http://www.organicbouquetwholesale.com/
Gerald Prolman launched OrganicBouquet.com in 2003 to sell sustainably grown flowers that are freshly picked and then gift-wrapped. But as the company grew, he needed a better way to meet the increasing demand from florists, event planners and other whole-salers. So in June, Prolman launched a microsite to make it easier for these customers to place orders.
A microsite lets you focus on a specific purpose, such as selling clearance or discounted items, selling products to businesses vs. consumers, promoting new merchandise, or trying out a new product line. Sometimes the design and navigation of a microsite differs from its parent site. “Unlike consumers, florists shop by variety and color, so the site is set up to help florists find what they need quickly,” says Prolman, 46, who projects 2006 sales of up to $5 million for his San Rafael, California, company.
So why didn’t Prolman just launch a separate section on his existing website to focus on wholesalers? Simple: to prevent consumers or future competitors from having easy access to the customized pricing available to wholesale customers. “The pricing is tailor-made for each customer based on volume,” says Prolman. “Once approved as a wholesale account, they will be given access to the site.”
Showing posts with label Website. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Website. Show all posts
Friday, July 20, 2007
Wedding Webcasts As A Business
Webcastmywedding.net broadcasts weddings to a couple's friends and family unable to come over from (or to) far flung places. Customers need a video camera, laptop, and high speed online access. The company then charges USD 395 for setting up a live stream of the event, support for up to 25 simultaneous viewers (who are sent a url and password), and an on-demand archive of the wedding for 10 days. More streams and an annual archive account can be had for an extra fee.Business is thriving, thanks to a powerful mix of tech and social developments: everyone is online; the infrastructure is in place (the web is finally about broadband and video: thank you, youtube!); more and more couples choose to get married in exotic locations far from most of their friends and family; globe-spanning immigration means family members literally live everywhere; while jet setting couples have friends in every major city in the world. Not to mention Generation MySpace, who, when they eventually choose to get married, will have virtual friends in every country with an online connection.
This is one of those simple, timely ideas that are ripe to be copied to virtually every country in the world. Perfect for minipreneurs, too. Make it ‘virtual’ like webcastmywedding.com, or go for the premium product, providing a fully equipped online video crew for couples who want the full deal. A match made in online heaven?
How To Make Money Flipping Websites
Jermaine Jones Story
The 20-year-old aspiring producer is a hip-hop fanatic. Yet even though his locale is far more about Tennessee twang than beats and bling, Jones has found a way to pursue his rap passion and earn some easy cash without having to leave home--thanks to his clever exploitation of yet another method of making money on the Web.
Last August, Jones paid $1,000 to buy 411Hype.com, a website about all things hip-hop. He beefed it up--added some forums about fitness and health, for example--and managed to boost traffic by a couple thousand unique visitors, to 7,000 a month. Then, in late March, Jones put the site up for sale on a marketplace called SitePoint. He was bombarded with offers, quickly closing a deal for about $13,500. "I spent less than an hour a day on the site," Jones says.
For obvious reasons, the big acquisitions by News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch, the Yahoo brain trust, and the boys at Google get most of the media attention. But every day, scores of small-scale Internet entrepreneurs are buying and selling simple-to-make, simple-to-run sites for thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars. These aren't just domain-name plays. The strategy involves spotting the potential of an existing website and then rehabbing it for your own portfolio or flipping it to someone else--and it's taking off, thanks to the froth created by high-priced deals like News Corp.'s $580 million acquisition of MySpace. "The feeling is there's massive growth to come," says SitePoint CEO Mark Harbottle, "that it's all just starting to explode."
While several places exist online to buy and sell already-built websites--eBay has a section, for example--SitePoint, a tech-focused publishing company, is the favorite of Web-savvy entrepreneurs. A year ago SitePoint added a market-place where, for a minimum of $10, people can list their sites for sale or auction them off. Demand has soared: In April, SitePoint added about 400 new listings, a figure that's growing by about 25 percent per month.
All sorts of sites are available--blogs, game sites, dating sites, entertainment sites--requiring varying degrees of expertise to run. You can build a site from scratch and flip it, or take Jones's route: Buy an existing site you think you can improve and resell. The key is to understand what you're buying. Start with the basics: See where the site pops up on a Google search. Amazon's Alexa.com ranks traffic. The seller will provide revenue stats, and you can scan message boards at SitePoint to assess a seller's credibility. And, of course, you need a plan.
411Hype.com, for instance, was a basic message board with various topics related to hip-hop when Jones bought it from a college kid who had never bothered to seek advertisers. At the time, the site was getting about 1,000 unique hits a day. To broaden its scope, Jones added topics he thought would appeal to his demographic, mainly guys in their teens and 20s. He spent time on the forums at SitePoint and DNForum, another popular site for small Web entrepreneurs, and posted threads saying he was looking for advertisers. That generated inquiries, and Jones sold some ad spots for $100 a month, quickly recouping his investment. He also used Adbrite.com, which sells space for many websites, to place ads.
Traffic steadily improved. Jones further boosted his ad revenue by signing up with Yahoo's Publisher Network and CasaleMedia.com, an ad network that works with publishers whose sites have no more than 10,000 monthly unique visitors. When he sold the site, it was earning $900 to $1,000 a month. Best of all, for Jones, nurturing the site was a blast. "The key is to be into the topic," advises Jones, who is now at work on an e-commerce site and will start college in the fall. "Then it's easy to figure out what your audience might want."
How To Sell Something You Know Nothing About
David Carter Story
http://www.asbestossurveys.com/
One of the many remarkable aspects of the Internet is how easily people can use it to pretend to be something they aren't. There are, of course, terrifying results, such as when crooks pose as your bank.
