RS

“They” say that some of the best educational dollars you can spend are sunk into failures - you can learn more from failed ventures than just about any other means. “They” are right - but it’s still frustrating (and expensive) as hell to fail with a product launch.

Take for example, YourOwnVows.com - my partner Travis and I thought we hit something big in November 2006! Prior to this, we had developed a number of very successful info-products that rake in great income - so, we were going into this pretty confident (cocky).

The project met all our (weak) criteria at the time - huge audience searching for a solution (custom wedding vows), very little PPC competition (1 other lonely competitor), great target demographic (women 25+) - sounds like a dream niche, right?

So, we invested $500 to outsource the writing of the vows and spend at least 6 weeks on the site design, sales copy, product design, etc. - We thought we had a winner!

We launched and pumped $350/day worth of Google traffic to the site for a week- and the traffic was there, thousands of clicks - we used every bit of our daily budget. We’re rich, right?!? - uh, 5 sales - FIVE SALES! - that type of ratio has to at least nominate us for the Worst Product Launch Hall of Fame.

What went wrong? We didn’t respect the organics - while researching the product, we noticed the organic listings but chose to ignore them. If we paid them mind we would have realized that the organic sites were giving away vows for free and monetizing via Adsense - even though they offer a inferior product, the appeal of FREE outweighs the process of whipping out a credit card to buy something that the end user is willing to spend extra effort to perfecting on their own.

Is it salvageable? Possibly - we could offer the book for free as an incentive to collect data with an autoresponder - building a list of brides to be could be lucrative. That plan is more suitable for a SEO initiative to organically rank with the rest of them than a PPC campaign - however, if the value of an acquisition merits it, a PPC campaign may be in order.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Costly Mistakes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.