Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

My online business ingredients

#1 – Massive Value

#2 – Social Sharing/Creating Connections

#3 – Projects

#4 – Scale

I’m ok at #1

Just getting started with #2 and #3 and have no idea how to tackle #4

Goal for 2013: Create 20 Niche Websites and make them profitable

I have to thank Mark Mason over at Late Night Internet Marketing. I stole this goal directly from him.

Progress:

Sites Created: 2/20
Niches Identified and Domains Bought: 3/20

Good news is my first sites are getting traffic and is profitable!

Site #1 (public speaking niche) – Brought in about $30 this month

Site #2 (personal development niche) – Brought in $35 in it’s first month!

Not a bad start.

Currently I am setting up a niche website default template. This contains
– WordPress installation
– 17 different plugins configured with my preferences
– 6 default pages (Contact, Archives, Privacy Policy, Home, Blog, About)
– Intellitheme installed and adsense configured

So far I have spent 2.5 hours setting this up and only have adsense configuration left to do (1-2 hours).

I will then be able to save this template and use WordPress Duplicator to clone this template for all new sites.

Then next step will be content. Do I create it myself or pay to get it done?

In the one of the latest Empire Flippers Podcast they coined a phrase for websites called “The Mendoza Line”.

It is a phrase taken from baseball. Mendoza was a short stop who consistently failed at the plate. Always hitting just under .200

“The Mendoza Line” was used as a benchmark at which a player was not worth hiring for the major leagues despite his defensive skills.

For Niche sites the boys at Empire Flippers stated that a website really needs to have at least 40 posts before it crosses that Mendoza line.

I am going to take this concept and run with it for my latest niche site on public speaking.

My goal is to attain 40 posts as quickly as possible. I am using James Shramko’s “Own The Racecourse” method to create content quickly by making videos and having them transcribed.

My Step By Step Process

1. Make a video and upload to YouTube
2. Extract MP3 from the video
3. Create blog post with video and MP3 podcast in it and hit publish
4. Get a transcription done using Koemei
5. Paste in the 85% accurate transcription
6. Hit update
7. Go back into the blog post and edit the transcription making it a more valuable article (and so it actually makes sense)

My Focus
So my focus right now is to quickly create 40 videos for my public speaking blog. Then I will be aiming to make another 40 videos on one of my other niche sites which is already getting good traffic.

I am loving the Mendoza line concept. It is really giving me a benchmark to work with and work towards

When you work in a Fortune 500 company with over 22,000 employees worldwide and receive many blanket emails from a “do not reply” address one starts to wonder…

“What would happen if I emailed the CEO of My Company?”

Possible answers:
– Caught in a spam filter
– Deleted by her assistant
– Get a reply from someone on her behalf
– Nothing

This is what happens when you poke the box:

– Employee emails CEO, makes sure email is fairly generic (albeit true) as to avoid getting fired. Just a nice email about how I love the company and find it inspiring
– CEO of entire company emails the MD of Australia asking who is this person that emailed me?
– MD and Head of Sales reply to CEO about this stated person giving (probably) positive reviews
– Story is funny because who has the audacity to email the CEO? Thus a few people find out (I may have told them)
– (Hopefully) no harm done

But wait…

After all that no reply?

{sad face}

Yesterday I wrote that I felt completely stuck. Well in less than 24 hours I have a new idea again and I am completely unstuck.

My problem was that I started with a product I was passionate about. However, it wasn’t right for the market. After 3 “pivots” I feel like a found a product that was right for the market but a product that was 100% wrong for me.

The product wasn’t scalable and it was a service where I would directly be exchanging time for money. It could work well at scale, but I currently don’t have the scale to make it work.

The Product Pivot

The result was a complete pivot away from providing a property finding service (one time fee) to an educational membership site (subscription fee).

I already had this product partially created as I had planned to launch a membership site around 18 months ago but decided against it. So I have launched it as an MVP as is, no extra work required.

Sales pages are up and as soon as I get my first paying customer I will begin frantically working on the product to make it something that I can be proud of.

The Initial Launch

Initial customers are getting it for ridiculously cheap (just $5/month) compared to what I eventually want to charge ($39-$99/month).

The goal is to get some early adopters into the membership site and then craft the extra features of the site based off their feedback and what they want. Eventually improving the product and raising the prices for new members.

No Testing Required
I didn’t test my third product because I knew within 12 hours I wasn’t passionate about it at all. So it was simply live on my website for about 12 hours and then I replaced it with my new offering (which I am testing).

This post is inspired by empire flippers.

