 Welcome To The January Experiment
!
My
challenge this week was to build a 500+-page website
and launch a new eBook within a week - and get on with
my "normal" work as well!
I
was helped by a new system called "Niche Products Monthly",
a membership site, which has now closed its doors. But I think
that my diary of those few intensive days (along with some of
the resources I used) will be relevant to anyone building a website
in a hurry. So here's what happened (along with some suggestions,
marked like this and
major task areas marked like this)...
Day 1: Monday
Early morning
Got
an email from John Delevara recommending this new website,
Niche Profits Monthly. I trust John's judgment so I hopped over
to the new site (through John's affiliate link, of course!)
and had a rapid read. I liked what I saw, and my decision was
helped by knowing that the site owner, Jason Gazaway, to have
a good, honest reputation. So I bought into the system and
went into the Members
Area to select my niche product.
 The
principle of the site is that, every month, members get materials
for three niche areas - AdSense websites, private label
products and supporting materials. The opening month's niches
were "Wedding Savings", "A Beginner's Guide To Yoga" and "A Guide
To Baby Showers". Hmm. Don't feel any empathy towards
babies and weddings, but I have practiced Yoga in the past.
So, Yoga
it is! (You can always do
better with a niche if you know something about it).
Downloaded all the yoga-related materials into a new working
folder on my hard drive.
Mid-morning
Started
researching domain names at Easily.co.uk -
a good registrar with a very easy domain name research feature.
(Find  available domain names
first - then you know what to call your website).
Amazingly, "learning-yoga.com" was available. Logged
into the control panel of one of my hosting accounts
and bought it. (Get your domain
name set up early on - it could be a slow process whilst it
propagates through the
Net). Fired up Paintshop Pro and modified the
header banner for the AdSense site so that it read "Learning
Yoga"
and not
just
"Yoga"
Thought
about my strategy. Decided I'd use the content-rich AdSense
site not only to generate AdSense income, but also to drive
traffic to the new eBook, whose private label rights I now
had.
Looked
at the website coding for the Yoga AdSense site - looked
complex, with a lot of "PHP Include" files. Went onto
the private forum at Niche Products Monthly and got some valuable
advice on modifying the files. (If
you're stuck with something, the answer is somewhere on the
Net!). Modified the navigation
bar, after backing up the original (always
back up complex files before you change them) so
that an ad for the new eBook, "Yoga
Basics Plus",
was on every page, at the top of the nav bar.
Skimmed
the PDF file for "Yoga Basics Plus"; not brilliant,
but I was happy to put my reputation behind it - but not so happy
that I wanted to claim authorship of it! Decided to sell it "as
is".
Lunchtime
(lunch is for wimps!)
Uploaded
all the AdSense site files (500+ pages). Found that the new URL,
www.learning-yoga.com , was already live for me! AdSense ads
started to kick in but - bummer - some were blank. There were
two blocks of ads, one in the nav bar and one in the main content
section of the page. If Google didn't have enough ads for both
blocks, it filled up the nav bar block first and went into a
default situation for the main central block. And the Niche Products
Monthly website system set the default as "collapse" -
i.e. blank space. Had to find the right file and modify it so
that yet another
ad for the eBook appeared there if there weren't enough AdSense
ads (never waste prime ad space
on a web page).
Afternoon
Had
a look at the sales page for the eBook in Dreamweaver, my favourite
web authoring tool. What a nightmare! Although the code displayed
OK in my IE browser, Dreamweaver showed that the table structure
was seriously flawed, with numerous errors. Strangely enough,
the page displayed OK in MS Front Page (a horrendous program!)
and in my second favourite web editor, the inexpensive 123
WYSIWYG. But I ran the code through an online
HTML validator, and it confirmed my worst fears;
the code was screwed. Even though it displayed OK in IE, as a
professional webmaster, I wasn't prepared to release dodgy code.
So I spent two hours repairing the damage. Must have a word with
the guys at Niche Products Monthly about this. (Never
launch anything that you're not absolutely happy about; this
isn't a
techie thing. It's not even a marketing thing. If you don't have
confidence in it, who else will?).
Tried
to register the Google Site Map (an
XML file generated by the Niche Products Monthly system - a nice
touch). But Google couldn't
see it, so clearly the domain name hadn't propagated to West
Coast USA yet.
Evening
Spent it catching up with other work. It's been a long day!
Day
2: Tuesday
Morning
and lunchtime
Spent
the time on personal and domestic tasks. What's the point
of being a full-time internet marketer if you can't fix your
own hours!
Afternoon
Turned my attention to autoresponders. On the eBook's sales
page (when I'd fixed it) was a space for inserting an autoresponder
for an "eCourse" on Yoga. Excellent idea, and Niche Products
Monthly had provided a series of 5 emails about Yoga, each
of which had links back to the eBook's sales page. (People
seldom buy on the first visit to a sales page. You need
to capture their contact details and get their permission
to email them regularly. It can often take 7 contacts with
them before they buy).
