Day 23: Post Mortem - part I
I’m cashing in the chips on this dog training campaign. I took a shot at it and it didn’t work. No biggie. You have to expect to fail more than you succeed in this business. Any decent internet marketing guru will tell you to “fail fast and fail often”. You need to make sure that you put enough focused effort into each “fail” to at least give it a chance. Sometimes you can tell if something is going to work within a day or so and sometimes it might take a bit longer. You don’t want to continue throwing money away on something that isn’t working though. You must recognize when to stop.
I could continue on with this campaign if I really wanted to break into the niche. I’ve talked about how I would do that in previous posts. The best strategy is most likely to target a sub-niche. There is definitely money to be made on the broad niche but it would take more effort than I’m willing to put in and I don’t think it’s the right fit for my Profitmart site.
It’s important to do a post mortem on a project once you wrap it up. Each project is a valuable learning experience and the only way you really “fail” is if you fail to learn something and repeat the same mistakes over and over.
I still have some time left in my 30 days so I’m going to spend the rest of the posts looking at marketing strategies and ways to pimp up your Profitmart site. I think that will be more beneficial than beating this dead horse.
Post Mortem
If you want more detail on any of these points you can review the previous blog posts.
What went well:
- Changing the domain name. I found a good way to change the domain name of my Profitmart site. This method would even allow me to target different niches using different domains that all pointed back to the one site. If I was going to do that it would still be wise to stick to one main niche. I could then target something like “poodle-training.co.nr” and point it to my poodle training page.
- Creating a custom header. I was able to make a custom header and get my title text to show up in front of it. Granted I have some Photoshop skills but there is lots of header art available for someone who’s Photoshop challenged. There’s a cool site at quickwebcreations that Seth posted in the Profitmart forum today. It has a great web based graphics creation tool for under $7.
- Repackaging PLR content. I was able to easily find PLR and MRR dog training ebooks to use as bonuses for the main product. The PLR content was rougher but has the advantage that I can put it together any way I like and claim authorship.
- Ghostwriting sources. I discovered how cheap and easy it is to get original content created for your niche. You can get an original 400 word article on the topic and keywords of your choice for as little as $10.
- Article writing. I discovered that I can do a decent first draft of a 500 word article in about an hour. I also got through the process of submitting articles which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
- Embedding Sales pages. I started using iframes to embed other pages within my site. Instant content!
- Tutorial creation. I used Wink, Camtasia and BB Flashback to create online tutorials. Wink is my favorite of the three but unfortunately the audio sucks. I will definitely be using this type of technology more to create tutorials on my Profitmuse site.
I’ll look at what didn’t work tomorrow.
Oh yeah - you are probably wondering about the secret weapon. I did manage to get into the first page of listings but only when searching for the title of my article “Is your dog training you?”. The thing I forgot was to look at the number of search results for a particular term. That will determine your chances to make it onto the first page. I’ll expand on this in a later post.
The site I used was http://scribd.com. It’s an article submission site. It took about an hour for my article to get listed in Google which is pretty good. If I was targeting a more long tail term that had less search results I would have a pretty good chance of making it to the first page of listings.
mike
www.profitmuse.com
:8^)