After last nights Reboot post I decided to get started quickly so that I didn’t lose momentum. This morning I completed the inventory of my web assets. I knew I had a few domains but didn’t realize there were 28 of them. I also quickly grouped them into re-build now, re-build later (soon hopefully) and discard.
My next step is shutting down 22 sites, redirecting 2 of them to this site and re-building the other 3.
Over the years I’ve had many ideas, implemented a few and acquired domains for others. My dream of generating a part time income has always been the same. After reading the Niche Site Project on the Virtual Business Lifestyle blog I’ve become very disillusioned with how my product empire is (or rather isn’t) preforming. It always felt like I was struggling and now I’m sure I am. Over the last two days I’ve concluded that there is really only one option… reboot!!
My plan is pretty simple:
I’ve been hunting for a good niche for long time. Recently I came to a conclusion that I think should have been obvious a long time ago: Consumer apps are the micropreneur’s enemy!
Here’s my reasoning:
That makes consumer apps a volume game. If you want to make your living off a niche you really need to be invoicing $20+/month which is a much easier sell in the business market. Once I realised this it allowed me to instantly rule out a lot of ideas and find two niche markets that look very promising.
In my previous post I mentioned that Google chewed up two days worth of budget over one night. That made day 3 my first chance to do any optimization. By this stage I’d worked out to turn off most of the content network. My traffic was now only coming from the search network a management placement on urbanMamas. I also lowered the daily cap to $10.00 but I left the keyword bids high.
Lesson #1: I’m still bidding too high
I’ve cut my bids to $0.50 on the search network and $0.20 on the content network.
Lesson #2: Monitor keywords people use
I’d been bidding on babysitting club/co-op/group keywords but monitoring revealed that babysitting circle is another keyword that I should be bidding on.
Until tomorrow…
Today comes the bad news that my coupon is now completely used which means I’m paying for traffic. There is some good news because I finally seem to have the campaign under control. While bidding less has seriously reduced the click through rate (CTR) I got twice as many clicks as yesterday for half the budget.
I think I’ll let it run like this for another day before try to optimize it further.
PS: If anyone has a coupon for Google AdWords then please send it to rich@zoombug.com.au and I’ll give you a mention tomorrow.
At the start of this year I set myself a two year goal to be in a position where I didn’t need to work for someone else. I’m hoping to do this through a combination of activities including blogging, other websites, developing software and non-software products. It’s now the 1st of June 2011 and it’s time for a 5 month update.
Over the last few months I’ve been operating a number of blogs. Most of them have been used for SEO experiments. Some have shown promise but the only one I’m really interested in running is ASP.NET MVC Ninja. As a result I’ve been spending a lot more time on it than the others and that’s reflected in its growth.
Over the next few months I’ll continue to focus on writing quality content and increasing the subscriber base/number of visitors. I don’t want to start monetizing the blog for at least another 3 months. Too many blogs die because the owner gets distracted by monetization too soon and forgets that people come for the content rather than the ads.
The Zoombug blog has been pretty quiet. While I’ve had stuff that I wanted to post I just haven’t been able to find the time to do it. I’m hoping to change that by setting up a regularly weekly posting schedule.
From the other blogs I might keep two of them to promote affiliate products via SEO but that’s very unlikely.
Planet Micro ISV has been chugging along nicely but it’s barely covering the operating costs (which are very tiny). I’ve been thinking about building a spin-off site based on the expanded concept of “products” which would cover everything a micropreneur might do. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in then let me know (rich@zoombug.com.au).
For a while I’ve wanted to build a babysitting group/babysitting co-op application. Lately I’ve been sending traffic to a landing page to measure the general interest in the product. While it’s something I’d definitely use myself I’m starting to wonder if the market for this is large enough to justify the effort. My most successful source of registrations has been posting comments on blog posts about babysitting co-ops/groups but that isn’t sustainable. I have a couple of traffic sources still to try but unless I can find a good source of traffic soon this might get put onto the back burner again.
If the babysitting co-op/group application falls through then I have another web based software product I’m considering. The market is very quantifiable (around 400,000 world wide), it has existing players (some of them big) and people are use to paying for the product. My initial research indicates that there may be an opportunity for an easy to use product designed for the average person rather than the professionals in the industry.
Over the next month I’m hoping to make a decision on which way to go. I’ll only be building one product so I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on the wrong one.
Black Friday in the US started a couple of hours ago. For those not familiar with Black Friday it’s the Friday after Thanksgiving and the traditional start of the Christmas shopping period. More recently it’s become known for crazy deals by retailers.
This year HostGator.com is giving 50% of everything for most of the day and 80% OFF between 5am and 9am CST. That makes shared hosting as low as $0.99/month, VPS from $3.99 and dedicated hosting from $34.80 for the first month.
I’m currently in the process of renovating a number of Internet properties that Zoombug owns and it’s finally time to update Planet MicroISV. The update actually started a few weeks ago when I refreshed the list of blogs that are aggregated. Many new blogs were added and a few without posts in the last year were removed.
The next step will be to replace the current aggregation software, Planet Feed Reader, with WordPress and the FeedWordPress plugin. This update will happen in the next 2-3 hours. If you’re using a feed reader then you might like to update your feed to http://planet-microisv.com/feed.
First, let me apologize to Planet MicroISV readers for the recent outage. The site was fixed about 24 hours ago although I’ve had to temporarily remove two blogs (I’ll add those again shortly).
As luck would have it this occurred just prior to me moving the site to new hosting at Blue Host. I’ll be making that switch in about 20 minutes. If everything goes according to plan then there should be no outage.