I need a way to stay on top of all my websites and continue to move my business forward without getting overwhelmed.
Project 10 is my solution to this problem.
June 2013 was a record breaking month for me. I received 16,082 visits to my 9 websites and I had 1,184 podcast downloads.
However, with 9 websites all needing work and improvement I often find myself overwhelmed. I spend more time checking stats and thinking about my websites than I do working on them and improving them.
Thanks Seth Godin
I was listening this Good Life Project episode with Seth Godin and Seth talked about “Projects”.
Seth doesn’t have employees, but he will often come together with people on projects. Just like the movie industry will bring people together for a project, and then they will all go their separate ways.
Seth’s simple comment about projects made me start to think differently about the way I manage my websites. The idea for project 10 didn’t come instantly. It came weeks after I first listened to this inspiring podcast.
Set and Forget
My issue is overwhelm. I have 1,000 things I want to do to improve each of my sites, and I have the goal of creating 20 profitable niche sites in 2013. I needed a way to set and forget
Looking at past experiences I could see that I am very successful at building small niche sites that have great content and get a lot of traffic. I have one niche site that was getting around 5,000 views per month with just 5 pages of traffic and making over $60/month.
One of the things that I have found worked well was creating stellar content (1,000+ words) and then also creating a YouTube video about that content. I link to the blog post in the YouTube video and then embed the YouTube video on my blog.
This seems to work well with Google and allowed a new niche site of mine to receive 530 visits and make over $35 in it’s first month of existence.
Introducing Project 10
Project 10 is designed to keep me focused on one project at a time. The goal is to have each project be clearly defined so I know when one project stops and the next project begins
Project 10 requires these actions:
1. Create 10 blog posts/articles and post them to a website
2. Create 10 associated YouTube videos. Link to the relevant blog post in the description and embed on the relevant blog post.
3. Move on to next project
I will mostly be using project 10 to create new websites and then let them sit and grow organically over time. However, I can add to an existing website using the project 10 approach.
For existing websites I will commit to creating 10 articles and videos (just like new websites). The only difference is I will be adding these to the existing website, not putting them on a new website.
FIRSTLY
Firstly I need to update my existing blogs to be in line with project 10 standards.
Some of my existing blogs don’t have 10 blog posts, or they don’t have 10 videos. I will commit to fixing these first and I will then move on to my new websites.
When a project is finished I will stop focusing on it. That means I won’t check stats as often for this project and I won’t be working on it or thinking about it.
When each project is finished I will look at all possible projects and choose the best project to move forward on.
Hopefully Project 10 will help to keep me focused and growing. I also hope it will help me to reduce my overwhelm.