By Rich Whittle and Tim Kerber

Successful Web Site Marketing

By taking a look at successful sites, it can really help give you some ideas to apply to your own site. If you are up for the challenge, it may even inspire you to start a similar concept site of your own.

Let's take a look at how this site is pulling in over $600,000 a year in sales for this woman...

There's a new web service that will interest even the most serious penny pinchers. It can help you save an average of at least 50 percent on your weekly grocery bill.

It's called 'The Grocery Game' and was invented by California housewife Teri Gault. She developed her way of grocery shopping after her husband lost his job. She figured out how to feed her family of four on $35 a week.

(Note: upon entering the site you are asked to enter a US zip code. You can enter any valid US zip code to get in such as: 03843. They may be doing this to statistically track the interest across the US. It could help them decide where to franchise next to).

She spends around 25 hours every week pouring over grocery sale ads and walking the aisles uncovering unadvertised specials in two supermarkets, tracking the sales and entering them into a sophisticated database she's created.

Gault developed a web site (www.thegrocerygame.com) around her database of "when" to buy "what." Her subscribers log on every Sunday---the day a new shopping list comes out. The 'list' tells them the advertised and unadvertised sale items for the week. It also shows the corresponding coupons from the Sunday newspaper.

The idea is buy more than you need, because the game's shown that stores operate on 12-week cycles. You wind up only buying items at their rock bottom, lowest price.

Gault is franchising the idea to other cities and says she gets very few cancellations because customers get hooked.

The Grocery Game reportedly has over 11,000 subscribers. At $1.25 a week, that adds up to over $600,000 in annual sales.

Not bad for sharing your grocery list.

Applying Some Of These Success Strategies To Your Site

Its always worth it to take a moment and figure out what it is that makes a website successful. In the case of "The Grocery Game" there are quite a few.

You are encouraged to take a look at her site so that you can see how she applies some very solid concepts. What helps in her success? Her site has the following qualities:

• It Serves a basic need - Everyone has to go grocery shopping so she has a huge target market.
• It Saves Members Money - After reading through her site, it becomes very clear that you will definitely be saving money by joining. That makes subscribing to her site a pretty easy decision for people.
• Media coverage - There are several mentions on the site of various t.v. and radio stories about the site. Apparently one of the local stations did an investigative report about grocery stores based on the information learned from the site. That was obviously worth some serious traffic to the site.
• Trial subscription - This site makes the acceptance of visitors much easier by offering a $1 trial offer. This lets people test drive the site at minimum risk.
• Testimonials are up front and center - One of the very first thing you see on the site is the scrolling list of many testimonials. They are simple short quotes about how much money they have saved using her information. Obviously this is the main selling point of her site and she effectively showcases that.

This testimonial box is up top and very visible as soon as you come to the site:

• Testimonials are naturally generated in massive quantities - If you go into the public discussion board on the site, people are encouraged to post their results. Subscribers happily do so, probably for bragging rights :) and because they are thrilled with the results. This use of the discussion board is a very powerful selling point from a visitors perspective. They made a smart decision making the discussion board public.

Take a good look at their public discussion forum. It is finely tuned to be a strong marketing tool:

One of the most interesting things about thegrocerygame.com? It is only specific to a few geographic areas. This site model could be duplicated any where else in the world right now with most likely very similar results. Or if someone wanted, they could simply approach them for a franchise to apply to their area.

Even if you have no intention of going into the grocery coupon business, the site has many strong selling points. It does a terrific job of filling a large niche market in an extremely profitable way.

This is a very effective site that deserving some studying.