On the brink of cutting a business deal!!

Oh yeah!!

I'm sure many of you will know about my website www.nottinghamstudent.co.uk. I started this website about 10 months ago and it has really taken off!! It's gone from a small information site for students to a bucket of opportunity.

It gets 150-200 visitors a day but has become a bit of an institution for nottingham students.

I had to take it further:

The first step was to sell advertising to small business in the area. I am a good salesperson and pretty much sold a few hundred quids worth before it was even built!! I now charge £50 per three months for ads on internal pages and £150 for three months on the homepage. Not bad cash for a student!

The next development was to start selling tickets for a large nightclub. I sold 160 tickets last week. This added nicely to the weekly revenue (£3 a ticket).

Today was the biggest business meeting of my life. I enlisted another student to become my partner - he has lots of contacts. He got a meeting with the manger of a large nightclub in town.

The meeting went really well today, hopefully we are going to start promoting a tuesday night at the nightclub. We get the ticket cash and he gets the drinks cash. Its not confirmed yet - we'll hopefully get the contract signed this week.

We have to get 500 people through the doors each week. I have to admit I'm pretty daunted!! He had 4 large promotion companies in before us - but he liked what we had to say.

The moral is: use your website to diversify! I'm a 21 year old student, but I've got a good head for business. My website is looking to turn over 15K this year. Hopefully my new nightclub promotion business will turnover nearer 50K

Not bad stuff!

Wish me luck - if we don't get 500 people through the door we're gonna lose a lot of money!!!

Look past adsense and really start to utilise your site. I see so many people talk about:

crap amazon payments (i did myself recently ). Why not get down to your local book store and cut a deal with them.

If you are an affiliate, why not arrange a business meeting with the person who actually sells the product. You're sure to get a better cut this way.

Take your business further!

Good luck all
Notting

 

That's a really good post and example of how the internet/your website can be used. Local businesses know how expensive it is to advertise just in the local press, anything you can bring to their table will usually get their attention.

Congrats on the deal, hope you get those numbers.

 

Best of luck for your deal. Nice earnings for a 21 year old student.

 

Damn good post mate, there is life after Adsense.

 

Nice one!
I don't use adsense either.

Do you advertise offline? Perhaps you'll have your web address printed on all the tickets or in the actual events themselves? Do you use any posters around campus, or perhaps sponsor university based events? You're lucky to have an easily targetted market, makes it a lot cheaper to advertise as I'm guessing you don't have any backlinks or adwords setup.

Also, weird splash page idea, I don't like it personally, but I can see why it might work.

 

nice, i am going to sell ads space to plastic surgeon and create a directory for them too. Just wait for my keyword to be top ten in google.

however i am a bad sales person since i don't talk much....i might need a partner on this...

 

How do I start selling snow to Eskimo's? I could make millions if I knew that secret. Well done Notting. Great to see some positive stuff here!

 

Hey, glad to hear your great ideas and it does help if you can sell to ppl....

 

very inspirational, great thinking out of the box and leveraging your contact list. All too often we get lulled into thinking this is an online business but in reality, it's still all about people.

 

I wish I could make so much money with so few per/day users

Congrats! Well done

 

I have done a lot of offline advertising. Firstly I had 10,000 flyers advertising my website printed (though admittly some are still in the basement - it got the word out fast). When youre new to a region, you want to know taxi numbers etc. If you get a website handed to you the first thing you'll do is go to it. Most hits are still from type ins.

The nightclub I started selling tickets for put my webaddress on all of their promo material some time ago.

I have put up lots of posters, especially when I started selling nightclub tickets online. Repetition is my mantra for marketing.

That means 10,000 flyers with my website go out *every week*

Yes it is very easy to segment my market, and easy to target. My website ws the first student website for nottingham (which is why it has succeeded). There is a lot of competition for nights out though as there are a lot of nightclubs in nottingham and a lot of promoters. Having the website has given me the edge in that respect.

Never user adwords for this site. - has lots of content and backlinks though.

Back in the day that was a filthy page! I have changed my ways but kept the page.

 

A few months ago a friend and I did this same thing. We signed a contract with a local night club/bar. We were supposed to do the "thursday" nights. We would earn whatever door fee was and a small % of the bar. The only downfall was that we had a gaurantee of 2500$ for every thursday. That means we had to rake in 2500$ each time or pay the difference.

Beniffets:
-You are "in-charge".
-Bar Tab (usually to get drinks for other people ex: girls, connections, etc...)
-Drink deals for yourself. (I was getting any drink for 1$)
-Great way to get your reputation out there.

DownFalls:
-Must meet gaurantee or pay the difference.
-Take all responsibility for anything that happends. (Fights, underage drinkers, etc...)
-Must sign contract for certain amount of weeks. You cant just do it once to see if it will work. We signed a 4 week contract with a 2500$ gaurantee.

In our scenerio, we started a myspace website and did the street promotions. We made way over the gaurantee the first time and made a few hundred $$$'s. Everyone was happy and motivated for the next week. As the weeks went on less people started showing up. I personally think it was because of the 80's music my partner was dedicated to play. We had to pay for the D.J.,promotion girls, etc... Eventually after the 4th week we broke even and decided not to do it anymore. Was too much stress. I did however meet alot of people and now know alot of club owners and managers. Also remember to go to other club industry nights. This is where you meet alot of people that can help you and give you advice.

Just be carefull when you sign the contract. Make sure the club doesnt throw in some extra tiny words...

Good Luck and let us all know how it goes. If you have any questions pm me.

 

Also, just to let you know. When you are writing out the contract make sure you add in there that "after a certain amount of times that you do this you are subject to re-discuss the contract." This way if you are bringing in way to many people, you are subject to a bigger % or you can go to a new venue. Make sure you leave that loop open for yourself in the contract.

 

So you're pimping it up with the Nottingham ladies? I'd imagine you could abuse your webmaster power a lot with VIP everywhere, hehe.

I don't like the design of the webpage, it has that 'flash template' feel, but you're not doing too badly with the advertising on the right hand column and I guess that your average user isn't aware of flash templates in the same way.

Have you ever thought about expanding (creating new sites) for other universities? I would've thought that this 'local university spirited website' would have been taken already in most areas, but I have no idea If your site proves its worth with the ticket selling, you might want to think about a redesign with a more directory feel and one that can be easily replicated for other university sites. All just my opinion though

 

It is definately something i have considered. There is a lot you can do with a student website.

However i feel that the nightclub promotion is a more profitable direction to take at the moment.

Obviously I am still a student as well, and going into my third their is a lot of hard work ahead. I have to devote a large portion of my time to that. These ventures are to differentiate myself from the thousands of other students. £££ speaks louder than anything else in business.

Notting