Looked
at the 5 emails provided by the system; they looked OK as
far as content went, but I inserted a couple more ads for
the
eBook.
Then I
went further - after the series of 5 lessons in the eCourse ended,
I built a further 5 (and I may build more), based on the article
content of the Yoga AdSense site. Also, I inserted an "unsubscribe"
link at the end of each email, along with my postal address
(do this to comply with anti-spam
regulations). Went into
my autoresponder system (I use AutoResponse Plus) set
everything up - and tested it. AOK!
Installed
the autoresponder code on the sales page and then thought
"I need a popup as well". (Despite
us all hating popups, they do work!).
There's a lot of "unstoppable popup" systems around,
but the one I provide my newsletter
subscribers in my Free
Download Library is a good
one. Might as well use it myself. Built it in ten minutes,
tested it - and it failed :-( Took me half an hour to find
the one superfluous
character causing the problem - my own copy-and-paste error).
Looked good, eventually. The great thing about this unstoppable
popup is that it stays in view even when you scroll down the
page.
Evening
 Looked
at the sales page again. Hmm - the free eCourse really needs
an eCover (Even if you're
giving something away for free, enhance its value with a picture
of
it.. even if it's an imaginary picture).
Got out Paintshop Pro again and modified one of the images I'd
got with "the system". I then loaded up my copy of eCover
Generator to turn the flat image into a 3-D report cover.
It's
not brilliant (took me 20 minutes) but it's better than nothing!
Now,
what about the product itself? Looked a bit thin on its own,
so I decided to add some bonuses.
Searched my huge library of stuff I've downloaded over the
years, and found four health-
and fitness-related eBooks (If
you give bonuses, make sure they're related in subject matter
to the main product). Felt I needed another
bonus (five's a nice number) so I took advantage of my Gold
Membership at SureFire Wealth (a good source
of resale rights products) and found a useful health report
by Liz Tomey.
Bundled
everything up into a zip file, gave it an unguessable name
(to beat the download thieves!) and uploaded it to my web
server.
Day
3: Wednesday
Morning
 Tried
Google Site Maps again. Yep - they could find the site map
file, so the domain name seems to have propagated OK. I then
had to upload a blank file with a name that Google
selected
to prove that I was the owner of the site. After several
attempts, Google finally verified my new site. Now I have
to wait for Google to crawl the site.
Turned
to the task of setting up the payment
system for the eBook. I can use both ClickBank and
/ or PayPal, but I decided only to offer PayPal as a credit
card payment system (customers don't need to have a PayPal
account) because their charges on a low-price item such as
my "Yoga Basics Plus" are lower than ClickBank's.
Went into my DL
Guard system to set up the payment
(DL Guard is a brilliant and
inexpensive way of protecting you from download thieves).
Set up the payment system, got the coded links for the "buy
button" and download page
and set everything up on the sales and download pages. Uploaded
everything then tested the payment system. Fixed one minor
error.
Final
task for the morning: putting some tracking
systems in place. (Tracking is one of the
keys to successful marketing. If you don't know what's working
and what's not, you are handicapping yourself).
I'm currently using AdTrackz, but a good, simple system is
Ad-Tracker. It doesn't need PHP or MySQL, as AdTrackz does.
At
last - everything is completed. I now have a 500+ page AdSense
website and a
new product to sell: http://www.learning-yoga.com
But
I Haven't Finished Yet!
OK, so the two sites are completed and accessible.
There's one thing missing - website
traffic! I need visitors
to the site before I make any money. So, over the coming
days and weeks I'll be spending some time on the following
traffic-generating techniques:
- Search
engine optimisation (and getting the site into the search
engines in the first place)
- Google
AdWords (to drive traffic to the sales page)
- Reciprocal
linking I've already got a lot of outbound links on the
new site; I can contact these sites for an exchange. I'm
also going to look at LinkMetro's linking system
- Cross-linking
from my own high-ranked sites (at least it could get the
new site into the search engines)
Also,
there's a fair amount of tweaking I need to do (a) to improve
the appearance of the sites and (b) to make sure they are
different from sites that other Niche Products Monthly members
will be building.
Footnote: Although
I built these sites using materials available through the
Niche Products Monthly membership site (currently not accepting
new members), the same principles apply to most sites. There
are many systems
and software
items available which make building content-rich websites a snip.
And many resale sights products come with a ready-made sales
page - which you need to modify.
So, hopefully, you will have learnt something
from this "experiment",
,
which will help you with your own website development.
Ian Traynor
York, UK
January 2006 |
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