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

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

If you need help naming your next info product, check this out:

www.infoproductnamer.com

Basically it’s to help you be lazy.  You can create your next info product name easily.  If you don’t even know what you want your info product to be, it can help you with that too.  It comes preloaded with many different niches for you to try out, or you can enter your own.  All of this value completely free!

The product is currently in beta and accepting feature requests.

What do you think about it?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Be lazy naming your next info product.

Many people think that hitting home runs in business is quite a bit about luck.  I hear all the time that I’m lucky I work for myself and I can live the way I do, making my hours, etc.  My first response is usually: “yeah I make my own hours, but usually it’s 16-20 hour days.”  What really happened is I prepared myself mentally to start a business for some time.

When the opportunity presented itself, I was ready to execute.  I knew I would be changing jobs soon, and so I decided to take a leap of faith and depend on my ability to execute.  It worked.  Since then, I’ve started and joined many ventures with many people, some of which didn’t work out, but others that worked tremendously.  Most of all I learned something from every single venture.

I’ve started or joined businesses making t-shirts, building websites, fixing computers, doing real estate, Internet Marketing, general sales, creative writing, fine art, and some other things I’m probably forgetting.  The first extremely sustainable was my main business, Acute Technology, which started as a hodgepodge of IT support and website development, but is now building enterprise level applications for businesses, educational institutions, and government.  I was able to leverage my clout with Acute Technology to get into other projects that I’m passionate about as well.

Luck doesn’t just apply to the large victories, but the small ones as well.  Just the other day, I heard through Twitter that Brian Brushwood was looking for someone to help with Name That Autocomplete, and was on a very tight deadline.  I was able to make things happen for them and make some friends along the way.  I think the ROI on my few hours worth of work will pay off, and that small victory makes me feel lucky, but really I was just listening at the right time, with the right knowledge and skills (preparedness).

What are your thoughts on luck?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Luck is Just Being Prepared for Opportunity

I got really lucky with that domain name and put it to use.  I just made a website that tries to be offensive, sexy, and disgusting all at once.  We’ll see how it does.  The system is built on WordPress and is using a free theme for now.  What’s interesting is how low my bounce rate is.  We’ll see if it keeps up.

Here’s a link:

http://www.drunkasshole.com

Note: drunkasshole.com is NSFW.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: New Project: DrunkAsshole.com

I just threw this website together for my own use like a year ago.  Right now there are the three most common tools I use.  I couldn’t really think of anything else that I would have used, but the three tools are:

• Creating MD5 Hashes,
• Whois Lookups, and
• Public IP Address Checking

I use it all the time, so I thought I’d tell you about it.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Project: Toolerific.com