My continuity / membership business - Tragic start to finish!!!

Since I became one of the top nightclub DJs in my city and ran a business that everyone thought was successful, I have been asked a lot of questions about the music industry. I got asked how I became a DJ, how I got to Dj all over the world, how I started a record label, how I got gigs etc...

Last year I was spending a lot of time in airports and on trains so I decided to write down all of my knowledge on the industry and create a book on how people can become a professional DJ.

Shortly after, I read the book the 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris.

In his part on Muse Automation he explains how to setup a test site to gauge a nice market before you invest in creating a product.
This test website without any product to sell is comprised of 3 pages:

First page - sales copy, testimonials, pictures, guarentees etc
Second page - pricing and order submission info
Third page - "Thank you for ordering but our book is on back order. Your information has not been saved."

The idea here is that you drive traffic to your site with PPC. You have analytics setup on the back end to monitor how many users get through to sale pages. Depending on how you tweak the sales copy, you will see what the conversion rate is from the first page to the second pricing page. Then again, you can tweak the price on the second page to see how many people actually "buy" the fake product.

This will give you a very real idea of how much of a demand there is for your product and weather you can make a ROI before you invest a lot of time and resources into creating a product.

I wanted to take action and just get the page up so I partnered up with a friend of mine named Jay. Jay is one of the world's biggest name DJs and has a ton of connections. He's buddies with household names that you may know like Paul Oakenfold, Tiesto and Pete Tong. He also knows web design so I figured he would be a good guy to partner up with.

I broke down what the motivations of DJs are. Why do Djs want to become DJs? What is the conversation inside of their head?

When you ask Djs why they do it they all say "because I love the music" but the real reasons I found are as follows:

-they want to have attention / spotlight on them
-they want to get attention from the opposite sex (hang out with good looking girls)
-they want to live a glamorous lifestyle
-they want to have lots of friends
-they want to travel

So I took these motives and Jay and I created a simple 3 page site:

doubleyourdjing-ebook dot com

I had never used Google PPC before so I blew through a ton of $ because I was paying close to $1 per click! I read the Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords and brought that average down to .20 per click while still generating a similar amount of traffic.

The sales page is weak. The video looks armature even though my DJ friends say its effective. The testimonials are weak. The Bonus products are not attractive at all. We just threw something up to get the page live and haven't changed it since.

I started driving traffic to the site half way through October. In the first two days I got two orders at a pricepoint of $39.00 USD. I was ecstatic! We tweaked the sales copy, the arrangement, images, price etc and we ended up getting 2 more orders.

So far I have spent $520 on PPC in the month and have got 8 orders. Not making a profit by any means but it is enough to be encouraging considering how weak my offer is.

I say that its weak for a number of reasons:

1) Because there are other Dj books out there offering the same thing.
2) Because the preferred medium of DJs is movie files.
3) Bonus offers aren't that attractive at all.
4) The name sucks: New Djs don't want to double their djing....they want to get the hope and skills that they too can have the rockstar life that pro djs have one day.
5) We talk about it being a 'package' and then we are just selling it as an ebook. Not congruent.
6) The largest market for this type of a product is beginner DJs. These are the people that are most anxious to get started and spend the most money. beginner djs want beginnger skills, not some of the advanced stuff I say is in the book later on.

It was about this time when I stumbled onto Ryan Deiss's Million Dollar Napkin and Snowball videos which introduced me to continuity and membership models.

I feel you.. has happened to me too many times as well.. Beckham

Your biggest mistake is hiring a developer to do something
that you could have learned to do yourself for free. Your
degree is not useless - apply it to this business.

BTW, I have a friend who is into techno and I've told him
a gazillion times to do a ringtone site. I think there's great
potential there but I could be wrong.

Since when did this forum become a multi-user
blog?

This isn't a discussion it's a monologue and, as
such, should be on a personal blog not a forum.

John