Category — #02 RAMPrint.com

Thank you for stopping by! As you can see, this is an exciting page. My goal is to start 52 businesses in the next year! Yes, these will be generally simplistic self-maintaining and hopefully self-evolving websites; but that's just the point! As with most businesses, some will "fail" and most will only make a bit, but some will hit; and that gamble is what wakes some of us up in the morning.

You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

One of my friends owns a pet shop.  I offered to find a way to partner with him on a website, and this was a neat opportunity.  I created SafariPetShop.com.  At first I created safaripetSTORE.com, forgetting to check google trends, which yelled that “Pet Shop” is way more popular than “Pet Store.”  I know, if you drill it down to the US, the leap isn’t so great; but it justifies buying both domains and redirecting one.  This business really is exciting for many reasons.  First off, I have a partner.  We haven’t formalized an equation yet, but basically I pitched the following simple formula: I get 1) 100% of the profit from 2) the first visit of 3) any walk-in traffic who comes from the site; PLUS 100% of the profit directly from the site itself.  So it requires no investment on his part, it just gives me a piece of the value I create and nothing else.  So if nothing ever happens, no one is out anything, and if someone comes in to buy a dog, I get $100-ish, and John gets all the dog food and supplies revenue ad infinitum.  Yes, this measurement is both subjective and requires that I trust him to know where his foot traffic comes from and to hunt me down and pay me; which is why it may not be extensively duplicable.  But I trust him. 

Really, designing any business a website in exchange for our owning the website seems really win/win, and itself a business.  The site is another Wordpress install, this time with a plugin called GetWIKI that will scrape open-sourced articles about pets into categories, and an aStore syndicating a catalog of pet related products.  So the next exciting part of this business: it has a storefront!  I used an Amazon aStore, and you have to click onto the site to see it.  It’s not elegant and I didn’t take the time to embed it correctly–it’s just there, but I eyeball matched the colors, and it has hundreds of products.  So if someone finds my site and buys a $5 bottle of shampoo, I get $0.25.  Probably John’s wife will keep the site updated, with new articles, new products to the aStore, etc. 

So there are two forms of revenue driving this site, an auto-evolving eCommerce store, a partnership with a walk-in store, a simple and non-Colin-centric content base on the website–it should go beautifully and definitely evolves my formula–I mean, I at this point assume every website I do from now on will involve an aStore or something similar.

I also spent some time valuating RAMPrint this week for multiple buyers (not just for the website, but for the parent company), which is the real reason I put up PrintShopForSale.net.

Okay, I just posted business #12, and it dawned on me that I am therefore 23% of the way through my Business A Week year!  Yes, I may do it more than 52 weeks, but don’t tell my wife that.  In the meantime, let me update you on where each business is at…

1. Business a Week - 304 visitors making 841 visits, roughly 100% growth this month, 16 site pages on google, 99 total mentions on google, top keyword: enfp.  It’s been a blast, and there are sufficient ads along the side to monetize on its own.
2. RAMPrint.com - I don’t have access to these stats, but I know we have 59 site pages on google, 159 total mentions on google.  People mention it.
3. OfficeSpares - 38 visitors making 39 visits, roughly 100% growth this month, 2 site pages on google, 337 total mentions on google, top keyword: spares.  No mention from anyone, we’ll see how this goes.  I got one email of someone suggesting a place that might have a spare phone system, but they didn’t. 
4. F00Music.com - 113 visitors making 460 visits, roughly 200% growth this month, 4 site pages on google, 28 total mentions on google, top keyword: foomusic.  Starting to get traffic, need to organize the monetization.
5. ENFP Consulting - 39 visitors making 40 visits, roughly 500% growth this month, 1 site pages on google, 7 total mentions on google, top keyword: enfp.  Most of the hits are from mid-life crisis ENFPs, but I have billed about $1000 via ENFP Consulting.
6. The Invitations Expert - 196 visitors making 447 visits, roughly 350% growth this month, 14 site pages on google, 42 total mentions on google, top keyword: wedding.  One of my favorites, and so little traffic relative to its potential.  I guess I need to make the salespitch a bit more overt, and I need to post more.  It is amazing that the highest traffic demographics come from LDS people…
7. ScriptureForum.net - 259 visitors making 372 visits, roughly 150% growth this month, 141 site pages on google, 136 total mentions on google, top keyword: site.  This will take off as soon as I get a few people.  Just a few to volunteer some labor building out the scripture sections, then it’ll go crazy.   It’s too obvious not to.  Anyone, of any religion, looking for a church oriented way to volunteer and build the kingdom from your living room?
8. QD Web Design - 17 visitors making 20 visits, roughly 100% growth per month, 4 site pages on google, 3 total mentions on google.  I’m not sure which of my requests have directly come from this site–probably none, but we’ll see.
9. FilmClean - 41 visitors making 45 visits, roughly 300% growth per month, 2 site pages on google, 4 total mentions on google.  Easy, duplicable, we’ll see.
10. Karate Consulting - 20 visitors making 32 visits, 1 site pages on google, 2 total mentions on google, top keyword: karate.  Again, good energy but too new.
11. Fortibus Es - 44 visitors making 87 visits, 10 site pages on google, 14 total mentions on google, top keyword: es.  One IM, we’ll see if it goes through.
12. The Union Statesman - new as of today! 

I still need to

• create a skeleton… this is all too much based on my ideas, and not a duplicable and perhaps eventually automatable formula
• create forms for said skeleton
• create channels in google adsense
• fill out some of these sites–scriptureforum needs a lot before it’s truly professional
• just put more time into them.  These have been wonderfully successful for having not spent more than 6 hours on any of these businesses, but I’d really like to expedite the enlargement of my efforts…
• find partners
• find volunteers
• find sponsors / donors / investors

Ideas anyone?

This week I installed a joomla website for RAM Print & Communications at RAMPrint.com.  I don’t mean to further obfuscate my codification of “business,” but RAMPrint.com exists as a profit center, its profit benefits me, and is both self-maintaining and self-evolving.  The website itself is built on the CMS (content management system) called ”joomla” and uses the “redonwhite” template.  The color scheme and branding were the constraint of the corresponding brick-and-mortar business.  Overall, I think the site looks well visually and owing to the solid skeleton will be both dynamic and search engine friendly.