To start things off, I hope you are having a great Labor Day (for all my US readers), and you have all had a great weekend. Welcome to the first week of the chase to $250,000/year journey - I am so stoked that you are going to be on this journey with me and I hope I can provide some valuable insights on what I am doing, what worked for me and what didn’t work so you don’t make the same mistakes I did. So without further ado let’s begin go what I did week 1!
My Background
For those of you who haven’t read my “about me" newsletter check it out here. It’s a pretty quick read and you will get to know about what I have done in the past, what I currently do and why I started this challenge. It’s a quick and easy way to get to know me a bit better, but for those who want a 30 second recap of that newsletter I will explain below. For those who read step 1 newsletter - skip down to the Week 1 header.
My past - I went to college in Michigan, and got a degree in Computer Science. During that time, I started to create websites for family friends and local businesses and really enjoyed making the extra money, and that is where I got into online businesses. I have created an online course about programming, a e-com store that didn’t do very well, sold some digital products and did more and more freelancing to make money. I would say the best success I’ve had has been freelancing - mainly developing websites and managing social media and some SEO. I have failed multiple times, but I have also had success in these ventures and I’m going to take what I learned and apply them moving forward.
My present - Currently, I am a full time software developer. I still enjoy and do web development freelancing on the side and this will count towards the $250,000/year but I also wanted to create online businesses where I don’t have to directly give up my time for money.
My future - I started this challenge for a couple reasons, the first is I want to create financial freedom for my family (have a nice house, put my future kids through school, etc), second I wanted to share my experiences with people who also want to do this - because I truly love to teach and enjoy that and last I want freedom that this type of money can create, no more 9-5 job and just do what I want. Those are the 3 main reasons behind this whole endeavor.
Now that you know me, I hope a little more I hope you keep coming back and following my journey, because the number 1 thing I want this newsletter to do is simply provide value to you. Maybe not every week, but hopefully there will always be a nugget of knowledge you can take away from each newsletter.
Now let’s get back to week 1.
Week 1
Day 1. Day 1 was the start of the idea. I have thought about this idea for a couple of months and didn’t know if I wanted to share my experiences or not, and if I did want to share them - how was I going to do that. There is a huge trend right now for newsletters in the online business space and I figured why not create a newsletter for this, I thought it would be interesting for one, two it would hopefully be valuable to the readers and selfishly it would keep me honest on this journey. That is why I chose to do the newsletter. Not much was done as far as actually work except for confirming that I was going to do the challenges with all online businesses and I was going to do a newsletter with weekly updates and tips along my journey.
The next couple days were filled with random administrative tasks and events. The first task was getting this newsletter set up. I obviously ended up choosing Substack for my newsletter platform. I think it just so easy to use on my end and on yours. Its truly made for newsletters like this and that is why I enjoy substack so much. I just have to create a new post, type out my content and boom hit send and it goes to all of you instantly.
Social Media
Next day, I got my Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pages set up and running (shameless plug - they are linked and you should follow them!). This is super simple now-a-days, but one thing I will recommend, especially for Facebook is to fill out all the fields. This will get your page seen more by people if you have it filled out completely and Facebook will have a better understanding of what you page or group is about so it can show it organically to people who may be interested.
What Business to Start…?
Next, I sat down and tried to figure out what online business I wanted to start first. After a lot of thought and planning, I chose that I was going to start with a lead generation business. For those that don’t know exactly what this is, a lead generation site or business is when someone creates a website for a service in a town, and then ranks that site on page 1 of Google, and then people in that town will start calling or filling out contact forms for that service and then I would sell those leads to companies that may be on the 3rd or 4th page of Google that aren’t getting a ton of leads through SEO. There are a lot of different ways you can get paid with this model, and I am unsure what model exactly I plan to use yet, but I will continue to think about that as I continue.
What Is Lead Gen?
