For most people, working at home sounds like a dream. I’m not one of those people. I can barely get any work done while I’m at home due to distractions, which is why I work at a coworking space, where I pay each month to have access to a designated area.
However, my business operates 100% in the cloud and I’ve been getting a lot of questions as to how someone who is just starting out can actually build a business from their home. Maybe they were laid off and are transforming the negative energy into something positive, or they want to start the business part-time and transition it into a full-time gig. Maybe, they eventually also want to bring on employees!
Well, I’ve decided that the best way to tell people how to do it, is actually to show them! So, if you’d like to join me as I build a new business completely from scratch, be sure to subscribe to this blog!
Background of the business case study:
There are a lot of avenues that you can take when building a home-based business. You could create an eCommerce store, sell services as a contractor/consultant, sell a software product that you’ve created online, etc. It all depends on your inclinations and your skill set.
The great thing about business is that as long as you service your customers in the best way possible, you can also decide how large or small that business gets and whether you eventually move into your own office some day, or keep the operation small out of your home.
In this case study, I’m going to specifically be building a business through content marketing (blogging). What does that means? I’m going to create a new blog, build up an audience, and sell them something of value that will improve their lives. That could be someone else’s product, my own product, or my own services. I haven’t decided yet.
Keep in mind that this avenue is only one way to start a home-based business. There are many others, like paid traffic!
Depending on where you live, your business may need to generate more or less money to replace your full-time job. For measurement sake, I’m setting my initial goal as low as possible. Georgia and Wyoming have the lowest minimum wages in the USA, at the rate of $5.15 (2015). By minimum wage standards, the website will need to generate revenue of $824 per month to hit my goal.
This might seem like a small number, but for my purposes, it demonstrates how to build an online business and with extra work, that website likely could earn double if not more.
How I will build the initial traffic to the website:
As I mentioned, I will be building the initial traffic to the website through content marketing, also known as blogging. One of the most important parts of building up a successful blog is to pick a good niche!
Arguably, I’ve picked a niche that is much smaller than others I could have gone with. However, I care very much about the subject, am learning every day about the subject, and am passionate about it! In my experience, these qualities matter more than any other.
You can view the newlyish created website here. Essentially, I’m sharing everything that I’m learning about podcasting! I genuinely believe in the resurgence of podcasting, am committed to producing helpful content, and don’t care about the competition in the niche. I think that everyone can benefit that is also getting into this new media platform and I want to help out others, whether they are fellow podcasters or educators!
I’ve started blogs that have fizzled out in the past and having blogged on this one for a few months now, I can already feel that I am very passionate about the topic and have a lot to say about it. You can see my initial traffic numbers below.
As you can see, the website did 532 views in March. I officially registered the website in December of 2014 and am hosting the blog with BlueHost, which I highly recommend for anyone building their own self-hosted blog.
In my experience, it will take at least 4-5 months before a blog or website begins to rank in search engines like google and yahoo for their homepage and articles. Also, it can a year or two before the blog is doing reliable traffic or considered a growing authority in the particular niche.
My goal is to get the website to 500 page views per day initially. Then, order out dominoes to celebrate (or pizza hut if you are so inclined). After I regret my poor food decision, I’ll set the new goal of getting the website to 1,000 page views per day.
How I am going to promote the website:
Aside from writing extremely high quality articles on my topic of choice, I’m going to be promoting the website through social media (see the twitter), the website’s email list, and my other blogs, like this one. This last point might seem like an unfair advantage if you don’t have another blog, but guess what, I’m building up this blog (salvadorbrigmgan.com) from (basically) scratch at the same time I’m building up the other one!
I also am planning to get more heavily into youtube and might be starting a podcast related to this blog on the subject of motivation. Then again, plans are great, but it’s action that matters, so you’ll be able to see relatively quickly which initiatives I choose to follow through with.
Join me on this journey!
Again, I invite you guys to join me on this journey. We’re going to be exploring a lot of different online marketing techniques in order to achieve our goal of getting podcasting hacks to be an authority blog that also deserves the recognition!