I’ve been busy creating my ‘entry level’ product and sorting out some of the details about my next product, and my soon-to-be-launched monthly newsletter.

So even though progress might appear slow (maddeningly slow for me, I can assure you!) there is progress. Trust me.

Okay — I’ve filled in most of the empty spaces on my business plan.

In the process of thinking through the plan I’ve sorted out what my entry level and back-end products can be.

I say ‘can’ because there’s a heap of products and service offerings I can create; it’s just a matter of creating them.

I can honestly say you have NO idea how liberating it is seeing that Business Plan with all of the projections around traffic, sales and revenue.

Truly, truly exciting and exceptionally motivating!

So, having already listened to the cds on my Offer, Sales Letter and Sales System/Website, it’s time to get to work and create the free opt-in, continuity and entry level products.

Yee haa!!

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• no obvious back-end at the moment, and I don’t have sufficient free time to design products or services from scratch, or sort out suitable affiliate deals
• I am already a ‘guru’ in Social Media and have a wealth of resources on which to draw, plus a clear back-end product and service revenue funnel
• I have some ‘Employee Communication’ and ‘Business Communication’ resources already created that can be added to any shopping cart immediately

So even though the whole niche is tiny in terms of its search engine/keyword numbers, the large amount of resources and back-end already available for me, plus my ‘guru’ status, plus

• the ability to leverage across my Doctoral Research into products, plus
• the ease of creating continuity products and affiliate relationships

means that ’sticking to my knitting’ makes sense when looking at the time I have available to me.

So now all I have to decide upon is what sort of entry product I need to create [whether from scratch or by compiling a product from existing resources] and to get to work on my monthly newsletter.

Now is the time to complete my Business Map Blueprint, outlining the product, traffic and income projections.

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I mentioned in the previous post that I thought a continuity program was becoming essential to my fledgling new business.

Here’s why.

First, to answer the question, "What’s a continuity program?" Consider your electricity bill, your phone bill, your car loan… they all occur monthly and if you don’t pay them you don’t get the benefit of them.

Same with an online monthly continuity program.

It would be a monthly newsletter, a ‘____ of the Month’ club, an audio file, membership to a subscription site, a members-only forum…

It could be any number of things.

It’s what it does that’s so important!

By providing a monthly continuity program you are generating revenue that you would not normally.

Say you sell an eproduct. Great, but you only have the one sale. You only see the benefit that once.

Sell a hundred ebooks one month — great, but the next month you have to sell a hundred ebooks to a brand new set of customers.

But by selling them the ebook and a monthly subscription you are continuing the relationship, allowing you to market other offers of value to them, as well as securing an on-going income for the next few months from them.

Say you sell your ebook for $50; add in a $30 monthly subscription and your cashflow suddenly looks a lot healthier.

Sell 100 ebooks at $50 and you generate $5,000; not bad for a month’s work. But if you add in another $30 monthly subscription, you generate $8,000 for the month plus an extra $3,000 per month for a few months after.

If you do the same numbers in month two, it starts to look like this:

Month 1: $5,000 ebook sales + $3,000 subscription = $8,000

Month 2: $5,000 ebook sales + $3,000 new subscription + $3,000 month 1 subscription = $11,000

Month 3: $5,000 ebook sales + $3,000 new subscription + $3,000 month 1 subscription + $3,000 month 2 subscription = $14,000

Month 4: $5,000 ebook sales + $3,000 new subscription + $3,000 month 1 subscription + $3,000 month 2 subscription + $3,000 month 3 subscription = $17,000

Now, reality would reduce those numbers of subscriptions a bit; it seems the average ‘life span’ of a subscriber is about 3-4 months, but you get the picture.

Suddenly the value of each customer goes from just the ebook sale to considerably more; the longer you can keep them in the continuity program (by offering them great value), the more their value goes up.

Cool.

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Okay, so I looked on Amazon, Clickbank and various other places to see if anything to do with poems and poetry are selling.

There’s not many eproducts for sale, but then again that’s no bad thing; it leaves me some space to create some myself, as well as a monthly newsletter which none seem to offer.

The monthly newsletter, as part of a ‘Continuity Program’ is essential, I have come to see. By offering one I am creating a far more consistent and predictable cashflow.

