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Let’s Sing It Together
// TheWorldJournal.com
Can a dot-com grow 300% per year? Raymond Bonsee, the founder of LetsSingIt.com, one of the largest music lyrics web sites on the Internet, says it can if you have the right strategy. Basically, it all comes down to keeping your goals simple and then making sure they remain that way during the ride.
He was only twenty years old when he opened his first lyrics web site in 1997. His action was based on two years of Internet experience, started in 1995, when he first faced the Internet. Studying astronomy at the university at that time, he was often looking for lyrics on the web. “I stumbled on lousy fan pages with black background and small blue font filling your screen from the left all the way to the right, blinking textures here and there – pain in the eyes,” – remembers Bonsee.
With no consistent results in finding lyrics, he simply followed everybody and decided to make a lyrics-site himself. “One, on which you easily would find lyrics to whatever performer you would be looking for,” says Bonsee. “I had no intention to make it a big site. I just wanted to try to make a site that wasn’t like the others.”
To his own surprise, he was wrong. The first web site, named “Ray’s Music Site” was receiving hundreds of daily visitors only just a few months down the road. His visitors got to participate as well (they still do): He started to receive lyrics by e-mail. The archive was expanding quickly. In 1998 he had 5,000 visitors a day. In 1999 the number climbed to fifteen thousand. It was time to make substantial changes.
The freshly redesigned LetsSingIt web site was launched on its own rented server and was ready to handle more searching-for-lyrics visitors. Competition, strikingly, looked at LetsSingIt differently than it used to. Bonsee created something others still try to implement. LetsSingIt dot-com has personalized the way people use lyrics as no other lyrics web site has ever been personalized before. So far it’s the only site to create a unique interaction between the user and information he is getting. His visitors are no longer receiving just plain text results. There is a smart combination of numerous features for them to use. Most widely recognized are rating the song, printing, e-mailing it to a friend, adding or correcting lyrics. The most interactive features are adding your favorite lyrics to one page to simplify access and save time during your next visit (our favorite), buying the album/single or checking out the best fan pages of your best-loved performers with one click. Add to the package easy site navigation, really fast page loading and a little advertising and you get a paradise for music-lovers. This is what keeps tens of thousands of people coming back again and again every day.
Even the biggest competitors don’t always have half the features offered by the twenty-five-year-old Bonsee. So what’s the big secret behind a simple idea, which seems to grab most people’s attention online? As we found out, a satisfied-with-performance owner likes to keep things simple. There are five basic rules he has been trying to follow since the launch in 97. In Bonsee’s own words, they are as follows:
Keep working on the information on your site. If the visitor finds what he/she is looking for, he/she will definitely come back again.
Keep the navigation easy. What could be more frustrating than if you can’t find information in a site while you had the idea that what you’re looking for “should be around here somewhere”. If visitors get this feeling when visiting your site, they’ll leave and won’t return. Would you find a book in a library if the books were placed in random order?
Don’t loose your primary goal out-of-sight. At the beginning when your site is starting to grow, it is usually a result of the fact that you have done something unique on your site. Try to figure out what that is. Often, it is what the reason you built the site in the first place. In my case I thought I’d make a site that was easy to navigate. This was my primary goal. It’s important that you keep this goal in your head. This started your site growing, so why wouldn’t it keep your site running?
Don’t do things by hand. Updating your site is something you can automate. Don’t spend your time on work that can easily be done by a tool. Let your primary target be improving your site.
Don’t be impatient. It takes some time before your site will be indexed at search engines. Also, lots of visitors get to know your site by hearing about it from others. This takes time. Lots of companies expect too much from their web sites too quickly. A web site has to grow like a tree – you have to be patient.
Then Bonsee adds: “The problem is – you can’t find a manual about how to be successful and what you have to do about that. Looking backwards, you can assume you obeyed most of the rules.” He also confessed that some rules were discovered while running his web site.
We learned that the man behind LetsSingIt.com has built his business on visitors’ ideas and feedback. You can almost feel the appreciation he shows to them: “I don't spend much time figuring out how my competitors are doing, and besides, I believe in my own strategy: I carefully read the feedback from visitors sent to me by e-mail or what they post in the forum on my site. What's missing the most on my site is called “the most”. If I notice a lot of messages about the same subject, I consider this important and start making plans for implementing it into the site. [“Rate a song” feature is the result of such feedback].”
Looking at decisions and actions he makes in regard of LetsSingIt, it seems as if he is trying to keep his site as innocent and independent as possible; guarding his creation from all those negative effects that appear when going too deep into being commercial. For example, you never find much graphic advertising on his site. Says Bonsee: “There is income, but it is not my primary task. If I respect this goal, I can grow bigger. If I switch it to ‘make as much money as I can’, I'm sure I’ll lose visitors. I'm satisfied if the income is enough to pay for hosting costs. I'm not financially dependent on this site since I also run the counter-service CheckStat.”
So far he had nothing but success with LetsSingIt and he hopes it remains that way. But with competition rising, soon, he will have to make tough choices about how much longer his web site can continue its independent ways – and if it does, how it can preserve the unique culture that allows LetsSingIt to outperform the behemoths that surround it.
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