Your next amazing idea doesn’t need to be a big project with a ton of investment. Sometimes people jump directly to the website building part of their next big venture, when really that’s more like a mid-point. You can build an amazing website that costs thousands of dollars and looks pretty, but if it doesn’t attract any users or doesn’t convert, you’ve wasted your time and money.

Have a plan.

People skip the planning stage too often. It’s hard work and they don’t want to do it. They just want to jump right in. A plan doesn’t need to be some 30 page business plan, but it should fill a certain amount of criteria. It also doesn’t have to be that detailed. It should answer the 5WH criteria at least:

• Who is my target market? Figuring out your target market can be hard sometimes. I can’t believe how many people I talk to who say their target market is ‘everyone.’ It’s never ‘everyone.’ If you’re working on a non-profit website and looking for donors, your market is probably people with above-average income in your local area. If you’re looking to sell houses, it’s probably recently married women. Know your product’s market. It will save you a ton of time in the long run, because you can build and test accordingly.
• What are my goals? If you don’t know your goals out of the gate, you won’t be focused. Every decision you make for your project needs to work towards those goals. Many people say they need to be clear cut and finite. I disagree. A goal can be as simple as: create awareness. Don’t get me wrong, finite goals make it easier to convey you vision if multiple people are involved, because there is a finish line.
• When do we cut our losses? This is really important. You need to set a negative option goal for yourself to have a clear cut idea of when to get out. If you don’t you can potentially waste a ton of time and energy on a project because you’re passionate about it. Know when to cut your losses and stick to your plan if things don’t work out. Unlike goals, this is where you NEED to be specific. For example: if I don’t make more than $1,000 per month in 6 months, we’re pulling the plug.
• Where can this project benefit other projects? Cross pollination of projects is essential at creating efficiency in your life. There is no such thing as separating different jobs or home and work. You’ll always be thinking about something work related at home and vice versa. Embrace that and make sure that when you’re creating efficiencies, that you’re taking all facets of your life into account. If you’re working on a blog project on Monday and a shopping cart project Wednesday, but both need mailing list software, why not use a package that benefits both? Always have efficiencies of scale in mind.
• Why am I doing this? This should be an easy question, but it’s answer should always point in the direction of your life goals. This will be your motivation.
• How will I fuel this project (time, money, passions, etc.)? This is really where you decide IF you can do something. You need to make sure that you have the TIME and MONEY to venture into something. If you don’t it will probably fail. Don’t stretch yourself too thin either. I’m guilty of that quite often. Make sure you can scale your projects adequately.

Test your market before you go big. Grow incrementally.

Before you invest a ton of resources in a project, test it out on a small scale. If you’re trying to sell things in a shopping cart, just go with the default template for a few weeks before you pay $5,000 for a custom template. Unless what you’re doing is based around a custom designed functionality and is completely new to the market, you should be able to test things cheap.

This also applies to things like pay per click (PPC) campaigns, list building campaigns, blogging, the service industry, and a slew of other things.

I started a similar project with my hosting business. We started with a desktop machine in my basement and were able to grow it incrementally until we had a cluster of servers co-located with Rackspace. You should be able to do the same with whatever venture you’re thinking of working on.

Build features and content. Design can come later.

People on the Internet are trying to scratch an itch. They’re looking to buy something or consume content. For the most part, people don’t care about the design of a site if the content and features are rich and useful.

Don’t get me wrong; building a website that looks nice will help people convert too, but he general idea is that they’re looking for products and services before they’re looking for a ‘pretty’ site. When trying to decide whether to spend $1000 on a logo or additional search features, consider which one your users will appreciate more.

I prefer to build projects that run themselves first and then make them look pretty later. I prefer to make my income as passive as possible. That usually means drop shipping product and automating the process of purchase orders between your cart and vendors, and sometimes that means hiring out portions of the work to a third party.

If your redesign looks better than the original, launch it.

