Dear Internet friends & family after 1 year in development I would like to present to you a very unique proposition.
This is a Special offer to those of you whom I’ve met and continue to meet on the web.
As you all probably know, real estate is my first love and I remain a big part of a website called www.MagicBullets.com however I have been working on another complimentary
website design and build adventure that dovetails and supports anyone who wants to be an internet website entrepreneur.
I originally built this new website due to the high cost of advertising properties for sale in our local newspaper, I've seen the acceptance and blossoming of other classified advertising sites built upon the same principles as what I am about to show you. (This is a growing industry)
Here is the proposition and it's not for everyone, but I certainly want to offer you, the first opportunity to take advantage of this before I begin letting the general public know.
Let me first ask you to stop reading and click over to the new website application that I have built over at: http://www.CitrusCountyClassifieds.com so that you can get an idea of
what I am referring to here.
STOP! Did you go look? O.K. Good, glad to see that you did.
I built this new website for a few different reasons:
#1 was to lower advertising costs of everyone in my local area.
#2 was to be able to list my own offerings to the community at no cost to me! #3 was to generate income on an automated basis by allowing others to advertise at super low rates compared to traditional newspaper advertising which is going the way of the dinosaur.
#4 to create a more local online community to discuss general issues relative to all things in my local county.
#5 to eventually offer an exact copy of the programming code/application to others who would like to operate the exact same operation in their areas and syndicate us all to enhance joint operations, profitability and effectiveness across the web.
It took about 9 months of effort to design, build, test and configure the new website using 4 different programmers, artists, etc to get it done. The site has now been tested for an additional 120 days to work out initial bugs and get a feel for how to effectively manage & promote the operations while generating a profit. (It makes money!)
Some of the things I've learned from the initial launch:
Advertising and Marketing tendencies are a plus as you really need to get out and meet and greet business owners to show them that advertising on the website will generate business for their operations.
The general public is slow to come on board but their placing $10 ads is pure gravy to the operation as business display ads are where the real money is at, business owners generally tend to stay and pay on a monthly basis to create a presence in the publics eye once you sign them.
The link below shows the advertising spaces available on the homepage of the site with prices that will be relevant once the site becomes a superior destination for the county in question (Yours?) These prices can be cut in half and you are still making a great profit: http://www.thecitruscountyclassifieds.com/images/banner-ghost.jpg you'll notice this is a
page you can use to show potential advertisers available positions were they can advertise on the homepage while offering them a 50% discount.
Also note that you can load as many banners as you like into each of those banner rotator positions, we limit it to 5 advertisers per spot to ensure all the advertisers banners will be seen by website visitors.
Here's an exercise for you, cut all the prices of the ad spaces on the homepage in half and add them all up, how much income does that equal per month? I'll save you the trouble at full price it is $2,950.00 giving people a 50% discount to try you equals $1,475.00 a month.
The above represents only one advertiser per position if you had five ads per position then $1,475.00 x 5 spots = $7,375.00 per month! Don't kid yourself; it isn't easy to fill up all those spots! But over time it certainly is possible. We now also have the new ability to place banners in every individual link category on the website which opens the door to hundreds more link sponsorship opportunities at $200 per six month contract: Here is how this application will benefit you significantly by using the classifieds.
You'll notice on the homepage beneath the blue video screen player that we have Lora Wilson's (Lora Law banner) listed on the homepage, you can see it here
http://www.citruscountyclassifieds.com
I promised Lora that we would soon have the ability to place her banner directly into the
"Citrus County Business Directory Listings Area" in addition to her homepage listing and
it has taken significant time and resources to accomplish this feat of automation.
This new feature allows us to use the system to insert banners of similar design in ALL
categories of the website, you can see Lora's banner here as well now:
Click this link then click the first category which is Attorneys:
http://www.thecitruscountyclassifieds.com/business_subcat.php?catid=29
This is VERY specific ad placement and even beats the more expensive homepage
advertising spots in relevancy, because when someone is searching for a specific service or
product they will click on a link category to see who is listed there first.
By sponsoring that specific link position the advertiser’s banner will be placed at the top of
the list and it will always be first while being hyperlinked to their email or website along
with their phone number and message appearing in the banner.
You can easily charge $200 for 6 months and $40 for custom banner artwork. $240.00 out
the door, tax, tag, title and destination charges all included. That’s $10 a week to advertise
a business, response is picking up.
There are hundreds of these single link positions for many categories which equates to
$45,000 annually just considering the Business directory links alone!
So how much would owning and running a website like this cost? Not much considering
you are instantly in business and you have Myself, Marty (My tech partner and SEO king)
and Vic our trusty webmaster at www.MagicBullets.com who will Host, Update and lend
support when you need a helping hand.
Basically the initial set up is $5,000 and Vic gets every penny of that in order to duplicate
the website, set up initial hosting, Pay for vBulletin and Ecards application licenses and
help you along the way in getting it set up for your specific location, once it is set up your
hosting fee's are the only other thing that you must pay on a monthly basis that is $120.00
directly to Vic and you get a virtual private server and support. A vBulletin license renewal
is an annual fee of $60 if you want a forum.
