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The First Step to Building a Passive Income
A couple of weeks ago, the new Buy to Let Helper web site went live. Buy to Let Helper provides guidance and advice for those considering investing in property, with a growing library of articles covering the ins-and-outs of buying to let, and a free, no obligation mortgage quotation service.
And for those of you that prefer the personal touch (or perhaps just hate forms), there’s also a callback request service.
A vested interest
Dreams of fame and fortune. Well, fortune.
Buy to Let Helper is a particularly important project for me personally, as it represents a shift in the focus of Manifest as a company. Rather than charging a fee for building this site, I’m hoping to make my income from commission on the mortgage enquiries that it generates, an arrangement that I first mentioned at the start of 2007 in this blog post.
For this project, I joined forces with an SEO expert that I’m lucky enough to be friends with, and developed the site under the banner of Blue Egg.
I took care of the design and build, and am now working together with Mark at Blue Egg to ensure that the site gets some much-needed Google loving. The actual mortgage advice, quotes, and so forth are all handled by a refreshingly approachable team of mortgage brokers, who are proving to be great fun to work with.
Building a successful business by not reinventing the wheel
The Buy to Let Helper site is about as far away from the glamorous world of web 2.0 as it’s possible to get. It’s not built on the back of an ?ber-trendy technology, doesn’t have much in the way of bells-and-whistles, and boasts no real acronyms, outside of the usual XHTML and CSS.
It doesn’t claim innovation, has no desire to become a pivotal online social network, and has few illusions of ever being acquired by Google.
All of which is fine by me. A few false starts last year (in terms of speculative projects) taught me some valuable business lessons, the most important of which is that you must understand (and be realistic about) how a venture is going to make money.
Ridiculously obvious I realise, but it’s easy to lose sight of this simple fact when you’re surrounded by tales of startup riches and AJAX glory. Great ideas are all very well, but they’re frequently difficult to execute, difficult to explain, and even more difficult to monetise.
Having collaborated with Blue Egg on the Company Insurance web site, a financial services site was reasonably familiar ground for me, and made better business sense than many of the more innovative ideas I’ve encountered to date.
As boring as it may sound, copying (and improving upon) a tried and tested business is almost always the better option, assuming you want to be financially rewarded for your time. The world would be pretty boring without the great innovators, but for people with slightly more modest goals (and I’m not ashamed to admit I’m just such a person), a simple, clear, workable business model also holds a certain appeal.
Designing for the commission carrot
Buy to Let Helper doesn’t make money unless it’s visitors take out a mortgage as a direct result of requesting a mortgage quotation, or requesting a callback.
This overriding business objective has to be balanced with the need for useful content on the site. Quality content is essential both to reassure the visitor that this is a site worthy of his time, and also to help in the quest for decent search engine rankings.
Bearing all of this in mind, the immediate project objectives (in addition to the longer-term goal of making money) were as follows: - Provide useful buy to let advice in the form of guides and articles - Make it as easy as possible for people to request a mortgage quote, or a callback
Meeting the project objectives
The design for the Buy to Let Helper site is clearly focused on the things that are of interest to the visitor, and will make money for the business (thankfully, as with most good business ideas, these two are in alignment).
The primary navigation contains just three links. Two lead to pages that enable a visitor to make the essential first contact with the mortgage team, and the remaining link leads to a section containing genuinely useful buy to let guides and advice. These guides help to instill confidence in the site, and also provide appropriate landing pages for targeted search terms.
The secondary navigation, at the top of the page, contains links to lower-priority content.
Getting things done
Rather than going through the usual (potentially lengthy) process of producing wireframes and Photoshop visuals prior to building the site, I adopted a design-as-you-build approach, which resulted in a greatly reduced development time.
Whilst not suitable for most projects, the simple structure of the Buy to Let Helper site (and the fact that I was my own client) meant that this technique worked very well, and enabled me to get it designed, built, launched, and populated in a matter of days rather than weeks.
It was an interesting experience, and you can expect a more detailed post on this subject sometime in the not-too-distant future.
What next?
The only thing that remains to be seen is whether or not the site generates money. My involvement with the project on an ongoing basis will mean that I can tweak and refine it over time, based on real-world statistics and usage patterns. However, only time will tell whether this little experiment becomes a big success.
I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes, but in the meantime please check it out, and let me know what you think.