All too often, I’m working on a redesign for a customer that is light years better than their original website before it’s done.  That happens in the first third of the project.  If they don’t observe this rule, the other two thirds of the project can be spent knit picking at the details – delaying the launch.  That’s really tragic when you launch the website and do A/B testing and remove all of the little changes they added anyways.  Just because a design isn’t perfect, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use it right now.

In this same vein, but a little off topic: if you are doing a redesign, don’t add functionality at the same time.  It can be confusing and time consuming.  Do your feature adds at a different time than your design change.  It makes the whole project much less convoluted.

Look at the big picture and go.

Once you’ve built a functional website and then moved on to design, start saving your resources for the next big (but incremental upgrade), but only if it fits the big picture of what you’re trying to do. You don’t need to build a million dollar website out of the gate. There are a ton of websites out there that just grew with their user base. Some of them still have horrible designs too. Look at Craig’s List. It looks horrible, but gets the job done. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, and a ton of the other big ones didn’t start big, but that’s where they are now.

What are your thoughts?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: The Smart Way to Start a Project

Building content for a new blog can be extremely formulaic.  I find it’s actually easiest to get the first ten to fifteen articles built before writing starts to get more challenging.  That’s because after you write the first set of articles, you need to start getting creative.  I’m going to give you a blueprint for building those initial articles and we’ll cover on-going content in a later post.

Creating the Initial Content

This really depends a lot on your niche, but I’ll try to give you the building blocks for building that initial push towards bringing your blog online.  The core step to launching your blog is building the initial content.  I say ‘building’ instead of writing, because this is extremely formulaic in nature.  The goal is to create ten articles to cover your first month of content release, so you don’t want to throw all of your knowledge into one article.  Always hold back a little bit of information to give them later.  That will keep them coming back AND give you material for later.  Also make sure your posts are not more than 700 words.  People tend to get bored if they’re much longer than that.  If you have a post that is over that, consider breaking it into multiple postings.

There are a few different types of niche.  Most notably, those types are: products and services, skills, ideas and opinions, or some combination of those.  For instance, some niche ideas that fit those categories are: left handed golf clubs (product), building a tree house (skill), or Buddhism (idea/opinion).

• Article 1: Introduce the niche in it’s most basic form.  This is a building block post.  It brings everyone to the same level, and be linked back to for reference if questions come up about what you’re talking about.  You can also use this post to create an outline of your next nine posts.
• Article 2: Showcase the different brands of the product / sides of the argument or idea / how different skills can be approached.  Basically this is a breakdown of the different factions of a niche.  Many products have different sub-products/brands/etc.  Many skills have different ways of approaching a problem, and many ideas or opinions have multiple sides.
• Article 3: Talk about yourself.  Explain why you’re an authority on the niche.  Give quotes from other authorities on the niche.  Don’t skimp on the social proof and details.
• Article 4 – 7: Give a tutorials on ‘how to’ do something relevant to your niche.  This could be something like: ‘How to line up for a left handed golf swing’, ‘do simple double column accounting’, or ‘raise money for your next political campaign’.  These ‘How to’ articles are the core of your posts and will keep people interested and coming back to your blog.  In a specific niche – say ‘Left Handed Golfing’, three ‘how to’ posts might be: ‘How to select your first set of clubs’, ‘Lining up your first drive’, and ‘chipping with accuracy’.
• Article 8: Do another – more detailed post about yourself.  Case studies work great.  If you’re doing a case study, pick a specific event which proved your authority in this niche.  When you give specific details, be sure to reference the most impressive connections to other authorities in your niche, so your audience relates you to them.
• Article 9: Do a top X list post.  This could be: ‘Top 13 golf club brands’, ‘Top 7 accounting packages’, ‘Top 11 reasons to us a mac over a pc’, or ‘top 3 video games of the year’.  Notice I didn’t use ‘top ten’.  That’s because that is over used.  People are drawn to other numbers than ten, because top ten posts have been over done.
• Article 10: Do a review post, reviewing the key points of your previous nine posts.  Write a paragraph on each post, giving additional insight to what you originally said, while linking back to other relevant articles.

