Mediapainter

Team SCS is actually one of my own projects that I put together, with the help of a couple buddies I’ve been racing religiously with for the last 10 months or so. Basically we’re a bunch of road racing junkies with limited budgets on a mission to somehow subsidize our adventures with someone else’s money.

Well, that was the plan anyway, at first. And then the online marketer part of my brain kicked into full boost and all these affiliate ideas started buzzing around my hairless head. Next thing you know, we’re not only selling racing parts; we’re an authorized seller for the DC Shoes Auto Collection.

You think that’s hot right? We already got another deal in the works with Mothers Polishes, Waxes and Cleaners. We’ll be selling their product from our online store and I’ll be doing a number of how to clean your ride tutorials to demonstrate how well the products we sell actually work.

I think the key to selling online is proving your product; once you do that, it sells itself. Alright, so we’ve got e-commerce down, that’s one tried and true revenue model that’s definitely going to bring in some funds. Affiliate marketing is up next, although I’m not going to show all our cards just yet.

In about 6 month’s time, I’ll do a case study on the site to measure our successes and failures, and perhaps share some of my secrets that you can take to your online business and profit from as well. Here’s a few big hints though; get analytics and start logging your traffic data to figure out what’s working.

Right now I can say that we’re getting more traffic on Team SCS than some of my other clients with PageRank as high as 5. Actually in terms of traffic alone, we’re competitive with companies that have been around for years. I’m very confident that our efforts will pay off tenfold when it really heats up.

This for fun turned serious venture has taught me something very important though; money can’t buy what’s taken quite possibly years of experiences to develop. When someone provides a service, you don’t pay for the hour of time; you’re paying for what’s done in that hour that you can’t do yourself.

For example, Team SCS wouldn’t be possible without Ferdie Ang, my partner in shenanigans. The deals he’s put together for the team, not many people out there could’ve done; certainly I couldn’t have done. I make the wheels turn with the web but he’s pouring the race gas. Keep it in mind for your own businesses.

Mediapainter was officially launched in the summer of 2006, only a few months after I’d graduated from University of California, Irvine. I’d just finished a week-long trip to Whistler, BC, Canada for epic snowboarding with the Camp of Champions, followed up by a month of surfing almost every day. I figured if I was to continue to enjoy even a shred of semblance to the lifestyle I was currently enjoying, I ought to get moving and figure out how to earn a respectable income.

For years I never even bothered having a website of my own; I’d just show potential clients the websites I’d done in the past, and that usually was good enough to get the ball rolling. Feeling like I needed to do something bigger, I did everything and anything that was trendy and all the rage. Naturally that means I started blogging, and my website was animated in Flash, regrettably. Don’t get me wrong, Flash has its time and place, but if you’ve ever visited a Flash website more than once or twice, it gets old fast.

After a while I got sick of looking at my own portfolio website. That happens to me a lot though; I always want something more, something better. It’s that obsessive compulsive side of my personality that drives me wild but at the same time evolves my skill set because I have no choice. My biggest pet peeve was that my search engine traffic was garbage; I wasn’t ranking for any keywords really, and that’s a result of developing an entire website completely in Flash which search engines cannot index.

At least they couldn’t back then; Adobe released some neat technology to Google in 2008 that would allow Flash files to be opened up and indexed by search engines. Although, I’ve yet to test if there’s any disadvantages, perhaps content being indexed slower than say, a dynamic driven WordPress site that’s pinging search engines every post. Word is that these Flash sites won’t be appearing at the top of many search results anytime soon!

Fast forward to 2009 and I’m on a mission to rank well in search engines, mostly Google. I’ve set reasonable expectations: PageRank 4 and would like to be in the top 10 organic results for the keyword phrase “Orange County Web Design.” To accomplish my goals, I’ve employed WordPress to power my website as a content management system and I’m unleashing my online marketing fists of fury to get those rankings up there. I’ll be documenting the journey, both successes and failures.

So far I’m at PageRank 2 and still have a while to go before I start killing it in the organic search engine results pages. For fun I’m going to launch a couple PPC campaigns in AdWords to see what kind of damage I can do; I’m also very curious to see what kind of action they’ve got going on with Facebook ads. In my line of work, you’ve got to be the cowboy and can’t wait for someone to tell you its all clear to move forward. If you wait around, it’ll be too late; the opportunity will have passed. Wish me luck!