So far I’ve been following the AffiloBlueprint instructions pretty closely. The only thing I did differently was making my content be posts instead of page in Wordpress. I’ve been watching the videos in order and trying to do at least some of the homework assignments.
Weeks 1 – 5 were all about setting up your website; picking a niche and keywords, putting content up, and optimizing your pages to convert. Done that.
Week 7 is about newsletters and I’ll have to put this off until I can afford an AWeber account. (By the way, again he’s right on the money with his recommendations. I did a very thorough review of some of the more popular auto responders and AWeber came out the clear winner).
Weeks 6 and 8 are about getting organic traffic via backlinks and web 2.0 techniques. I’ve decided to skip this for now and jump right ahead to week 9: advanced tweaking of your website and week 10 – 12: PPC.
Why am I doing this instead of following the order of the lessons exactly?
One of the marketing experts I’ve followed pretty closely is Perry Marshall. If you ever get on his email list, try to attend any free teleseminar he offers; they’re great.
One story he tells is an excellent analogy to building a website. I’ll summarize:
At the same time the Wright brothers were trying to be the first men to fly, Samuel Pierpont Langley was attempting the same. He was in the limelight with tons of funding and press coverage while they were lowly bicycle mechanics operating on a shoestring budget.
Langley was convinced he had finally done it and he invited all the papers to witness the historic event. As they watched, his magnificent contraption rose majestically up in the air and…crashed into the Potomac River. It was a major embarrassment.
Meanwhile the Wright brothers did successfully build the first flying machine that could hold a person, as we all know.
Langley’s approach which resulted in failure and Orville and Wilbur’s that achieved success had a very, very important difference that can be related to creating a website.
Langley thought that if he built a big enough engine, he could make anything fly. He spent a lot of money to have an enormous engine constructed.
The Wright brothers instead concentrated on the plane, not the engine. They studied birds and even built the first wind tunnel. After creating a glider that would fly just by running down a hill with it, popping on a relatively small engine easily gave it enough power to carry a man.
So how does this relate to website development?
The website is the plane and traffic is the engine.
Perry states (and I totally agree) that the first thing you should do is build a website that can fly, i.e. convert. You tweak and test and tweak and test so that your website converts with a small amount of traffic. Then you add on the engine (traffic) after you’ve already got a big conversion rate, resulting in larger and larger profits.
If you do it the other way around and concentrate on getting traffic before you have a converting website, you’ll get lots of people who come to your site and then leave without buying anything. I’d rather get 10 visitors a day where 1 visitor buys than get 1,000 visitors a day where nobody buys.
So based on this approach, I’m going to concentrate on getting my website to convert with a small amount of traffic first from PPC. Then once I hone that, I’ll add on the backlinks and the web 2.0 to get more people to it.
Posted by susb8383 under Affiloblueprint | No Comments »
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