100 Percent Bootstrapped 10 Million Dollar E-Commerce Company: WaterFilters.Net CEO Jamin Arvig (Part 3)

Sramana: When you first started in 2002, how did you acquire customers?

Jamin Arvig: Primarily search engine optimization was how we found customers. Even today that remains a key part of our operations. We did not invest in a lot of pay-per-click advertising initially because that was more risk than I was comfortable with.

Sramana: In 2002, I have to believe that the market was a lot less crowded than it is today. If a user did some keyword searches, how hard was it to get your site to show up?

Jamin Arvig: I can credit luck for a great deal of success because timing was on our side. There was not a lot of competition. There was not a single strong e-commerce player. It was a completely open market.

Sramana: So, you were the only real site that showed up if someone went searching to buy water filters?

Jamin Arvig: Perhaps not initially when we launched, but that was the case by 2003. It did not take long to get to the top.

Sramana: Do you remember what you did to your rather small e-commerce website to get into the search rankings?

Jamin Arvig: We did the same thing that we do today. We stick to the basics. There are white hat and black hat search engine optimization techniques. Black hat finds the loopholes and abuses Google algorithms. We have never even come close to that. We have not even adhered to all white hat suggestions. We try to focus on the customer service that our website provides and the expertise we provide the community as water filter industry experts.

In 2003, this really worked well. Our content demonstrated that we understood the industry and that we were respected by the industry. This led to Google seeing us as a reputable resource. We had a lot of good keywords in our content which were centered around the major industry keywords. Since our content was always customer focused, we never had to revamp it. We were just able to consistently add new content to what we had.

A lot of times people will watch for Google algorithm changes and they will adjust all of their SEO content to match. We have always felt that if we just provide good content that serves our customers, it would be reflected in customer rankings. Even if Google cannot get there today, we are confident they will get there tomorrow.

Sramana: What was the format of the content? How was it delivered to your customers?

Jamin Arvig: We focused on good content for our catalogue elements as well as other content on our site. The website is critical, and we needed to have a lot of content to help educate our customers. That led to very detailed product pages which had all the information that customers wanted. The information that we were able to provide was not information that manufacturers had readily published, but it was information that customers needed, so we found it, organized it, and made it accessible.

In general, website organization was critical. There are many water filter websites out there today that copy our content. To an extent, they have to be carefully for legal reasons. The competitive edge that we have is that we stand up for that content and we continually improve that content.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 100 Percent Bootstrapped 10 Million Dollar E-Commerce Company: WaterFilters.Net CEO Jamin Arvig
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