The Profitmart Experiment

It’s been a long month and it’s finally over. This has been a great experience for me but I have limited time to work on internet marketing and this has been sucking up most of it this month. I have a slew of projects that I’m itching to move forward with.

What did we learn this month?

Is it possible to make non-membership affiliate income with Profitmart?

My campaign was not successful in turning a profit. However I did learn a ton and hopefully you did as well. I tried a lot of things that I hadn’t done before. As I’ve stated in past postings, it’s more important to try new stuff and learn from your mistakes then to succeed with every venture. From that perspective this month was very successful.

But where does that leave you, the budding internet entrepeneur, hoping to make some cash with your Profitmart site?

I wouldn’t count on making affiliate income through ebay, amazon and clickbank. Not that I don’t think it’s possible but you would need the stars to line up perfectly for it to happen. It certainly isn’t going to happen out of the box as they would lead you to believe. If there is anyone out there who has been successful with this please let me know and I will bow down to your marketing abilities.

Can you make money promoting Profitmart memberships?

Absolutely yes. I’m certain this is where members are making some money with Profitmart (myself included). Don’t expect to make thousands of dollars a month though. I would suspect that a few hundred dollars a month is about the ceiling for this opportunity and that’s with a lot of promotion. If Ron and Rick start putting some energy into the site that might improve or at least stabilize.

Is it ethical to promote a turnkey website where your best hope of making money is from selling memberships to other people? That’s the part I’m not so sure about. I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong as long as you do not misrepresent the opportunity as making excessive turnkey affiliate income from clickbank, amazon and ebay.

Is Profitmart worth the monthly fee?

That’s a good question. What do you get for $20 - $50 a month? Let’s review.

Upside:

• The opportunity to sell hosting for Profitmart sites (the website is free with the hosting)
• Residual income for as long as your sponsored members stick around.
• A turnkey website that is easy to monitize with clickbank, ebay and amazon.
• A very easy entry point for people who want to get their feet wet in internet marketing.
• Some great support and encouragement from an active community in the forum.
• The cPanel interface is one of the best around. I would love to find another hosting provider with the same interface.
• A very good ebook that covers the basics of internet marketing.
• Some excellent tutorials that show you how to use the site.
• A few PLR products that you can resell.
• If you manage to get two people to sign up your monthly fee will be paid for. (for as long as they remain members)
• The affiliate powerbar is pretty good. I especially like the feeds from the forums.
• If you make some money they pay on the first of the month. For comparison Amazon takes several months.

Downside:

• Spotty support from the management.
• Sub-standard graphics (compared to many free and paid alternatives).
• Rare upgrades. I haven’t seen a new tutorial, admin panel or graphic upgrade since I’ve been a member. They did give a facelift to the forum recently.
• Lot’s of things that get started and abandoned. ie: site of the week, podcasts, blog.
• A very cryptic affiliate income screen. There is a tutorial that helps with this.
• A high cancellation rate. I lost 30% of my signups last month and I know a lot of other members did as well (source: forum). It is not within my power to reduce this number (and believe me I’ve been trying!).

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Dear Ron and Rick,

You have done some great work getting Profitmart to this point. With a certain amount of success it is easy to get complacent and let things slide. I think it’s time for you to re-evaluate your business plan and take this service to the next level.Here are some suggestions that would help make Profitmart the excellent site that it could be:

• Update the FAQ to cover questions that come up in the forum. Point people to the FAQ when you see common questions coming up. I didn’t even know it existed until recently. I had also totally forgotten about the other FAQ at http://support.joepro.com/activekb.
• Answer every single support related post in the forums. I understand that there are tutorials, a FAQ, videos, live support (sometimes) and a decent ebook. However, you are missing the fact that the impression of a lack of support is very real. This is enough to make people doubt and leave. If you reply to the post with a link to the resource that answers the question it will show that you exist and are listening. It should take you all of 30 seconds. If it’s a tougher question please don’t ignore it, acknowledge it and follow up with an satisfying answer. Hiding in the shadows and popping out on occasion isn’t working. There are less than 10 posts a day in the forum.
• Don’t rely on your members to provide primary support for you. It’s not their job.
• Add the ability to set keywords for an affiliate feed separately from the link name. This would allow people to target a specific niche. Currently the broad categories almost always come up with unrelated results.
• Add the ability to edit the html in the left and right side panels. Better yet, provide a selection of backgrounds for people to use as well.
• Add the ability to easily change the look of a Profitmart site. Provide some themes that actually look different and attractive. This will require you to hire a programmer and a web designer but will be well worth the cost. Provide a selection of header graphics while you’re at it. I saw a recent post between Ron and Dave from Profitmarthelp.com about creating new templates. Great idea, please follow up on it.
• Upgrade the Rich Text editor. There are much better ones around. In particular, the editor should have the ability to use <b> and header tags. This one doesn’t and that is not good SEO.
• Regularly add PLR products for the members. Don’t send out emails saying you have 9 PLR products when there are only 4.
• Write in your blog more often and create some new podcasts. Both of those were good ideas that were abandoned.
• When you start something like “site of the week” stick to it. It only takes you 10 minutes a week to update. Letting it slide is a reflection on your committment to customer service.
• Getting other members to critique your site is not a “professional site critique”. Please reword this or be prepared to follow up on it.
• Don’t include passwords in every single email you send out. Email is unsecure. Provide a way to retrieve passwords instead.
• Add the ability for members to contact people who have signed up under them. This will empower them to offer bonuses for signing up and give them some control over member retention.

Most importantly, recognize that your members are building YOUR business for YOU. Not the other way around. You benefit from every single membership that someone sells. If you don’t have the time yourself to properly support the site then please hire someone to do it. I’m not talking about some post in the forum looking for help. Hire someone who is qualified and on your payroll.

Remember the first rule of building your business: “it’s easier to maintain an existing customer than to get a new one“. Customer satisfaction is the best way to make this business explode. Why do half the job when you’re so close to doing it right?

There are 1306 profitmart sites listed in the affiliate panel. If one quarter of those are advanced members you are grossing almost $15,000 a month from Profitmart. Once you take out expenses it’s not a huge salary for each of you but I’m sure you have other ventures going as well. Rick posted recently that he works 16 hours a day. How many of those hours are spent on Profitmart I wonder? If you take a portion of that time and income every month and put it back into improving Profitmart your members will thank you for it.

They might even stick around longer.

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That’s it for the Profitmart Experiment blog. I sincerely hope that it’s been helpful and inspired some of you to try something different.If you like what you’ve seen here and would like to read more I have started a new blog at http://www.profitmuse.com/blog. You can also sign up for my no BS newsletter at www.profitmuse.com.Hope to see you there.Regards,mike
www.profitmuse.com
:8^)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under profitmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.