Low-Cost Resources Developed Sales at Cameraman’s Web Site

Richard Haberkern is an engineer and cameraman in the sports broadcasting and filmmaking industries. About three years ago, the 33-year-old Philadelphia native saw a market emerging for affordable, high-quality accessories for hobbyist filmmakers. He dreamed of designing and selling his own product line, but it wasn’t until the dot-com bust of last year that he found ways to market and distribute his products without a huge capital outlay. He shared tips for taking advantage of free and low-cost Web products and services with freelance writer Karen E. Klein.

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As an experienced cinematographer and engineer in the motion picture industry, I was aware of the recent increase in the popularity of digital video equipment. With the huge success of the Internet, I knew these two markets could be combined, but until recently, anyone with a product idea had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in product development and advertising. What I’ve discovered over the last year is that there is a wealth of free and reduced-price services, left over in the wake of the dot-com bust, that are available to anyone with a small business.

I needed a way to reach the millions of people who wanted to become filmmakers or were just looking to shoot better home videos. This is a huge market, and I knew the Internet was the perfect place to find tech-savvy video enthusiasts who wanted accessories for their video cameras. So I started with a Web site.

It needed to be designed in a way that would lead customers to pull out their credit cards. For less than $2,000, we got a Web site from a company specializing in small e-commerce sites--https://www.precisewebdesign.com. We emphasized good pictures and written text, a pleasing design and secure ordering. The site started generating sales the first week it was launched.

Next, we needed to find a way to interest customers. The fastest way to get started was by listing our products on EBay.com at discounted prices. At a listing fee of about $2 per item, we auctioned our products with a reserve price 20% lower than our regular selling price. EBay allows sellers to set the minimum reserve price that they are willing to accept for each item. Using EBay enabled us to gain insight into our market and helped set the prices for our products based on what people were bidding. We also discovered that good pictures and detailed product descriptions are the key to successful selling on EBay and the Internet in general.

Since this business operates solely online, I knew that advertising and directing traffic to our Web site would be very important. People commonly believe that if you have a Web site, customers will find you, but most Web sites get fewer than 25 visitors a day. Habbycam.com needed a lot more traffic than that.

I quickly found that there are many free services and software packages available on the Web, and thousands of sites competing for your ads. All the ones I contacted claimed they could help generate huge sales on our site, in exchange for payments of hundreds to thousands of dollars per month. Because I inquired about their ads, many of these sites began to place free banners and even editorials on their sites about us, in the hope that we would eventually become paying advertisers.

Some of the more successful of these free listings sent as many as 1,000 visitors and even more in revenue in one day to our site, but we found that the traffic would fall off after only a few days, since these sites had the same visitors showing up every day. Once their readers had seen our editorials and advertisements, traffic dropped.

The sites never generated anything near the revenue they promised. I learned not to waste money on banner ads because none of them worked. With a response rate of about two people to 1,000 banners displayed, they are hardly worth the money or time involved in placing them.

Early on, traffic to our site was sporadic. We’d have 1,000 visitors one day and 50 the next. We needed a way to get steady traffic, every day. I looked at other sites and noted their traffic, using a free software package from https://www.goodkeywords.com. That software enabled me to look at my competition and measure the popularity of their sites.

Once I got a feel for their site traffic, I was able to make very good estimates of their number of visitors per day, and I set a goal for us based on that. The number I set was much smaller than what I had expected, but I found that a Web site can become profitable with less than 100 qualified visitors per day.

After three months, our site’s popularity was double that of sites that had been around for more than three years. I knew that to get noticed more, I needed to learn about search engine positioning. Sites such as Yahoo, Google and MSN direct the most traffic to Web sites, and they account for 60% of all the traffic to Habbycam.com. Although we hired a professional search engine submission service for $10,000, anyone can get started for much less. Using free sites such as https://www.goodkeywords.com and https://www.keywordcount.com, you pick the all-important keywords for good search engine positioning. Once you achieve some top positions, keeping them can become a full-time job. I spent six months, 14 hours a day, watching my search engine positioning--and the traffic to our site--grow.

As our site traffic increased, so did our popularity. Soon, people began to list our site as a link on their Web pages. As the number of links to our site increased, so did our search engine positions.

In the last few months, we have expanded our advertising to include print ads. We got free advertising in magazines by using search engines to find hobbyist magazine Web sites and then submitting press releases via e-mail. We were amazed at the number of large magazines that mentioned Habbycam.com as a result, and these free editorial mentions have been worth thousands in revenue. Finding the magazines was time-consuming but well worth the effort because if readers take the time to go to our Web site, we find, they will more than likely purchase something.

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At a Glance

Company: Habbycam.com

Owners: Richard and Andreana Haberkern

Nature of business: Designs and sells accessories for digital video enthusiasts

Location: North Hollywood

Founded: September 2000

E-mail: Info@habbycam.com

Web site: www.habbycam.com

Employees: 2

Annual revenue: $200,000

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If your business can provide a lesson to other entrepreneurs, contact Karen E. Klein at the Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016 or at kklein6349@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number.