Need your opinion on this

[alex]

I'm a web/windows applications programmer and system administrator with a large experience. I work part time for the last four years at several successfull internet advertising companies and get not a bad salary, but it is not a treasure.
I thought how I can do some extra and decided to launch a web development services internet business. Unfortunately my ad campaign hardly brings me 5 visitors a day and a requiest per week.

I would appreciate it a lot if you express your opinion on the following questions:
1. Is a web related programming profitable as an internet business?
2. What whould be better for me to do:
- continue advertising pure web development services?
- create new products and try sell them?
- create new products and use them?
- combine all things above?
I understand - combination is the best, but don't forget I'm alone and can't do everything.
3. What advertising tools are better to use in my case?
4. What categories of internet surfers may most probably be my potential customers?

:wink:
Alex,
support@viescripts.com

[RonHollingsworth]

I haven't writen a line of code in almost 10 years, but I would try to find a niche that hasn't been tapped (if there are any left). I'm sure there are you just have to research and find out what people need/want and code it and sell it.

I have a couple questions.

1. When you say web development are you referring to web design?

2. What is it that you enjoy doing?

[mediatech]

Originally Posted by alex

1. Is a web related programming profitable as an internet business?

Both can be more profitable using the combined approach. Much depends on your programming specialty and target market. Your target business market could be anything from general to specific. Specializing a group of web services for a specific target market is key I believe. I can elaborate later if necessary.

Originally Posted by alex

2. What whould be better for me to do:
- continue advertising pure web development services?
- create new products and try sell them?
- create new products and use them?
- combine all things above?

How about advertising how your web development services relate to your Internet business? You could be your best client

If you can demonstrate how your web services help your Internet business then people may want your services for their own business. I am doing this with several open source web products. My target market is vacation packages for a specific location.

My web services involve consulting and design for for 3 open source web applications that I use to manage vacation bookings, web site content, and B2B stuff.

Eventually I will not have time to manage both my web services and my vacation business. This is where outsourcing comes into play. I could even offer programming services for these web applications if I outsource.

Originally Posted by alex

I understand - combination is the best, but don't forget I'm alone and can't do everything.

Then you may need to locate developers you can outsource work to. These developers could be strategic partners if they really help your business and you in turn take care of them. These developers can handle development overflow as well as help develop for your own business needs when you don't have time. Managing a successful business sometimes leaves little time for anything else.

Originally Posted by alex

3. What advertising tools are better to use in my case?

Search engine placement is the cheapest if you know what you're doing.

Originally Posted by alex

4. What categories of internet surfers may most probably be my potential customers?

Overture has a nice tool for calculating what keywords people type in on various search engines. Try it

http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/

[RonHollingsworth]

mediatech, so you live in San Marcos huh? I just moved from O-side in Dec out to AZ.

[mediatech]

Originally Posted by RonHollingsworth

mediatech, so you live in San Marcos huh? I just moved from O-side in Dec out to AZ.

Yeah It's nice and warm here compared to North Carolina in the winter. My target market is in North Carolina of course. Welcome to the area

[RonHollingsworth]

right on

Nice site you got there. I like!

[alex]

Originally Posted by RonHollingsworth

I have a couple questions.

1. When you say web development are you referring to web design?

When I say web development, I mean something more than programming (don't confuse it with coding - programming includes coding, coding doesn't include programming).

Originally Posted by RonHollingsworth

2. What is it that you enjoy doing?

Yeah, I enjoy staing at my PC all day long
As about coding, most of all I enjoy PHP which I think fits the best for most web applications, but don't think this is the only thing I work with. The latest software I'm finishing the work over is an autosubmitter.

Alex

[alex]

Originally Posted by mediatech

How about advertising how your web development services relate to your Internet business? You could be your best client

Brilliant idea, but this takes time and I won't be able to do anything else but creating new products which I use for myself and if no one else uses them? Time waste? Not quite, any time spent for job if doesn't bring money, brings experience :wink:

Originally Posted by mediatech

If you can demonstrate how your web services help your Internet business then people may want your services for their own business. I am doing this with several open source web products. My target market is vacation packages for a specific location.

I'm trying to approach to this, but my speciality is programmer, not marketer.