How do we make anything here? Myself and Marty ask the operators to remit to us 10%
monthly of the net profits generated as a franchise fee/Licensing fee, if you don't generate
any profits, you do not pay! This forces Myself, Marty and Vic to work hard to ensure you
do make money and are profitable or we don't make a dime! I’ll be working 24/7 for that
10% you can believe it!
Everything about this classifieds site operation is performance based, it must prove itself to you, your advertisers and the general public or nobody makes money! Believe me, we will be working hand in hand with you giving you everything we have created from invoices, sales literature, operating procedures, tips, hints, hosting support, upgrades and so forth to ensure that you will indeed generate profits in your local markets.
My phone is always on at 1 352-601-3863 and you can call me day or night when you need assistance along the way. Hopefully I've built up some trust along the way through operating www.magicbullets.com , not to mention you can hammer me on the boards if I'm
not performing to your expectations! LOL
Here are a few other insights I've found as a result of immersing myself in these classifieds operations, many people (Business owners) like to barter their products and services for advertising space in the classifieds, this allows you to trade advertising space at their places of business by placing physical vinyl banners in front of their places of business on busy highways, radio stations will trade you airtime in exchange for some cash and a place on your website, food producers will trade you food credits, the list is endless as far as opportunities to joint venture and barter services etc Your imagination and creativity along with your presentation skills in suggesting joint venture propositions is the only limitation to your success.
My partner Marty Johnson has been doing search engine optimization for over 10 years http://www.maximumhits.com he will also help you initially to optimize your website
(SEO) so that you begin to appear in the search engines online where people will see you, after only 3 months in operation we are #1 on page 1 of both Google and Yahoo for the search term "Citrus County Classifieds" (type it in to see for yourself) we surpassed all of our competition who have been around for years due to Marty's skills in SEO. We include initial SEO for you and have Marty available to you should you want to optimize beyond our initial efforts. Due to the local nature of these operations it is easier to get high rankings than if you were to try to optimize on a global/worldwide nature. You only need to service your own County to make very good money.
Here is another insight that I have found to be of considerable importance, if you are in a larger city that has an Oodle, Craigslist, usfreeads.com, classifiedads.com or Kijiji then that is serious competition and will present some challenges but it's not a deal stopper, the other thing is that the smaller the County, City or Town that you live in the better, because the bigger players like Oodle, Craigslist usfreeads.com, classifiedads.com & Kijiji in many
case have no presence at all there. Regardless, none of those free ads operations work directly with local businesses to work hand in hand with promotion and banner ad placement on a local level so your area really is your own oyster with many possibilities, plus you don't have to make a killing to be profitable!
Another support here as well is that you will have access to our graphics artist to help you build beautiful banners for your advertisers that you will place on your website, so you can outsource artwork at the lowest possible price (Charge your advertisers a little more) and work directly with our artist Cindy@statchoo.com to make a few dollars on the override
so feel free to use Cindy regardless if you take me up on this offer, she is extremely good and doesn't charge and arm and a leg.
Since this is brand new we are still learning and fine tuning things, one thing we are working on is building an application that allows you to put individual banners at the top of every single category within the entire site (We just finished this!), we will charge advertisers $200 every six months to insert their banners at the top of their respective category/specialty, there are literally 1000"s of links, categories and pages that can be sponsored with a banner at the very top of each link listed, we anticipate this to generate significant income in the coming days and you will always get every upgrade we make free of charge as a licensed operator along with the support on how to use the new features as we build, test and install them. (Update: This feature is now installed and it is generating another stream of income)
You'll also get a Vbulletin forum license and have your own forum, you'll get over 300 ECards and the application that lets your members send free ECards around the world, you'll get a guestbook for visitors to leave comments, you'll get a full suite of online games, you'll get full support and everything you see at http://www.CitrusCountyClassifieds.com
There is considerable work to set up your online store so that may be the one thing that will eat up a lot of your time initially if you decide to pursue affiliate sales through an online store.
Cindy@Statchoo.com can help you if you decide to set up an online store, otherwise you
can link to our online stores while you build yours to at least offer that option to your visitors.
Some of the applications We have built-in may not be of interest to you so just know that if you do not require some feature or application that already exists and would prefer to go with a more streamlined website then we can certainly comment out certain things so they will not appear at your website, also know that if you want to add additional features,
upgrades or new modifications that we will be open to allowing those upgrades to be made and will help you do it.
I do want to make this clear; you would be a licensee not an owner of the code, by paying the one time licensing fee of $5,000 you will be entitled to operate the website indefinitely so long as you do abide by general decency standards and remit 10% of the net profits generated monthly so that we may continue to support, upgrade and provide you leads along the way.
We may charge $10,000 a copy in the future, since this is new and we are still ramping up and fine tuning and you would be a founding member, I am offering it to you at $5,000 to put you in a business on your own within one month of your signing on.
You don't need to know how to write a single line of code to run this website, Vic is our go to programmer, all glitches, hosting, updates, maintenance and technical matters will be addressed by Myself, Marty and Vic, you just need to get people to advertise, insert your local content using easy to use backend CMS modules (Content management systems) and go out into the business community to consult with and collect your monthly checks for the services that you now provide.
