New biz (poker video site). Want feedback.

[Kjell201]

Me and my partner just opened a poker video site at http://www.donkit.com and we're interested in as much feedback as possible. Being a forum with both poker players and business savvy people this should be the optimal place to get feedback [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

The idea:
Poker videos seem to be a good way to learn poker these days. Most regular players might have a few books but videos of a professional player actually playing and explaining the concepts during the game can add a new level to teaching poker. And some videos can even explain concepts that haven't been publish in poker books yet.

There are already some sites offering videos, and atleast two of them are, from what I understand, pretty successful. We still feel that the market for videos is far from saturated and that it's possible for a new site to get a piece of that market.

Marketing/Branding:
Our idea is to differentiate our site from other similar sites by not having it as a subscription based site.
So if someone wants to try out just one video or so, they don't have to pay any initial startup cost and then monthly payments, they can just buy one video. I think subscriptions can be a good idea sometimes but having payments per product instead allows people an easier way to try just one product while also making it possible for us to earn more from the customers who want a lot of videos.
We also want to focus on having good video quality and still keep the filesizes low. Customers will be able to download the videos, watch them anytime they wish, even without access to the internet. They can even watch them on their Ipod.
We're also trying to brand ourselves by having a name that's easy to remember, a good looking site, etc.

Payments:
So far we're using PayPal and Google Checkout as payment options. PayPal can be used both by PayPal users and non-PayPal users (using credit card). Google Checkout so far only allows US credit cards.
The good thing about both of these options is that they're easy for the merchant to set up and have pretty low processing fees. If customers want a more integrated payment option we'll have to look into getting a "real" merchant bank account and adding a payment processor to that.

Layout:
We think we have a pretty good layout for the site. It's tested on most browsers (IE, FF, Opera, Safari) and should work fine on every one of them. We also got help designing the donkey character used in images, etc, and we think that's a good addition to the whole branding thing.

Authors:
So far, most of the guys creating the videos are 2+2ers that I've contacted on this forum and asked to participate. We have a contact form on the site for new potential authors to use if they want to try making videos for us. Obviously we'll look through all "applications" and only choose good authors that can create valuable videos. Some of the authors we have on now are among the most respected posters on 2+2 (curtains, Newt_buggs, cero_z and ggbman) and we hope to get more and equally good authors on in the near future.

Affiliates:
We'll use affiliates to try and get as much ads on blogs, etc. They'll get a good deal to make it profitable and a good idea for them to have our ad on they blog/website. That way we'll get some good marketing without having to pay in advance which is obviously a good thing if you're working with limited funds.

I think that's pretty much it and I'm now interested in as much feedback as possible. Some questions:

1) How much in sales/month do you think is possible for a good poker video site selling videos at about $10 a video? (best guesstimate).

2) Opinions on layout. Anything that needs improvement?

3) How do you think the current legislation affects the launch of a site like this? It's obviously a bad thing, but how bad?

4) What do you think of pay per product vs subscriptions and what's your opinion on downloadable video vs streaming video?

5) Anything else?

[dc_publius]

The site looks good, but you should reword some of the bios. Also, when I click on categories, nothing happens (I'm using Opera). Lastly, you definately need to have a sample video or two. (one cash/one SNG) It's hard to buy a video without knowing exactly what quality of video and instruction to expect.

I wouldn't worry about current legal environment just yet. Once you start making money, you can start to worry. Right now, you have nothing to lose and there are bigger fish that can worry about it first. `

Subscription model is easier and better. You acquire a customer and you get repeat sales. When you make it easy for people to just buy one occasional item, people will buy one occasional item. You will need to constantly promote individual videos and stay very fresh.

One idea you might consider is to offer the first video for $1 or very cheap price. You can build your promotional mailing list this way, and promote via your targeted mailing list. For example, every wed/thursday (before massive weekend play) you could email your list the latest and greatest videos they might be interested in...

[Kjell201]

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The site looks good, but you should reword some of the bios. Also, when I click on categories, nothing happens (I'm using Opera). Lastly, you definately need to have a sample video or two. (one cash/one SNG) It's hard to buy a video without knowing exactly what quality of video and instruction to expect.

I wouldn't worry about current legal environment just yet. Once you start making money, you can start to worry. Right now, you have nothing to lose and there are bigger fish that can worry about it first. `

Subscription model is easier and better. You acquire a customer and you get repeat sales. When you make it easy for people to just buy one occasional item, people will buy one occasional item. You will need to constantly promote individual videos and stay very fresh.

One idea you might consider is to offer the first video for $1 or very cheap price. You can build your promotional mailing list this way, and promote via your targeted mailing list. For example, every wed/thursday (before massive weekend play) you could email your list the latest and greatest videos they might be interested in...

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We're definitely going to have a demo video. We just haven't put it up yet. But we will today or tomorrow.

Good thing you mentioned the categories. We just today changed the cart to be more search engine friendly by having the pages named like "donkit.com/category/sit-and-go/" instead of something like "donkit.com/category.php?id=7". We'll fix it asap though.

