“If you don’t design your life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”
Jim Rohn
In my first blog post, I talked about passive income businesses and my first business idea.
Today, we'll walk through my 1-year plan, including the vision, goals, and timeline.
First, let's start with the Vision.
I always start a plan with the end in mind.
It's like sailing a ship - you want to know the destination before leaving the harbour.
In summary, I'm creating the "how-to" guide on acne scars that I wish I had.
Now, let's turn to the milestones on this journey: Goals.
My top priority is publishing an ebook on acne scars. Here's why:
You've probably seen ebooks before as study guides, interview materials, or "how-to" manuals, among others. In general, people buy an ebook because of:
(a) Convenience
An ebook provides a concise summary of all the important content. This saves the reader time - and time is money.
(b) Greater Scope
The ebook may go beyond the scope of free content. This includes more details, examples, exercises, tutorials, and audio or video supplements.
(a) Recurring
As with traditional books, a well-written ebook can become a "go-to" resource for beginners. This means there is recurring demand as new beginners learn about the topic.
(b) Scalable
Selling your own products generally carries higher margins than selling someone else's products (affiliate marketing).
Suppose the ebook sells for $30 and affiliate marketing commissions are $5 per referral. With just 10 ebook customers, you'd make the same sales as 60 referrals.
However, selling your own products is far more difficult. Readers must trust your site and feel that they are getting something of value.
The blog post is the bread and butter of most sites.
My plan for writing blog posts is twofold:
As I learn more about my topic, I'll write blog posts along the way.
This helps me better understand the topic while providing content for the site.
Once I finish my research, I can reuse the blog posts for the ebook.
Goals 1 and 2 won't matter if no one is reading my content.
So my last goal is to target 750+ visits per month.
How did I come up with 750? I looked at the performance of two similar websites.
Using SEMRush (an SEO tool), I checked the historical traffic of Super Natural Acne Treatment and Acne Einstein (screenshots below).
Both achieved ~1,000 visits per month in about a year's time. I adjusted that number to 750 as the search volume for acne scars is lower than for acne.
SEMRush Report on Supernatural Acne Treatment
SEMRush Report on Acne Einstein
I've split my 1-year plan into 3 distinct phases.
In this phase, I'll develop the foundational skills required to build a successful website and work effectively as a solo entrepreneur:
Next, I'll be reading medical journals and writing blog posts. I call this content "curation" rather than "creation" because I'm taking pieces of what already exists and aggregating it.
The final phase is distribution and increasing traffic to the website.
I'll use social media appropriately and learn to optimize SEO.
Thanks for reading this post! Stay tuned for more details on my journey!
Cheers,
Tom