Two months ago I posted that it was time to reboot my business.

What’s happened during the last two months?

There have been two fundamental changes in the last two months. First, I’ve let go of a lot of ideas and cancelled the domains associated with them. This is to prevent me from being distracted by those ideas.

Secondly I’ve moved my focus to creating niche authority sites that I can build a product around. It’s a subtle change that follow Rob’s Market, Marketing, Product approach. To start with I’m building a site about envelope budgeting software that I want to rank #1 in Google for the keyword “envelope budgeting software” over the next 60-90 days. It’s already off to a flying start ranking on page 3 for that phase and page 7 for the related “envelope budget software”.

The Future

I’m currently doing all of the work for this site on my own. For now I’ll use AdSense to generate revenue. Once I have the site ranking I’ll build out a minimum viable product that I can promote via that site. This way if it proves too difficult to generate organic traffic I haven’t wasted 3-6 months building a product.

I have at least one other niche site planned in a related field and I’m now searching for other niches that I could create sites/products in. While I’m doing a lot of work for the envelope budgeting software niche site myself I will start to outsource work on the later sites.

I’ve made further progress on my reboot project. Yesterday I completed three tasks:

1. Get a privacy policy
2. Get a terms of service
3. Register new domains

My reboot project has been under way for almost two weeks now. After some thought I’ve decided to switch to the free version of Google Apps. I don’t need the features of the paid version (yet) and the 10 account limit is more than sufficient for me. To make the change easy I’ve also decided to switch domains from zoombug.com.au to zoombugmedia.com. That way I’m building something new rather than trying to move something old.

Taking this approach is not without it’s downsides:

Google Apps (Mail / Calendar / Docs / etc)

Set up of the basic Google Apps went smoothly. My web hosting company (Bluehost) has a wizard in the control panel to allow you to quickly set up the required DNS entries.

Feedburner

The old Feedburner interface allows you to transfer your feed to different account. While the process of moving the feeds to my new account was trivial I’ve lost the ability to monetize the feeds because Google AdSense is still linked to the old account.

Google AdWords

AdWords and AdSense were the two areas I was most worried about because both accounts currently have funds on them. With AdWords I could give administrator access to my AdWords account to a different login and then remove access for the old login.While not as obvious as transferring an account with Feedburner it seems to have worked.

Google AdSense

After transferring my AdWords account I had high hopes that I could do something similar with my AdSense account too. Unforunately Google AdSense is very inflexible. There is no way to assign my AdSense account to a different Google Account and Google doesn’t allow you to create a new AdSense account.

Does anyone have any advice about what I can do here? (see my update below)

Google Analytics

Before starting I already new that I would need to set up a new Google Analytics account. While it’s annoying to lose my analytics history I can live without it.

Google Webmaster Tools

With Google Webmaster Tools I needed to set up all of my sites again but there is a slight twist. If you add a site using the same URL that you used on the old account then once you have been verified Google Webmaster Tools will show you the information from the old Google Webmaster Tools account for that site. The important thing is that you use the same URL in the site name.

Example: Previously I used a mixture of www.sitename.com and sitename.com which I wanted to standardize on www.sitename.com. But putting in www.sitename.com for a site that was previously put in as sitename.com meant that Google Webmaster Tools treated it as a new site and started from scratch. I’m still not sure if I’ll bite the bullet and just move everything to www.sitename.com or keep the original mixture.

Overall the experience was positive. The only negative has been the inability to move my Google AdSense account. To be honest, it wouldn’t be a huge problem if Google allowed you to create a second AdSense account even if I had to close the original one first.

Update: After further investigation it turns out that I can cancel my current Google AdSense account. As I’m over the cancellation payout threashhold Google will payout my balance. Once I’ve cancelled my AdSense account I can then apply for a new AdSense account from my Google Apps account.