Originally Posted by mediatech

My web services involve consulting and design for for 3 open source web applications that I use to manage vacation bookings, web site content, and B2B stuff.

Eventually I will not have time to manage both my web services and my vacation business. This is where outsourcing comes into play. I could even offer programming services for these web applications if I outsource.

Does this mean, I should look for additional outsource job at my competitors and if I can't bear so much job to outsource it? It's a chain.

Originally Posted by mediatech

Search engine placement is the cheapest if you know what you're doing.

This hasn't brought me any visitors so far.
I even tried more ad tools and no one helps much.

Originally Posted by mediatech

Overture has a nice tool for calculating what keywords people type in on various search engines. Try it

http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/

Great, I usually use search engines stats to find out the keywords popularity.

Thanks for help,
your suggestions help me a lot,
Alex

[mediatech]

Originally Posted by alex

Brilliant idea, but this takes time and I won't be able to do anything else but creating new products which I use for myself and if no one else uses them? Time waste? Not quite, any time spent for job if doesn't bring money, brings experience :wink:

Nothing good comes easy unless you get lucky. It does take time and I can't stress how important a simple business plan is to help you prioritize time and goals in stages.

Instead of creating new products why not modify and improve existing ones? I'm referring to source code as the product in this case. If you're talking about hard goods then that's another story. I'm a services man myself... I don't like managing physical inventory and overhead :wink:

Originally Posted by alex

I'm trying to approach to this, but my specialty is programmer, not marketer.

Then find someone with marketing skills who needs some programming help... barter services

Marketing is 90% of the battle in my opinion. 10% is offering a good product or service. If you can't get exposure then no one will notice you or your company no matter how good it is unless you are lucky and word of mouth gets you noticed.

I did not intend to be a marketer but once I saw the logic in it marketing has become an obsession.

Originally Posted by alex

Does this mean, I should look for additional outsource job at my competitors and if I can't bear so much job to outsource it? It's a chain.

Yes. I enjoy approaching my competitors as potential strategic partners. This works best when smaller companies offering similar services create strategic alliances in order to compete with larger corporations offering those same services. Generally larger corporations have more overhead than 10 small businesses with home offices

The word cooperative comes to mind. I'm not suggesting to form a cooperative as they typically take to much time to manage and there are way to many politics. However you can use some of the principles of a cooperative to enhance your client offerings. See my rant here.

http://www.internet-marketing-resear...ghlight=#56644

Originally Posted by alex

This hasn't brought me any visitors so far.
I even tried more ad tools and no one helps much.

I gave up on ad tools a long time ago. What I notice works best are lots of links to relevant key word terms and a quality site. This takes time but works for me every time. Mediatech.net gets ranked #1 for the keywords "typo3 template" which is what I specifically offer. Notice how many links I have back to typo3.com and typo3.org that actually help make the site useful.

Typo3 on the other hand is an obscure market generally speaking so it could be I just got lucky here. When you're dealing with a high profile market like cars, apparel, books and DVDs search engine placement becomes more challenging. This is where I believe specialization is necessary.

The travel and vacation market is where I'm planning to focus on next. In order to achieve search engine rank here I decided to register some 30 domain names that relate to this market from general to specific.

The idea is to capture traffic on a general domain name like vacations.com and direct traffic to several specific domains like vacationnorthcarolina.com and ncvacationpackages.com. This will take between 1-2 years to pull off. I will keep us informed on what works and what doesn't

[alex]

Originally Posted by mediatech

Then find someone with marketing skills who needs some programming help... barter services

Marketing is 90% of the battle in my opinion. 10% is offering a good product or service. If you can't get exposure then no one will notice you or your company no matter how good it is unless you are lucky and word of mouth gets you noticed.

I did not intend to be a marketer but once I saw the logic in it marketing has become an obsession.

Barter is good as far as you beleive 100% to your partners and understand that your both goal is the same.
I worked on several projects with partners beginning with the previous summer. All of them were promissing me large incomes, but most of them got lost when the projects were close to finish, just the last one is trying to do something - but doing a job in 4 months instead of 2 weeks is also time wasting (job is taking so much not because of me, of course).