Over time I have come to realize that ideas mean very little when building an empire. Ideas are in abundance, execution however is extremely hard to do.

Little did I know a “great idea” I had about 3 years ago will lead me to a new way of thinking about building an empire.

About 3 years ago I had a great idea, to provide a monthly service to potential property investors looking to find and buy positive cash flow property.

I created a sales page and began to market it using Google Adwords. Wanting more traffic to test my idea (and not having enough money) I looked to find free ways to generate traffic. I commented heavily on a property forum and started writing blog posts the get organic traffic from google.

The idea proved to be plausible but with a 9-5 job and a family to feed I didn’t have the time to pursue it (or the guts). Over the next 3 years I slowly added bits of content and eventually added advertising to the site to make a bit of money. I also started up a couple of other sites on the side also but did very little with them.

In 2012 I started investing some of the advertising money back into creating more content. The traffic to the site grew with little to no extra effort and in February 2013 I had a great month and decided to turn this into something more.

My new business model begins
In February 2013 I had 2 niche websites that were performing quite well in terms of traffic

CashFlowInvestor – The site mentioned above was generating enough traffic to get a check from Google every 2-3 months which I could use to pay for more content for the site.

TiredandSleepy – Was climbing the rankings in Google and despite traffic being triple what it was in January I didn’t even make enough money to cover my yearly domain name costs

The Insight
Here were two sites both delivering traffic. One generated money and one didn’t.

It occurred to me that the two markets were very different and one website had the potential to become great over time and the other would simply generate little to no income.

The Empire Building Model

1. Find a profitable market and get them to your website

I choose a topic that I want to go after (testing keywords in Google’s keyword tool) and create a niche website (5-10 articles) with really awesome content. I write the content myself.

…then I wait (6-12 months)

2. Reinvest profits or shut up shop

If the website starts generating traffic I can then see how much money it is making. If it makes money I reinvest the money into more content for the website which should grow the traffic even more.

If it doesn’t make any money (like TiredandSleepy which has traffic but no income) I just let it sit and die when the domain name expires.

3. Find products for your readers

Over time I get to build up a good base of web traffic from Google that is mostly passive.

I can then begin creating products for this market and testing them by letting my readers know about them and see if they buy the products. If they don’t like the product then try another idea for the same market.

Worst case scenario is I never find a suitable product for them. Even if this happens I am still making a good enough return from advertising to keep growing the content and the income that the site generates.

In Summary

My strategy is:

1. Test a market and find potential customers
2. Get them coming to me passively with no ongoing costs
3. Continually test ideas on this market until I find something that sticks.

How much content would it take to earn $5,000/month? It really depends on the site.

I have a website where each blog post makes about $1.50/month.

To make $5,000 I would need to have 3,333 articles on the site (currently I have less than 100).

If I wrote 3 articles/day everyday for a year I would write 1,095 articles per year.

At this rate it would take me 3 years to write enough articles to make $5,000/month.

So currently I am writing about 2 articles per week. At this rate it would take me 32 years to write enough articles to make the targeted $5,000/month.

The moral of the story: Slowly but surely, better to take 32 years to achieve your dream than spend 32 years and end up in the same position you are today.

Recently I tested a new service on one of my websites. I released a paid BETA version to my email subscribers and had a low but acceptable conversion rate (1% conversion from free subscriber into paying customer).

I then put an adjusted service offering on my website and just let it sit there. In 20 days I have just over 100 pageviews and a total of 0 sales.

The basic premise has merit (I proved this in the beta launch) but the service offering needs some tweaking.

My problem is this: I don’t want to wait 20 days to find out if it is working or not. I want faster batch cycles because I want to get something of value up as quickly as possible so I can grow the website.

My solution – I took the sales page from simply being one page on my website (getting about 150 pageviews per month) and I added it to my home page also (700 pageviews per month).

This should give me about 850 pageviews for the month and should only take 4 days to get the 100 pageviews it previously took me 20 days to get.

I have now cut my batch time down by a multiple of 5! Or increased my data set by a multiple of 5 allowing me to make more intelligent decisions.

Now it’s time to just wait for the results or see if I need to change tact again.

What I like about this website is that I have readers (potential customers) constantly coming to the site without me having to do anything. What I can focus on now is making products for my customers…instead of trying to find customers for my products.

Love it

I have thousands of good, maybe even great, ideas.

I have zero hours to execute on them.

Ideas are the easy part for me.

Turning them into something worthwhile is my weakness.

Time to narrow 1,000 ideas down to 1 or 2. Then maybe I can find a small fraction of time to create some progress.