We're probably sticking to the non-subscription way for now though, but might look into changing it later.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

[abuljooj]

the site looks good. I had a very similar idea but never got around to building the site.

I definately like the pay per video idea (i was planning on doing the same).

I think you should lower the price of the videos for now, maybe $5 or lower to start building a customer base. You can still make a decent amount by linking to affiliates and adsense.

Once you've got at least 20 or so videos up there, you gotta start getting traffic. Do some PayPerClick (ppc) with adwords and overture. there are a lot of fringe keywords that aren't being bid on much. (there are a few hundred people searching for "online poker training" and not a single person bidding on it so u could get it for $0.10 per click)

To have a successful PPC campaign you need to pick at least 20 of them that are under $0.50 a bid for top 3 positions. Those are the only ones that will put you in the sponsored links section.

Submit your site to the open directory. If you don't know much about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) go out and buy SEO for dummies. Get your site on the first page of google for keywords like poker training or poker video. trade links with a few sites and you'll soon be golden with lots of traffic.

hope this helps and that it wasn't all stuff u already knew. Best of luck with the site.

[BradleyT]

[ QUOTE ]

Good thing you mentioned the categories. We just today changed the cart to be more search engine friendly by having the pages named like "donkit.com/category/sit-and-go/" instead of something like "donkit.com/category.php?id=7". We'll fix it asap though.

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You need to change the TITLE tags (use keywords!) for all your pages and add meta descriptions (use english sentences that make sense and have keywords) as well.

[John21]

testimonials, testimonials, testimonials.

[Kjell201]

[ QUOTE ]
the site looks good. I had a very similar idea but never got around to building the site.

I definately like the pay per video idea (i was planning on doing the same).

I think you should lower the price of the videos for now, maybe $5 or lower to start building a customer base. You can still make a decent amount by linking to affiliates and adsense.


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It's hard to figure out the optimal price for a product. I'm sure we wouldn't get twice as many sales by cutting the price in half, but it's possible that in the long term the lower price would catch up due to more customers. We'll have to look into it some more. We won't have AdSense on the site (doesn't look professional on a commerce site IMO), though linking to other poker related sites might be possible later on.
[ QUOTE ]

Once you've got at least 20 or so videos up there, you gotta start getting traffic. Do some PayPerClick (ppc) with adwords and overture. there are a lot of fringe keywords that aren't being bid on much. (there are a few hundred people searching for "online poker training" and not a single person bidding on it so u could get it for $0.10 per click)

To have a successful PPC campaign you need to pick at least 20 of them that are under $0.50 a bid for top 3 positions. Those are the only ones that will put you in the sponsored links section.


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This is already being done (through AdWords)

[ QUOTE ]

Submit your site to the open directory. If you don't know much about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) go out and buy SEO for dummies. Get your site on the first page of google for keywords like poker training or poker video. trade links with a few sites and you'll soon be golden with lots of traffic.

hope this helps and that it wasn't all stuff u already knew. Best of luck with the site.

[/ QUOTE ]
My partner does most of the SEO stuff and has a pretty good understanding of it. It might not be 100% optimized yet but that's basically because of lack of time and because we had to get some custom modifications to the cart-system to be able to make it more SEO friendly. Trading links is something we won't do for two reasons. 1) it looks bad on this type of site. A blog or whatever can trade links but IMO a commerce site should'nt. 2) If I understand correctly, Google already knows about linktrading and has a pretty good way to ignore link trades for page rankings (basically meaning that they don't do you any good anyway these days).

[Kjell201]

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Good thing you mentioned the categories. We just today changed the cart to be more search engine friendly by having the pages named like "donkit.com/category/sit-and-go/" instead of something like "donkit.com/category.php?id=7". We'll fix it asap though.

[/ QUOTE ]

You need to change the TITLE tags (use keywords!) for all your pages and add meta descriptions (use english sentences that make sense and have keywords) as well.

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I'll pass this on to my partner as he's the SEO/coder for the site.
About meta descriptions: If I'm not mistaken they are now only used for the description that shows up on google and doesnt have any impact on search results at all, right? So packing a bunch of keywords etc into the descriptions doesnt do any difference anymore. Correct?

[Kjell201]

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testimonials, testimonials, testimonials.

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Yep, we'll look into getting testimonials on the front page next to the donkit logo.
I'm personally 100% immune to testimonials that come from the sites themselves but I guess there's people who listen to them more than I do.

[BradleyT]

While you may want to ignore 1:1 link trades, you should still try and get as many incoming links to your site as possible.

Here's a possible idea - find 10-20 people with poker blogs and let them view a video for free in exchange for a cut/paste "blog entry" that you provide them. In the blog entry instead of having a link of http://www.donkit.com/ you use link text like Poker Videos or online poker training videos. And make each blog entry slightly different. This gives you incoming links, traffic, and will rank you higher for the terms used in the link text.