Interpreneurship: Where To Focus Your Online Business Energies?

While Aaron Wall’s SEO Book site is more technical than maybe some of the intended readers of this site would seek, Aaron has some amazingly revealing information on a post about whether to build his own sites or selling his consulting services. I’ve had a similar experience as Aaron, in that most clients never want to pay you what you think you’re worth. Sometimes it’s better applying your knowledge to your own work and profiting from that than trying to convince a client that you are worth every dollar of your quote.

If you have one or more skills which you can talk authoritatively about (but not condescendingly), then Aaron has an example scenario that should make all of you budding online publishers salivate. He talks about building “2 legitimate 12-page sites a week” that each eventually bring in $200/month in some form of revenue. Now think about that. He’s an expert, and a successful interpreneur/ online publisher, and he’s giving you a valuable clue. You don’t need to have a site with hundreds of pages if you can build a small one with useful, real articles about a focused topic.

I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but if you can research a topic and write about it coherently, 12 pages is less effort than hundreds. Maybe you need to start with two such sites per month instead of per week. Can you do that? If you’re still holding on to a full-time job, you don’t want to wear yourself out trying to do too many things.

So start small, build a site up, and move on. What type of site? Well that’ll by part of your research. I won’t tell you what to do; you’ll have to decide. But here are 10 tools for online research. The article I’ve linked to is aimed at people doing distance or online education, but the tools discussed there still apply. Take particular note of one tool, Google Trends.

I’ll leave you with one piece of advice, if you are building a site related to a skill you have, or a product you are selling. (This is in comparison to sites that give away pure information and display advertising as the only way of monetizing the site. For example, the site you are reading now.)

To promote your skills/ products for sale, you need to promote your website, either through advertising or fresh, regular articles that relate to your site’s main topics, or both. You could try blogging, but  you don’t necessarily need to write everyday. If you are promoting, say, your voice over skills, then you need to write articles related to that kind of work. However, what are you going to write about? Taking care of your throat? A potential client wouldn’t care about that. But someone who wants to get started in voice overs would. So one possible course for your site is to use the keywords that would attract both clients and future peers.

In this particular extreme example, because potential clients for voice over work could come from any industry, you can only talk about the common theme: voice over work and anything related to it. However, by writing about voice over work from your perspective as an available talent, if you use the right terminology, clients and agents will find you through the search engines.

If you’re learning about the industry as you go, no problem. Document what you learn about, say, finding clients, signing contracts, getting residuals, etc. This will draw in readers and build up your site’s ranking, which in turn will eventually draw in clients. And for those few clients that do hire you because they see on your website how much you know about the industry (and because of the free, downloadable demos you have), the ROI (Return On Investment) in time and effort will eventually pay off.

You may have a thousand visitors to your website before you get a client. But if you get one client out of every thousand visitors who gives you a contract worth $500, then the ROI is $0.50 per person. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but sometimes that’s more than you’ll make per visitor from a pure information website.

So before you begin building a site, ask yourself who is going to be the primary reader, how you expect to monetize the site, and where the revenue will actually come from. Most online businesses that fail did not address these problems.

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