Once you have your articles written, you can launch them in one of two ways.  You can do a retroactive launch where you set their ‘Publish date’ to dates in the past, or do an active launch where you set them to dates in the future.

Retroactive launches make your blog seem like it’s been around longer, building trust, but require that you do this initial process twice, because you’ll immediately need to pump out new content to keep people interested.  If you have the extra time, this builds trust faster, and will lead to a faster influx of returning visitors.

If you actively post your information, your blog will be almost empty when you first start, not giving people much information to go on.  This doesn’t build trust, but takes about half as much work.  By the time you’ve reached the end of your article pool, people would have been along for the ride for almost a month by now.  This means that your work to traffic ratio will be much higher.

I prefer the first method of producing twice as many articles and retroactively posting, while scheduling the other half to release slowly over the next four weeks.  What do you think the best method to building that first wave of content for your blog is?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: How to Build Content for a New Blog

Stay focused and have a backup plan.

During the last three weeks, I’ve been going to trade shows, getting sick, and having family issues. On top of all of that, I started two additional business ventures, and started dumping more time into an existing one I was already working on that. Needless to say, my time has been limited and I’ve been slacking on posting to my case study blog, as well as this one.

Commitment

Ongoing, but 4 hours to get started.

Set up the safety net.

Make sure you have a backup plan for when life just gets a hold of you. Try to have a two to three week article buffer on your blog so that people don’t think you’ve dropped off the face of the planet. Remember to have those posts already written and scheduled to go. If something more timely comes up, you can always change the date the post will launch.

Make sure you stay focused. Adding two new projects to my workload derailed my progress train on the other blog. That means that my attention is split and one of the projects is getting the short straw. Be sure not to dip into too many projects at a time, or you may ultimately make all of them fail.

Guest Posts

If you’ve started gaining some traction with your blog and want help building out your content, guest posts are an excellent way to get that extra little bit of content to give you that safety net you’re looking for. If you know you’re going to be away from the blog for a while, consider setting up a system for guest posters to submit articles to you for the long haul of that absence. I picked up the idea from an experiment that Josh is doing over that The Worlds Strongest Librarian.

He solicited guest posts from his readers and they’re going to support his site for him while he works on the macro-issues of dealing with the site. It’s a great plan and I really hope it works out for him. Maybe you’ll see a post or two from me over there too. I’m pretty excited about it.

Problems I Had Last Week

I’ve already kind of told you what my big issues were. That was the point of this post. Life can hit you when you least expect it. I had a death in the family which pulled me away from writing for almost a whole week. After that, I went to Affiliate Summit and immediately came back sick. I’m guessing I got sick from shaking hands with so many people. That brings up another completely unrelated point: use hand sanitizer when you’re at conferences. The little hassle of doing it will make you much more productive in the long run.

Remember: if you get behind, you have to do all of your current work, plus the stuff that you’re behind on. It’s better to get ahead when you have extra time than mortgage today’s time against your productivity tomorrow. It’s much less stressful that way.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 5

Get social.

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your blog, it’s time to get engaged.  You have great content and you’re tracking your visitors. Now you need to get out to the community and interact. If you’re focusing on the gaming niche, do things like hit up gaming forums and talk about the games you’re playing. Don’t blatantly advertise your blog. Just put it in your signature. People will click on it, I promise.

Be creative when you’re baiting people to come visit your site. Back on gaming: if you’re playing, why not set things up to do live casts of whatever you’re playing. People can interact with you while you’re trying games out and that entices users to visit and subscribe. You can take the archived video and turn them into posts later.

Commitment

12 hours or more.

Constantly be Producing Content

Back to that content thing. You’ll most likely see this every week for the rest of the series and then beyond. This is the groundwork and foundation that your website rests on. Without nice, high quality content people won’t have a reason to visit. Try to vary things up a bit. I have three major topics I focus on with mine: diet, exercise, and motivation. I try to hit at least one a week, and never three of the same one in a row.

