Lee Gomes writes for the "Portals" column, which runs in the "Marketplace" section of the Wall Street Journal®. Read his article, "PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait for a Huge Success" if you can. The article was published in the Wednesday, May 23, 2007 issue of The Journal.
This "PlentyOfFish" story is the kind of tale that we all want to hear. Markus Frind, a 28 year old online marketer located where he wants to be, in Vancouver, British Columbia, is making lots of dough online and all by himself. His site, PlentyOfFishruns just about all by itself. His staff amounts to one individual, himself. How much revenue? According to Gomes, "the site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year."
Gomes looks further and notes more of what I want to hear: "How does he do it? In large part, by keeping things simple." Music to my ears. Check out Best Plain Web Pages for a look at how I see simplicity working for successful online sites.
So I went and visited the site myself and noted a couple of things: 1) Mr. Frind makes good use of CSS: The simple ad list that takes up most of every page is controlled by CSS and table tags (which do not want to go away) 2) Mr. Frind uses scripts when he needs to: for example to quickly capture page view information via Javascript (AJAX) and .asp for membership and 3) Page addresses are simple URLS without funny characters.
On the marketing side, his objective is clearly the best monetization that he can get from his site. The theme is very popular, dating, with a very, very large market. The revenue generator is advertising. The strategy is twofold: 1) as Mr. Gomes notes, "via Google's small text ads," and through 'affiliate marketing.'
The last bit, affiliate marketing, is of interest to me as I recently dipped my toe into the water of an online marketing approach, StomperNet that preaches affiliate marketing all day. I have mixed feelings about affiliate marketing; however, if you want to make money online, it would seem from Mr. Frind's achievement that the combination of a big, popular and pressing market (theme), together with affiliate marketing will make for lots of money.
Go get 'em
©Mike Blonder, 2007, All Rights Reserved. No Reprint Without Prior Approval