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.