If you've been reading in this blog for any length of time you'll know that I follow James Brausch's blog regularly, because of the valuable information that he shares with his readers. I've yet to come across a blog where the reader is so often and directly challenged to take action on their life / business. His latest challenge is to come up with a "freedom plan" to declare your independence in three months and take off to somewhere like Costa Rica. Well, not being someone to back down from a challenge, here is my plan.
First of all, as a programmer, I was taught that every program that you write naturally follows a procedure. You write your code to follow a predefined set of rules so that the compiler can interpret it correctly and that you have a bug free application when finished. When your application is working, then nothing has to be changed. Every time the computer "runs" the program, it follows the specified procedure every time without fail. I believe this should also apply to your business. First map out a procedure. This is my procedure for the "Freedom Project".
Step 1 – Create a Product
1a. Brainstorm a list of products that I think will "fly". This list can be compiled by simply listing the things that you are good at. What are your hobbies? what do you like to do? What don't you like?, etc. Now narrow down your list to what you can apply online. For example, I created this blog to promote my product, AmazingCloaker, I also like to write software and custom scripts for my internet projects, I like guitar, etc.
1b. Market Reasearch your potential products next. I'm going to create a "How to build a blog for marketers" product. It will be designed for the raw beginner starting from the very basics and progressing into more advanced areas such as customizing your look, and optimizing for the search engines. The finished product (the blog) will also be my sales page. Now go out to http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ and use their keyword suggestion tool and type in your main keywords. In my case, I'll type in keywords such as "creating a blog", "blog marketing", "web design", etc. For "creating a blog" I scored 1,747 monthly searches, 998 of them from Google, which is ok if the competition isn't to stiff. These are conservative figures and are probably much higher in reality.
Ok, now let's get an idea of our competition. Go out to Google and type your best keyword. Now take a look at the right hand column where the Google Adwords advertisements are located. If there are more than 10 ads listed you will see a link at the bottom of the column that says "More Sponsered Links". Click on it. There will be 10 ads listed for each page. Click through each page at the bottom of the list until you reach the end. This will give you an idea of what kind of competition ratio you have to monthly searches. Each page contains 10 ads, so if you scroll through 5 pages before it runs out, you would have 50 advertisers.
In my example – "create a blog" I got 8 advertisers, not bad at all. A more competitive keyword like "designer handbags" has 172 advertisers, seems like pretty stiff competition for that product, but you also have 32,000 searches a month. In a perfect world that's around 186 visitors per advertiser. In reality we're talking high bid amounts for first page positions for such a competitive keyword. Anyway, back to our blog product.
Now that we have our product, the next step in our procedure is to:
2. Get a website. Pick a domain name, preferably one with your best keyword in the name. Get your domain before anything else. The domain will help commit you to the project as well as get the clock ticking for Google to list it. Now host it of course, and make a quick home page. Put a couple of paragraphs explaining your new product and how this is going to be something really worth having. Put an email capture form below to catch & notify interested prospects when your product is released. This will allow you to generate a list of interested buyers before you even get started! If you don't have an auto-responder like GetResponse, or Aweber, go sign up now, otherwise you're really not serious enough to keep reading on. Now I can do some quick promotions via existing blogs, forums, web 2.0, etc.
3. Create Your Product using Camstasia Studio or the free equivalent (camstudio). I will be using Camtasia to create my "how to make a blog for marketers" course. I suggest opening wordpad first and writing out the steps that you will take in creating your product. This will help you move along smoother and allow your customers to grasp what you are teaching more easily. Now just create your product as you narrate what you are doing. Try to keep each section less than 15 minutes. 10 is better. Having each section broken down is easier to digest. Besides, Camtasia won't compile over a certain number of frames for the web.
4. Create a bonus video (optional), in my case, an HTML primer video and offer it free to anybody who signs up on your new web page.
5. Publish your project and upload to your website.
6. Create a sales page using Glyphius to generate your most effective sales copy. Keep your page short & sweet. Maybe 3-5 pages (Not more than 7 pages at the very max).
7. Add your order link and thankyou pages. Use PayPal or Clickbank, or any program you prefer. (Clickbank is a good choice because you can then easily allow people to affiliate with you, who will then spend their own money on advertising your product). Set your auto-responder to send the link to your customer immediately after they purchase your product.
8. Promote via PPC to get initial traffic rolling. Optimize web site for search engines with keyword rich all-in-anchor text, title, tag, h1, h2 tags, body, footer, etc. Remeber, you're writing your content for the visitor first, so don't make your web copy look phony & keyword stuffed. Start getting backlinks to website via blogs, forums, directories, StumbleUpon, diggit, flickr, del.ic.ious, etc. If you have the funding, sign-up at rasof.com to get the best SERPs.
9. Purchase SuFAQ (recommended) or install if you already own it to automatically handle tech support questions. Remember, FREEDOM is the keyword here, so we want zero headaches here.
10. Create a new product repeating steps 1 through 9.
11. Create a network of 10 – 20 domains / websites with related content to your successful product(s) webpage and interlink all your sites together to push up your rankings and boost your business.
If you've been there, done this and are ready to step up to the next level, get yourself a mentor. James Brausch offers a mentoring program through his magical e-mail address. The price is always increasing, so don't wait too long. He will personally answer any questions that you have on building your business and becoming successful. There's only one hitch, however. You have to follow through with what he tells you. He will give you the path to success, but it's up to you to walk down it. Are you up for it? I'm going for the freedom challenge. I'll keep you posted these next few months how the procedure is working along with any ratcheting that I may do if any. Until then… I'm off to create a product!
[tags]James Brausch, Internet Business, Creating a Blog, marketing, Google, Information Products, marketer, make money online, SEO, business opportunity, glyphius, rasof, magical email address, sufaq[/tags]