I anticipate that a few may decide that this offer looks pretty darn cool, if we get more than a few people wanting in please know that we will go with the first come first served method to take care and support our initial licensee's before going forward with more than we can physically handle at any one time. If you think this is for you, I encourage you to call me as soon as possible to discuss it before we close out any new applications due to the overwhelming nature of creating too many sites to support in the beginning stages.
I encourage you to do a few searches in your local area online to see what exists in your local areas now, also stop into http://www.godaddy.com to type in some possible domain
names for your website, you can call it whatever you like but remember the more relevant the title the better, hence I live in Citrus County so I sought out and bought the domain www.CitrusCountyClassifieds.com I know the local newspaper is kicking themselves for
not buying that because I get calls weekly from people thinking that I am the local newspaper! What a kick! LOL
One more caveat: This does take effort and will take a lot of your time, but it is very gratifying to watch your numbers climb according to your efforts, you also get a statistics program that shows you everything that is happening behind the scenes at your website, you'll know EVERYTHING that is happening with your website operations from how
many visitors and clicks you get to knowing how many visitors and clicks your advertisers are getting as well.
I'm not going to give out our statistics to just everyone in this letter but if you call me with further interest I will provide you a link to our statistics that shows you every detail of what the website is doing and has done at all times all the way back to day 1.
You will get that statistics program as well with your own website, it really helps you to plan your strategy and tactics then monitor the results of your different campaigns as you implement different initiatives directly into your market. Post card direct mail campaigns always send visitor numbers through the roof. I would say this is a very exciting business and it can be fun if it is something that is right for you.
Thanks for reading through to the end, feel free to call me when you have a question, I'd love to speak with you more on this. I'm available on Sundays too. I do mean 24/7 support!
P.S. I've incorporated as an LLC and since this is a virtual online service business we don't have to charge our advertisers sales tax, just one less headache to deal with.
We're not guessing here folks; this website works IF you work it. It is making money and easily can support itself while you gain momentum.
You'll notice there is no hype in this letter; there aren't even any testimonials yet! I look forward to the day that we use your success to give those to future operators of this venture.
You often see classifieds on the web but how often do you get the opportunity to be a part of the syndication and be a part of those networks? We’re out to make everyone who signs
on successful; you must make positive profits in order for us to be paid. We will ensure you succeed.
Dan Auito USCG Ret
DanAuito@TampaBay.RR.Com
www.CitrusCountyClassifieds.com
www.MaximumHits.com
www.MagicBullets.com
1-352-601-3863 Anytime
Here are a few good questions that have been asked:
Let me ask you this.
What is your total revenue for advertisers? Good question! Currently we take in $1,057.50 in cash from business owners and we are bartering for an additional $412.50 a
month, we also get about $200 a month directly deposited from people placing $10 dollar
ads at all different times of day and night for a total of $1,670.00 and we have 5 more
people setting up contracts to advertise in the coming days, so $2,000.00 a month is
reasonably assured within another 2 weeks. I personally think that at the six month mark
of operation we should be doing $3,000 in cash steadily while continuing an upward path
as we become more and more established. The only expenses are hosting which is $120 a
month and banking and credit card fee's which is another $39 a month roughly, it varies
upon volume. (Update we are now also getting those individual links sponsors at $240.00
a piece so those are adding up but haven’t been factored in yet.)
Total expenses going out for direct mailing or anything that is costing you $? We have
done Radio at 120 (15) second spots at $500 a month in cash and another $500 a month
given to us in credit for placing the radio stations banners on our homepage. Direct mail
campaigns run about 50 cents per household when you factor in the cost of the mailing
list, the production of the post cards and the postage itself so 2000 houses can be
estimated generally speaking to be $1,000.00 you can choose to do less of more based
upon incoming funds. Bandit signs run $3.50 a piece double sided 4 color 18" x 24" and
ground stakes are .73 cents so bandit promotional signs run $4.23 when you buy them in
volume at 110 count or $520.03 for 110 signs. I bartered with a printer,(You'll see his ad in our main screen , Yellow One) for our Bits
and Bytes magazine and order forms they would have ran close to $400 for 250 copies of
all the different pieces of literature assembled. There are so many ways to promote that I
could go on forever! You only spend actual dollars when you have them otherwise you
can barter quite effectively for services in many advertising and materials realms.
And tell me what I would get for the $5k and 10% figures. You would get everything you
see at http://www.CitrusCountyClassifieds.com minus a set up online store as that is very time consuming and an ongoing individual specific type of decision process, you
would get the rights to a specific county, you will own the licensee rights to operate the
site indefinitely and you can sell your rights and transfer the website operation rights to
future buyers (we do own the code), you will receive initial SEO efforts to get your site
ranking in the search engines, ongoing phone & tech support along with all future
upgrades and modifications that we make at no charge. You would get the rights to use
any and all materials that we have developed to market, bill and foster business
operations. That's for starters, everything we learn and do in the future will also be
available to you as well. I will consider setting up a private forum for owners of these
websites so that we all could work together, pose questions, suggest ideas and grow
together in creating a well oiled machine.