Achieving Financial Independence with content sites
In an article called The Past is Paralysing, Face The Future, Luke Johnson, investor and entrepreneur, talks about the necessity to look forward.
I can completely relate to his last sentence: ¨I have little time for those who say: I wish I had started my own business. My only response is: so do it now.¨
Don´t look for excuses. Start now. Ideas are plenty. Look at your passions and interests. And if you still need help… Here’s An Idea!
Last night, SiteSell passed the 10,000 facebook fans mark, just a few weeks after starting their new page. Congratulations on this achievement.
These are real fans, people who have been involved with content sites for a while and who understand their value. Just take a minute to scan the posts and comments on their FB page. You won´t help being amazed by the heart-felt nature of these reviews. Behind each comment is the real story of a family whose life was changed.
My goal with this blog is just to show that there is a way to a different financial life if you really want it. It requires effort and discipline, but it gives result. This is a message of hope.
He said it...
Keeping expenses to a minimum is essential to creating a successful content site. The key to profitability is to generate free traffic through good content and backlinks. This will cost you nothing but your time and perseverance, and it will generate positive results in the medium / long term. This is the theory (and practice) of the book Here´s an ide@.
If you are in a hurry (don´t forget however: there are no miracles) and still want to give a boost to your site in the short term, you need to be careful with the cost of advertising. It is very easy to spend quite a bit of money in a promotion for very little result. So do your homework well. It rarely makes sense to spend a few hundred dollars to make less in return…
Thanks to the increasingly amazing resources available on the web, it is of course possible to do original and clever things with a little bit of thinking and creativity. For example, I was able to find service providers that created two media supports for my sites at very little cost ($5 each). For such a price, it would not be worth my time to learn the techniques to create them by myself. I always feel I am better off spending my time generating unique content...
The first example (above picture) consisted in using an easily recognizable photograph to promote this blog with a touch of humor (Hint: enlarge the picture if you cannot read the text). The picture was then shared on Facebook, Twitter and will continue serving other promotional needs.
The second example is a video to promote our family site, Marbella Family Fun. I thought the use of sand and stone to create a customized introduction for the website was a great idea by mrbrent (from Fiverr) and that it fit well with Marbella, a beach town in the South of Spain.
These are two simple examples that worked for me. I am sure that you can come up with much better promotional ideas on a budget. Please share them with me.
Any passion will do
Follow up to the dinner table talk with the kids…
My son surprised me with a Power Point presentation of a website he would be interested in doing. His niche: XBOX Gaming Tips. Somehow I am not surprised by the topic… I am still very pleased that he took the time to create the structure of the site, thinking of the different categories, their content and even coming up with a tag line.
He is asking now for help on choosing a platform. Typically I would recommend SiteSell without any hesitation, but in his case I am still not sure he is completely serious about the project, so I will wait before spending the $29 per month. I will suggest he starts either with iweb (the mac free website software) or with the free version of wordpress. He can get proficient at either system in a matter of hours or days.
If his interest proves real and not only a smart trick to get more study time on the XBOX, we will probably reassess his needs. The work done won´t be lost. He will have acquired new skills, organized his thoughts better, and be ready to commit for the long term. Time will tell…
Anything goes!
Gigs can be of any nature, from ´I will advertise your business while wearing a panda mask for $5´ to ´I will give 10000 hits to your sites for $5´. Just scanning through the gigs on offer shows you how creative and silly people can be…
As usual, there is no miracle and you get what you pay for. For $5, don´t be surprised if the hits delivered to your sites are not from your target audience. Don´t be shocked if they are automated, come from Malaysia or India, or from user profiles with attractive women pictures… Probably a few gigs are complete scams. However, many gigs are genuine, and could be useful for particular situations, if you need a boost to your website or if you are creative enough to use panda-masked performers to your advantage.
I have personally tried a couple of social marketing gigs and I can say I was quite pleased with the results. They won´t make a fundamental impact to the long-term performance of my sites, but they did not break the bank either. The providers performed as promised and on time. I had made sure to choose people with a history of positive comments and I was not expecting too much anyway…
