We feel we have a innovative idea and have put together a new website at www.iwonitlive.com . It is a game site that is based on advertisers products and pricing. Advertisers can post up to 100 products include their pricing and a description. We currently have 16 games for them to choose from in which those products will be part of the game. Problem we have run into is this, our membership is low since our games rely on sponsorship and have found it hard to market without members. We were hoping the IDEA of the site would sell it to advertisers but have come to find out this is not the case. Any ideas or input would be helpful.

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Jay’s Answer: Advertisers are looking for targeted people to advertise to. The first questions they’ll ask are, “How many people visit your site? And who are they?” The better your statistics, the more your potential advertisers may be interested.

As for the gamers coming to your site, I think you have a problem. First, I can’t play a game without first registering. And to register, I have to provide my email address. So, you’ve lost me at the start.

But let’s say I’m willing to register. What’s in it for me (WIIFM)? Playing games to see advertiser’s products for an unknown chance to play an online game to compete to maybe win something? Unless the games are strong enough to keep me coming back to build my skills, you’re going to have few returning visitors.

Ideas don’t sell. Action sells. While it seems that you have a chicken and egg problem (you need advertisers to feature to get players) you could simply offer free advertising for 6 months just to build your site and test out your idea. At the end of 6 months (or 3 months), you should have sufficient data (and time to tweak things) to decide how to proceed, if you can charge advertisers, etc.

I would like a Quick Start on setting up an on-line course. Primarily dealing with Getting started (the right way) in real estate, Creating equity and Property management.

A Book has already been published and we conduct classes that are well received in our city. Many people across the country have asked for on-line courses.

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Jay’s Answer: You have 3 basic directions: webinars (web-based), teleseminars (telephone based), and DVDs (prerecorded). Each has their pros and cons.

Webinars allow you to have visuals (although you could supply separate PDF files with teleseminars), but sometimes suffer with slow internet connections. For best audio, many webinars actually have a phone # you call to get the audio. The downside is also you need to sit in front of the computer. Many webinars can be recorded and played back at a later date.

Teleseminars allow people to dial in from wherever they are, and are the most flexible for live calls. The downside is that there’s no visual tie-in.

DVDs (and other prerecorded) allows you to do the most editing for a professional result, but there’s no “live” component.

If you decide to do a webinar/teleseminar, make sure you have someone who’s handling all the technical details for you. Are your bridge lines working? Are new call-ins muted? Are recording levels good (if you’re recording)? Are some users have technical problems? You also want a person (it could be the same one), to sequence questions for you (like a radio call-in show producer).

There are many different levels of products for these offerings. Make sure you’ve talked with people who’ve produced many courses to at least learn the pros/cons of each commercial choice.

With the increasing number of Blogs out there, how do people deal with the negative and inaccurate information that is being presented? What strategies and tactics have proven effective?

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Jay’s Answer: Don’t attempt to argue online.

Do publicly offer to have the head of the appropriate department (or president) respond to the problem if the poster would kindly contact you.

The key is that people following the issue from the sidelines will see that the issue will be handled at a high-level, and restore any loss of faith in the sincerity of the company.

I am trying to grow my website maintenance business (www.enrichmint.com). I have been able to add several customers in about a year but I would like to increase that substantially in the next year. Based on my price point and my current clients, there is a very niche business that can afford the monthly fee and benefit greatly from the service.

It is the small to small/medium size business that cannot afford a full time web developer in house but knows that they need to keep their website fresh. All of my clients come from word of mouth or from search engines.

I really believe (maybe naively!) that there is specific group of business owners who would sign up in a minute if they only knew a service like this was available.

How do I find and get the word out to those businesses?

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Jay’s Answer: There are many ways, such as: 1) Focus on who your competition is focusing on and 2) Identify companies that have budgets but whose website hasn’t changed in a while.

However, you have a number of problems. Most micro-businesses (1-15) employees can’t afford your $400/month fee. They could hire someone to update their site for them for much less. Small businesses don’t either have the time to generate useful content or the need to update their information monthly.

Also, fresh isn’t as important as generating new customers. That’s what your clients ultimately care about. Help them to both attract more traffic and get more conversions, and you’ve got something that will attract potential clients in droves.

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Jay’s Answer: Not directly. Let’s say you write the best articles on the web about your business expertise. Pithy. In-depth. Lots of world-class material.

First, the web crawlers have to find your blog. That means either you list it on a directory or from your existing site. Will that bump up your page rank, no.

The web crawlers don’t see how wonderful your text is. Humans do. They refer to it by linking to the great material.

