Read Part I here and Part II here if you need to catch up.

I was doing really well with creating backlinks from MySpace pages, and my own custom bot was in the process of being built.

My Adsense page stats were looking up, individual niche products were continuing to produce and various affiliate promotions were doing well. Money was coming in, but because of the delay in payment (45-60 days at for some programs) I was running out of cash.

Because I’d lost so much rank before, the payments that were coming in were miniscule and I had to wait another month or more to see the money I was earning now that I was back up in the indexes.

I wondered if, for a quick cash fix, I could sell the bot I was having made.

I posed some bulletins on my biggest MySpace accounts to see if there was any interest – and got the most responses I’d EVER had to a bulletin.

So I started contacting some folks in IM to tell them about what I was doing and the potential it had. But back then – early 2006 – very few in IM saw MySpace as a moneymaker. So I decided to launch it on my own, no JV partners, to the folks who were already on MySpace and understood it’s marketing potential.

I put together a Jeff Walker style product launch – straight from his course, which is excellent, by the way. Launch blog, build-up for affiliate partners (who were all MySpace “promoters,” as they call themselves), sneek previews, the whole thing.

The day before it went live, I found out I was pregnant (we’d been trying, so it wasn’t a total surprise, but wow, that was a shocker right before I did this big thing!). It went live on April 16 2006 (if I remember correctly) and sold like ganbusters.

Word got out I was offering a bot you could use with unlimited accounts, and MySpace promoters and musicians jumped all over it. The Hollywood crowd got a hold of it too – comedians, actors, musicians were all buying it. Looking at my invoices as they came in each day was really cool, I’d often see a name I recognized from showbiz.

I was doing support by myself, by email, and found it unmanagable. Software is a great product to sell, but there is a heck of a lot more support involved then you might have the time to do, particularlly if it’s selling well.

I hired a few US-based VA’s and installed a support desk for them to work from. I was getting morning sickness like crazy and couldn’t sit and work for a portion of the day. The VA’s quit because they didn’t like dealing with my customers.

Now, it’s probably not the coolest thing in the world to say your customers suck (and if you are a customer of mine reading this, rest assured I’m not talking about *you* personally). All my customers at that point were from MySpace and many were incredibly rude and verbally abusive. Customers in other markets, when encountering a problem, have never responded like the MySpace crowd did. It’s special and unique to them. An initial support email would often go something like this:

“I downloaded your free demo and it only gave me 30 minutes and you guys are fucking assholes because I want more time. Give it to me now, you slutty bitch!”

Seriously.

We did our best to help them, but I don’t blame the VA’s for quitting. Sometimes it was mentally exhausting.

I hired an India based firm to do the support – they had a bunch of people working for them so perhaps they would get burnt out less quickly. They did a really good job, until the support desk crashed completely because it just wasn’t coded to receive the kind of volume I was getting.

In the meantime, I was averaging about 40-60 orders each day, at $47 each.

I installed a new support desk that was much, much better (it’s Kayako). We had a ridiculous heat wave here in California (temps of 105+ for about 2 weeks) that summer, and being pregnant I was absolutely miserable.

Originally Badder Adder itself spread via word of mouth, but soon I got the #1 listing in Google for the main keyword phrase – myspace friend adder. I also switched between #1 and #2 for “myspace friend” “friend adder” “myspace adder” “myspace bot” (without the quotes) which were shorter terms but didn’t bring in as much traffic. I was receiving about 3000-4000 uniques a day to the homepage.

I hired a site builder / link builder to maintain my other projects outside of Badder Adder so that they would continue to grow, and they did. I got involved in a bunch of other fun projects, did Click Flipping (made a bunch of money there), more niche sites and products, and spent a lot of time keeping up on Web 2.0 and where the whole social media thing was going – while always asking “How can I use this for my business?” I implemented a lot of Web 2 linking strategies I developed – which is how I maintained my Badder Adder rank, and rank in my other projects.

After 11 months of doing stellar, better then I ever could have asked for sales, Badder Adder was forced to close.

(To be continued….)

   

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Tagged as: badder adder, badderadder, click flipping, michelle macphearson, niche marketing, software business