So I understood - best of all to use paid employees, they do exactly what you want to. But this idea is good only in case when you have money to pay them :wink:
May be I'd better requalify into a marketer? So my job would consist in: finding customers, bring them to idea of our cervices necessity, then manage the other coders job?

Originally Posted by mediatech

Yes. I enjoy approaching my competitors as potential strategic partners. This works best when smaller companies offering similar services create strategic alliances in order to compete with larger corporations offering those same services. Generally larger corporations have more overhead than 10 small businesses with home offices

The word cooperative comes to mind. I'm not suggesting to form a cooperative as they typically take to much time to manage and there are way to many politics. However you can use some of the principles of a cooperative to enhance your client offerings. See my rant here.

http://www.internet-marketing-resear...ghlight=#56644

This works but not always.
I'll tell you a story: When I was first going to find an outsource job for me in Internet, I thought my best customers whould be Web Programming (or related) companies.
So I sent to all of them an email with such an offer. Most of them ignored my offer, some of them promissed me something in the future and some of them qualified my request as SPAM.

Anyway I think this item should be discussed as I think it is a good idea, but: how would you say large companies could be brought to the same idea and how to advertise it to them? Diect mailing again?

Originally Posted by mediatech

I gave up on ad tools a long time ago. What I notice works best are lots of links to relevant key word terms and a quality site. This takes time but works for me every time. Mediatech.net gets ranked #1 for the keywords "typo3 template" which is what I specifically offer. Notice how many links I have back to typo3.com and typo3.org that actually help make the site useful.

Huh, but before people found out what typo3 was, what were they searching for in search engines to find you?

Originally Posted by mediatech

The idea is to capture traffic on a general domain name like vacations.com and direct traffic to several specific domains like vacationnorthcarolina.com and ncvacationpackages.com. This will take between 1-2 years to pull off. I will keep us informed on what works and what doesn't

Of course if I had enough money I would do reasearches I'm interested in, instead of looking for new customers now. :wink:

[mediatech]

Originally Posted by alex

Barter is good as far as you believe 100% to your partners and understand that your both goal is the same.

I worked on several projects with partners beginning with the previous summer. All of them were promising me large incomes, but most of them got lost when the projects were close to finish, just the last one is trying to do something - but doing a job in 4 months instead of 2 weeks is also time wasting (job is taking so much not because of me, of course).

I've been in that situation too. This is where open source code and having more than one programmer, group of programmers or client needing a service or project based on that same code base is helpful. This way you are not dependent on one person or a group of people to follow through.

Be careful of promises without contracts and never put all your eggs in one basket.

Originally Posted by alex

So I understood - best of all to use paid employees, they do exactly what you want to. But this idea is good only in case when you have money to pay them :wink:

May be I'd better requalify into a marketer? So my job would consist in: finding customers, bring them to idea of our services necessity, then manage the other coders job?

Sometimes there is a fine line between a client and a contractor. Paid employees are expensive and not needed most of the time. A subcontractor is often more responsible than an employee who is only interested in collecting a paycheck and going home. Contractors often run their own their own businesses and often are generally more accountable under contract.

Originally Posted by alex

This works but not always.
I'll tell you a story: When I was first going to find an outsource job for me in Internet, I thought my best customers would be Web Programming (or related) companies.
So I sent to all of them an email with such an offer. Most of them ignored my offer, some of them promised me something in the future and some of them qualified my request as SPAM.

I found web programming (or related) companies pay me the least amount of income. I only service non-technical markets unless it's for barter or open source development. I plan on being my biggest client.

Originally Posted by alex

Anyway I think this item should be discussed as I think it is a good idea, but: how would you say large companies could be brought to the same idea and how to advertise it to them? Diect mailing again?

I stay away from large companies... unless I'm ready to be bought out

Originally Posted by alex

Huh, but before people found out what typo3 was, what were they searching for in search engines to find you?

They didn't... before Typo3 there was PostNuke. My stats indicate people find me under various searches for templates but I'm dependent on the popularity of TYPO3 to get my traffic. TYPO3 is what I am using for my travel related marketing needs.

I'm more interested in attracting clients for designers and programmers of TYPO3 than clients for me. I figure I will outsource work to web developers in trade for help with my travel business.