Page rank is a combination of: the number and quality of your backlinks. Once you have a blog up and running, visit other relevant blog sites and post pithy comments. If accepted, your comments will create a backlink. If someone who reads your comments visits your site, likes what they see, then they’ll post a backlink, and so on. Ideally, someone else’s site which was deemed a high page rank site will backlink to you, creating the page rank bump.

So, creating a blog is only half the work. The other half is starting a viral backlink plan.

I’m with a purchasing cooperative and we need to get product updates to our members in a timely manner. I’m wondering if we could some how take advantage of RSS (real simple syndication) technologies to get this information out. Not all our members carry all of our lines. No one in our organization has experience with RSS.

• Does this sound feasible?
• Would this be more time consuming than sending blanket emails to all our Members?

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Jay’s Answer: It’s easy to do. The problem is that your members need to subscribe to your feed to see the updates. While you can see who has subscribed to your feed, you don’t know if they’ve seen it. Using email contact manager software you can see if they’ve opened it, clicked though, etc.

As for which is more time consuming – it’s a toss-up. With RSS you’ll need to update your web page. With an email, you’ll need to compose it, and send it out.

I own a small internet startup in the business of online games. We are launching our first project within a month or so, and it is a service where users must sign up to create a free account. Our goal is to simply get as many users signed up as we can in order to grow as large and as quickly as possible.

Since we are a small firm, we only have a few thousand dollars to put towards advertising and marketing. We’ve already decided on positioning and a target market.

So the question is: How can we get the most bang for our buck? We’ve considered Google Adwords, MySpace or Facebook advertising, and online contests/giveaways. Any other ideas or strategies?

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Jay’s Answer: Focus on your strategy first. You have a lot of competition online (over 31,000,000 pages when I searched for “free online games”, and 1,000,000 for “free role-playing games”) so it makes sense to plan rather than spend your money randomly.

Are your games much different/better than what’s out there? Is there another company that you can team up with – offering your games (content) in exchange for ad revenue on their site?

PopCap Games (www.popcap.com) has been around since 2000, and has successfully grown their company. They have free web-based games. Free downloadable games (but you need to pay for higher levels or longer play). Multiple hardware platforms. No ad revenue, though.

If you’re focusing on role-playing gamers, then it would make sense to find the popular role-playing forums & blogs and tell them about your games, why they’re great, how they’re different. Send a press release to role-playing magazines or a personal introduction letter to the web game reviewer on staff.

Create a blog about your site. Allow people to share tips/tricks. Rant. Applaud. Actively respond to questions/problems. You’re trying to build community – make it easy for people to hand around.

We are starting a business for which people will get a lot of information via our website. The problem is, the name that we want to use is parked. We paid Godaddy to give us an estimate of what it might cost to have this name with .com, .net etc. The .com name, they estimate could cost between $2,000 and $9,000.

My question is, have there been any studies done where we can see the validity of spending this kind of money in order to secure a name. In other words, is it going to be a worthwhile investment to secure the name? My gut tells me it is because this is the name people naturally think of without any prompting when we tell them what we are all about. I’m assuming that we eventually would educate potential buyers about any name we choose. After all, what does Pepsi mean? BUT, it also seems to me that it would be so much easier and FASTER to name ourselves what people naturally would call us and use to find us on the web.

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Jay’s Answer: If the name wasn’t taken, and it’s the name people think of off-the-bat, I’d suggest taking it.

Given it has a $2-5K cost, you need to evaluate if it’s worth it to your business long-term. If your competitor got this URL, how would that affect you?

I recommend to my clients that they pick names that are easy to spell and remember. That’s what sticks in people’s brains when they’re talking to each other. If you are a for-profit company, get a .com suffix.

Names are what you make of them. Ideally, the URL matches the company name. If not, people who type in: yourcompany.com and get a different website may wind up at your competitors’.

I am the CMO of a new social networking site (similar to that of myspace or facebook) but we are paying back 100% of our net profits to the users.

We launched our open beta at the U of M campus in Michigan. We are doing a Big Ten Promotional tour, along w/ Monster Energy Drink. We are passing our promotional cards out that give users a 500 point bonus for signing up. (Points are how we monitor how much profit sharing you are alloted). The top ten point earners during our beta round win an iPhone. the top point earner from each campus while we are there (two week period) also win an iPhone.

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Jay’s Answer: The problem that I see is that you’ll get people to sign up (to win a prize) but people will continue to use their default social networking site to communicate with their friends.

Focus on what will make your site better than your competitors, rather than simply getting sign-ups. That way you’ll grow your traffic, not just your membership.