Increasing Online Profits Further

One business I own and openly talk about is House Of Rave .com.
It has consistently made between $800 – $1,000 every month for the last five years. I particularly like this business because it’s extremly simple to run and I have no inventory.

I’ve been very satisfied doing a minimal amount of work on House of Rave and making a few hundred dollars a month, but I am graduating this December and will have more time to focus on my businesses. I recently set out some Forecasted Goals for HoR and how I would go about accomplishing higher profits.

On September 2005, I set my sights to start breaking the $1,000 barrier per month by years
end. In October I beat my forecast and brought in $1,120. In November I beat my expected forecast, bringing in an HoR record of $1,630. This increase in sales seems to be directly related to the changes I’ve made to make HoR look more consistent and have faster customer support.

My actual income for November 2005 was higher than $1,630, and I report the actual figure on my tax statements. However, I always understate my profits so I don’t withdraw all of it from the HoR account. This is because online stores tend to surprise you down the road. For example, I may bring in a $200 order today which gets charged back for 3 months down the line. Since I understate what I can withdraw from my business account, I have extra cushioning building up for those surprise expenses.

The good thing about the business is I don’t have any inventory, I’ve had a great dropshipper in California who does all of that. The negative side is I haven’t seen 99% of the stuff I sell. To increase sales of already popular products, I’ve been ordering my own products and doing photoshoots with my ghetto photo studio.

I’m currently taking pictures, videos and writing my own descriptions for many of these products. I will keep adding 1 or 2 a week when time permits.

I did a photoshoot, video and instructional post on this Scrolling LED Message Belt Buckle. The photos were taken in my room and edited with Photoshop. The video was also taken in my apartment.

A customer emailed me while I was doing the photoshoot saying she had lost the buckle programming instructions, so I decided to make a full instruction manual for the customers. The original instructions are a little hard to use and have some confusing grammar, so this should help people out.

The video I took of the belt buckle features the now World Famous Crotch of Neville Medhora:

Another product I enjoyed playing around with were the Ultra High Intensity Glowsticks. It’s like a regular glowstick but they burn themselves out within 5 minutes. I ordered these to see how bright they were. I took some photos and two videos demonstrating the brightness.

The first video shows the cracking of an ultra bright glowstick, and the second video shows my skills at swinging glowsticks. I can’t afford real actors or anyone with talent, so I enlisted one of my roommates as camera man and shot the videos myself. This was a zero budget production, so I had to settle for that! I simply used my Casio Exilim for filming.

The last product I’ve recently updated was the Glow Paint I carry.

I added some nice before/after shots to show the effect and give HoR a free plug.

There are several reasons I am adding my own content:

Search Engines. A good amount of unique content on a page helps higher positioning.
Branding. House Of Rave needs to become more engrained in customers minds.
Customer Comfort. The customer must know that HoR is a real business, and unique content should help. This is especially important for online retailers.
More Information. The customer can get a better idea of what a product is with additional forms of media and descriptions not found anywhere else.

Hopefully enhancing the product pages with unique content will help increase profits in the long run. I see no reason why HoR cannot be a $5,000 p/month part time business by the end of 2006.