I haven’t been posting here on the blog much, and I’m not entirely sure why.
I’ll be posting more updates soon on how IMVUCE is going, for now it’s going great, volume is way up, higher than I had ever hoped it to be, and appears to be climbing higher and higher with each passing day.
Just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who is a part of IMVUCE, whether you are a buyer of credits, or a supplier of credits – and definitely thank you to the people who are earning credits, as you are helping spread the word of IMVUCE every time you make money. =)
Keep on IMVU’ing everyone!
Phil
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Well, IMVUCE is getting a lot bigger now. I cannot disclose statistics mainly because I’d rather shock and awe people when it hits a price point that everyone thought was impossible, especially in under a years time. Anyway, we are a lot bigger now – and this means we are now able to start buying from people left and right, up and down, front ways and back ways and every which way – we’re buying millions upon millions each day. We used to only grab 1-2 mil a day for the longest time, now it’s much greater than that, which means we are buying from a dozen sellers a day! So if you have ever tried to sell at IMVUCE before and never saw the ability to sell directly on our website, try to now. I almost guarantee you if you watch the sell imvu credits page for a day or two you will definitely unload some credits for cash.
I want to thank all of you sellers for making IMVUCE possible, as well as all of the credit buyers who are smart enough to get a good deal on imvu credits. You guys rock and I hope that you continue to make use of IMVUCE for the rest of your IMVU lives, and I hope you all have a great IMVU experience!
-Phil
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So today I have just finished sprucing up IMVUCE.com by editing the rotating slider code a LOT, changing it to use jQuery instead of Flash. The main benefit of this is search engine compatibility, as well as browser compatibility. For example, now google will index the site correctly instead of leaving a big white space. Another example goes out to you iPhone users out there, as IMVUCE will now display properly on Safari for the iPhone! Which used to be a big white space as well.
That’s not all, IMVUCE is now securely on the new dedicated server. It is faster than it’s ever been before, and should not have any major issues ever again. Woo!
I am currently working on more site updates / upgrades, so please stay tuned to this blog – or just the website – to see what’s to come.
Phil
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Hey everyone.
If you notice anything fishy on IMVUCE.com (hopefully you will not), be not afraid. We just moved from a slower server to a super-de-duper fast server. Reliability of the last provider wasn’t exactly superb, but after taking a look all around the web I finally found one that suffices. We are using SingleHop.com (a great dedicated hosting provider), and so far everything is going smooth. Plus everything is really, really fast.
I just wanted to provide a little update. I’ve been doing a lot of work to get MySQL moved over and what not, with a little help from some members of the IMVU community. Thanks folks!
I will post a better update later, but for now I must get back to work! Thanks for choosing IMVUCE to be your IMVU Credit Reseller.
-Phil
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A couple of months ago I started to work on an iPhone application, known as the “IMVUCE Mobile App”.
It tooks months to approve (for some odd reason), and Apple apologized for it taking so long, but it’s in the App Store now, waiting to be downloaded – for free of course. The thing is that it’s getting bad reviews daily. It’s average (out of 5 stars) rating is 2.5, aka it’s got a low approval rating. This would normally offend the author of an application greatly (me), as a lot of time and effort was put into creating it. But it doesn’t, it just makes me want to work harder on creating a bigger and better version of the application, which of course too will be free.
So now my goal is to take all of the corrective criticism, and yes – even the harsh words of some of the people downloading it, and push a new version out that will hopefully bring the 2.5 rating up to a 4 or maybe even a 5. So if anyone reading this has actually downloaded the application and used it on their iPhone, or maybe you just have ideas for what the application could and should do – make a comment to this post and let me know what you think. Or you can join the ranks of review, and leave your own message on the App Store (given you have an iPhone), which I will read there as well.
I just want to know what people want in an iPhone app that is based around IMVU. Yes, I want to be able to provide IMVU Credits to users via mobile, but I also want to be able to offer a nice user experience for people who want to say.. check their buddy list for friends online, or maybe chat with their buddies somehow via text? I’m not sure how I’d go about chatting from iPhone to IMVU, as that sounds extremely difficult, but hey – if it’s a requested feature I’m all for attempting to bring that to the table.
Anyway, that’s all I have to talk about for now. I’ll try and post more here in the near future.
Thanks,
Phil
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One of the most important contenders in growing any business, is having plenty of volume. Let me start off this blog post by giving you a good example of why Volume wins overall.
Imagine Site A, who sells their product at $10 each. Then you have Site B, who sells their product at $5 each. Site A has 10 recurring customers. Site B has 20 recurring customers.
Now, Site B has more customers because it has a cheaper product. Site A has less customers because it has a more expensive product. But they both make the same amount of money… currently.
Which has more potential for succeeding? Site A and B are making the same amount of money right now, 10 customers x $10 = $100, and 20 customers x $5 = $100. Well, when you get down into the details of it, you will find out that Site B will probably succeed a bit better than Site A, due to one simple fact. 20 customers means 20 people to word of mouth advertise. The 10 customers to word of mouth advertise is half the success rate. And when you think about it, if they get 10% new customers from their existing user base at the same time (10 * 10% = 1 … 20 * 10% = 2), they are still getting the same amount of profit ($10), BUT… but but but… what about when Site A and Site B customers try and refer eachother? Even with loyalty in mind, Site A customers are far more likely to convert to Site B customers than vice versa, ESPECIALLY during hard times like the current economic situation going on right now, which really means Site B is Key. =)
So, in the long-run, even if you aren’t making much profit initially – it is usually better to ride on the volume than ride on higher prices just so you make “more money”. So if you can afford to cut your prices back a bit, and you feel that it will help you start getting more customers when you compare yourself to the competition. Go for it! You’ll probably do a lot better, and your customers will be excited by the great deal.
