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.

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

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.

My next step is shutting down 22 sites, redirecting 2 of them to this site and re-building the other 3.

My plan is pretty simple:

1. Inventory all my web assets
2. Shut (almost) everything down
3. Re-build any assets that I think can be made profitable
4. Chuck everything else

There’s a time limit involved, 30 days, which knocks out anything big. I guess I should start with a list of ideas…

1. Form builder – Conflicts with a work project
2. Application Builder – Not enough time
3. Hosted “Launching Soon” – Easy to build but there are so many of these
4. Niche Site Builder – SaaS application. Not enough time.
5. Microsite CMS – A CMS for marketers who want to host lots of small sales sites.
6. WordPress Theme Framework – I think there’s room for an alternative to Thesis.
7. Babysitting Co-op Manager
8. Budgeting Application
9. Self Managed Superannuation Fund (SMSF or DIY Super)
10. Reporting / BI Tool for Small Business
11. Ticketing Software
12. Kanban Software

Some of these ideas could get to version 1.0 in 30 days but a lot would only reach minimum viable product. I’ll sleep on it for tonight, possibly add a couple of ideas tomorrow and then talk it through with some people at work. Ideally I’ll be down to one idea tomorrow night.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what I should do? I could really use the feedback.

Here’s my reasoning:

• Mobile apps rarely go for more than $5 once off and you’ll lose a 30% to the app store
• Desktop apps will struggle to break $60 once off (there are some exceptions)
• SaaS apps will struggle to break $30/year (again, exceptions apply)

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.

So what have I learnt since last time?

Lesson #1: Google will tell you if your bid is too low to appear on the first page.

The bid for a couple of my keywords is too low to appear on the first page and Google AdWords kindly tells me this.

Lesson #2: My tracking sucks

The landing page is receiving both organic and paid traffic. After two conversions I realised that I have no idea if the conversions are from paid or organic traffic. The only way I can tell is to download the access logs and try matching an entry with a sign-up email. I’ll need to solve this before I re-start the campaigns.

Lesson #3: Don’t use shared hosting

I’ve been using shared hosting at Blue Host for about a year now. Lately it feels like 20% of page requests when I access my sites are timing out. Instead of wasting traffic I’ve decided to pause the campaign until I can switch to a VPS.

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…

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.