I’m building a review site right now for online dating offers.  I didn’t realize quite how much work I would have to put into it, but it has been a lot of hours at this point.  Nevertheless, I feel great about it.  The reason I’ve been able to work so hard is because I’ve been breaking the entire project down into lists of steps that I have to follow.  I talked about this a couple days ago when I wrote about keeping records of everything you do, and also with the affiliate review site “formula” I posted about a week or so ago.  It was a formula, but I regret to inform you that there are a ton of little steps in between that I did not foresee.  Nevertheless, it still is a rough outline of what needs to be done.  It’s just that there’s a lot of grunt work in between.

I feel that I’m not at the level with this review site where I should be outsourcing everything yet, simply because I want to turn a profit on it first and see what kind of potential it has for the first one.  If it works out the way I hope it will, then I will feel much less guilty spending on outsourcing a few more when I know that there is almost certainly money at the end of the tunnel.  I feel very confident that there is, but I also feel that so long as I’m forced to sit at work for 8+ hours a day, I might as well be getting things accomplished.  So I will be my own bitch for now.  The me who thinks up these projects will hire out the me who sits at work all day to do the grunt work.  Fine.

I cannot express how greatly my new habit of breaking projects down into simple to-do lists has improved both the amount of work I’ve put out, as well as the quality of work I’ve put out.  By designing the project from start to finish, I set a clear road ahead of me.  I made a number of adjustments and additions to these steps, but that was only in the midst of trying to accomplish them.  That’s where the real learning occurred during this process – in the doing.  Furthermore, by having this clear list of things to do, and by putting my blinders on and not allowing myself to get distracted from this project, I have had only two options each day – perform the steps set out on the list from the day before, or don’t.  If I don’t, then I am on the path to nowhere (failure).  The only other option is to work on the damn project.

Make a giant to-do list, small-chunk it, and then work, work, work.  Then you can sit back and marvel at all the things you’ve learned and created.  I’m now convinced this is the only way to go.

There are plenty of mindless, totally boring steps in internet marketing, particularly when it comes to link building.  That has been the major thing slowing down my output, and dragging on me.  Every time I realize that the time has come to post all my damn articles to 50 different websites and build the links, I get this ultimate dragging feeling and then my mind distracts itself by finding something more interesting to do.  This cycle perpetuates, and the reason is that it’s simply NOT worth your time to do all the linking yourself.  Ugh.  What a terrible task… just about as bad as accounting. HA!

Now that I’m finally willing to pay other people to do things for me, I’ve realized that the most important factor to success is getting things done exactly how I want them to be done.  Communicating clearly with the outsourcer, and having very specific requirements for the work I receive.  That way, if I’m not happy with the end result, I can point to a specific line in the job instructions that clearly states what I expected, and then demonstrate how that objective wasn’t fulfilled, eliminating any confusion in the mind of the outsourcer.

So what I’m doing now is going through every boring & repetitive task that I feel is essential to my current project,  doing it once, writing down exactly what my thought process was, as well as the steps I took to accomplish that task in a manner that pleases me.   It sucks, but I have a feeling of accomplishment when I finish each task, knowing that I will hopefully never have to do that task again unless I choose to.

An added bonus is that by keeping very specific track of these tasks, I’m actually creating a specific internet marketing method for success that I’m going to turn into a product down the road and sell to other people.  2 birds, 1 stone.  Huzzah!

Find a Product
Ideally, high price and high margin for each conversion and a great product that sells itself.  Just be the conduit, don’t do the selling on your own.

Find an Action (Buyer’s) Keyword that expresses a need.
The most important step of all.  Take your time with this.  At the same time, finding good keywords is always guesswork.  Might consider doing PPC offers directly to the landing page to test whether certain keywords convert, then for those that do, design organic placement campaigns to get ranked high in organic, and keep the PPC ad so long as it’s profitable.

Try to approximate how difficult it will be to break into the first page of ranking.  Keep that in mind when it comes to how many links you outsource.

Get some effective, ultra-realistic reviews of the product written.
If there are other reviews to be found online, style yours after them and include more detail.  Actually using the product would be useful.  This is the whole point of all this right?  Once somebody lands on that page, we want to reach them with a solid message.  Your conversion rates are just as important as how much traffic you’re bringing.  This can certainly be outsourced.  If you like to write, you can take part in this but it’s your choice.

Get a really attractive-looking WordPress review site template made up.
Outsource this.  You shouldn’t have to pay more than $100-200 for it, if that.  But you want to make sure that it really does look nice, because this will decrease your bounce rate (number of people who leave immediately without reading the content).  Once you get this done the first time, you can easily update the template for other sites, so it’s mostly a one-time expense.  After that, you just need to update little stuff like the color scheme and banner in order to use it for a complete new product.  You can get somebody to make little changes like that for $20 or less on future sites.

Get Articles for Link Juice.
The articles will be about related topics in the niche.  You probably found a couple long tail keywords while you were doing your research… well, make the articles about those keywords.  SEO the shit out of them.

Don’t forget to search online for PLR, because why write them if somebody else did it for you… but if you don’t find anything, outsource them.  Since they’re not going on your actual site, they don’t need to be that good.  They’re just for building links.  You should be able to get these for less than $5 per article.  A new technique I just heard is actually to get just a couple articles written, and use an article spinner program to change the articles around a little, and voila you have like 10x more articles.  Up to you how you want to do it, but remember that this is just for link juice.

Post the articles onto social/article sites until you’re ranking in Google.
You can find lists of the best article and linkbuilding sites… Take one and hire somebody to post up the articles for you.  Give very specific instructions regarding which articles, which sites, what you want in your author resource box, etc.  Doing these postings yourself the first time around is a good idea, so you can give very specific instructions.  Document everything you do for future outsourcing instructions.

Don’t forget about making free blogs on wordpress and blogger, plus squidoo and scribd.  People will do this for like $.25 per submission, so its super cheap.  Remember to space these submissions out over time so it looks more natural to Google.  Like 10/day or something for a week… it’s really up to you how many you want to post up depending on the competition of the keyword, but if you’re not ranking yet, keep posting more…

Watch the money roll in.
Document everything you do.  Keep track so that on the next project, you can streamline it and see what’s taking most of your time and effort.  Once you get some cash rolling in, you can do this for one niche after another… it’s endless.  All you will have to do is find the product and do the keyword research, after that all the outsourcing instructions are written out and you’ll make relationships with outsourcers that do a good job so your process will become much simpler.