A journey from Internet marketing stasis to business mastery and financial freedom (I hope)

… They’re a bit tough to start off with, but as you chew on them for a while, they soften up and begin to stick. Then after some time, they get a bit old and manky and you have to throw them in the bin!

And so it is with my business plans.

I’ve tried so many things, I don’t know whether I’m currently on Plan E, H or Q. So I’m going to start from scratch and outline my new Business Plans A, B and C.

Plan A
Here’s where I continue what I’m doing with my software business. Now I don’t know whether it’s the current economic climate, increasing competition or other factors but sales are not what they should be and I wonder about the future of this business. I think it has great potential but it’s a struggle and requires huge effort for relatively poor reward.

Plan B
This is where I finally decide once and for all to get into the Information Publishing business properly instead of just dabbling and thinking about it. A low-cost entry opportunity has come up and I want to really go for it. I’ll tell you exactly what it is in a moment but when I do, please hold back from yelling out “sucker!” at your screen. Think it by all means, just try not to let it out loud .

Plan C
Now Plan C is really an extension of Plan B and here’s where I get really serious about the whole thing. I don’t want to reveal exactly what this is right now but it involves a day of training and ongoing mentoring to help me started and make it all happen. Yeah, I’ll be surprised if I learn anything truly new on the day but I really think the mentoring will give me that extra kick to make sure I get on with what needs to be done. It’s expensive though. Only time will tell if it’s worth it.

So, what’s “Plan B” all about?

Well, it’s about a little trip to Brighton at the end of the month to Andrew Reynold’s latest 3-day Entrepreneur’s Bootcamp (hey, I heard you – I said keep it to yourself).

So Andrew’s at it again, doing what he does best; organising big marketing events and pulling in top speakers from all over the globe.

Now I’ve been to enough of these things to know what to expect. It’s going to be a pitch-fest. No doubt about that!

Sure, there will be some nuggets of great information given out by the speakers, but no single, coherent plan to follow. And all of the speakers are there for one reason only – to sell their products, courses or mentoring programmes. Why else would they do it?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re in business to make money and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to appear purely out of the kindness of their hearts. I just want to point out that whatever people think the event is about, it might not be quite what they expect.

So why am I going?

Two reasons:

(1) It’s for charity. The meagre £149 entrance fee is going straight to The Make A Wish Foundation which is a fantastic charity. I’m sure AR will make plenty of money from the JV deals he’s surely made with the speakers, plus the DVD sales later on, but he should be applauded for putting up all the initial event costs and raising so much money for such worthy causes. And I want to support that.

(2) This time, he’s thrown in some resale licenses for physical products (CDs/DVDs). Now apart from not being in “make money” markets, we have no idea what these are and how many there are.

And I’m not stupid (well, not very stupid anyway). I know there’ll be about 3000 other punters, all being given the same licenses. But if there’s a reasonable number of different product licenses (say 5) and only 10% of punters (at best) do anything with them, the numbers start to look a bit better.

I figure that if Andrew truly believes that decent money can be made with these product licenses then there’s every reason to believe that I should be able to make money with them, so long as I take immediate action.

So that’s the plan. Go to the event, pick up the licenses, try to figure out what the markets are and how to best approach them, pick my 2 favourites, make contacts to get the ball rolling and maybe look for supporting back-end products too.

Let’s see if I can really make this work the way we’ve been ‘promised’ it can.

Then again, there’s always Plan C…

In some eariler posts, I talked about starting project Mercury as a hobby that can evolve into a business. I think there’s a big difference in the approach when doing this compared to taking an arbitrary niche topic (of little interest) and trying to build an instant business that can bring in the readies as soon as possible.

For one thing, the gradual approach will allow me to slowly build momentum with highly personalised and unique, high quality content that the search engines love so much. It will also allow me to feel my way through the topic, discover what people (potential customers) will be interested to know about and form friendships with like-minded people (potential partners).

Having said that, I have enough ideas about marketing and the longer-term view of the business side of things to know that if I set it up right from the start then things will be a lot easier later on.

In good-old Internet Marketing tradition, I won’t reveal exactly what my topic is (yet) but instead will use the generic “Sausage Making” niche that worked so well during the 30-day challenge.

So I can immediately see the following long-term objectives, though there will be others:

• A personal Sausage Making project blog
• Articles about various aspects of Sausage Making
• Information products including e-books, videos and audios
• Physical information products along the same lines
• Reviews of Sausage Making products
• The sale of Sausage Making products either directly or through affiliation
• A discussion forum for Sausage Makers
• The creation of a Sausage Makers club with local group meetings
• Provision of other Sausage Making resources

If you have followed Internet Marketing for any length of time then, perhaps with a few exceptions, all of these will be fairly familiar to you as ways to build a Sausage Making “Virtual Real Estate (VRE) Empire”. But because this is a topic that I’m extremely interested in, my goal is to take it slowly and make it the best it can possibly be, and with my own spin on things.

My step-by-step plan is currently this:

1. Choose, register and get hosting for 2 domains: 1 for the blog and one for a resource site. I could use just 1 but I want the blog site to be just about my Sausage Making project with the resource site being more generic. There might also be search engine advantages to splitting them (as long as they’re on different hosts or IP addresses) but that’s a secondary concern.

2. Investigate and choose a good Content Management System (CMS) for the resource site. As I progress with my own project, I will discover information that I will want to turn into articles or references, even just for my own purposes. I could slap these up as simple Web pages but, long-term, I know I will need a better way of managing them and I don’t want to suddenly find myself having to convert what I’ve already created. I also want it to be as quick and easy to add content to the site from anywhere to save myself effort but also allow others to add content later on.

3. Set up the blog with a suitable template and customise it as necessary, probably adding AdSense blocks (though I might save those until later).

4. Start my own Sausage Making project and, at the same time, report on my progress through the blog.

5. As I work on the project I will keep a detailed log in addition to the blog (possibly on paper) and record videos and still images of progress. These will later be used for resources and to form the basis of information products. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that the project is not something that can be put together in a week. It may take a year or more so I’m really in this for the long haul.

6. Slowly build up the resources site and as the content reaches a reasonable level, turn it into a free membership site. This will allow me to start building a prospects list but it can also have the effect of making the site users feel more special, particularly if what they’re joining is called a “club”. It’s tempting to set this up from the start but I don’t think it will work without a certain level of content. Even a free membership site has to offer a compelling reason to sign up.

I could go on but that’s plenty to be getting on with and I don’t want to plan too far ahead because a lot will depend on what happens along the way.

Income is not the goal at this stage though I expect to make a small trickle through AdSense and perhaps a few affiliate product links. Instead, the aim will be to build a community of Sausage Makers that can add to the content and provide a ready market for later plans. This may sound a little under hand but it’s not. I think it’s fair to make money from people if you’re offering them things they desperately want to buy.

So there you have it. Basic plans for a small niche business.