As I explained yesterday, below is the detailed plan that I will follow this year in order to build an Authority Blog. In reality, it’s a very simple plan but I wouldn’t have been able to put it together if it wasn’t by all the things that I’ve learned from a lot of people across the 5 years that I’ve been trying to build a business online, specially from Ed Dale and Jack Humphrey.
These two guys are the only ones that have really opened my eyes and have taught me the whole picture of the Internet Business, Ed showed me the whole process via the 30 Day Challenge and Jack Humphrey taught me what Web 2.0 and Social Marketing is. Without a mentor and without a formal education in Internet Marketing, it is really easy to get lost and fall into the traps of scams and people that only want to take your money away, so if you want to start a business online, these are the 2 guys that I recommend the most.
The whole picture First
As I had said in other posts, I’m the kind of guy that always have a ton of ideas in the head and ALWAYS tend to get distracted with something, so I laid out a plan that allow me to focus on very specific aspects of the business at a time. Also because it is so easy and cheap to start a business anytime, it is also very easy to abandon them or fall into the trap of building another one from scratch. So this time, I’m gonna stick to ONLY ONE project for a whole year.
Here is the plan: (click to enlarge)
I won’t explain the tasks of each phase on this post, but the general idea is to first pickup a Niche Market that I feel comfortable participating in. Then on Phase II, once I have identified the keywords that best describe the niche, I plan to spend at least 6 months, focused only on getting the keywords ranked in order to get search engine traffic. On Phase III, at around the 7th month (July), I plan to play a little bit trying to pull traffic from Google Adwords. As I learned on the 30 Day Challenge, once Google trusts your site, it tends to give you a better price on the Cost-per-click. While I work on getting Search Engine traffics, I will only try to make revenue out of Affiliate products.
The interesting part, comes at around September and October, because by that time, I should already have a good knowledge of the market needs so I will do an information product I can sell to them and then during the last 2 months of the year, I plan to develop the “back-end” process by building a mailing list and try to sell even more of my own products to them.
Other thing to note here, is that at the same time, I’ll go through all the phases, I need to keep participating in forums, blogs, and other authoritative sites that my target market visits, so I can get a feel of their needs and finally I can develop a product they would likely buy.
So nothing fancy as you can see, plain simple and with a long term vision. At the end of the year, I’ll have to assess whether I keep the site or not. At the very least, even if I fail to develop and sell my own product, I should be able to endup with a high traffic site with good rankings on the Search Engines and that should be enough to sell the site for a good chunk of money. Last year, in May 2008, I sold a 3 month old website with almost no traffic for $220 dollars so just imagine what I could end-up selling this site in case I no longer want to keep it.
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Thanks for the mention and good luck on your plan!