Twitter

Search.Twitter.com is a powerful tool to interact. You can use this to find out what people are talking about in your niche(s) and correspond with them. You want to be spending at least an hour a day doing this. If you’re not an expert, use it to find experts and ask questions. You can also aggregate news stories in your niche that you find. This will provide value to your followers as well.

There are some more advanced ways to interact with Twitter that I won’t go into here. There are all sorts of things you can do, like setting up bots to aggregate information for you to using services to respond to high volumes of followers. I just want you to know that they are out there and I might cover them in the future.

Facebook

You should definitely have a fan page for your blog. You can do one of two things: if you have brand awareness already you can just create a page for your blog; if you don’t, you can create a page about the niche for your blog. What does that mean? It means that if you’re in the gaming niche and you blog is: MyGamingSite.com you could either make a fan page called: 1) MyGamingSite.com or 2) Playing Video Games. The latter will attract more likes from people that don’t know who you are.

You can then leverage that population to advertise your site. When you reach a higher level of traffic, you can create a new fan page for the same blog and name it whatever the site is. That fan page will be much more targeted and convert better when you’re soliciting your fans, followers, and users. You should spend at least an hour a day conversing with people on Facebook and creating awareness of your pages.

Problems I Had Last Week

I didn’t really have any problems last week. I did change my mind about some plugins, etc. That was mostly a function of response to the post I did about plugins. That wasn’t anything major. I’m mostly talking about plugins that added widgets that could easily be HTML in a text widget. For example: Feedburner subscription boxes.

How are things going so far?

Please let me know if this was useful to you and how things are going. I’m truly interested in helping you do this and want to help you along the way.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 3

Get your house in order.

You’ve written content going back ten posts, so now your blog has some roots.  You don’t look like you just started that’s good.  Now you need to do the additional setup to get things going.  Setting up tracking, search engine submission, comments, spam protection, and a slew of other details is next. First, though, you need to write some more content, because, well, that’s what having a blog is all about.

Last week I intentionally didn’t tell you what domain I registered, because I didn’t want everyone to flock there before everything was at least partially set up.  I was still on the fence about giving out the domain name, because I didn’t want traffic from this blog to boost traffic to that blog. I want to grow it naturally without any help from my other online properties. That being said, I am going to tell you, but only so you can keep your eye on what I’m doing. I’m only going to mention it this once though, and it might be the end of the project later if everyone copies the strategy. It’s CoreFitnessBlog.com.

Commitment

13 hours. $0.

Next Wave of Content

You should be doing at least one post a week with a minimum of 2000 words per month. Never do a post under 200 words.  What does that mean? Do 1 post a week with a minimum of 500 words each, or Do one a day that is at least 200 words.  I prefer to do longer, less frequent posts, so I’m opting for the 4×500 method. Also: one minute of video is worth about 100 words, so feel free to do video posts as well.

I find it’s best to sit down for 4 to 8 hours and bang out all of the posts for the month, assuming that your niche isn’t based on the news.  You can then drip those posts out scheduled on specific days. Remember: you can always add posts on the fly when breaking news in the niche comes up.

Subscriptions

Set up a Feedburner account and start soliciting subscribers. There is a plugin for adding a subscription widget and changing your WordPress feed URLs to Feedburner URLs that I talk about below.  The best visitors are return visitors and RSS and Email subscriptions is the easiest way to keep people updated and make them return visitors.

If you’re feeling ambitious, set up an account with Aweber too. It’s never too early to start your email list. You might be jumping the gun just a smidge, because there is so much more to set up and get going.  This will be covered in a later post and if you already have an account, it’s really a no-brainer.

Plugins

I did a post last week, listing all of the plugins I use on this blog. Go read that post and install the ones that are relevant to what you’re doing. You need to be especially aware that you need to install the Google Analyticator and Feedburner Subscription widgets to make sure you can track what’s going on and start building a subscriber base.

