Best Incentive Affiliates – The Best Of The Best!

The Journey Of PrizeFast! – Week 1

Posted on 06. Apr, 2009 by $haz in The Journey of a New Incentive Owner

This post is from Gabriel Hunter, the owner of www.prizefast.com. He is a new and upcoming incentive website owner who will share with us his journey into the incentive industry and his experiences of starting an incentive website. He has started from scratch and will be talking about his ups and downs of this industry. Here is what he has to say in his very first post!

It’s mid November 2007, I’ve just spent the year running two businesses and both had a polar opposite effect in profits streams – I’m at exactly where I was a year ago. Well, not really, 1 year ago I had a steady job and a position that most at my age would kill for. But I had a problem; I’ve lost all passion for the job and needed a change. So I quit and started a business, 4 months for my first unprofitable venture and 6 months for my profitable one.

So now I had a decision, what to do next. I googled work at home careers and came to an abundance of MLM schemes and survey sites. I saw something called project payday and said what the hell – I signed up. Honestly, I did if for fun, I wanted to see how this works. But after I got an Ipod from a freebie site, I realized I have to become a part of this.

8 Months of planning, roughly $15,000 in expenses and I created PrizeFast.com. We launched on April 1st, 4 days ago, and my journey as a site owner had just begun.

I’m glad Shaz had done this segment with another site owner who was beginning his incentive site because it showed just how hard this can be and that this is, by all means, not just some quick method of getting rich. Three reasons why the previous site owner failed.

1. He assumed that this is a way to get rich quick and neglected the difficulties of differentiating yourself from the competition.
2. He had an unrealistic view of the capital needed to fund his enterprise
3. He didn’t have experience in the industry

This is not a supplementary stream of income, let me repeat that, this is not a second stream of income. This is a business that you have to run and develop, and that’s how I perceive it. The amount it profits or succeeds depends on how I run it.

Capital, I put in $15,000 worth of capital into the business for graphic design, custom programming, pre-launch promotions, etc, there are a multitude of expenses to deal with. You can’t do this with a grand in your pocket thinking you’ll get rich.

Finally, experience, I was a trader before and I know how things are run. You don’t start an auto shop if you don’t have any experience as a mechanic, nor is this industry any different.

These are my methodologies, and I believe they’re important when you’re starting an incentive site. Is it hard, very hard. Why, because we’re in the middle of 2009.

In 2007 a person could very well take a $1,000 and make a rather good freebie site all other things being isolated. But now the market is saturated and Porter’s five forces show us how this industry is developing: barriers of entry are beginning to emerge, competition is rising and the next phase, I feel, is a change in supplier power (by which I mean the affiliates).

These are just tools I use to position myself and set my business model, don’t take it to heart. The point is, starting PrizeFast was hard and even now I cannot give a definite answer on my network’s future.

In the past 4 days, the site has surpassed my expectations in terms of the numbers. But that means absolutely nothing because, like I said, it’s only been 4 days.

The key to this was generating a buzz a month before I launched the site. I held a promotion on Freelunchroom and Anything4free that revolved around a DVD giveaway. By March 25th I had 500 people that signed up and I gave away a total of 90 DVDs. I made sure I would attain those numbers by purchasing banners ads from both forums and ensuring I keep a presence on the forum.

Each person that received a DVD also got a personalized letter. The letter was mailed in a highly textured off-tone white number 10 envelope, the “from” and “to” address was hand written. The letter was then sealed by a burgundy red wax seal with the PrizeFast logo inscribed in it. This gave a very authentic feel for the envelope modeled after the Renaissance period of how letters were made. Inside the envelope was a letter, I used old English calligraphic font that I purchased to add to the authenticity. Each letter was personalized to each person, I made it my business to read the profiles and read the posts of all the people I was writing to. As I said, 90 letters were written, this took some time. There were also two more papers; they were two 8 by 11’s that showed the April promotion, in full color.

http://prizefast.com/april.php

I had to pick 90 winners, write all the letters and ship out all the DVDs from April 25th to the 28th because I wanted to ensure that people get it before we open and get a realization for why I named my network “PrizeFAST”. Those 3 days were very hectic to say the least.

The response was very good, it set a precedent for what the site stands for and showed people that we can deliver. Overall, a huge success.

Three things, customer service, fast payments and dependability, this is key. Beyond the two obvious critical elements which are having a great site and having good offers that credit; these three are very important to me. The problem is, words like customer service and fast payments have been thrown around so loosely that they’ve lost all meaning.

I made it my business to treat every user like I’m dependant on them to succeed, my accessibility is consistent from 9am to 2am and you can always reach me on AIM or similarly by telephone. I have a support rep that takes care of systematic procedures so I can fully focus on helping the people that are the lifeblood of my enterprise. A new site just launched, I won’t mention the name, saying they have 6 support reps. That’s bullshit, when your dealing with such a tight knit community on forums you have to be honest and open; word of mouth is critical. 5 support reps, give me a break, it’s a 19 year old from North Dakota hyped up on energy drinks.

This is a good start, far better then a multitude of other sites, but it’s exactly that: a start. My goal right now is to swim with the sharks and get a feel for the water. Starting an incentive site means nothing, the goal is to perform and function on the same level as the top performers. I set my sights as being the best, I’ll never fade away from that vision.

After I attain a certain level of revenue and performance, it’s then that I’m going to put into play some tactics and strategies that are going to turn heads. This is a great niche market, an absolute jem, and I want to be a key player in flourishing and growing this industry.

Asides that, I’m very excited for what the future holds.

Until next week,

All the best

- Gabriel Hunter.

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Tags: gabriel, journey, prizefast