Help Please

[SilverTwist]

My 2 questions are:

1) I need £500 for marketing costs - Any ideas

2) I need a bank account to accept cheques to my business name (No overdraft etc)

Before answering please read my situation.

I own an online adult store called SilverTwist. The site is clean and is mainly targeted towards the female market segment however many companies stay well clear due to the adult nature - it was difficult enought finding a card processor.

I am currently taking my A levels and have no full time income or house to secure a loan.

My business needs £500 to cover inital search engine marketing costs. The SEO company, JTSEC believe they can get top ten google rankings within 6 to 8 months which will generate approximately 50000 to 250,000 hits to my website a month.

This taffic will be highly targeted and I believe that a 2% conversion rate (industry average) will be seen creating between 1000 and 5000 orders a month.

To many £500 is not alot of money however for me it is. I truely believe in JTSEC to carry on the search engine optimisation and that sales will poor in within 6 to 8 months.

Any ideas

Thanks

pete

 

[Kent Accountant]

Have you made any sales yet?

How are you funding your stock purchases?

If you get hits on your site and orders, how will you fulfil those orders?

£500 seems low capital if you have purchasing power for your stock lines

Bob

 

[SilverTwist]

Currently using a number of dropshippers. It is our intention to purchase our own stock and warehouse within 24 months.

We have made about 5 sales at the current moment in time, all orders have been fulfilled without any problems

 

[JamesUK]

so how long have you been operating to gain those 5 sales?

 

[SilverTwist]

The site has been up since the end of April.

However those sales were generated from only 250 visitors to the site which is a 2% conversion of visitors into sales which is the adult toy industry average.

These 250 visitors were generated from PPC advertising as a test to see how visitors would use the site and to see if there were any problems relating to sales etc.

I am now happy with this marketing test and this is why we are looking for £500 to source a search engine optimisation campaign to bring large amounts of targeted traffic to the site.

 

[Alpha]

If this company JTSEC are extremely confident in their own ability to get you the traffic that you require and you have demonstrated the conversion rates then I would ask them to consider deferred payments on their work (especially if it takes 6 - 8 months for the results to feed through.) To get them to consider this you might have to offer them a premium over the £500 say 20% but if they are as good as they make themselves out to be I would think that this would not be a problem. You would then be able to pay this from the cashflows of your site.

If they are not willing to entertain this idea then possibly try a few other SEO's (there are a number on the forums).

Finally you would probably be back to the notion of borrowing the money from family members or getting a small personal loan guranteed by parents.

It really depends on how confident you are in your product and your ability to deliver:smile:

 

[SillyJokes]

I would imagine a first page listing for the adult toy market will cost you considerably more than £500. If it is worth 50,000 + visitors a month then even at 10p a click for PPC that is £5000 a month (it will be many times more than this however for PPC on sex toys, a lucrative market)

With respect your site is not as good as many of your competitors like lovehoney, natural instinct and Anne Summers.

250 visitors is nowhere near enough to judge your conversion rate on. 2% is a optimistic goal, not a reality. You should make your calculations on a much lower conversion and anything on top of that is a bonus. Getting this conversion gfigure wrong will cost you dear. Instead of doing 1000 sales a month on 50,000 visitors costing £5000-15,000 you may only do 500, or even less. Ouch. Watch that pay per click like a hawk.

Mind you, I do understand there is a lot of money to be made from this stuff and it has a good margin. Good luck with it, you have made a fantastic start, but consider thinking about other niches as this may already be too fully covered for you to muscle in on at this stage.

 

[SilverTwist]

The Keywords we are targeting are relatively niche. We do not intend to target keywords such as "sex toys" and "vibrators" however more 2 and 3 word key phrases.

JTSEC specialize in adult SEO and rank 1st for the keywords "Adult SEO" without going into much detail they offer a pay for performance - up to about 100$ a month once the keywords are ranked within the top five of major search engines. The £500 is a set up fee for this.


Although our site may not be designed as well as LoveHoney etc we offer the same service and policy. We are currently introducing our price promise. We are also undergoing a pricing change to lower our prices to match or beat all other online retailers.

Any more Help/comments is much appreciated

 

[SillyJokes]

As for getting £500 - when we needed about this amount for stock starting out we got some home piece work stuffing envelopes. Mind numbing, but we got the money together and it was the beginning of a successful business.

I appreciate you have school, but £500 can be earned in a lot of ligitamate ways, particularly when you don't have any bills to pay(!) (I did temp factory work in the evenings when I was re-sitting my A levels and when my Universtiy grant didn't come through and I had nothing to live on in my final year I got a job packing continental breakfasts for the hotels around Heathrow).

your A levels will shortly be over - concentrate on them (this business could go t!ts up - there will be another business, but A levels need to be done now) and then get yourself a job down Waitrose and get that £500 in no time.

 

[SilverTwist]

To true I guess.

As long as i dont want an overdraft or loan should it be possible to get a business account?

 

[iresearch]

To true I guess.

As long as i dont want an overdraft or loan should it be possible to get a business account?

I don't know the answer, but if it is and you do, check out my post, as I need people who are opening a business account for a market research project. You just need to keep a record of how long things take and as a sole trader with no lending you would receive £50!

 

[SillyJokes]

To true I guess.

As long as i dont want an overdraft or loan should it be possible to get a business account?

Have you actually asked the banks yet? If not, I'm sure they will be able to answer this one far better than we could. You sound like you are probably 18, why couldn't you have a business bank account?

One thing - you might want your trading name/bank account to be called something fairly innocuous so you can tell potential customers that only something like ST Trading will appear on their bill. This protects their privacy.

 

[Tin]

£500 is really cheap for seo given your market. Have you checked that the 'search volume' is actually 'there' for your keywords? By not going for the heavyweight end of keywords you may well find you've very low visitor numbers per month and your £500 may take some time to pay for itself.
Also, 'Adult SEO' is not an especially competitive keyphrase so although your seo company are #1 for the phrase have you actually asked them for proof of performance on other Adult sites they've worked on and checked the results for yourself?

My apologies, I came in on this thread late and picked up on the SEO side of things but I hope my post doesn't take the nature of things away from your original point which was sourcing your finance. :smile:

 

[SilverTwist]

Using overture keywords we have come up with our first ten words to target that accoring to overture were searched for 50,000 times. We have been told that we could see this number mulitplied by google rankings.

The comapny are ranked for alot of keywords, 4th and 5th on google out of 64 million for the term adult site marketing so am confident of there ability. They have also testimonials from other sites which i am currently trying to verify from said sites.

 

[SillyJokes]

Long term this is an area it would pay you to learn about yourself.

 

[bobc]

I also hired JTSec for SEO help in June. After some initial emails which seemed promising, I have not heard from them. No one answers my phone calls or my emails.
I am in the process of mailing a registered letter and if I still do not hear from them I will have to file some legal action. Did your project with them ever get done?
Since we are talking about the same time frame, I would think not.
Thanks.