Here are some things I’ve learned with building websites, writing and online business in general:
- Daily content is great. Regular content is a key factor in online visibility.
- Online success is longer term than you can plan for in actual steps.
- With writing, productivity is a cornerstone. Think like a pulp writer and write at pulp speed.
- Strategy should only take a certain amount of your time.
- There are no excuses for not starting.
This article won’t be more of the same. This article deals with what happens when you’ve jumped in head first and after a few months realise that you don’t know where you’re going with a project.
When this happens, you find yourself with no control over many variables which you didn’t see coming. That’s where we’ll start.
Control of the Variables
There are people out there who improvise everything. Like James Bond or Captain Jack Sparrow, they seem to hop around from situation to situation, winning some, losing some and generally being able to scramble their way out of doom.
I’m not like that. I prefer to plan ahead. However, there are times when I jump head first into a project and don’t know where to take it. A lot of you will be the same, and unless you have superhero think-on-your-feet abilities, it’s somewhere we don’t want to stay for long.
Because this is all a bit abstract, let’s take two scenarios:
- You have an idea for a product in your head. You decide you’re going to write a book, a website around the book, and then specific posts about specific parts of the book. So, if it’s “How to get rich for already rich people,” then that’ll be the title of your book, then the chapters will be, “how not to lose money” and “how to make MORE money” and those will then be categories on your site where you write about subjects concerning those things.
- You have a theme for a site… let’s call it “how to make a living as a writer.” Instead of planning a product out, you decide to write about a ton of aspects about writing with no particular structure, rhyme or reason. When it comes to writing a book… sure you can do that. But your site isn’t remotely set up to sell the book in any structured manner.
Scenario One is a planned approach. Scenario Two is a unplanned approach.
Scenario One is great because you have a clear pathway between starting, creating valuable content and then creating an even more valuable product down the line. In scenario two, you are going to hit a lot of roadblocks and variables which are going to be harder to control.
How To Solve The Problem
The best way to solve any dilemma like this is to never have to encounter it in the first place.
However there is a way to solve a lack of planning, and luckily it can be beneficial. You need to retrace your steps, ala Hansel and Gretel. (This has only come to me after a few days of trying to unpack a problem and find a solution, so it’s definitely tougher than having a plan in the first place.)
What I mean by this is; Say you want to start an online business, but you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. You write a “My journey” type blog. You go through the motions, and after six months you look back on your website.
Month one: Feel-good Four Hour Work Week Style Stuff. (We’ve all been there.)
Month Two: Graphic Design, Freelance Stuff
Month Three: E-Commerce Store (You probably sell T-shirts or something.)
Month Four: SEO Services
Month Five: Back To Blogging For Money
Month Six: Where the Hell Am I Going? Posts
This is what an average would-be digital mastermind’s first few months (or years) look like. Project-hopping from one place to another with no rhyme or reason. By the time you’ve learned anything, you’ll realise that all those posts were mostly wasted time and incorrect information. Or were they?
This is where the unpicking comes in. Let’s say you’re the guy above. You want to write a book to sell on your website. Whatever it is you’ve written about to this point, there’ll be trends, themes and subjects which you can branch out and write about.
So start with the big picture stuff:
- Failure
- Learning
- Money
- Planning
- Goal Setting
This is the first stage of unpicking the knots that you’ve woven yourself.
The second stage involves you picking a topic from those meta-subjects and running with it. Let’s say you write a book called, “How not to start an online business” and you are going to write about your experiences over the six months.
Third stage: You go back through and collate all the information into digestable lessons which will serve as chapters for your books. “How Not To Start An Online Business” could have chapters like:
- Don’t Sell SEO
- Don’t Try To Set Up A Store
- Don’t Start Blogging For Money
- Don’t Freelance
(Those are convenient examples. Bear with me.)
Step Four is to create a product that’s fit for your style, experience and knowledge. Take all the usable information, and new information and do a really great job of creating a comprehensive list of all the ingredients you need to succeed (or fail, in this example!) at whatever the chapter is about.
Step Five is to then, after the fact, go through and retarget all of your articles/categories on your site to reflect the product and drive interest to it. In our example, you might take the article, “I’m selling my T-Shirts on Teespring” and put the following P.S. Section at the end:
P.S. Back then, it all seemed so easy. I thought I was going to become the next Georgio Armani by dropshipping T-Shirts. It’s never that easy. You can make money selling T-Shirts, but not like I did. Check out my book How Not To Start An Online Business for a list of the 1000 mistakes I made in my quest to become a guru. It’s funny, and it’ll help you avoid being an idiot.”
This process has taken you back to where you’d been if you started with a plan in the first place: You have a theme, product and website that all work as though they were clockwork elements, all feeding off each other.
Final Thoughts
Obviously, planning is great. Working is great. Put the two together and you have a winning combination.
However, there are times when you need to jump straight in and see what happens. I’ve written about the process above so that when you get stuck and feel like you need to start over from scratch, instead, you can go through the Hansel and Gretel step-retracing and salvage (and later build upon and improve) what you’ve already worked on.
There’ll be a lot of projects you undertake which aren’t as successful as you’d hoped. However, a salvage operation can mean those failures aren’t really failures at all.