16.Jun.2009 The Road to IMVUCE

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