PlusOne - Musings of a marketer

Welcome to the first Webmaster interview.

This interview with John Holifield of Scary-Software.com is the first of what will become a permanent fixture on this blog - interviews with other webmasters to gain an insight into who is behind the site, where they have come from, how they have done it and where they are heading.

Your feedback, comments to the interviewee an other suggestions are welcome via comments at the end of the interview.

So to our first question:

The internet provides access to global audiences and markets. Where are you located and is your market influenced by your location?
I live in Pell City Alabama USA. Our market does not seem to be influenced by location as we make sales in the USA, Europe, Australia and probably more countries I’m not aware of.

What were the circumstances that led you to start your site/online business?
I’ve been making websites for years. Software development is what I do for a living. I’ve made websites for companies such as Pacific Life, ABNAmro, and ESPN. A few years ago I decided to make a site for myself and some friends just for fun. Well it got such a good response that it outgrew its first couple of hosting packages in a few short months. I became an Amazon affiliate to try and offset the rising costs. Sometime in there I got really interested in creating mods for my site, and other people wanted them to - so I started Scary-Software to have a place to create and showcase my mods for Invision Power Board.

Originally I just started doing this as a hobby, but rising bandwidth costs led me to become interested in affiliate marketing. Well it took over a year before I even made my first sale and it was almost the end of the second year before I made enough to collect a check. Still not getting rich, but the sites are making me more than they cost now and they have a steady and consistent cashflow. We’re making money consistently now, and the amount is rising every quarter - not to the point of quitting a day job yet but still doing well enough to see that as a possibility in the future.

What does this site do?
Scary-Software.com started as just a web playground for me and some friends. I use it to practice programming and create things that I later use on my other sites. Its a place for me to play and learn without risking messing up one of my other busier sites. I’ve recreated this site from scratch several times, but now its probably going to be pretty permanent. The best feature of this site is its Amazon.com store. We have close to 10,000 pages in Google’s index and make 1-2 sales per day, so I guess the site will have to become a store instead of my playground now. This site also hosts a few graphics and IPB skin creation forums on subaccounts.

Is this your only site?
Not its not my only site, I have several other sites on subjects ranging from local city directories, death metal band “Cannibal Corpse”, and Computers and sites about Fishing, Hunting, Guns, and Paintball in the works.

Are you a full time web business person or do you have other income as well?
I’m not currently a full time web business person allthough I spend close to full time hours working on my sites. When I’m not working at my regular 9-5 job I’m usually doing something on one of my other sites.

There are many methods of promotion for website. What do you do and which do you think are the most effective?
I’m really not the best person to ask about web promotion. For the most part, I’ve tried to go with organic search promotion because A. its free, and B. I want to learn how to do it and get better at it. We could probably do well with some kind of pay for traffic thing like AdWords, I know that many people do quite well that way but I’m not going to do that right now, I will likely want to give AdWords a try sometime in the future though. The best method of promotion as far as I’m concerned is regular word of mouth advertising, my most successful site got to be where it is because of friends telling friends.

Where do you see yourself in a few years time?
Within the next 3 years, I would like to replace enough of my income from my regular job with online affiliate earnings so that I can afford to stay home and make a go out of being an internet marketer.

If you could give two pieces of advice to aspiring or new webmasters/internet business owners, what would they be?
1. Make a commitment to stick with it for at least one year and make an improvement of some type each and every day. I’m convinced if you do that, you can make a successful site on any subject.

2. Be careful who you listen too, some people will tell you “that will never succeed” because they’ve been there and done that and already learned the lesson the hard way, other people will tell you that because they just don’t want you to succeed for whatever selfish reasons of their own. When people are negative about what you want to do, remember to mostly ignore negativity but at the same time learn to recognize when someone is telling you good advice from experience and try to avoid learning the lessons the hard way.

Thanks John!

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