|pros • per • ly|

Last night as I was waiting for my wife to come home so we could watch “The Office” together I decided to do a little channel surfing. I came accross a show on Discovery channel called “Treasure Quest”. It is about modern day treasure hunters who look for ship wrecks at sea and try to find gold and other valuables. They recently made a discovery of over 17 tons of gold and silver from a ship wreck.

Any way this peaked my interest so I started watching and they interviewed the captain of the ship. He told of how he was a Navy captain who went into work at corporate America where he was financially very successful.

He then went on to say how when he was offered this current job it was a big pay decrease but he then went on to talk about how they gave him a beautiful new ship and said go find stuff with it. I could really hear the joy of his new journey in life. It wasn’t just about money for him but doing something he loved to do…and the money came later.

I have talked alot about how much I value my freedom and working for myself. I value it alot more than I value money. I chose to go out on my own and build my internet business and live my dream of coming and going as I choose and doing the things I wanted to do during the day. I have loved every second of it. Even when in the beginning I was making just enough to take care of my family.

Years later the joy remains and the money has come. I have been truly blessed.

“Well you know. Money isn’t everything, Jim. Not the key to happiness. You know what is? Joy. You should remember that.” – Michael Scott

Mark over at TheKeywordAcademy.com nailed it.

And that’s probably what spurred my thoughts along these same lines.  Oh, and also perusing BackyardChickens.com for an hour last night.

Mark basically says most people looking to make money online have an information addiction (the ease of publishing on blogs surely hasn’t helped):

The reality is you read blogs because it’s a mental escape. It gets your mind off your job, your bills, your stress – your life. It does all the same things for you that xbox live does for 7th graders. Why is this so dangerous? Because time is not only your most precious resource, it’s the one you can never get back.

I believe I also have an information addiction with a different twist. I want to become an expert before I take any action whatsoever.

I’ve been reading Omnivore’s Dilemma and now would like to raise my own chickens.  If you don’t want to want to start raising your own chickens, then do not read that book.  As always, with any new undertaking (whether it’s making money online, or raising chickens), I begin gathering my information online.

And I gather…

and gather…

and gather…

and gather…

And I guarantee I won’t be gathering eggs at this point.  I’ll still be gathering information.  I want to know how everything works, from A to Z, before I even remotely get started actually doing something.

Did you know you need to rotate an egg an odd number of times each day while you’re incubating it?  Two times — you’ll likely have a deformed chick.  Three times and you’re golden.  Did you know pine shavings are best for the floor of your chicken coop?  I didn’t either.  And there’s a whole lot more information out there that I could ingest before it finally becomes so scrambled in my brain that I forget completely what the heck I’m even doing in the first place.

You don’t need to know everything before you get started.  You can figure things out as you go.  Learning by doing.

What’s the best headline? How do you increase your conversions? How do you grow your list? What type of product should you sell?  How should you do fulfillment?  What’s the optimal price? Where should you truly be spending your time (short answer: where you add value).

Your questions will be endless.  And, as bad luck would have it, with the advent of the internet and one-click publishing…information is endless as well.

The phrase “proceed with caution” still has a very important word in there:  proceed.  Move. Keep going forward.  Don’t just stand around attempting to become an expert without doing anything.

Now…I’m off to find a chicken coop vendor.

As you begin to buy more websites your portfolio will obviously grow. If you’re careful, your total time invested will remain about the same (there is ALWAYS an incremental time cost when adding to your portfolio unless you just let a site grow moribund and die).

If you really want to run a successful online business you need to make sure you’re focused on the things that matter most. At Prosperly we have a laser-like focus on one metric only:

Revenue per Visitor

One of our employee’s job every morning is to run the previous days stats, calculate the total income derived from all sources for each business and then divide that by the unique visitors.

Each industry is different. Some have a naturally high revenue per visitor, others aren’t so high (though still highly profitable because traffic acquisition is easier — obviously).

One thing this has done for us at Prosperly is really help us recognize what is in our control. We can control revenue per visitor much more readily than we can our rankings in the search engines. We control revenue per visitor more than any other aspect of our sites because we have complete control over the site.

There have been times where we’ve made changes to a site and then watched our income fluctuate (up or down) — growing antsy with the change. Was it right? Will this be more profitable? We didn’t always focus on traffic AND revenue (which revenue per visitor is). So we’d see a dip in profits and be worried that a site change was unsuccessful. In reality, visitors had fluxed.

Now, realize that when you’re simply looking at one site day in and day out, it’s easy to monitor several metrics separately (conversion rate, revenue, traffic, search engine rankings for key phrases, etc.). However, as I mentioned above, your portfolio growth will necessitate that you dial those metrics down to one (maximum two) that truly matter. As you become dialed in on the metric that determines your online business success, you’ll see decisions are made more quickly, with better outcomes.

