I have completed second week of my pre-launch setup plan for my new online business where I am going from broke to a full-time income in just 12 months. My intention was to spend 3 weeks in pre-launch and the progress so far appears to be on track.
If you are new to my project you can discover the background to it by reading the blog post ‘The Journey Begins . . .’ on my website.
You can catch up on what I completed in week 1 of pre-launch by reading this article.
This pre-launch period is pretty intensive and is taking most of the spare time I have outside of my full-time caring role I have for my partner Andie and also looking after her 12 year old son.
Completing the tasks needed to be able to launch, especially with the ambitious content distribution system I am setting up for both my blogging platforms and my social media platforms would not have been possible without my prior experience and knowledge.
If you want to follow in my footsteps, I suggest you allocate at least a full month for this type of setup, maybe double that if you are totally new to online business.
Summarising My Progress
I summarise each week by focussing on the sub-projects I have listed in Yanado, my project planning tool :
The subprojects are the list on the left in the black area on this snapshot from last week.
In addition to Yanado, I am also using a whiteboard, split into 7 daily sections with my tasks written on strips of paper and tacked to it. This allows the plan to be micro-managed on a daily basis.
This whiteboard provides a quick visual aid to my most pressing tasks and provides a flexible way to plan as I progress day by day.
Here is the whiteboard at the start of pre-launch week 3, ready for the coming week:
If you compare it to last week’s image, you will see a big drop in the number of scheduled tasks for this week. I am not sure if this signifies much as I don’t use bigger pieces of paper for bigger tasks and I still have a few big tasks remaining.
You will notice I have planned to keep the end of the week relatively free just in case I need to catch up on a few of the tasks.
In the weekly review below, I will be posting Yanado screenshots for each subproject. These screenshots will show Yanado after I have completed my Monday morning review.
Here is a breakdown of what each of the 3 columns in Yanado means:
1) Pending – These are tasks yet to be scheduled
2) Doing – These are the tasks scheduled to be completed in the current week (week 2 in this case)
3) Done – These are the tasks I have completed in the previous week.
I will ‘archive’ all of the tasks in the ‘Done’ section once I have completed this review article. This will make the tasks disappear from this specific Yanado view and reduce the number of tasks remaining in the system. This will allow a weekly snapshot of progress.
The tasks currently in Yanado are for the pre-launch of my business only.
I had originally identified a total of 301 tasks within the preparation phase of my business by the end of week 1 and over the last week I have added another 36.
In addition, I also have a new sub-section called ‘Project 24 E-A-T or SEO’. This accounts for 30 of the new tasks.
These were the key figures from my week 1 summary:
Number of tasks at the beginning of the week 1: 253
New tasks added in week 1: 48
Tasks completed during week 1: 58
Tasks remaining at the start of week 2: 243
These are the figures for last week (week 2):
Number of tasks at the beginning of the week 2: 243
New tasks added in week 2: 36
Tasks completed during week 2: 74
Tasks remaining at the start of week 3: 205
So out of the new total of 337 tasks for the set up of my business, I had completed 132 in 2 weeks.
205 looks a daunting number of remaining tasks but as you will see from the screenshots of each section many of the tasks will be completed once my business has launched and out of the pre-launch phase.
In fact, some of these tasks will be easier to implement once I have content created and have traffic stats coming in from Google Analytics.
. . .
Here is a review of last week’s progress for all 9 of the subproject sections in Yanado:
Website Development
I managed to complete most of the tasks I set myself for week 2 in this section, plus several extra tasks I hadn’t originally planned for week 2.
I managed to run through 5 of the SEO checklists I have from Madalin Tudose’s ‘The SEO Checklist’ training course. Most of the tasks in these checklists I had already completed and it only took a couple of hours to complete the remaining ones.
I also changed the look of the website by creating a new logo header, introducing a 2-column blog post listing to the category pages, and building out the side bar content.
You can see the current layout of the website in the image below:
You can see I also added links in the side bar to my main social media accounts.
The target for the coming week is to get the last couple of pre-launch tasks completed. The other tasks are non-essential for pre-launch.
Social Media & Citations
I had completed most of the tasks in this section in week 1, so not an abundance of activity here over the last week.
I created the Facebook group that was specific to my journey (of going from zero to a full-time income in 12 months) and added it to my social media automation tools so any relevant posts are scheduled to be posted there.
The idea behind this Facebook group, as opposed to my Facebook business page, is that this group will focus on my journey only and will not get cluttered by other irrelevant content.
A new task I identified and completed last week was to set up the schedule of social media posts from MissingLettr for each of my blog posts.
I had used this tool about 3 or 4 years ago for a client but it had changed a little in the interim. Nevertheless, I managed to schedule the posts for 2 or 3 blog posts.
MissingLettr schedules 9 posts to be posted to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn over the coming 12 months for each blog article. The time period between posts increases each time. This ensures more posts are scheduled at the start of the campaign than in the last 6 months.
It is a great tool to get people coming back to any evergreen blog posts you publish. You can also reschedule the campaign again anytime after the original 12 month period has completed. It’s a great way to get your own relevant content frequently onto your social media pages.
Another new task I identified and completed in this section was to set up my Google website from within my Google My Business (GMB) account.
It is a fairly simple website using the information you enter into your GMB account and also using your GMB posts. It has the advantage of being a Google property, so it provides more authority to your business in the eyes of Google and can only help with your ranking.