One plugin I forgot in the post I did last week was FD Feedburner, which changes all of your WordPress URLs to Feedburner URLs. This is essential, because if you want to track RSS feed. I actually made that mistake when I started this blog and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get subscribers.  The minute I installed it, my subscriber count went up by 500%subscriptions, you need to use make sure people are going to Feedburner and not your WordPress. My subscribers didn’t actually change, but I could see the data.

Here’s a quick list of plugins that you need, no matter what your vertical is: Akismet, Google XML Sitemaps, FD Feedburner, and Sociable.

Problems I Had

The biggest problem I had was when I wrote a post highlighting other blogs. I quickly realized that I only read one fitness blog. I didn’t want to make poor recommendations, so I spent almost 5 hours reading fitness blogs trying to find some that I would actually stand behind. I picked some that seemed great, but we’ll see how that turns out.

What I should have done was table that post until later in the blog when I was reading other peoples’ information and got to know the players in the niche. Don’t stay on projects that are time sinks. I could have easily written an extra 3 or 4 posts in that time.

How did your first week go?

Please share your success or failure stories with me below.  If you have questions about how to do something, please feel free to contact me in the comments or via email. I will help you set everything up. Also, if you haven’t nailed down hosting yet, remember you can always contact me.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 2

I’ve been using the Shoemoney System for about nine weeks now.  I’ve seen all of the videos up to the ‘Facebook Ads Results’.  I personally love Facebook advertising and it was a great experience seeing some of the training videos, because I could pick up things I hadn’t known about.  I consider myself a fairly advanced user and was still able to walk away from the Facebook series with some new knowledge of FBML and Split Testing.  If you don’t know what those are, you really should be a member. Jeremy does a pretty great job teaching you about it.

Other points:

• The $50 Facebook coupon was released finally in week nine. This means you should expect to see your coupons about two months after you start the system.  We all look forward to seeing the other $2450 in coupons.
• I can’t comment on the quality of their support, because I haven’t needed to use them yet. I’ll addend this post if I do need to though.
• In week 9 I’ve seen 27 Videos. Of those videos, I found that seven were useless (i.e. they were how to sign up for something), 4 were entertaining but not really educational (i.e. interviews and tours), 3 were great for beginners, seven were great for novice/intermediates, and five were advanced.  Overall, I’d say the best customer of the Shoemoney is a beginner to intermediate user.

Looking through the comments from the last review I did, some questions came up that I’d like to answer here:

• Do you recommend this course for a newbie? Yes.
• Does anyone know if the people that were allowed to join yesterday [Week 7] are already caught up to the people that joined on day 1? No.  The content is slowly released over time, so people that joined on day one will always be ahead (until they finish).
• …The ShoeMoney System is now permanently open from Jeremy, I thought it was a exclusive program only for 500 student[s]… The first 500 people were just a test group.  I’m sure he doesn’t want to limit his potential to just 500 people.
• I am seriously thinking about joining the Shoemoney system but not too sure whether it is actually any good at teaching about Adsense? In week 9, Adsense hasn’t been covered.  If you’re looking for something specifically for Adsense, this may not be the program for you.
• Do you guys have any idea how to cancel you shoemoney system account? I can find the freaking cancel-button…

Here you go dude. Its all handled by Clickbank:

The ShoeMoney System billing is handled by ClickBank. Unfortunately we have no way to initiate a refund to you from our end, but it’s very easy for you to initiate the refund request and get the funds credited back to your bank account in 72 hours.

All you have to do is go to http://www.clickbank.com/orderDetail.htm

Entetr your Order number (this will be in the email you received from ClickBank when you purchased the product) along with your email address and click ‘Submit’

Then follow the step-by-step instructions for requesting a refund.

• So I guess it is not possible to just get the whole thing, all 12 months, right away by paying all the money up front? True.  You’ll need to wait for the videos to be released.  This may change in the future though.

Have more questions?

Ask them below.  We’ll get them answered for you!

