Webmaster-Interview wird ab 2010 in loser Folge Interviews mit erfolgreichen amerikanischen Webseiten publizieren. Dafür konnten wir den Autor und Social Media Consultant Reto Stuber als unseren US-Korrespondenten in New York gewinnen. Mehr zu ihm unter www.Schreibenslust.com.

P.S.: Bitte gebt uns in den Kommentaren bekannt, ob ihr an Englischsprachigen Interviews interessiert seid oder ob wir diese jeweils eindeutschen sollten. Besten Dank!

Please introduce yourself and your website.
My name is Will Hamilton and I run a website called FuzzyYellowBalls.com (FYB).  We teach people how to play tennis over the internet using video.

I graduated from Davidson College in 2004.  I was on their tennis team (Div. 1) and taught at the Tennis Center at College Park, MD, on-and-off for about 1.5 years before starting FYB.
My partner’s name is Adam Sieminski.  He’s a former IT professional for small banks.  He handles most of the technical wizardry you see in our videos.

Here is one of our most popular videos:

Why did you start it?
I was motivated to start FYB after watching some instructional tennis videos on Youtube in 2006.  Several of the videos I watched had tens of thousands of views despite the fact that the production quality wasn’t particularly good.  I figured I could do a better job.

More generally, I’ve always been pretty entrepreneurial.  FYB seemed like a logical way to combine my entrepreneurialism with an area of expertise.

How do you make money?
We make most of our money from a pay product called “FYB Premium.”  Simply put, these are tennis lessons that people have to pay for to access.  The lessons in FYB Premium are organized differently than our free lessons.  I’d compare them to a college course.  Each successive lesson builds on the material that comes before it.  It’s also a comprehensive look at what is necessary to playing winning tennis – technique, footwork, strategy, and so on.

The reason people are willing to pay for FYB Premium is because we’ve given away a ton of free content.  We currently have 331 videos on Youtube.  All that free content gives people a good sense of whether or not we know what we’re talking about.

We also make money off of in-video advertising.  But it’s very much a secondary source of revenue.

Can you give us some facts and figures?

Here is some basic information / statistics:

-          Launched September 27, 2007
-          2 full-time employees
-          Over a million video plays per month on Youtube.
-          Worldwide audience of 300 – 450 thousand per month
           (Website & Youtube combined).
-          57,000 subscribers to our e-mail newsletter.  Between 100 – 300
           people sign up every day.
-          About 50% of our viewers are in the U.S.  South Korea is a big overseas
           source of traffic for us.

Where do you get the new content?
We have two primary types of content – instructional and match commentary.  Our instructional content is largely driven by requests – “How do I hit a kick serve?” – while our match commentary focuses on big professional tournaments / matches.

How do you promote your site, what works and what doesn’t?
Most of our promotional efforts focus on Youtube.  It’s the second largest search engine in the world – somewhere around 18% of worldwide search traffic – and it’s much easier to rank well on Youtube than on Google.  I can pretty much guarantee you that I can get on the first page of Youtube search results for a particular tennis-related search term, if not the first result.

For example, if you search “tennis” on Youtube we have two results on the first page.  If you type in “Federer forehand” we have the first two results.  We dominate the first page for “tennis lessons.”
We don’t emphasize Google search results as much as we used to.  It doesn’t yield close to the results that Youtube does.

In retrospect, what would you do differently?
There are lots of things we would do differently in retrospect.  We should have used WordPress – a popular blogging platform – from the get-go.  Our previous platform was much more inflexible and limited and, as a result, our website was much less dynamic than it currently is.

Our initial business model was to make money via advertisements.  This proved not to be sustainable in the long run.  Thus, we should have launched a pay product much earlier than we did. FYB Premium launched in August of 2009 – we essentially spent 2 years try to make the ad-supported business model work.
We didn’t start actively building a mailing list until September of 2008.  We should have built one from the get-go because much of our revenue is derived from the list.

Any tips for people just starting out?
Start building an e-mail list from day one.  It’s an incredibly valuable asset.  It allows you to steadily grow your traffic over time and insulates you from the whims of search-engine results.

Also, it allows you to develop a relationship with your audience.  One of the reasons people pay for FYB Premium is because we’ve been able to demonstrate our expertise / chops over the course of several weeks / months.  It’s very unlikely someone is going to pay for your product the first time they visit your website.  It takes time for a particular person to decide that your product is something they want and is worth paying for.

Use video.  There’s a book titled “Differentiate of Die” which, unsurprisingly, says that you need to stand out and be different if you’re going to be successful.  Producing a high-quality video is an excellent way to do this.  It’s cliché to say that a picture is worth 1,000 words, but it’s true.  You communicate so much more information to your audience through a video than through text.  Thus, you can build your authority and credibility much faster than you could through a text-based blog.

Please tell our readers some of your favorite blogs.
Here are a few of my favorite internet marketing and social media blogs, in no particular order:

-          http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
-          http://www.problogger.net
-          http://www.beet.tv
-          http://mashable.com
-          http://sphinn.com
-          http://www.allfacebook.com

Will, thanks so much for the interview and the valuable insights you gave us! We wish you a lot of success.