I’ve been listening to ‘The 99% Solution’ cd on my iPod and I’m really excited about the progress I’ve made and the steps to come. I can see how the whole system hangs together (partly because I’ve tried and failed so many times with other online business systems so that I can ’see’ where they are leading me with each step I take).

One of the ‘maybe not’ moments for me, however, concerns their view that a blog should ‘hang off’ the main page, that the main page will be the ‘landing page’ that will sell the ‘offer’ and capture the opt-in email addresses.

Here’s why I was thinking ‘maybe not’:

A few years back I set up a site called ‘Poems with Passion’ and attempted to build a database of poems, looking to monetize it by Adsense and affiliate links to other products.

It failed, partly because I didn’t market it effectively and partly because—as I see now—the ‘business model’ was wrong.

The more I reflect on this new approach, the more I realise that trying to create a database of poems (the MySpace/Facebook approach where you get the users to create the content and value) is a lot of hard work.

Better that I create a series of products aimed at helping poets write poems, get them published, etc.

After all, who made money in the goldrush: the diggers or the shovel sellers?

I therefore took back my ‘maybe not’ thoughts and will continue on this path, more excited than ever.

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Okay, so it’s been a bit of a gap since the last post, but I’ve been listening to some of the other sections, or Steps, and I’ve decided that they are right — I need to FOCUS. I need to focus on completing one step at a time and only move on to the next step once I’ve completed the step I’m currently on.

So, the current step is figuring out what my goals are (I’m still sorting this out) and what potential businesses or niches I could and would want to get into.

So far I’ve come up with these areas/themes/ideas:

• Adelaide Hills wine
• desert sand
• labrador
• depression
• clothes folding
• hanging clothes/laundry/washing
• suicide
• poems/poetry

No, don’t bother asking where those ideas came from; ‘no correspondence entered into’ as they say.

So far, according to Wordtracker, the principle keywords around all but one of these themes completely suck as far as revenue and traffic potential goes. Perhaps I’m looking at this from the wrong angle.

Certainly a look at the Clickbank products around ‘depression’ and ‘labrador’ are ‘iffy’ at best. ‘Depression’ has a few products, but ‘labrador’ has nothing at all.

The B2B market shows that the major products all revolve around beating or ‘gaming’ Adsense and Adwords, and SEO.

I bought some material a few years ago on niche markets and at the time poems and poetry were still worth pursuing.

According to Wordtracker they still are — way above and beyond what any of the other areas I’ve so far researched have shown.

So now I’m going to focus on seeing if there is a paying market out there — after all, there’s no point in spending heaps of time and energy in an area if no-one actually buys anything, is there?

Okay, so I’ve just finished watching the video. WOW!

It takes what is an incredibly daunting task — creating a successful online business — and turns it into a series of boxes that you fill up one at a time.

So easy!

This system is certainly impressive so far!

Tomorrow (or whenever I can get back to this — I’m spinning several plates in the air at the moment…) : finding out what the ‘99% solution’ is that will immediately put me into the ranks of the top 1% of online marketers.

Plus following up on the exercises of Step 1 — researching what viability my potential business ideas might have, what other potential markets and opportunities are out there, and if they are easy to reach.

Watching the intro dvd on my laptop after setting up my project blog.

Only half way through the dvd but already excited by what has been shown.

The presenter, Kevin Wilke, is one of the creators of the system and by his own admission he’s not comfortable in front of an audience.

There’s no doubting he’s a ‘back office’ guy rather than a marketing salesman.

But this actually works in his favour — rather than being bombarded by the same old marketing shtick I am hearing from someone who has actually ‘done it’, ‘used it’ and ‘learned from it’.

Right now he’s talking about finding what avenue to pursue, and because he wants us (you, me) to create a long-term business, rather than just a dollar-chasing job, he is asking us to focus on answering four key questions:

1. What do I like to do?
2. What am I good at doing?
3. What interests me?
4. What frustrates me?

Already, because of one example he’s shared about a current client of his, I can see a potential blockbuster of an online business myself, so I’m scurrying to write the idea down in the ‘IDEAS’ area of my journal.

The Nitro Marketing Blueprint System arrived today and I’ve already listened to the first CD.

After just eleven minutes it has paid for itself (even though I got it for free) with ideas on how to find markets where the fishing could be good — impressive!