Marketing, Meanwhile...

As expected, Dr. X and Mr. Y were unfortunately not grasping the importance of marketing for our (or any) site. Mr. Y was put in charge of coming up with a marketing plan and he decided to read up on improving google placement. I insisted that something else be done because it would surely take some time to get traction in google. The response was to run a campaign on what they considered a critical site for anyone doing any sort of technical analysis on stocks or options research. We would end up running a four month campaign on Big Charts that would cost us just over $10K. By this time, my investment in the company was limited to $2K plus some small monthly payments to our hosting company. We really had no concrete understanding of who the target audience was, why they would register (let alone subscribe after the two week period) or what the competition was doing.

Besides coming up with the plan, I had some difficulty getting the guys to author the content for the site. Our strategy was to educate those that didn't know much about covered call investing so we needed articles that explained how it all worked. Eventually, Dr. X and Mr. Y drafted a dozen or so articles that we posted on the site.