Hello there, my name is Alex Pooley and I'm a freelance web developer residing in Perth, Western Australia.
My passion is in the development of web sites that solve everyday problems. Here's a
gallery of some of my notable work. If you need a web site designer
or developer, contact me with further details. Lastly, you can read more
about me.
It’s been over a year since I left full time work and I’ve had the privilege of seeing business from many perspectives. I am beginning to form the conclusion that business is all about turning unpredictable circumstances in to predictable ones.
Let’s say that you sell puppies in a shopping center. You know that you will average x number of people walking in the store each day, of which you can predict y% will purchase. Though you will experience cycles, you know that some breeds will outsell others. You also have a known margin on your puppies, and you also have predictable monthly revenue, costs, and hence profits.
The biggest hurdle facing anyone starting a business is to discover these “knowns”. You don’t know what you haven’t seen, and you will never see what you never try. And don’t assume! Measure! Test! You know what they say right.. “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me”
The biggest personal challenge is to get your feet wet. Once you’re in though, don’t hesitate or you will eventually freeze to death. Make sure that before you hop in, you set a soft budget of money and time. Spend as little money and time as possible but kick as hard as possible in every direction you can. Build channels and test.
My first mistake was to not budget my time. My second mistake was to not budget any money. You need money, and you need time. Without money, it takes too much time. Without time, you won’t make any money! ;)
My definition of business: predictable channels from your customers to a sale.
Here’s a slick recipe to build a niche site that delivers what people want in your niche, with little effort. I’d bet that you could find a stack of ebooks charging $27, $57, maybe even $77 for this advice.
Goal: To create an info product with little use of your time.
Setup: Do a little research to work out what niche you’re interested in targeting. You want something narrow enough that you can fill a specific need, and broad enough that there’s enough potential sales volume. Something like “beagle training” is a good idea, something like “training beagles to run through tunnel obstacles” is not.
Method:
Create an “above the fold” page that asks the reader to tell you specifically what information they are seeking. The goal is to acquire information from people that visit your site. Promise that in return for submitting the form, you will send them an answer and copy of your info product when you’re done.
Create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to the site. Let it run for at most a week, and aim to acquire around 30 questions.
Run off to a site like guru.com, or Elance and find an expert in your niche.
Record a question answer session with the expert. The questions include, and are based on, the questions that people submitted from your question page. The recording is now something that you can sell, or offer as a bonus to a complementary offer.
Run off to a dictation site (E.g. idictate) and get your audio interview transcribed. Now you have more fodder to sell.
Start to sell your goods by building a “1 page sales letter”. Use it to replace your “ask a question” page.
This is stupidly easy, but I thought it was pretty elegant. You can mold the interviews like play dough to create articles for article submission directories, marketing fodder, etc.
I heard about this method from a webinar by Jim Edwards and John Carlton. I don’t know if it really works, but if you’re in to info products you would be hard pressed to develop a more efficient process.
Scribd is a new document library that has been getting a lot of press lately . It’s from Paul Graham’s Y Combinator outfit, and has received two reviews from TechCrunch. You add a document, and others read it. You can use the content on your site with the embedded flash reader, vote for articles, etc etc. It’s a bit like Youtube for documents I guess.
One common way to build traffic in the world of SEO is to write a document, and then add it to a document library for others to use on their own web site. The optimizer builds a keyword laden document and includes links back to their site, and the person using the article gets free content.
I threw in my global warming report to see what would happen.