You can see this website by clicking on this link.
All of the pre-launch tasks have now been completed in this subproject. TikTok can wait until I have time to learn how to use it effectively for marketing.
Tools Set-Up
I didn’t manage to complete anything on this section last week, but I did start pushing out social media posts about my blog articles using the scheduler in Publer.
As you can see, there are a few tasks building up in this subproject for the coming week. With the exception of possible the VideoDashboard setup, none of them are critical to be able to exit pre-launch and go live with my business.
Project 24 Blog
Project 24 is a training course on blogging created by a company called Income School. It is my go-to training for everything blogging. The snapshot above is just part of the 60-step action plan that is set out in Project 24. Not all of the steps are shown.
Last week I added/updated the Legal Pages to my blog. These I placed in a menu on the footer of my website along with the link to my ‘Contact Us’ page. They include pages such as the privacy policy, terms and conditions, cookie policy, and my affiliate disclosure for my website/business.
These legal pages are important, especially if you want to run ads on Facebook or Google. Google also sees them as being an important part of your website authority and they help build credibility for you and your website.
I reviewed my WordPress settings as laid out in the Project 24 training and added a couple of WordPress plugins that will allow the placement of banner adverts on my website. I haven’t set any banners up at this stage but they are part of my launch plan.
Over the coming week my main targets from the training course is to identify the keywords relevant to my business and build a list of at least 30 blog post topics for when my business launches.
The other key project this week is to build my resource pages. These pages identify the tools, training, and equipment I use in my business so people can see how I am producing my blog posts, social posts, and building my website and montising my business.
Both of these subjects are not essential for pre-launch and could quite easily be categorised as post-launch tasks. So this subproject is already ready for launch.
Project 24 YouTube
As per the blogging section above, this is part of the Income School Project 24 training. It too is broken into 60 steps.
As you can see, there was nothing completed last week and nothing is planned for this week.
This subproject is ready for my business launch, which is where my video content will be produced.
Project 24 E-A-T for SEO
This is a new subproject added last week. As you can probably gather, it is based around another training course from the Income School Project 24 training system.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is becomimg more and more important for ranking, especially on Google who have been making noises about this for a couple of years or so.
The Project 24 course consists of 30 steps to build E-A-T on your website and help you rise up the Google rankings.
The majority of the steps are designed to be undertaken once you have completed the 60 steps from the main Project 24 blog training and have built a good library of content articles on your website, but there is no reason why many of the steps can not be undertaken in conjunction with that training.
Having reviewed the training I realised I had naturally completed some of the steps and a few others were fairly simple to complete.
None of the steps remaining are pre-launch tasks, so this subproject is ready for launch.
Marketing
This subproject is more relevant after the business launch.
I had completed the only pre-launch step within this section in week 1 and this subproject is ready for launch.
Affiliate Marketing
There was no progress on this section in week 2.
The 3 steps earmarked for this week could just as easy be classified as post-launch tasks, but my target was to have a marketing funnel built pre-launch.
It seemed sensible to build a funnel that I could montise using an affiliate program as opposed to just offering a list magnet that just added people to my newsletter email list.
This makes the funnel slightly more complex but it gives the possibility of getting my first affiliate commissions. It seemed worth the slightly extra effort.
I have much of the funnel built from the first week but I need to get everything working with my email autoresponder and test the process. I hope to complete this over the coming week.
This subproject is ready for launch.
Content
I published several blog posts last week with a total of 10,773 words.
It am quite proud of this achievement considering all the other tasks I completed.
One of the things I have learned from this flurry of blogging activity is that writing a blog post is roughly a only a third of the time of the full publishing process.
It takes the remaining two thirds of the time to undertake all of the following tasks:
- Proof read the article
- Source images and download, create, or screenshot them
- Resize or crop images
- Optimise images so they have smaller file sizes and load on the website faster
- Add the images to the blog post
- Add links to relevant articles on my website or external websites
- Set up the SEO data, such as the title and meta desciption
- Schedule the blog post for publioshing on my blog, Medium, and Tumblr
- Ensure the blog post has been publish and looks correct, including testing any links
- Create relevant social media posts and schedule them
- Set up MissingLettr for a 9-post social media campaign over a 12 month schedule
You may have noticed one of the blog posts I have scheduled to write this week is to cover this subject.
Originally I was going to write a document for myself to follow listing the steps needed to produce and publish a blog post. It would document things such as the image dimensions I use and the process go through, including the tools I use at each step of the way.
Then I thought it would be better as a blog post so anyone needing a guideline on writing a blog post can follow it too. Aren’t I a generous guy?
I have a couple of other blog posts planned for this week too. The first one is the article I am currently writing. The second article will detail my video content distribution system once I have completed the set up of it in the next couple of days.
. . .
So there you have it, a brief overview of my second week’s work preparing my business for launch.
Assessing the work remaining, I have set my launch date for a week today.
I will officially be going live on Monday 5th October 2020.
By setting this date I will have had exactly 3 weeks in pre-launch as I originally planned.
There will also be 88 days left in 2020, so roughly meeting my requirement of having a 90-day plan to work from until the end of the year and having 12 months to build a full-time income before I reach my 60th birthday.
So, without delay, on to this weeks work . . .