Okay, just before settling down to another fun, fun day of analytics, research, HTML/CSS encoding and data feed configuration, I thought I would do a little bit of procrastination and wicked fire posting.
So here goes:
For the last nine months, I have been working with a guy on an investment site that cover the junior oil and gas exploration market. Now, in case you guys haven't been paying attention, because of new tech for shale exploration, the juniors have been smoking hot the last two years. The Economist has a pretty good article on it here: A special report on America's economy: Energetic progress | The Economist
Now, the business model for investment newsletter is sorta like IM in general: They are "blackhats" and "whitehats."
The blackhat guys write up stories on penny stocks and take money under table from the penny stock owners to plug their crap. The blackhat guys burn out pretty quick, maybe lasting four or five years before they get banned from SEC or the Canadian stock exchanges or even busted for fraud.
The whitehat guys can last for decades, a lot of the established newsletter publishers have been in existence since before the internet in 1996. One example is this guys: Welcome to the Golden Jackass, Hat Trick Letter, JimWillieCB, Gold, Stocks
BTW, see how his website looks like it was designed in 2002? That's because it probably was.
Anyhow, the business model for a white hat is a little more complicated. They make money in one of three ways.
1. Portfolio (Trading stocks)
2. Paid subscribers for their stock alerts and investment bulletins.
3. Offers out to their mailing list.
Right now, as we are new (by whitehat standards), the main revenue of the investment newsletter is #1. But in the long run, to survive you need to build up your mailing list and your paid subscriber list. Now, I'll answer the question that is probably in your head right now: If this partner you have is so good at picking stocks, why does he need to go the bother of running an investment news site.
And here is the answer: In order to get your phone calls returned, you need to be a player. That is to say, a private investor simply will not get access to junior company CEOs, private interviews with people in the know, and timely tips on when extremely pertinent bits of information are going to be released to the public. Insider trading? Not really. Unlike the senior markets, when a news item hit the wire, there not really an instantaneous analysis of what the news "means" and how it will affect the stock price. And in those golden few hours before the stock price moves and the info is "public," the guys who really know their stuff make their money.
That just the way the world works, get used to it kiddies.
Okay, so why am I posting this? Well, our list is over a thousand and we have a few hundred paid subscribers. Our refund rate is less than 2 percent and our chargebacks (contested payments). Our demographic is male, college-educated, over 40 (hell over 6o really, if you see our website, you'll notice we have to put everything in really large type).
We are slowly getting traction in the investment community but here for us is the million-dollar question: Can we get traction using mainstream traffic sources?
Has anybody ever done investments newletters? Does anybody have a traffic stream of white male guys over the age of 40? What sort of landing pages work for demographic? How the bleep are these shitty penny newsletter guys paying $5.00 a google click just to send visitors to a web page just to collect an email address (maybe).
I look around in my niche and see a whole bunch of websites designed by some guys in 2002. How do these website promote themselves? They swap mailing lists amongst each other (5K-15K lists are pretty common).
Anyhow, that's the end of the post. Just pinging to see I'm the only guy on Wicked doing this niche, 'cause some days I'm feeling pretty lonely.
Cheers, Benji
P.S. Hey if you do FOREX, and have the sudden urge to PM me, please don't. We don't touch FOREX with a twenty-foot pole wrapped in lead. No FOREX, NO FOREX, NO FOREX <---- Read again
So here goes:
For the last nine months, I have been working with a guy on an investment site that cover the junior oil and gas exploration market. Now, in case you guys haven't been paying attention, because of new tech for shale exploration, the juniors have been smoking hot the last two years. The Economist has a pretty good article on it here: A special report on America's economy: Energetic progress | The Economist
Now, the business model for investment newsletter is sorta like IM in general: They are "blackhats" and "whitehats."
The blackhat guys write up stories on penny stocks and take money under table from the penny stock owners to plug their crap. The blackhat guys burn out pretty quick, maybe lasting four or five years before they get banned from SEC or the Canadian stock exchanges or even busted for fraud.
The whitehat guys can last for decades, a lot of the established newsletter publishers have been in existence since before the internet in 1996. One example is this guys: Welcome to the Golden Jackass, Hat Trick Letter, JimWillieCB, Gold, Stocks
BTW, see how his website looks like it was designed in 2002? That's because it probably was.
Anyhow, the business model for a white hat is a little more complicated. They make money in one of three ways.
1. Portfolio (Trading stocks)
2. Paid subscribers for their stock alerts and investment bulletins.
3. Offers out to their mailing list.
Right now, as we are new (by whitehat standards), the main revenue of the investment newsletter is #1. But in the long run, to survive you need to build up your mailing list and your paid subscriber list. Now, I'll answer the question that is probably in your head right now: If this partner you have is so good at picking stocks, why does he need to go the bother of running an investment news site.
And here is the answer: In order to get your phone calls returned, you need to be a player. That is to say, a private investor simply will not get access to junior company CEOs, private interviews with people in the know, and timely tips on when extremely pertinent bits of information are going to be released to the public. Insider trading? Not really. Unlike the senior markets, when a news item hit the wire, there not really an instantaneous analysis of what the news "means" and how it will affect the stock price. And in those golden few hours before the stock price moves and the info is "public," the guys who really know their stuff make their money.
That just the way the world works, get used to it kiddies.
Okay, so why am I posting this? Well, our list is over a thousand and we have a few hundred paid subscribers. Our refund rate is less than 2 percent and our chargebacks (contested payments). Our demographic is male, college-educated, over 40 (hell over 6o really, if you see our website, you'll notice we have to put everything in really large type).
We are slowly getting traction in the investment community but here for us is the million-dollar question: Can we get traction using mainstream traffic sources?
Has anybody ever done investments newletters? Does anybody have a traffic stream of white male guys over the age of 40? What sort of landing pages work for demographic? How the bleep are these shitty penny newsletter guys paying $5.00 a google click just to send visitors to a web page just to collect an email address (maybe).
I look around in my niche and see a whole bunch of websites designed by some guys in 2002. How do these website promote themselves? They swap mailing lists amongst each other (5K-15K lists are pretty common).
Anyhow, that's the end of the post. Just pinging to see I'm the only guy on Wicked doing this niche, 'cause some days I'm feeling pretty lonely.
Cheers, Benji
P.S. Hey if you do FOREX, and have the sudden urge to PM me, please don't. We don't touch FOREX with a twenty-foot pole wrapped in lead. No FOREX, NO FOREX, NO FOREX <---- Read again