That’s all I have to say for today, check back later for more insight from me.
Phil
When developing the code for IMVUCE, I didn’t exactly plan to optimize my site for search engines. I wasn’t thinking about page ranks, or getting on the front page of Google and Yahoo, or even just realizing the monetization that can come from having your site easily indexed by search engines. I was relying fully on advertising to take care of that, but what about when ads aren’t getting clicked -and actual quality search results are? That’s when I realized that I should put some time into getting my site on the first page of Google.
Why Google? What is so important about this Google? Well it makes up for 70% of every single search performed by users on the internet. That’s “why Google”. And when you think about it, doesn’t it make more sense financially to get your site on the front page of Google for free, than to pay hundreds of dollars per month to assure your site is on the front page? Duh, but I’m going for a combination of the two. I am advertising on Google Ads as well as Yahoo Ads, and then I am paying a private company to do some external work for me while I do internal work on optimizing my site for Google. Hopefully within a few months IMVUCE will be one of the top 3 results on Google, and if not – I always have those ads on the top slots of Google. =)
So no matter what, I find it important to optimize my site so that it is easier for new users to find. So anyone out there working on a site – read up on SEO techniques, implement them into your site, and then sit back and wait for the results on Google. =)
That’s all for now, I will make another post shortly within a week or so.
Not many people believe me when I tell them that IMVUCE has been in the works for over a year. And I understand why most people wouldn’t believe me, I was running another company last year up until the beginning of 2009. So how could I possibly be working on another company? Well it was easy, I registered a domain, started playing with some PHP frameworks, and failed miserably up until the last month.
A few people inspired me to just do the work on my own. I don’t have to mention their names as they probably know who they are, but I do have to say a big THANK YOU to each and every person who helped me realize what I am capable of. Most of you may or may not know that I am a web designer primarily. Coding in PHP is definitely not my profession skill in life. But just because you major in one field doesn’t mean you can’t minor in another. Web design and PHP coding kind of go hand-in-hand in this day and age, as you can create a lot of really neat things on your own, that not only are functional, but look nice too.
That’s what I hope people look at IMVUCE and think. “Wow, that is a beautiful AND functional website! I just might use it.” But just having a pretty site that works doesn’t get you anywhere on the web, the real issue is getting people to come see this beautiful and functional piece of work you’ve created. But how do you do that? How do you get thousands of people who want to use this service to come aboard and use it?
There are only a couple of ways to get people coming to your niche category. IMVU Credit Sales is so niche that it’s kind of hard to traffic in people who are interested in IMVU and buying currency. The “best way” (that IMVU itself will probably tell you) is to make use of their “Shout-Out” system. A shout-out is a message that scrolls across the screen at any given time for users of IMVU who are on the site, or on the IMVU 3D Chat Client. So basically you are paying IMVU Credits to broadcast text-based messages all across IMVU. But is that the best way? Some say yes, but others disagree. I do try and run at least 100 broadcasts every few days, but it’s not necessarily the primary advertising source of IMVUCE.
What about Google ads? Those are popular now-a-days. And Google makes up of around 78% of all search queries done on the internet. But what if Google’s demographic is different than say, Yahoo’s, or MSN’s? (Now known as Bing.com I guess.) I’m sure there are slight variations, so I thought to myself, “Well – let’s try out Yahoo! Ads!” But why Yahoo!? All of the other credit resellers seem to be using Google. Well duh, if only 1 other reseller is on Yahoo Ads and roughly 10 or so are on Google, I can pretty much assure myself 50% of the marketing on Yahoo who search keywords like IMVU, IMVU Credits, etc. And it’ll cost lest because there is less competition.
But then I thought, well, I still need to try and target people on google. What to do on that end? Simple. Look up “IMVU” on google and see the top sites on the first result page. And then target one of those pages to advertise for IMVUCE. And eventually when the site grows it should be a front page result for IMVU Credits, or maybe even IMVU. So that is what I did. You can see on http://koinup.com/in-imvu/ a flash advertisement for IMVUCE. It’s slightly animaed and uses a bit of secret marketing techniques to help draw people in to check out the sweet service we offer. Hopefully the money invested in placing that there will pay off, and I’m sure it will.
As you can tell I am doing a lot of advertising from the launch of IMVUCE. I am spending more money on advertising than I am currently making with the site. Why would someone do such a thing like this? Because i am looking at what IMVU did in the beginning. They started using Google Adwords to buy ads all over the web. I am doing just that, I am targetting my audience (which are IMVU users, not the whole web), and I am trying to get the word out to as many people as I can of what my product is, and how it can help them. I also heard from IMVU it’s better not to spend just a small amount on advertising. If you’re going to do it – go all out. You need to get a lot of people coming to your site, and hopefully I will be doing just that.
So we’ll see how it goes, it is a lot of work starting up your own business, but I have done it before, and this time I plan to succeed at what I failed to do the previous time. Thanks for reading everyone.
Phil