Today’s post is an interview with Ling Valentine, she was the 2006 North East Entrepreneur of the year and owns and runs the super successful website LINGsCARS.

Ling became a legend when she pitched for investment on Dragons Den and famously turned down 2 different offers from the Dragons, you can see a video of her pitch over on the Dragons’ Den site which includes the classic line “Chinese eats dragons for breakfast”.

Like herself, Ling’s website and blog are exceedingly unique and it proves that if you have the passion and give your customers what they want with excellent service that you can succeed. So without further ado here’s what Ling had to share with us.

1/ Can you give us specifics as to the traffic you generated through your website through being on BBC2 Dragons Den especially on the night it was aired.

On the Dragons’ Den night – 14th Feb 2006, after the first minute of the programme, my website activity went mental. I use “WhosOn” (www.whoson.com – fantastic British software) to monitor LINGsCARS.com and live visitors went up to over 550 concurrent. The “clicks” of arriving visitors sounded like a machine-gun! My server was disk-swapping like hell. At one stage the server that monitors the live visitors crashed, too, it was overloaded. On that first night, I had over 5000 unique visitors (between 8pm and midnight). The next day, I had over 10,000 visitors. This volume settled to a doubling of pre-DD levels and has stayed pretty constant since then. All the Google links and stories posted on the web about me helped enormously, of course. I’m always surprised that many other businesses on Dragons’ Den don’t have a website to promote to give instant gratification to the 2m TV viewers.

***if you want technical*** My webserver is an AMD-powered unix dedicated server and runs 4GB of RAM. LINGsCARS is programmed mainly in php and ajax and runs a MySQL database.

2/ You used to sell over £1 million worth of cars a month, can you tell us how much car sales you managed to achieve in 2007 and your targets for ‘08?

In 2006, I was selling just over £1m of new cars a month, at retail prices. My turnover in 2006 was £125,000 which is finance commission income. In 2007, I have moved over £28m of new cars (£2.3m per month), my commission income reaching over £280,000 (£282,986 to be precise). I am targeting over £40m of new car sales in 2008, to generate a gross income of over £400,000. This seems steep, but I think I can achieve it. Matter of fact, £1m of income would be possible but I am not brave enough to gamble on that much marketing. Plus, I have to cope with the work I generate. I have moved into my new office I bought – “LINGsCARS World Headquarters”. I am planning TV advertising later this year.

3/ You say the website should be an extension of yourself, do you till update the site yourself or have you managed to delegate and let others take more responsibility, do you still change your website everyday?

I do live inside my website. I am constantly updating it; I really enjoy to do this. Most of my time is spent modifying or changing and adding cars and prices. I also spend a lot of time monitoring who is visiting the site, using “Who’s On”. For instance, as I type this I can see 30 visitors online, 16 from random Google searches (not AdWords). Often I spend 30 minutes just watching customers navigate around LINGsCARS. I do my best to add some customer letters every day, add news articles and every week I modify at least one form. I employ two part-time IT students from Sunderland University and pay them very good money and feed them free doughnuts. We work on long-term projects such as a customer management side to the website, as well as new features, fun stuff and operational improvements. I have developed 9 extra videos to accompany emails at various stages of my sales process. This means I can take a more hands-off approach, yet customers get “Lingged” more than they ever did before.

4/ Your website is something on the busy side, is this intentional and do you think it may confuse some of your visitors?

Yes, it’s intentional. In this World, you generally have just one chance to grab a visitor, and I try to do this by being different. Often visitors can spend a whole hour inside my site. I try to engage with them emotionally instead of the standard about>contact us>home>order approach most companies use. My professionalism is in my service to the customers, but my shop (my website) is as unique in my industry as I can make it. I give customers so much information, treat them like adults not idiots, and allow them to pick and choose what they need. It may confuse some people, but most customers are ABC123 and are quite intelligent enough to find their way around. Most other car sites seem to want to bore people to death instead of entertaining them. Google also seems to like my approach.

5/ Do you feel your blog helps greatly with traffic flow and sales of cars through to the main part of your website?

Yes. My blog is mainly auto-updated from my customer letters and my added car deals. Google loves to index it, of course it pings out every time it updates. As well as the blog, a great tool is the live chat. I have dozens of live chats with website visitors each day and have webcams in my office during office hours. I simply try to give the best experience to any website visitor. I can’t work miracles, I’m Chinese – not Catholic; but customers can see I am doing my best for them.

6/ You are something of a master at offline marketing and promotion can you give us some examples of your must successful offline marketing campaigns?

Well, they all have an online side to them, my whole purpose is to attract the maximum number of intelligent, credit worthy users to my website.

I have my nuclear missile truck which brings in loads of visits every time I park it next to a motorway. Unfortunately the town planners don’t like that rocket. Also, I make movies of everything I get up to. I have over 140,000 views of my movies on You Tube. These include my rescue” of Northern Rock, my adventures sponsoring UK Rallycross and photo-shoot for the Financial Times. I offer “free lunch” for 10 visitors every day, and post out “FUKU” brand noodles and Chinese coffee.

7/ You’ve made a fantastic success with Lings Cars, do you have any other business ideas and plans for the future?

I would like to start another business, but LINGsCARS takes up all my time. I am really not even scratching the surface; I market to the whole of the UK. This way of financing cars is so popular in America, it takes over 20% of the market. In the UK it takes less than 1%, so you can see the potential.

I would encourage anyone to have a go at running a business website, it can be lots of fun. As long as you get loads of visitors, that’s the key. I would advise to talk to customers in personal terms, for example to show them who is behind the website and manage email enquiries in double-fast time. In the motor industry (for example) email replies can take between 24-48 hours, that’s not unusual. I speed that up to 24 minutes at the outside. Often I grab customers when they are still logged into to Outlook and they commit after a few ping-pong questions. It’s all common sense really, but very few other businesses in my business sector take the web seriously. Go for it!

Thank you very much Ling for taking the time to share your answer with our us and our readers, we all wish you every success for the future. If you would like to ask Ling any other questions check out Lings Cars and feel free to drop her a question via a comment.