THROUGH THE FALL and into winter, Lucina fell in line with Ivan’s small cow party idea, making two to five thousand dollars off each event they partnered in to promote. Using his model of consistency, the small parties added up to an average of twelve thousand dollars a week. As Ivan had planned, a few of the other small promoters of San Diego agreed to use IDPromotions.com to increase the awareness and traffic at their events.

The consistent party activity also increased the popularity of the website. But despite the immense traffic, Ivan’s ad manager, Eddie K., still found that many businesses were hesitant to advertise on the site. So Eddie applied the idea of using printout coupons for website viewers to receive 10 percent discounts on selected items bought from the advertising businesses. His plan was to prove the site’s traffic value to the advertisers. However, the price tag was steep, a 25 percent discount off of the website ad price.

At first, Ivan balked. “Damn, twenty-five percent? Why not just match their ten percent?”

Eddie K. explained, “With some of the higher-end retailers, our website costs are not high enough yet to do that. Our ten percent discount wouldn’t be worth the value of a ten percent discount at their stores. At least not right now. But at twenty-five percent it works.”

He said, “What I’ve done is basically swapped the discounts you were trying to give to frequent advertisers, and instead, we use the coupon so we can encourage viewers to utilize the site for retail action. Because if a business can see that an extra two hundred people are walking into their stores each month to buy something because of the coupons on our website, then obviously it makes sense for them to continue to advertise with us.”

Ivan agreed with the philosophy and loved the idea. He said, “That’s why it’s good business to hire the right people.”

Eddie chuckled and said, “You betcha.”

By the end of the year, the discount coupon idea had caught on to help the sales team to pull in thirty advertisers from general retail, restaurants, party promotion, community events, San Diego sights and travel, specialized services, and general branding, producing nearly thirty-five thousand dollars a month in revenue, of which Ivan netted thirteen thousand.

Since the initial ad rates were based on eight thousand unique hits per day and forty thousand daily impressions of visited pages, the end-of-year numbers of ten thousand unique hits and eighty thousand daily impressions of visited pages would allow them to increase their rates another 25 percent in the next quarter.