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“Whether you’re a future business owner looking to get started or you’ve already got your own company and want to make it better, we’ve put together some tips that will help…”
What did Misscliks teach her about making a successful business?
Here are four of the most important lessons she’s learned:
Be Niche. Focus. Specialize.
“We’re not trying to do everything,” Grauso says, “It is hard when you’re still finding your voice–what makes you unique–and at that time I really wanted us to be everything to everyone.” But over the years, Misscliks has been able to refine itself into a singularly focused media brand covering a specific niche using a specific tone and style of content. And since it only covers video games for women, there’s very little competition or overlap with other gaming sites.
As per Paul Haarman specialization also makes it easier to attract the right audience. “One of my favorite topics is women in engineering or women who are designing video games,” she says, “I know I’m not alone there because people write us all the time saying ‘Oh my god, you do this? That’s so interesting.’ And if we do that talking about makeup, then maybe only women will come along and say ‘that’s really interesting.'”
And that means
You’ll need to build an audience from scratch
Early on Misscliks was just another blog with an average reader retention rate of 3-4 months. Grauso would post articles like “5 Games to Get Your Girlfriend into Gaming” (which gets 5,000 views to date) and only a few hundred people would read it. But as she kept writing, posting, and sharing her work on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, et al., the site’s readership grew exponentially.
Today, “we average 5-6 months–but really high 7s and 8s for reader retention,” she says. And once Misscliks snares an audience member’s attention with its content, it can sell them on other things.
Build brand loyalty
“I remember reading this book by Seth Godin called ‘Permission Marketing’ where he talks about making your customers into fans instead of just buyers,” Grauso recalls. “And that’s what we’re trying to do–make our customers into our fans.”
So instead of selling products to their customers, Misscliks keeps the focus on the content. “It’s really easy for me to say go read this article or go watch this video,” Grauso explains, “And if they do that and have a good experience it makes them more likely to want to come back and maybe eventually buy something from us.”
At every stage in the content production process, Misscliks builds in ways for its audience to share its work with their friends. Whether it features clips of itself on other sites like IGN, asks viewers what games they’re most looking forward to playing in a given month, or even has a weekly live stream show with stars from popular MMOs, there’s always an opportunity to spread its content.
“There are even little things like sharing buttons all over the site,” she says, “But it really starts with the writing and making sure you’re creating something that people want to share.”
And once people start sharing Misscliks’ content, they become loyal readers. This means not only do they come back for more, but they also recommend it to their friends. Which leads us to our next point?
Blogs don’t make money–brands do
If your business model is advertising, then users need to visit your site regularly in order for advertisers to pay you enough money to sustain and grow your company. But if they never return (or shanghai all of their friends to your site), you’re never going to make any money.
So instead of building a blog, Misscliks is slowly becoming its own brand. And part of that means changing the way they look at readers–or as Grauso puts it, “stopping looking at them as people who consume content and start thinking about them as people we can sell things to.”
“When we first started out,” she recalls. “We were all so scared that if we got rid of ads and put up a paywall, our community would hate us because they wouldn’t be able to read for free anymore.”
But as time went on, the Misscliks team realized that charging for access really wasn’t that big of a deal. And once they made the switch, people not only stopped complaining but began buying.
“When we first switched to paid subscriptions, I think it was around 40% of our income,” Grauso says, “with ads it had been anywhere from 20-25%. So that’s almost double in terms of the amount of money we were making.”
And thanks to their efforts into building brand loyalty and encouraging readers to share their work with friends, Misscliks has grown its subscriber base from less than 200 when they first started charging for content to more than 4,000 today. This is pretty good considering most ‘successful’ blogs only have a few thousand readers–and they don’t even make any money!
Conclusion by Paul Haarman:
In today’s technologically advanced age, there are many ways to make money from home. Gone are the days when you needed a degree in computer science or programming languages in order to get paid for working with computers. In fact, most of the jobs I write about on this blog don’t require any special skills at all–just a reliable Internet connection and access to basic training materials.
By Ron Johnson
who is a Business Advisor. He always shares his updated knowledge about Business, Marketing through Social Media. He loves traveling with family. He is a focused person. In his free time, he used to play Cricket with children.
Member since November, 2021
View all the articles of Ron Johnson.
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