Many of you may be wondering why I chose that as my first business model, and I will let you know the main reasons behind this. First, this is what my online expertise is in, I have created local service websites and have done their SEO for them to help them to rank better on SEO and Google rankings. I have also come up with a sheet that I will give you all on how I got about deciding what services and cities I use. In general, its important to have a big enough city that there will be consistent leads but not a huge city where it may take 3-5 years to rank on the first page (like Los Angeles or Miami). Another great tip for this is don’t go into an already highly ranked service. For example, typically roofing is super competitive now-a-days because people found out they could do this years ago and understood roofing jobs go for 10k to 30k and that is by far one of the most expensive service jobs. So the people who sell those leads to the roofing companies will just take 15%-20% of each sale. So one sale could bring them a couple thousand dollars sometimes. You want a service that is a little more expensive if possible, and then just give them each lead for say $5-$100 depending on the service again. I will let you know that the service I chose was painting, but will keep the city a secret for now.
I will attach an Excel spreadsheet here, and you all can take a look at it. It basically goes over the criteria I look for when picking a city and service, and then also looking at their competitors in that region. And its super important that you look at the competitors because in one city, painting could be really competitive but in another with the same population it is very weak, so you would obviously want to go after the city that doesn’t have as much presence as far as Google rankings.
If you have any questions about that spreadsheet let me know! Just email me at the250k@gmail.com!
Creating the Site
So, after creating the social media pages, deciding on the first business and then what service and city I was going to focus on first I started to create my site.
For my sites, I use BlueHost for hosting and then use WordPress to make these sites. WordPress makes it super simple to spin up these websites because of the templates and themes it already has. On top of WordPress, I have a life time, unlimited amount of Divi licenses (because I have developed so many sites in the past), I also use Divi to create the front end which makes it super quick and simple. I usually can pick a template and from their change up the colors if I want and then obviously change up the text. There are some times I need to do some custom things, but it isn’t super often.
I don’t typically use a ton of plugin’s for my WordPress sites, only the ones I need. Those are typically Contact Form 7, analytics tool like MonsterInsights and then a website speed optimizer. I have played with multiple now and I can’t really find one that sticks out so I typically will just use WP Rocket. Then the last plugin is Yoast SEO for SEO purposes. Besides that, for these SEO sites you don’t want a ton of plugins because you want the site to be SUPER fast, because Google loves when your site is fast. I currently am still building the site out, mainly I need to add my content to the page and then I should be done. I chose this type of business first, because Google will need some time to rank this site, probably at least 4 months but maybe even 6 months to 8 months before it gets on page 1. I will typically check in with the site and SEO every week to see how it is doing and if it can be improved. I will also be looking for another city and service after I get this up and running, so I will have 2 sites going and just a better chance of making more money. Once I get the two up in running hopefully within the next 2 weeks I will then start my new business venture while these sites take their time to rank by Google.
I know I was kind of technical with the plugins I use and some of you have never used WordPress. Would it be worth it to take some time and create a video of me creating a website like this that is used strictly for ranking on Google?! Let me know - just email me at the250k@gmail.com and let me know you want a WordPress tutorial - definitely something I would do!
Wrapping up
Wow, I feel like that was so much information right off of the bat - I hope I didn’t scare you away. That is basically how the first week went. I am from and live in the US, so I took Sunday and part of Saturday off to enjoy with friends and family during the holiday weekend so if it didn’t seem like a lot for a weeks worth of work, I did take some time off - guilty.
I hope you learned something along the way, and this first week was mainly covering the idea, about me and then dove into the first business a bit. The next couple newsletters I will dive into the business more and what specific actions you can take if you also find this lead gen business model interesting, but I just wanted to cover it on a high level for the first newsletter.
If you are still here - you are awesome! And I’m glad you made it to the end. I have already had one of my subs reach out and wanted to see if I wanted to partner up with him in a business opportunity - and let me say - I love it! This is exactly why I ended up doing this newsletter to connect with all of you! If you have a business idea, and would like to partner up with me just email me at the250k@gmail.com! Obviously, I would have the time to do all of them if everyone had an idea, but maybe I could create a group on Facebook for all of you subs to give out business tips and ideas, or for people to meet possible partners? Let me know if that’s something that would be cool too!
The End…for now..
What a week. I am so glad I did the newsletter and so many of you joined. Each week’s newsletter will just keep getting better I promise, so stay tuned for next weeks and it will be even better.
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