Hi everyone,
Welcome to my first online business progress report. I have been meaning to write this post for a few weeks, however other business tasks have kept on taking priority. This is likely to be the case for the next couple of months as there really is no end to the workload at the beginning of a business venture. Hopefully my business progress reports will become more regular once the business is established with a few sites live and earning some money.
I plan to post progress reports monthly from June 2010 onwards, and I hope that visitors to the Working Vagabond website will find the information valuable and relevant to their own online endeavours. This post is going to be a bit of a marathon read as I have accomplished so much since starting the business four months ago in mid January 2010.
Business startup
I have registered myself as a sole trader enterprise and registered a trading name for my business. I live in the UK, and this was the most suitable option for my online business. I have also found out about all of my business responsibilities and the various deadlines that crop up through the year (e.g. tax returns, man power forms etc). I have opened up a business bank account and invested a lump sum of £750 to cover all business costs for the first year of trading. I also have a credit card attached to the account to make it easy to purchase business related products and services such as domain names. I have also been awarded a small business grant to the value of £1000 which I will use to pay for some search engine optimisation work, an email autoresponder, and paid advertising for my websites.
Training
I have learned so much since I started my business in January that I really don’t know where to begin writing about the training that I have undertaken. I have completed Mark Ling’s affiloblueprint course which has give me a really good general knowledge of running an online affiliate marketing business. Affiloblueprint really is a great course, covering everything from selecting a niche, keyword research, website building, SEO, PPC and much more.
I have successfully learned how to use Dreamweaver and WordPress to build decent looking websites. I have also made some nice looking graphics such as website header images and animated adverts. Recently, I have been playing with Google Adwords as I was sent a £50 voucher. I ended up using the credit to launch a few direct linking campaigns in the Google content network, although I am yet to make a sale. The purpose of my Adwords campaigns was really to learn about how the whole Adwords PPC thing works, and I wasn’t really expecting to make any sales. I have also learned about outsourcing work, although it will be a while before I can afford to start outsourcing the tasks that I don’t enjoy doing. I have been mainly learning on the job as I go and as yet haven’t found anything that I can’t do which is very encouraging.
Website Building and Affiliate Networks
I currently have 4 websites in various stages of development, own about 10 domain names that I bought using Godaddy, have a hosting account with Hostgator, and am a member of 3 affiliate networks. I plan on mainly building affiloblueprint style niche websites that promote products from the Clickbank affiliate network, however I will also build some small sites that promote products from other networks such as Commission Junction. I decided to branch out of Clickbank early on just to get a sense of what other products are available to promote as an affiliate. My main passion is travelling, and Clickbank doesn’t have all that many decent looking products related to the travel niche.
Working Vagabond is currently the only site that I have online, although I am very close to getting a large affiloblueprint style site uploaded as well. The niche that I chose for my affiloblueprint site had a huge amount of long tail search terms with high search volume and I just couldn’t stop adding pages. Eventually the site grew really large which is why it is not yet ready to go online, however It has been structured in a way that will make it really easy to manage and grow in the future. I hope to get this monster online in the next couple of weeks and I am confident that it will end up being a really good earner. The other sites that I am working on are still in very early stages of development, but as they are very small niche sites I hope to get them uploaded very soon as well, hopefully in the next two to three weeks.
Short Term Goals
Over the coming weeks I hope to get at least 2 new sites uploaded and begin doing some search engine optimisation work on them. This will consist mainly of article marketing and posting in forums in order to get high page rank backlinks to my websites. I will be heading to Sabah in Borneo in less than two weeks, so I will be doing some travelling and having some adventures as well as working hard on my websites from internet cafes and WiFi spots.
Please feel free to leave comments and ask questions below.
