Just stumbled upon this place…really great advice all-around.

Just a few thoughts of constructive criticism, since I know you’re looking to increase sales for House of Rave…as a visual designer, I think one way to do that might be with looking at the presentation and design of the site I think you’re totally on the right track with the videos, blog and glo-stick stuff. But overall, the presentation of the site seems low-quality and homemade, especially when compared to the bigger shopping sites.

I’m sure with your connections that you know someone who is freakin’ awesome with graphic design, particularly web design, and I’d argue it’s totally worth it to do a graphic overhaul of HOR.

First, the logo…while the name is catchy, the symbol is not memorable. You want your brand to stick in these people’s heads and keep them coming back. Maybe that’s incorporating a lightstick (tastefully animated?) into one of the letters, or a simple, memorable symbol that merges a house and rave culture somehow. Heck, if it’s cool enough you could stick it on a tee-shirt of its own and people would buy it (maybe with something to catch their attention, like a glow-in-the-dark design on a black tee).

After that, a clearer layout would definitely increase sales. Although I’m sure your intended customer is in the teens-college range and it seems like design might not matter to them, there are methods of making the path to a sale clearer or more enticing. As an example, BustedTees.com does a great job of this: instead of drowning you in text descriptions, the visually-driven homepage immediately grabs your attention. Maybe your images are animated (again, tastefully), like the scrolling LED belt or what you have in small-scale with the mirror ball set. Maybe there’s an option to “turn the lights off” on the site (like http://www.m5.icoke.com/bottle/index.html) and everything glows. This might seem like a marketing gimmick, but if it was done in a cool way, it would be the type of thing someone would want to tell their friend about to check out. Distinguishing your brand from the competition makes all the difference in the world.

I hope these ideas help in some small way…good luck with everything!

Now everybody can copy his success. It took me three minutes to find his dropshipper for these products.

I basically called every place that had products remotely similar to what I wanted to sell and asked them if they had a drop shipping plan, or if they could create one.

I got lucky with one finally who did at the time do some drop shipping for some other businesses, and they agreed to do it for me.

I’m to this day not sure if my supplier drop shipped the same products I sell at the time, but they do now for several other businesses.

As for converting NevBlog users into buyers, that is a bit difficult. That might even be a bit difficult as I’ve revealed in other post comments who my supplier is and their website.

Besides, the best people to go after are the ones searching for SPECIFIC products on the internet. If I am the first search engine result, THAT is a high probability sale.

December profits are coming along nicely!
-Nev

Stop by if you have a minute!

http://www.manageyourdollars.com/talk

Gualberto Diaz
gualberto.diaz@gmail.com
http://money.gmoneynyc.com

1) Traffic directed from your blog. I’d say a fair few people pass through here, in part because of various news articles.

2) Your blog has a decent google pagerank, so linking to HoR is good for your google rankings, traffic and therefore profit.

curious path

I didn’t think it’d be too hard to find a dropshipper. After all, I’d be selling their inventory for them, sheesh!

Any ideas guys? Should I just start calling places like Nev?

Hey Nev, question for you: does your dropshipper dropship for other people too? I don’t want to try competing with you by selling rave products, but you’re never really clear on how you got them to work with you. You make it sound like you cut some deal–”accepted my offer”, but I’m highly skeptical that any company that doesn’t already dropship would setup a dropshipping account just for you. So what’s the deal? Did you finally happen to call a place that dropships rave products, or will you have us believe that a high school youngster with no prior ecommerce experience had a company bend over backwards for him to attempt selling their products?