SportsLizard's making a comeback!

Anyone who's actively been reading this blog has known that for the past year SportsLizard has essentially taken a back seat to iPrioritize and my SEO work, which eventually led into Pure Adapt. I haven't spent a second marketing it in about a year, and I do no maintenance other than answer emails from people (about 10-15 collecting questions/month) and post two articles a month in the news section.

Funny thing is, traffic has continued to grow and the site (particularly the customs section and the news) have really, really taken off. Right now we make a few hundred bucks a month off of affiliate sales and AdSense, but for the traffic it gets SportsLizard does a poor job of A) translating in to money and B) giving visitors a reason to return.

The original idea
In 2003 my invention was a success and I was looking to start a business. My partner and I got crushed in a few business plan competitions and decided to go our separate ways. I had taken a few classes on web business in school, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Where else could I actually afford to start a business anyway?

I loved sports collectibles, something I'd been active in since I was a little kid, and I saw the old-school hobby falling behind the times. Other than eBay, there was no other great source for finding collectibles online, so I sought out to build a "better eBay" to truly pair buyers and sellers of collectibles. I wanted to become to collectibles what Amazon was to books. So I spent the next year going to bed 2 hours late every night so that I had 2 hours to read business books and write a business plan.

The launch
The site I launched with in summer of 2004 (seen here on the WayBack Machine) looks archaic, but actually had quite a bit of unique functionality and features that buyers and sellers couldn't find anywhere else. Even better - I programmed the whole thing myself, my first real website. In the first day I noticed that people cared about my site a whole lot less than I thought they would but it was OK because I actually had a pretty good marketing campaign. I was keeping it simple - I went where collectors were. I was active on forums, I paid for advertising in collectibles magazines, and I racked up a heavy PPC bill. It worked - for a month or two, but when I couldn't sustain the costs I began to see new users level off. Thus began the dark ages of SportsLizard.

The struggle
The problem with competing with eBay is that it's nearly impossible to grow the number of buyers and sellers concurrently. It's the chicken and egg thing - you can't have sellers if there are no buyers, but no one's going to buy if there are no items. And since SportsLizard only made money from sellers fees, I focused too much on getting sellers....a hard sell for a site that got barely any traffic.

What did I do when that failed? I decided to grow the site and add anything of any value that I could to it. I added the news section and the customs section, and about 15 other subsections (most of which flopped) over the next few years. I also became obsessed with SEO - a good career move, but not something that translated into revenue at the time. This is when the wheels started to come off - my simple plan was now a messy one with no direction and my marketing was all over the place.

I gave up
I wasn't planning on taking a job after college. I was going to live at home, work part time, and grow SL. But several companies came calling, and I couldn't resist the large salary and signing bonus. I decided that if I couldn't attract sellers to the site, I'd join a bunch of affiliate programs to get my inventory and focus on attracting buyers, which led to the current ability to search eBay and Amazon and other sites. The problem with this strategy is that 99% of the time the best item is still on eBay, so the buyer gets no value from SL, and the seller never even knows the buyer came from SL. Oh, and I make about 12 cents for a sale :). Anyone with half a brain can see that SL doesn't provide value to it's users (again, other than the customs and news sections).

False hope
But what about the Microsoft Award? I'm going to be honest - it means a lot to me that I was recognized by Microsoft, and it's kind of cool that I have a letter from Bill Gates hanging on my wall, but it didn't do a heck of a lot in the collecting community for me. What it did do was give me the confidence to quit my job and leave my career. After a few months, I saw the strategy I had in place wasn't working, and I moved on to iPrioritize and SEO work.

The opportunity is STILL THERE
The thing that always bugged me was that the opportunity is still there. Collectibles are dominated by a few large companies that absolutely RIP OFF consumers and do it with a smile on their face. Most of them hate me because I've exposed them in SL's news section with the help of other collectors (this one prompted an uproar from everyone mentioned in the article). I've always said I'd love to dedicate my career to taking down each and every one of them and exposing them for the frauds they are. I'm astounded by some of the things that collectors put up with - either because they've never considered the alternatives or they've never had an alternative.

It's amazing, but the opportunity four years later is even larger in my opinion than it was back then. eBay is still the only place to go to find your collectible. Everywhere else your product search is a waste of time and you're better off just going to eBay. I'm a firm believer that eBay is great for some things, but that most consumers would rather make a purchase from an actual business. They'd rather just put their credit card numbers in and not have to worry about leaving positive feedback or tracking their package or PayPal's quirks.

I'm baaaaack and this time I mean business
A few weeks ago I finally had my epiphany - I came up with the way to accomplish the goals of SL and meet this gaping need in the industry. I am four years more knowledgeable. I have helped successfully grow several sites, my programming and SEO/marketing skills are leaps and bounds better, I know infinitely more about business than I did back then, and I now have a team of successful entrepreneurs around me to supplement my weaknesses. With the blessings of my three amazing partners, I have decided to severely cut back on my client work and make it my sole mission to accomplish the original goals of SportsLizard.

This time I'm not starting from scratch. I have contacts in the industry, SL ranks high in the SE's and gets a ton of traffic, and I have advertisers lined up to sponsor the new site. I have the resources and wherewithal to truly accomplish my initial vision. I'll get into the details in another post, but my partners all believe 100% in the plan that I presented to them.

For the next several months, the primary focus of this blog will be the revival of SportsLizard. I'm going to do my best to share all the intricate details of this massive overhaul to my first business. It's kind of like getting back together with your high school sweetheart - you always knew you loved her but you were distracted by other opportunities for a while. Well not anymore - SportsLizard is going to accomplish it's original mission and I'm going to chronicle it here for everyone to read.

My tentative launch date for the new site is April 1. Starting next week I should be able to devote the majority of my time to this project. I'll keep you posted...this is going to be FUN.