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Shoemoney System Review – Week 9

Front Page of the Vermont Quilt Festival Website

We just finished a project for a local quilt festival.  This is their new website, built in conjunction with Graycat Studio:

Vermont Quilt Festival

The entire website is wrapped around Joomla! template and completely customizable for them.  This was an interesting project, and we still have a lot more work to do for them.  We’re going to be building a registration database as well.  Exciting!

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Recent Project: Vermont Quilt Festival

Is the content editor in WordPress too small for you? Just resize it. Look in the bottom right corner. It resizes just like a window in OSX, Windows, or Linux. Just click and drag to the size you want.

It saves the state of the window size, so all of your windows in the future will be that size as well.

-JKT

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Resizing the WordPress Content Editor

Overview

Google Sites is a product recently released by Google to create a place for colleagues to collaborate. I think it is meant to work something like a cross between Microsoft’s ultra complex SharePoint, and MySpace. The idea is to give users flexible control over their sites look and feel, while making it easy for users with out development or design skills to launch a functional work space. Once the site is created, users can collaborate in that “space.”

Joining

This is pretty straight forward. Just navigate to the Google Sites main page and set up an account. Your organization will need to be a member – using Google Apps. This can be a bit of a hassle if you aren’t the admin for your organization. I think this is Google’s way to combat the lash back from IT staff.

Setting Up a New Site

From the Dashboard, just click “Create New Site,” and you’ll be prompted for some basic information like: a site name, category, and description. You can also set who you’d like to collaborate with and pick a pre-defined theme from a rather bland selection of pre-made templates. When you’re done playing with these options, click “Create Site.” Your new site is online!

Using Your Site

Now that your site has been created, you can start using it. A nice place to start is with the “Edit Page” button just above the default “Home” page. This converts the whole page to a text area and title bar that are editable. You can place whatever content you want in there now, with standard options like bold, italics, underlines, links, bullets, etc. Click save when you’re done, and the page is published. You also have the option of attaching files and leaving comments.

Just next to the “Edit” button is a “Create New Page” button. This is where you can create new pages and add them the the “parent -> child” tree that the site is built on. Just below this area is the navigation menu, with a conveniently available site map, which is dynamically built, based on the pages you’ve created.

Tweaking Your Site

Really dialing in your site is where the fun begins. In the top right of your browser window, you can click “Site settings” and be taken to a page where you can edit site sharing settings, the appearance, and “other stuff.” The most interesting part is the appearance settings, where you can modify things like colors, fonts, and background images for different sections of the page. You can also modify your theme or site elements here.

Site elements are like widgets on the left bar next to the main content on your pages. Right now, there are only a few site elements, but I would imagine that they would add more as popularity grows. It may become something like the “widgets” for iGoogle (which by the way, I love).

The real meat of the Appearance section is “Colors and Fonts.” This is where you can upload your own background images and change colors for your theme create your own custom theme. I tried fairly successfully to recreate the look and feel of this site. One thing Google Sites does a lot better than a lot of other sites I’ve seen is the style manager. What one would usually use CSS styling for is in a nice GUI. For instance, adding a background image in the top left that doesn’t repeat involves just uploading the image, selecting vertical, horizontal, and repeat settings from drop downs, and hitting save. It’s done. That will probably make a lot of users that don’t know CSS quite happy.

“Other Stuff” is where you change things like your title, categories, and description. Oh, and you can delete the whole site here too.

My Thoughts

I’m quite underwhelmed by Google Sites. Products like WordPress seem to be much better. Although I’ve never used it, Blogger seems like a much better alternative if you’re looking for a Google product. That being said, this is an extremely new offering, and I’m sure it will get dialed in a lot better. Maybe the should have tagged it with “beta” for a couple years, like Gmail. This is also free. I find it hard to give something free a bad review, because your ROI is divided by zero. Im interested to see where this goes in the future.

I also felt like there should be more. That feeling just kind of confused me the whole way through. I think it may have just been so simple it was hard. Maybe I’m just dumb.

What do you think about it?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Google Sites Leaves me Bored AND Confused