Last month I re-built and re-launched MTW:ED, a expiring domain name data web-service. In terms of the data that MTW:ED collects, nothing has changed. The aim of the re-make was simple: make it easier for both new and existing subscribers to see what MTW:ED does, access MTW:ED’s data and ultimately subscribe to the service.

Since re-launching, I have seen MTW:ED’s subscription income increase by more than 33%, and it is anticipated that many more existing subscribers will renew their subscription. I wanted to share with you what I have done to increase sales, and give a comparison with the new and old website.

The old version of MTW:ED was a bit confusing. The data was not presented well, and it was difficult to immediately grasp what MTW:ED did. This obviously presented some disadvantages in getting subscribers, as they didn’t exactly know what they were getting for their subscription fee.

The new MTW:ED has been re-designed with this problem in mind. We now have a dedicated homepage which explains exactly what we do. We understand that some users don’t like to read a lot of text, and there are often better ways to communicate. This is why we created a ‘welcome video’-style banner which gives users some key information (stats) and shows some screenshots of the site in use. You can see our video here:

The video isn’t the best in the world, but it does the trick. For your curiosity, the video was created using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and uses stock audio from iStockPhoto: Aspects (Loop A).

Another central consideration was to make it easy for visitors to see our sample data and use our sample search tool. We knew from the old site that the average subscriber visited 23 pages per visit. Our re-design increased this figure up to a surprising 73 pages/visit (compared to 7 for all visitors), with each user spending 30 minutes browsing before subscribing. This demonstrates that users who do subscribe like to know exactly what they are getting — even if it is just $4.99 per month, they like to know it is $4.99 well spent. In fact, one user spent 2 hours browsing before subscribing and another viewed 220 pages. This is how we did it:

Rather than treating subscription as a ‘subsidiary option’, we wanted to make it an integral part of the service. We wanted to devise a way of making users flow towards subscription, without forcing them to subscribe. We achieved this using our 3-step-tour-style navigational structure:

We broke-down what MTW:ED does into 3 fundamental stages. We wanted to first show users the data we collected because it is important that they form their own opinion of our service before they bounce. We engaged users by giving them access to almost an entire years-worth of data. This allowed them to see MTW:ED from a subscriber’s point of view, only with 3-month-old data. Similarly, we invited them to perform searches on a reduced data set.

The final stage was really the most important. If a visitor ended up on this page, it meant they were probably about to subscribe — in fact, 32% of visitors viewing this page ended up subscribing.

Previously, subscription was priced at $9.99 per month for access to data and search tool. We recognised that many users only used the browse-list data (not the search tool), so for the re-make we decided to re-consider the subscription options available. Again utilizing the Rule of 3, we separated our functionality into 3 subscription packages:

Silver is comparable to the old MTW:ED monthly subscription. It costs $4.50 more as many more users will opt for the Bronze subscription option instead. Our subscription price now ranges between $4.99 and $49.99, depending on need. The observed benefits of using multiple subscription options are:

1. We are able to target different ‘types’ of people, and offer each group a more suitable package for their needs.
2. It gives the appearance that, for example, Bronze subscription is being ‘given away’ as it is comparitevly much cheaper than Silver and Gold. This means users are more likely to subscribe because they are (or at least feel as if they are) taking a lesser risk.
3. It presents an opportunity for us to showcase concisely what MTW:ED offers, and provides an implied value to each of our features.

MTW:ED also created an advertising campaign with Google AdWords. Since MTW:ED serves a quite small and specific audience, many of our subscriptions come from users looking for us in search engines. Our natural search engine presence is enough for us to sustain the service, but we wanted to target more subscribers. Google AdWords is perfect because it allows us to ‘link up’ to those very specific users looking for a service like ours.

Our campaign so far has been moderately successful. We are about breaking even in terms of cost against revenue, and will hopefully increase ROI by optimising in the near future.

