WAKEshine

Bluebarb is a set of iGoogle widgets that a friend and I coded up.  These widgets simplify ordering Amazon products and keep users up to date on hot new items.

You can see an example widget here, and the complete list here.  Try them out!

We developed these and let it alone to see what would happen.  Let’s assess this business and make a business plan for the future.

Here is my Online Business Assessment for myself:

My first question for any business is: what are your goals?

The goals for bluebarb are to simplify online shopping and keep users up to date on the latest projects, and to make some money doing this.  We make money via the Amazon Affiliate program.  Anytime somebody purchases something via our widget, we get a small percentage of the purchase price.

How well are you meeting the goals?

The income is extremely low (less than a dollar per month).  We have very few users of the widgets (less than a hundred for each).

What resources do you have?

We have created almost 10 widgets and they have been deployed to Google.  We have a domain name and a website but it is very plain and not very motivating for anybody who may show up.

The widgets are branded.

How much resources do you have for ongoing operations?

This is not our main source of income and we hope to spend very little time working on it once we’ve upgraded it.  The goal is to set something up and let it run, spending less than an hour per month monitoring it.  In addition, we would be open to the idea of selling bluebarb itself to an investor.

We would like to spend less than $100 upgrading this business.  In addition, we have web development skills, but we’d like to spend less than 20 hours of our own time improving this business.

Let’s take a look at traffic.  What’s your monthly hit count (the number of times somebody looks at a page on your website)?

Virtually zero.

My next question would normally be: what’s your conversion rate (the percentage of people who use your product)?  In this case, you don’t have enough hits to have a meaningful number.  For those widgets that are in place, how many hits to Amazon are they producing every day?

About two.
 

Assessment:

Money is produced in this business whenever a widget user goes to Amazon via the widget and purchases something.

The more widgets in use, the more trips to Amazon.  The widgets have been in the iGoogle directory for several months now and it doesn’t appear that many more users are adding the widget to their iGoogle Personalized Page.

Therefore, our goal is to get more people to add the widgets.  In order to do that, we’ll need to find people and let them know the value of the widgets.

Since the budget is low in terms of time and money, I think the simplest approach would be to set up some meaningful content on the bluebarb website.  A good start would be content that explained useful web tools and included a description of how valuable bluebarb widgets are and how to set them up.

The content will get indexed by Google and hopefully that will bring in some traffic.

Use your twenty hours of web development time to set up a WordPress blog for the website instead of the Dreamweaver site that is set up now.  Set up an author login and use the investment cash to pay for articles and instructions.  Because it’s in WordPress, the author can type the articles directly into the website.

With the one hour each month, gather and review the following statistics:

• website hit count for the month
• number of widgets in use
• number of times users went to Amazon
• number of times users purchased something at Amazon
• income

Track these numbers over three months and let’s do another assessment at that time!