At our meeting yesterday, Rick introduced some concepts to the group about how to plan a site (or mini-site) around the “M” first model—Monetization as the first step…
As all of us SBI’ers know, the C>T>P>M model (Content>Traffic>Presell>Monetization) has been a proven success model for many of us, but it does require good writing skills, lots of time and effort creating the content, and patience to wait until the search engines send traffic to our sites. I wouldn’t trade the education that my SBI site has given me for anything, but Rick’s ideas about other ways to think about and plan our sites gives a lot of food for thought, and may be a really great approach, depending on your skill set and what you are trying to do with your site.
He explained that sometimes it might be better to thoroughly explore the monetization options first, and plan everything else around that. In other words, choose a product (or products), service, or vendor FIRST that you like- ones that offer a great deal or terrific benefits to your customer that YOU can make money from, and make the rest of your plan support that first-and-foremost goal of making money.
He mentioned that some of us have gotten so excited about our niches that we have spent tons of time creating our sites based on a passion, but then find out later that the monetization options for it are not so plentiful. Sure, Adsense is a great option for content sites, but what about those of us with products to sell? Maybe it is easier (and better even) to consider another way of doing things, especially if we want to have a selling or shopping cart site.
Many of us begin with SBI because it helps us create our sites without knowing anything at all about how to build a website when we start. We come away with a great education about how to build a quality site, and there is great support for us along the way- lots of reading material, videos, active forums in which to ask and get our questions answered.
During our SBI site-building process, we are encouraged to really investigate the monetization piece before we get too far along, however if it is our first site we really lack the full knowledge about what that really means. And herein lies the rub- we can’t really know what it all means until we DO it. We have to build our sites to gain that knowledge, and there has to be a balance between trying to understand each step before we do it and what each step affects later on, and just jumping in and doing it.
We can read and watch and attend webinars and pay for ebooks and classes galore., but if the fear of making a mistake keeps us from moving forward in a steady path with our first sites then I think we have probably made the biggest mistake of all, maybe even bigger than building a site that is hard to monetize. We can learn from our mistakes if we make them, but if we don’t try, we are just stuck.
Lately, I have heard some grumblings from a few local SBI’ers who are a bit dissatisfied with the results of their sites. One even conveyed that they felt a bit misled by the person who got them into SBI originally because it is more difficult and has taken longer than what she felt or assumed was the timeframe for success based on the pictures painted by the person touting SBI.
But truly, no matter what model you use, it is going to be hard work and it is going to take time. With the Content-first model, you have to write a lot of content and struggle through while you wait for the search engines to find you and start sending traffic. With the M-first model, you need to learn how the whole PPC (pay-per-click) world works in order to ge the traffic that you need. That takes time and effort too, and certainly will be understood better if you work through the SBI-way of doing things first as Rick also confirmed.
Both models are going to require an investment, but the common factor is you and how willing you are to keep ploughing through, trying things out, not being afraid to take some uncomfortable steps, and learning from those mistakes. If you can do that, you will have success.
As SBI always says, the tortoise is the winner. Slow and steady wins the race.
For me, these are not shallow words. I am now beginning to make a living from multiple income streams through my SBI content site (C>T>P>M), and it is now building a bridge to other related sites I am creating that are more in the model that Rick just told us about (M>T>P>C).
It doesn’t happen overnight, but I haven’t given up. I have been at it for over two years now. I KNOW that you can all do it too. If you find the right approach and keep plugging away, evaluating your progress and making changes to improve along the way, you will have success!!
My husband, who kept asking me every day for the first year- “Are you making money yet?” is now a believer and a huge supporter of all I am doing. He doesn’t ask me that question anymore- what a relief!!
Hang in there everybody!
Lori
………………………………………
Thanks Lori for saying it better than I probably could. You can find the PDF file of the PowerPoint I used over on my site. It was too big to add here for some reason. Here’s the link to the page.
………………………………………
You must log in to post a comment.