I couple of weeks ago I wote a post about how you should be ready to take advantage of the great deals on websites for sale that would surely come because of the downturn in the market. Even though we have been “in a recession” for a year now, people seem to be feeling the effects of it more now that ever.

Personally, I think this recession is media made and although certain industries may be in a recession I don’t think everyone is. But I digress.

So back to the good stuff. I made a goal to acquire or build at least 16 websites by the end of 2009 that all make at least $100 a day. Naturally with this goal in mind I have been looking at websites to purchase much more aggressively.

I spend a lot of time on Sitepoint.com’s marketplace looking at the current listings. In fact I have made 3 acquisitions since that last post. The common thing on all three websites is that we were able to negotiate a purchase price that was far below what the person was asking. Was it our superior negotiating skills or just desperate website owners in a bad economy? Probably a combination of the two. But here is how I did it.

I would see a website up for sale and after doing background research on the industry and deciding that I was interested I would contact the seller. Keep in mind that I usually will only pursue websites where there is not a lot of bid activity which makes the seller more motivated. I ask him what it would take to part with the site.

They all came back with a figure to which I replied to the email and said I need to discuss it with my business partner. Then I wait a few days and come back with an offer that is way below what their price was. All three website owners agreed to my price without any further negotiation. This technique seems to work well.

For example, we recently purchased the website OrlandoTravel.org. I did the preliminary research and recognized that the term “orlando travel” gets high search traffic and based on the fact that Google gives domain name an unfair amount of weight in rankings we decided to make an offer. I noticed on Sitepoint that his opening bid price was $500 and his buy it now price was much higher.

No one had placed a bid so I went through that process with him that I described above. He told me that he wanted a quick sale and would let the site go for $650. I replied that I needed to talk to my business partner. I came back and said I would give him $500 for the site. He replied sounding a little upset because he purchased the domain alone for $550 but he still took the deal for $500. To quote a line from the movie “You’ve Got Mail”, it’s not personal, it’s business.

Anyway, if you are making any website acquisitions, try this tactic out, it has worked for me.

Stephen R. Covey’s wildly successful The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People touts one of the seven habits as follows:

Begin with the End In Mind. This chapter is about setting long-term goals based on “true north” principles. Covey recommends formulating a “personal vision statement” to document one’s perception of one’s own vision in life. He sees visualization as an important tool to develop this. He also deals with organizational vision statements, which he claims to be more effective if developed and supported by all members of an organization rather than prescribed. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People

This is obviously effective, setting long-term goals based on true principles.  Where I see a breakdown happen all the time is in just starting.  I suppose Covey might say be proactive (it’s numero uno).

Many times when people first begin building their internet business, they’re wanting to have an outlined, detailed business plan of exactly what they’re going to do to reach success (however defined) with their business.  You’ll see a person think through things to such an extent that they never actually start doing anything.

In this internet age, it’s even worse.  Why?  Because there is so much information available, you easily fall prety to paralysis by analysis.  For instanace let’s say you just want to get started with a little affiliate website where you try and get traffic through AdWords.  You could spend days — weeks — reading all about AdWords, optimizing, peeling and sticking, testing, evaluating, scrutinizing…

And never actually start.

Learning By Doing works.  Quite well.

Part of the reason we want to be outfitted with all the information possible (which right there disqualifies us, because that’s impossible) is because we’re afraid to make mistakes.  Learning from mistakes is a very quick way to learn, and it’s honestly not that expensive when you’re just starting.

Pick some key metrics that you want to track with your site: Visitors? Sales? Pageviews? Clickthroughs? Pick whatever’s important for your business goal and then write down three things that you need to DO (not learn about) to improve those metrics.  Do you need to reach out to other bloggers?  Write more? Find more keyword niches where you could profitably advertise?

Don’t worry about the Grand Scheme of Things when it comes to your business.  Don’t worry about every single logistic.  For heaven’s sake don’t waste a week on a logo, business card design, letterhead, legal formation, or accounting software.  That’s what I call circling the bush.  You only have success when you start beating the bush — circling it doesn’t do anything except give you a few warm fuzzies so you can go home at night feeling like you accomplished something.

Start DOING and things will fall into place–don’t worry so much about the big picture.  Suddenly, when you’re making money, you’ll need to do some accounting, and you’ll need to form a legal entity, and you’ll want to maybe have a professional-looking logo.  In the meantime, it’s better to just start (do the logo yourself) and not sweat the details.