The average Google-AdWords-referred visitor is viewing 14 pages before subscribing or leaving, with the best performing keywords at around 90. They are also spending an average of 5 minutes browsing; with the best keywords, around 20 minutes.

We will continue to look at these figures and decide which keywords are simply not getting conversions and remove them from our campaign.

Okay: so I’ve done my bit of sharing. Now, it’s your turn: I want to hear what has worked for you, so please start a discussion by leaving a comment below.

Thanks,
Brendon.

Earlier this month, I had been suffering from extremely unstable service from (mt) MediaTemple; this caused quite considerable downtime. In fact, it was so bad that some of my hosted websites became unusable for 2 DAYS! I understand that hosts have problems from time to time, but 2 days!? This is just totally unacceptable, and so I decided to pack my bags and look for a more reliable host.

I had Linode (aff), a Virtual Private Server (VPS) host, in my bookmarks for quite a while; just in case I decided to move host in the future. A ‘Linode 360′ provides 360MB of RAM, 16 GB of storage and 200 GB of data transfer for a mere $19.95 per month. {(mt) MediaTemple offer ‘more’, but you are unlikely to get anywhere near using it without overaging on ‘GPUs’ or database usage; I was eventually forced to buy a MySQL container, and my sites receive very little traffic at all.}

I found the decision of web host a difficult choice to make. I ended up choosing a VPS (it was out of Slicehost and Linode) just to give it a go. And now, I don’t think I’ll ever go back. VPS has its disadvantages (like taking ages to set-up), granted; but the power and flexibility of it is something I couldn’t help but get exited about. With VPS, you don’t get stupid rules like ’5 cron jobs per account’; in fact, you can pretty much do whatever you like.

Take a look at a Pingdom report for Taxomation. Day four was when it moved over to Linode. 2 hours of downtime that day was due to the (mt) MediaTemple hosting, and the downtime on consecutive days due to problems I inflicted on the Linode account. (Maybe I should have got everything working before I migrated, no? .) With (mt) MediaTemple, page loads were typically taking 0.85s. With Linode, that time has been almost halved to 0.46s.

If you are looking for a new web host and know enough about web server software, why not give Linode a go? I’m sure you will not regret it! You can get there using my wonderful affiliate link (Why not?) or with this non-affiliate link.

Bye, bye MediaTemple!

Please share you web hosting experiences…

As you may know, I run the website MTW:ED, a subscription web-service which scans expiring domains with Google PageRank and other popularity values. When it first launched (as a subscription site), it was getting around 4-5 subscriptions per month: enough to pay for hosting, and to make a little profit. When sales declined, I took some actions in attempt to regain them. It worked for a little while, but sales have continued to decline. The site seems to have a lessening presence in the search engines, and relies on mostly direct traffic: not good for getting new customers.

From this article, I hope to provoke a discussion of ways to increase sales. First off, I’ll discuss the methods I have tried:

MTW:ED doesn’t have a high presence in Google for high-quality keywords. I decided to try Google AdWords. It certainly increased sales, but cost more than what was being earned (about twice as much). My budget wasn’t big, and I didn’t have much opportunity to experiment, but I can give this advice if you are going to try AdWords:

• Be clear about what you are selling.
• Mention a price: many users have an idea of what they are willing to spend. Let them know in the ad so you don’t waste money on ‘just curious’ clicks.

I had never created a video before; certainly not for a sales pitch. However, I knew that product demonstration can mean a lot, so I put together a short video in attempt to sell the service. I put it on the homepage, but did not notice any increase in sales. I’m sure that videos demonstrating your product can only be beneficial.

My third and last attempt involved offering a free, 7 day trial. Unfortunately, people tend to take advantage of the 7 day trial, but have no need to subscribe to the service beyond that.

Well, as I said, these methods didn’t exactly go to plan. They may work for some services, but for MTW:ED they have made little difference. What I am really interested in is your ideas: please tell me how you have increased sales, and what methods could work for MTW:ED.