How we applied Tim's book: Our creation...

[bohans99]

Hi Everyone, Having read and applied Tim's book, i thought it time to share with you what we (my wife and I) came up with.

Tim's book was a catalyst for starting and basically just having a go, with an attitude of, "nothing ventured, nothing gain" or "something ventured, everything to gain..."

We created a business called www.athleteassessments.com. We offer 100% online personality profiling for athletes and sports teams. Having done an enormous amount of research in this area and with four Olympics behind me personally as an athlete as well as doing this type of work for large corporations in Australia, i thought it was a great fit. It is something i am passionate about and completely believe in.

We have finalised our testing of the product and the results have been fantastic with all of our test cases (100 plus) thinking the profiles are extremely beneficial and simple to use (these being our main objective). We are in the final stages of sorting out foreign currency payments with our Bank here is Australia. This has been quite a challenging process with the amount of paper work etc. But we are on our way.

We expect to fully launch in the next couple of weeks, Bank processing time permitting.

The www.athleteassessments.com site links to our Profile site called www.athletedisc.com. This is where you do the actual test. At the moment the link is not active as we as mentioned are still setting up payment methods.

But please take a look and give me your valuable feedback.

If you can, given their is not a lot of searching (via google adwords) for this type of thing as it really is perhaps the only genuine athlete profiling site out there, what do you recommend as the most effective way to drive massive traffic (1000 hits per day) to our site. We are marketing it in every english speaking country and see the US, Canada in particular with their well formed college sports systems as big markets.

Thanks so much for your feedback.

Bo

[dee-jay]

Hi Bo,

I just took a quick look at your sites and they look great! I'm a total nube here (first post) but I wondered if you had looked into "sport psychology" which is what I would search for if looking for your type of service. I don't know about massive traffic but I think you should include phrases of this sort. Of course, that's based on a very cursory look through your site. I hope I'm no the right track there.

Also, I hope you don't mind but I have a style note on your athletedisc page: the quotations on the left are very text-heavy. I think if you styled the quotations bolder or in a different colour than the name of the person quoted they would stand out more as quotations. When it's all the same it looks like a sea of text. There's a lot of text on both your sites so a little bit of white space or padding between the various blocks of text, would make it easier to read. Great colours and graphics!

I hope that helps.

Dawn

[bohans99]

Hi Dawn and thanks for your feedback. I am a little surprised i did not get more from all the other experts on the forum. But that is ok.

Today we are going live as we have finally got the coding done for US and Aus dollar payments and all associated details. It is amazing how long this all took in the end but there was so much work to be done and it is not a simple matter.

We made a border for the testimonials on the athleteassessments.com site but i get what you are saying regarding the white space. I will see what i can do.

I also just employed a serach optimization and adwords expert to sort that side of it out. Now we will see what happens over the coming months to guage conversion rates.

Will keep all up to date.

Bo

[cornflower]

Bo - my gut feel is that you will have to go to off-line marketing for your product. I can't imagine coaches etc. getting online to look for this kind of thing.. you could send out letters to college coaches detailing your services and giving them a free trial fo some sort.. you may need to approach them directly because if they haven't come across this kind of process before they won't even know enough to look.

You could try ads in sporting magazines for y our target markets etc. Maybe some well written press releases will give you some exposure for low cost. I don't know if any of these ideas would work, of course you would need to do so research on the best ROI...

[bohans99]

Cornflower, thanks. You are on the right track regarding athletes and coaches not really looking for this yet. Because of my knowledge of sport, i know that Personality Profiling for athletes is yet to be well recognised but i know it is coming. We intend to do a lot of direct marketing to drive the business. We also hope that a minimum of sales will come from the internet search as there are around 2-3000 searches a month for this stuff. We will see and time will reveal all.

Thanks for your input, i appreciate it.

Bo

[dee-jay]

Congratulations on going live! That's quite an accomplishment in itself -- your site is packed with content. And it sounds like you're really in on the ground floor when it comes to this type of assessment.

Your sites looks really good, very professional, and my comments above refer to small improvements that I think would help people access all that great info.

Please do keep us posted on how things are going.