’re successful just yet. However, we are purposely delaying our announcement until we get even more cars in the system - which we are diligently working on. For most startups I know, a beta launch = some friends and family feedback resulting in more development work. While perfect code is important, marketing is most likely what will make or break a startup so we’ve been doing tidbits of that as well. Seeding for SEO if you will…

Other than that, our team is working on the GRA/TAG business competition. I must admit, it’s been six years since I’ve written a paper and it’s tough. Day-to-day, I’d much rather be working on the business than writing this paper. On the bright side, our mentor has introduced us to a number of smart, local entrepreneurs who have given us a lot of feedback. As a result, we have changed amended our business model with different revenue streams at least 10 times this month - which is part of the reason why the business plan is getting harder to complete.

I’m hoping April will bring other challenges though. We are definitely ready to take things up a notch and do some marketing tests.