Leaving Work Behind

The One Hour Authority Site Project: My Make or Break Strategy

Tom Ewer
Photo Credit: Kalexanderson

The following is part of an ongoing series, The One Hour Authority Site Project. If you’d like to read more about it then click here!

As my income has increased over the past few months and I have started making more than I ever have before, my attitude towards money has begun to shift.

I bought solid wood furniture for my new home office. I took my girlfriend to a very fancy (and rather expensive!) restaurant for her birthday. I paid someone to decorate my living room. These are all things I wouldn’t have done a couple of years ago. I would have shopped at Ikea, eaten at Frankie and Bennys and picked up a paintbrush.

You may be wondering what this has to do with my authority site project. Well, it’s related to my attitude towards money. Now that my business is profitable I have an opportunity, for the first time, to invest financially in my future success. And that is exactly what I plan on doing — I will be investing a sum of money in my authority site with the hope that it will offer me a return.

In this post I want to share exactly what my plans are in order to make this site a success. If it doesn’t work I will draw a line under this project and move on. If it does work then the potential for future growth could be huge (both with this project and others).

My Deadline

Just a couple of weeks ago I was floundering a bit. I had no direction.

What I needed was a deadline, as my friend Steve Scott told me in one of our mastermind meetings. He was totally right. I set myself a deadline for both my upcoming book and my authority site and my attitude towards the projects changed completely.

But how do you set a deadline for a blog? By their very nature blogs do not “finish,” do they?

Well, the deadline is intended to be an exercise in commercial viability. I have been working on my authority site (freeonlinedatingadvice.net) since September of last year, and in that time I have done a great deal of work and achieved very little. I have a site with over sixty articles, but no one is reading them.

So I decided that I would create an environment by which success was required in order for the project to move on. That’s what the deadline is about — if the site is unable to sustain itself (i.e. create an income that matches its outgoings) by my deadline, or at least shows the potential to do so, I will cut my losses and move on.

As I revealed in my last update, that deadline is Monday 12th August 2013. By then the site should be earning a minimum of $90 per month, which will enable me to hire writers on an ongoing basis to produce one post per week.

I am hoping that with the intensity of the project I will be able to surpass that goal comfortably, but I honestly have no idea of what the outcome will be. This is totally new ground for me.

My Budget

Once I had set my deadline I needed to define a budget — the amount of money I would invest in that time to give the project the best possible chance of success.

To be honest the budget is likely to be a bit of a moveable feast — I have no benchmark to compare against and no real idea as to what would be a sensible amount to invest. Provisionally I came up with a figure of $500, broken down as follows:

10x posts @ $20 = $200

10x guest posts @ $20 = $200

Infographic @ $100

I know one thing for certain — the budget will not go beyond $1,000. That is mental cutoff point at which I would have to draw a line. I don’t think expenditure will get that high though.

My Content Strategy

One of the things that had been holding me back from taking this project forward was a lack of time to produce new content. In reality I had become a bit burnt out from writing so many online dating articles.

However, that situation has now changed entirely. The content for my site is now in your hands — literally. In my last update I made a job offer to LWB readers and the response I got was far greater than I anticipated.

I received around thirty applications for the role of which many were really top quality. Although I had originally planned to hire just one writer, I ended up with three:

They will share writing responsibilities over the next eight weeks or so, with a schedule of 2-3 posts per week.

Not only that, I received guest posts from no less than seven other talented writers:

My sincere thanks go out to all of those who applied — it was a seriously tough decision narrowing the field down and I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to pick from such a talented pool of writers.

My final choice of writers was led in part by a desire to have different “voices” on the blog, and I think I have achieved that. I’m really excited to see what Gina, Nick and Dave produce in the coming weeks.

My Marketing Strategy

I am delighted with future prospects for content on the site and have no doubt that my writers will produce great stuff. It is the marketing of the site that is the great unknown — will I be able to do enough of the right things over the next eight weeks to enable the site to break even?

Well, I certainly feel like I will be pulling out all the stops. My strategy will be based upon the advice contained within the awesome Point Blank SEO course, which I would recommend to anyone who wishes to boost the visibility of their site (both in the search engines and in general).

My approach will be made up of the following elements:

I will be spreading out this work over the coming weeks. My intended schedule is as follows:

The infographic is intended to be the coup de grâce — it will be sent out to every single website, blog and social media profile that I can dredge up in the niches of online dating, dating and relationships, women’s and men’s interests, and so on.

I have no doubt that I will think of additional tactics that I will implement as I go on as I am determined to give this site the best possible chance of success.

What Do You Think?

As always, I’d love to get your feedback on my plans. Do you think that I have a chance of success? Do you disagree with anything I have planned or do you have alternative and/or additional suggestions? Please let me know in the comments section below!