Advice needed: Which direction to take existing program...[links]
 

Hope everyone is having a good year so far, making a ton of money and seeing large growth. Amazing how many GFYers really are people with great character, always feels like coming home after time away.

In the last few months I've been involved in a mortgage-related startup, and had to put a small program that was nearly complete on hold. One of those things where you think you'll get back to it soon, but then time goes by and it becomes clear that you only have so many hours in a day...

So now I'm at a crossroads in terms of what I should do with the completed sites and thought I'd let you guys take a look at it and evaluate their future.

Late last year I drove some significant traffic to the sites to privately test their sell-through rates and guage member retention via paid links on several TGPs (The Hun, AL4A, WorldSex, Shemp, etc) prior to going the next step and taking it to the program level.

Out of that traffic I saw trials convert to full memberships at 36%.

After talking to RogerV, TheDoc, and a few others, I then put in a limited-trial system where trial members get access to only 1% of the full member's area content while being heavily upsold on the other 99%. That has resulted in the trial-to-full member conversion figure climbing to 45%.

Those full memberships then went on to recur at a rate of 72% overall (includes bad CCs, cancellations, etc) month-over-month, for 6+ months.

Here are the sites in question. They're at 99% or so, a few small details need fixing/tweaking that you'll probably pick up on:

PROGRAM SHELL (never implemented)
www.zeroarmy.com

SITES
www.asianzero.com
www.moviezero.com
www.asszero.com

My question for the board is about where I go from here.

I don't have the time to build out the rest of program and launch it properly for affiliates. It could easily be done using NATS or another drop-in system, but you guys know how it is as a one man show trying to do two seperate start-ups: Both will always suffer. The mortgage business take priority as there are other people involved. Plus there's no way I'd gamble with affiliate's time and money without being 100% committed.

What options do I have?

if you are committed to the mortgage biz, why dont you just sell the sites. I think that is the best avenue.

I agree, that sounds like the most painless solution, unless you wanna deal with the hassle of doing revshare with someone else running it. Which will always involve trust issues, communication issues and whatnot.

Selling them is always an option I guess. Hard to let go of things you've put so much time and effort into though for sentimental reasons.

Since they don't have a significant membership count, how do you go about determining what they're worth? Price of content + design - X%? Another way?

bump for the night crew.

Mako,

Long time no speak! Glad to hear things are going well with the mortgage biz.

Hit me up when you have a minute and let's talk about this and also play catch up!

joo got it mang. Definitely been too long. :D

I would agree with this statement, if you can't give your affiliates your undivided attention they will not have the tools to succeed and the affiliate program won't flourish.

Just my 2 cents but I do like your affiliate site design, it's nice to see something that isn't called "cash" something LOL! :)

DH

Hey Mako how goes it!

Yep, the first thing I thought was "sell".

Cheers man. :D

CD how are you man, hope all is well in your neck of the woods. Is winter finally over or are you still an eskimo? ;)

please give me a shout at 116786601

Hire someone who takes care of the daily work?

franky: Will do.

aboutporno: Always an option I suppose, but I'd probably prefer letting someone else manage it as a part of their program and take the appropriate rev-share slice.

whats up i'm not on gfy for about a week and it feels like i year in gossip lets catch up

Sell it or give it to someone else to manage and you will get a share from this...

Egomancer