But David Carter has taken that capacity for misdirection and made it into a legitimate way to make money.
For instance, Carter didn't know a thing about asbestos when he launched AsbestosSurveys.com - yet it sure looked as if he did. He wrote about regulatory changes in his native England by culling data from a government website. He explained what property owners needed to do to comply. He even posted local phone numbers for his "business" in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, each of which was forwarded to an answering service.
When inquiries flooded in, Carter steered them to an acquaintance who really was an asbestos surveyor. The requests were far more than one surveyor could handle, but Carter continued to book new customers.
"I told them there was a big backlog," recalls Carter, who is 47 and lives in Birmingham. "Then I said, 'Oh, God. What do I do now?'"
To Carter, there was really only one answer: Become a surveyor himself.
So with eager customers, Carter turned his site and follow-on properties into an actual business, called AsbestosServices.com. He took a half-week course, got certified, and teamed up with his friend. Today, once or twice a week -essentially whenever he feels like getting out of the house - Carter surveys a property, armed with a digital camera and notepad. The effort, he says, will net the pair about $350,000 this year.
Carter set up the site three years ago as an experiment to see what would happen if he dressed up a website to reflect a more serious and professional operation than it actually was. In doing so he stumbled across what turned out to be a clever way to cash in on the power of Internet search and marketing. The basic strategy: Build the customer base first, and then figure out how to sell to it.
http://www.asbestossurveys.com/
One of the many remarkable aspects of the Internet is how easily people can use it to pretend to be something they aren't. There are, of course, terrifying results, such as when crooks pose as your bank.
But David Carter has taken that capacity for misdirection and made it into a legitimate way to make money.
For instance, Carter didn't know a thing about asbestos when he launched AsbestosSurveys.com - yet it sure looked as if he did. He wrote about regulatory changes in his native England by culling data from a government website. He explained what property owners needed to do to comply. He even posted local phone numbers for his "business" in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, each of which was forwarded to an answering service.
When inquiries flooded in, Carter steered them to an acquaintance who really was an asbestos surveyor. The requests were far more than one surveyor could handle, but Carter continued to book new customers.
"I told them there was a big backlog," recalls Carter, who is 47 and lives in Birmingham. "Then I said, 'Oh, God. What do I do now?'"
To Carter, there was really only one answer: Become a surveyor himself.
So with eager customers, Carter turned his site and follow-on properties into an actual business, called AsbestosServices.com. He took a half-week course, got certified, and teamed up with his friend. Today, once or twice a week -essentially whenever he feels like getting out of the house - Carter surveys a property, armed with a digital camera and notepad. The effort, he says, will net the pair about $350,000 this year.
Carter set up the site three years ago as an experiment to see what would happen if he dressed up a website to reflect a more serious and professional operation than it actually was. In doing so he stumbled across what turned out to be a clever way to cash in on the power of Internet search and marketing. The basic strategy: Build the customer base first, and then figure out how to sell to it.
How To Make 18 Million Dollars With A Simple Real Estate Site.
Steve Weber Story
http://www.z57.com/
Steve Weber always wanted to be part of something big, but he repeatedly saw opportunities, like the fax and PC markets, pass him by. "I told myself, 'I'm going to get on the front end of one of these market waves,'" says Weber, 42. "When the internet came, I knew that was it. I didn't want to miss out on the biggest opportunity in the history of business."
In 1998, Weber left his job as director of sales at a website provider to start Z57.com. With $2,000, a desk and a computer, he and one of his former co-workers, David Baird, 30, launched the internet marketing company out of a small office. They roughed it in the beginning, sitting on metal folding chairs, using a dial-up internet connection and having college interns help with cold calling. "It was duct tape and Band-Aids for the first year," Weber says, "but I wasn't worried. It was clear every business would need some sort of web presence."
A year after launching, Z57 narrowed its marketing services to the real estate industry. That same year, the company had its first $50,000 month; sales have increased every quarter since. Even during the dotcom crash, Z57, which remained privately funded and owned, managed to thrived.
Today, Z57 has four offices, 225 employees and 2006 projected sales of $18 million. The company offers website design, e-mail marketing and personal coaching to real estate agents nationwide.
Though home sales have recently slowed, Weber sees no end in sight to Z57's potential growth. "We've reached less than 2 percent of the real estate market," he explains. "There's tremendous opportunity to move forward."
http://www.z57.com/
Steve Weber always wanted to be part of something big, but he repeatedly saw opportunities, like the fax and PC markets, pass him by. "I told myself, 'I'm going to get on the front end of one of these market waves,'" says Weber, 42. "When the internet came, I knew that was it. I didn't want to miss out on the biggest opportunity in the history of business."
In 1998, Weber left his job as director of sales at a website provider to start Z57.com. With $2,000, a desk and a computer, he and one of his former co-workers, David Baird, 30, launched the internet marketing company out of a small office. They roughed it in the beginning, sitting on metal folding chairs, using a dial-up internet connection and having college interns help with cold calling. "It was duct tape and Band-Aids for the first year," Weber says, "but I wasn't worried. It was clear every business would need some sort of web presence."
A year after launching, Z57 narrowed its marketing services to the real estate industry. That same year, the company had its first $50,000 month; sales have increased every quarter since. Even during the dotcom crash, Z57, which remained privately funded and owned, managed to thrived.
Today, Z57 has four offices, 225 employees and 2006 projected sales of $18 million. The company offers website design, e-mail marketing and personal coaching to real estate agents nationwide.
Though home sales have recently slowed, Weber sees no end in sight to Z57's potential growth. "We've reached less than 2 percent of the real estate market," he explains. "There's tremendous opportunity to move forward."