Diary of opening a paysite
 

This last 6 weeks have been exciting, frustrating and ultimately rewarding.
It was 6 weeks ago we launched Paul Markham Teens and nothing happened. Then a few days later we had our first sign up. He came off the content store.

We then set about driving traffic to the site and here our problems with lack of knowledge experience and everything else hit us.

The TGP galleries we had designed were too big and surfers did not wait for them to download, in fact few of them got accepted and in those first few days traffic was low, very low.

So I went out looking for designers. One was an old contact and the other a women in trouble who needed some money for Xmas. Their designs worked a lot better than ours, so traffic to the site increased. sign ups were now the problem. My idea of a tour sucked so again went out to find designers for a tour.

What a disappointment that was, most were lay out people with templates and few had a clue how to innovate something different. Most showed me a portfolio of other peoples sites and asked for money. The guy who eventually got the job was TPC at Bright Sign Productions he knocked me up some samples to show what he could do for ME and how he saw the site. He got the job. :)

Monday his tour went up behind our front page, FRONT PAGE, we added CCBILL to the billing and we got a decent stats program.

Amazing is all I can say, we seem to be converting about 1:100 that reach the site. :)

Problem is getting them to the site, conversions from TGP sites to us are running under 3% on average and I'm told it should be 5%. But as we know nothing about galleries and submissions it's not bad.

Good news is we are getting accepted a lot and on good sites, but then we are using PAUL MARKHAM CONTENT STORE content.

We just signed up to CCBILL and need a few guys to beta test the affiliate program. They can have FHGs or content and design their own.

So a great week after a lot of disappointment and a lot further to go, we have a few things planned that will make the site even better.

Every beginning is difficult. ;)

Some tips for free

1) Let TPC look at the tour. I get javascript errors on the pages (using WinXP SP2 and IE 6)

2) Your tour wasn't OK, your TGP pages weren't OK. Are you sure your site inside the membership is OK? You want to keep those customers as long as possible.

3) Get an affiliate program and let other people drive the traffic to your site.

thanks for the heads up, I will get it checked Monday. We did find a fault on Mozilla and Firefox that we fixed.

The tour is new and we need to test it some more, but very confident the inside works, it's off the same Content Management as the content stores.

We have signed up to CCBILL and got their affiliate program and in the process of testing it with a few friends who are driving traffic to us.