Over the past year I have failed. In fact I confirmed my success by failing.
After being a corporate strategist and performance consultant for over 15 years I decided to take a year off and look at ways to productise my knowledge, so that it could be shared amongst more businesses, and not just the large corporates and new ventures I generally work with 1:1.
Do you know how many consulting BMAPS I completed? – ZERO!!
Now, giving myself a bit of a break, I hadn’t planned to complete any until the end of the fourth quarter, which is 31 March 2007. So what have I done with the rest of the 12 months.
This is how I approached my 12 month plan.
I split it into 4 x 3 month phases.
Phase 1 – learn as much as I can about online business streams and decide what suits me best.
Phase 2 – Build a flagship site so I can learn how to use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Autorepsonders and all the other site tools I have purchased.
Phase 3 – Build 10 other niche sites that work into an overall vision map
Phase 4 – Complete 3 e-books based upon the top 3 consulting knowledge demand niches.
The Outcomes
Phase 1 – I identified 12 streams and built operations manuals outlining each stream in detail
Phase 2 – I completed and launched www.antiaging-wellness.com at the end of July 2007
Phase 3 – I built the following niche sites:
1. www.electrosmart.com
2. www.go-reviews.com
3. www.golfswingclub.com
4. www.anti-tiredness.com
5. www.theonlinegraduatedegree.com
6. www.lemonlawreview.com
7. www.golfvacationsreview.com
8. www.richmediamix.com
9. www.remodelingrenovations.com
10. ….and coming soon www.lifesuccesshabits.com
My aim was to spend the year building, rather than marketing.
- I didn’t want crappy adsense sites with headings that didn’t match equally crappy articles.
- I didn’t want low content – high unrelated link sites to drive people to click on my adsense
- I didn’t want sites that I would be ashamed to admit I owned.
I wanted to spend the year working out what worked and what didn’t.
So far, my income has been minimal – a couple of dollars a day on adsense. In place of a $350,000 consulting income, that is pretty awful, but that’s okay. Because my goal was to set up a business base that I could continue to build over the next five years, when I return to consulting, that would provide sufficient residual income for my retiring years. I would also give me a business interest that I could continue to build upon, anywhere in the world.
Now my sites may not have flashy graphics, but they are all reasonably professional looking sites, that provide quality unique information. Every one of those sites I have a background experience in that I can draw upon as I continue to build them.
There are days when I cringe at how much time it has taken to get this far. I have pretty much worked 9 hours a day, six days a week to get to the point of making $2 a day!!!
If I was to dwell on this, I could easily target myself as a real loser. But I am not, and this is why.
- I have negotiated my way through the over priced, low quality, programs that fail to deliver.
- I have built up a considerable resource knowledge bank – that is documented!! In an organised fashion
- I have built systems and process maps for my business.
- I have learnt everything I need to know to build and manage my own sites
- I understand all the software needed.
- I understand all the business concepts – which ones work and which ones don’t
- I learnt that all those IM gurus that claim they made $1million in their first 4 months are basically liars; or misleading at best. Most have been involved in IM for at least 3-4 years, or had a customer base they could readily establish on.
- I know bullshit now when I hear it.
In total, I have built a very solid platform upon which I can manage my business very successfully going forward, whilst being a full time consultant again.
And business processes, information systems and solid business tools are what makes a business great. It is what enables a business to move rapidly as new trends and opportunities emerge.
I admit I have been pulled into purchasing a number of “systems in a box†products – there is not ONE that I can highly recommend. They all had significant gaps in the feature set which made the process clunky and disconnected; or they were so buggy, they just made my day, very frustrating.
So why would a credible consultant risk her reputation by admitting that I have not achieved the goals I set out to achieve. The reason is this – I entered a totally new domain where I had absolutely no idea how long each task would take, what success risk factors would come into play, or what was real and what wasn’t in all the marketing hype.
One thing I can tell you – is that I sure know now. By having solid project management skills and tools I now have a recorded account of timings, process steps, errors, bugs & fixes and everything else one needs to make smooth sailing going forward. I still have an incredible amount to achieve, but hey! That’s what the rest of my life is for.
So as I go forward now into my fourth quarter, I want to bring this knowledge together and apply solid business success principles to it that I have used in every consulting program in the past 15 years. I have unsubscribed from every IM guru email list [apart from 3] and will focus solely on building a solid foundation business.
And I will be sharing these with you on this Blog as I go. If you are also a person that is aiming to build a credible sustainable business, I am sure you have also been disillusioned and wondered whether everyone else REALLY does find it easy, when you are struggling. So let’s help each other by sharing our experiences. In this way, we keep it real. We are less likely to beat ourselves up for not achieving the unachievable.
Esmart
[Getting Smarter By the Day]