What To Do Next?

The hardest part of diving back into my own projects is where to start and where to go next. With only so many hours in the date how do I decide what I should be working on. I want to do things that’ll bring me closer to my goals but also be a lot of fun. I don’t want to create a ton of sites that never get updated. I want to work on a small group of projects and make them great.

I do want to try my hand at some affiliate sites. While any site can sell a product, I’m talking about building a site around a product. I know people out there doing it but most people don’t post examples. If you’ve every done any amount of research into affiliate marketing you’ll no doubt end up at Clickbank. I know a lot of people swear by it but if I see one more “make money at insert keyword here” ebook I may be sick. The worst part about affiliate marketing is all the people trying to fleece new people by selling affiliate marketing itself! If you can sell them, more power to you. I’ll tell you what you need to know about affiliate marking right now. Find a great product that people want and sell it. It’s not magical, it’s not mystical and it’s not hard. The hard part is the same thing that’s hard about any site – getting visitors to it and getting them to take the desired action. I’m not sure I’ve found the right product to start my first real affiliate site, but I accidentally sold a big screen TV through amazon for a $49 commission and so LCD/HDTV’s are sounding pretty good! I know it’s way to late to think about affiliate marketing for this holiday season, but I’m already thinking about next year.

Aside from affiliate marketing, I’ve got ideas for sites like TV Forums and a re-launch of Readers Unbound. Both would be forum/community driven sites and RU would eventually have some cool features like your own book collections, reviews, etc. When deciding what to do I have to ask myself: “Is what I’m doing adding moving me towards my goal?” The answer is often no. I love doing cool little projects, helping just about anyone who asks and doing any number of things that don’t really move me towards my goal. While some of these ideas could help in some ways (link strategy, raising my visibility, etc.) the bottom line is building traffic and monetizing that traffic. So, with that in mind it’s time to decide what project is next up on my list. I’m leaning towards two product/deal type sites. One for gadgets, tech etc. and the other for women which my wife Aeryn would be writing. There is a ton of potential even if these markets are competitive. I just want to see if they work at all and learn from them and apply the concept to tighter, less saturated niches.

Within the next week or two I should be ready to launch one or both of these and I’ll make sure to point them out. During the downtime today I need to go through Azoogle and check out some of their offers. I’ve been seeing really good stuff from them.