Rebuilding An Online Business

I’ve described a little about the current state of my online business in a previous post and it’s now time to take inventory of what assets I have left and where to take things next. It brings to mind images you see on TV after a natural disaster such as a flood, tornado, or a hurricane: homeowners picking through what’s left of their homes trying to find anything that might be salvageable. Books, an old sofa, or even a few cherished family photos that somehow escaped being soaked by the floodwaters, certainly not enough to replace what they’ve lost, but at least something to hang onto as the rebuilding process starts. I certainly don’t mean to compare my current situation to such tragedies, but the mental picture hits home with me.

If nothing else, I’ve been forced to take a hard look at what I’m really doing online and if what I do can even be considered a business. This question is fodder for a lengthy discussion, which I won’t get into here, but for now, that’s just label my online business as “affiliate marketing” and leave it at that.

As also mentioned previously, a large chunk of my income came from click arbitrage. This in itself is a very shakey business model and one that seems to be universally despised by everyone with an Internet connection. However, when put up against a lot of what’s being thrown in the consumer’s face online such as a lot of the skuzzy CPA offers, click arbitrage starts looking a little less skeevy itself.

My current inventory of assets and skills consists of the following:

• A small portfolio of sites (static HTML and WordPress blogs) that receive a daily trickle of organic traffic. Two of these sites get several hundred visitors a day – nothing to write home about, but enough to at least earn a few bucks from Adsense.
• Decent PPC skills primarily focused on Google Adwords with an emphasis on the Google Content Network. I’ve been branching out into YSM and Bing, and though the available search volume is substantially lower there, I’m beginning to see a glimmer of hope with Bing.
• Fairly good SEO skills, which have now been greatly assisted by the use of WordPress.
• Average WordPress skills. Of course there’s no way that I’ll ever be able to get my arms around all the cool plugins and themes available, but isn’t that the true appeal of WP is the first place?
• Fair PHP coding skills, but I’ll never begin to approach the Wiz Bang status of a dedicated PHP programmer cranking away in Novosibirsk.

These are the main assets, with most of them being of the skill set variety. I suppose PPC campaigns could be considered assets, but they typically are very short lived, so I won’t rely on them. In terms of a business development plan I really so little choice but to go with what I know – at least until I can build back up to a reasonably steady income level and then consider moving up the IM food chain another rung.

Herein follows the core models for my business plan:

–Affiliate marketing – my plan is to solidify and expand the 2 main niche markets that I’ve had success with in the past and see where this leads. I will also being implementing the niche marketing strategies of Brian G. Johnson’s “Commission Ritual”. I like his very scaled down approach to niche research, site building using WP, and minimal SEO strategies.

–PPC Traffic Brokering – I’m a bit disillusioned with the “Traffic Brokering” model, at least with driving paid traffic to crappy CPA offers. Instead, I’m testing the waters with “Pay Per Call” lead generation and so far, this looks quite promising. The really nice aspect of PPCall is that the media channels used for promotion are virtually unlimited – it’s not strictly confined to PPC. As time permits, I’ll also run some CPL/CPA campaigns on the side, but this will be very minimal.

–Adsense – Yep, it looks like Adsense is making a comeback with a vengeance these days. It never went away for me. The trick as always, is to get a healthy stream of natural traffic to your Adsense sites all the while staying away from Google’s “Ban Hammer” for both organic de-indexing and banishment from the Adsense program itself. John “Xfactor’s” eBook “Adsense Masters” presents a clear and fresh outlook on building an Adsense VRE, much like Brian Johnson’s approach in “Commission Ritual”.

As usual, taking on all of the above is way too much for just one person. Outsourcing, is the buzzword du jeur, but for now, I’ll just need to put my head down and develop my own system for these methods with the hope of eventually outsourcing bits of it.

I’ll go into more depth on these specific models soon and will also provide fuller reviews of “Commission Ritual” and “Adsense Masters” as I’ve had some time to implement them and collect data.