Second Month Online: Now We're Making Progress

Congratulations! You’ve made it past the first 30 days and well on the way to creating something awesome. If you haven’t gone through the first months training then I recommend you check that post out before you implement anything you see on this page. If you’ve gone through month one already then you should have:

A website hosted with BlueHost and rocking the Genesis Framework
10 blog posts posted on your website hopefully getting a little bit of traffic
5 emails set up in AWeber ready to go out over the next 3–4 weeks
All the plugins you need for now set up on your site
An awesome looking home page and about me page

For month 2 we’re going to be focusing on scheduling blog posts for the entire month, building up an email list and creating a lead magnet to entice people to subscribe to your email list.

We’ll also be going through what we’re going to be spending our next $100 on. This is going to be completely different to last month because now we’ll have some recurring fees to take care of.

I’ve created another cheatsheet for you just like in month one so you can print it off and check off each day as you go.

Download that now

Are you ready to dig in? Let’s do this!

LET’S TALK MONEY… ALL THOSE DOLLARS AND CENTS

Last month we made the essential purchases for our business. Domain name, hosting, email service provider, theme and some images for our site. This month we’ll have some recurring fees to take of plus a few new ones.

The first recurring fee we’re going to have is our hosting. Remember this is going to be a fee we’re going to have to pay every month unless you decided to go for the annual option. If you can afford to go for the annual plan I would do so because you’ll save yourself 10–30% over the year. $7 for our hosting for month 2.

Next we have our AWeber fees. Last month we didn’t have to pay a penny because we get our first month for free. Now we’re going to be paying $19 per month for up to 500 subscribers. Here’s how their prices increase after the first 500 subscribers:

We shouldn’t have to worry about paying additional money for AWeber for this month as It’s unlikely you’re going to get more than 500 subscribers. If you do though tell me what you did! I wanna know your secrets!

We’re also going to set aside $8 for blog post images again. You’ll be creating 4 blog posts this month and if you use Canva to create your images you’ll only be paying $1 per image so you can create 2 images per post. Obviously you can use free images from places like Pixabay like we did last month too so don’t feel limited to only using 2 images per blog post.

So far we’ve used $34 of the $100 for month 2.

The next thing we’re going to buy is a logo for the website. We’re going to go over to Fiverr.com and get a very simple logo made. Why are we using Fiverr? You’re going to change your logo within the first year… Everyone does. There’s no point in paying $40, $100 or even using a service like 99Designs and paying $189+ on a design when you’re going to change it in the near future.

Find something simple and go with it. That’ll take our spending for this month up to $39.

For the remaining $61 we’re going to be purchasing ads to get a boost of traffic to your website. I’d recommend using Facebook ads because you can really specific on who you’re targeting AND you can set either a daily limit or a total limit for the ad. This means you won’t over spend on your ads and blow your budget for the month.

With Facebook ads you can target specific countries, towns, peoples likes, fans of other pages and even by their spending habits. It’s pretty scary how well Facebook knows us but this means we can target people who are most likely to be interested in our website. The more specific you get with your targeting the cheaper your cost per click usually is.

Now we’re rocking. We’ve got our website up and running with 10 blog posts for people to check out and 4 more to be created and scheduled throughout the month. Plus we’ll have traffic coming in via organic search (people finding your blog posts on Google) and a nice boost with our Facebook ads we’re going to set this month.

Let’s move onto what we’re going to spend our 1 hour each day doing.

COUNTING THE HOURS, MINUTES AND SECONDS

Our 24 hours for this month are going to be focusing mainly on building your email list. Email list building is vital to the future success of your business because the saying “the money is in the list” is true. With an high quality email list of people who eat up every word you say will lead to more in revenue when you have something to sell or promote.

However, what we’re going to be focusing on first is preparing content for the entire month. We’re going to batch 4 blog posts to be released every Monday or Tuesday right at the very start of the month so we don’t have to rush around trying to prepare content every week.

Spend the first 4 hours writing these 4 blog posts. Once you’ve created those you’re going to want to schedule those for every Monday or Tuesday. I prefer to publish content on either of these days so people have all week to check it out. The cheatsheet I created makes it easier to see what I mean.

We’re going to spend one hour creating all of our social media accounts but we’re not going to use them all just yet. You’re going to want to focus on using one or two for now so 1) you don’t get overwhelmed trying to publish to 6–10 accounts every week and 2) you’re going to find it easier to build a following on a social media platform if you can give it more time and attention. We’ll use the other social media platforms later down the road.

Personally I’d focus on using Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is great because they have BILLIONS of users… Basically everyone online has a Facebook account. We’re also going to need to have set a fan page up to use Facebook Ads too.

Twitter is optional. If you find your audience hangs out on Twitter then use it but if you find they’re more visual and hang out on either Pinterest or Instagram more then use one of those. Find out where your target audience are and be there.

You’re going to create accounts on the following platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ and Instagram. But like I said you’re not going to use them all right now.

On the same day as you’re creating these social media accounts we’re going to create a logo for our website. I recommend using Fivver.com because like I mentioned earlier you’re going to change your logo within the first year so it’ll be a waste of money spending more than $5 on it.

If you’re good at design then you can create you’re own but only if you can do so in 10–15 minutes. We don’t want to be wasting our precious time when we can give someone $5 to do it for us.

Now comes the fun part… Creating our lead magnet.

The majority of our time this month will be dedicated to creating a PDF/eBook/Cheatsheet to entice people to give us their email address. This needs to be something so good that people won’t believe they got it for free and they it’s something they would’ve paid for.

This doesn’t need to be anything massive but a 10, 20, 30 page eBook of pure awesomeness that’ll bring people back to your site over and over again. We want people thinking ”Man if their free stuff is this good then their paid stuff must be out of this world!” which is why we’re going to be spending 14 hours this month creating it.

We’re going to spend:

3 hours researching the topic and content.
2 hours planning/outlining how the eBook/PDF is going to look
9 hours writing the eBook/PDF out
1 hour putting the final touches to it, adding it to our AWeber autoresponder series (in the first email) and changing the optin boxes on our site saying people will get the PDF/eBook if they give you their email address.

I want you to really focus on creating something awesome for people visiting your website.

Finally we’re going to spend an hour each week on social media which is going to include scheduling posts, interacting with people who’ve liked your pages or in groups and creating/tweaking our Facebook ads.

Because we’ve batched our blog posts at the beginning of the month we know when they’re going to be released. If you’ve decided to focus on using Facebook or Twitter there are some apps and services we can use to schedule posts to let people know about our new blog post. Both platforms have the ability to schedule posts within them but some third party services make it easier.

Buffer and Hootsuite are two popular programs that have a free plan which you can use to make life easier.

You’re going to be finding different Facebook groups that are within the niche of your website. You’ll want to join in on the conversations taking place in the group so you get to know your target audience better and create content for your site that they’ll love to see. Don’t go in and start spamming it with links to your website because that’s not going to build your credibility in that space. You want should go in there with the intentions of helping people and occasionally mentioning what you do and your website.

There’s going to be several groups so I’d join 3–5 decent sized groups and just jump in helping people with their problems. You’ll gain the respect of people in these groups and they’ll then be much more interested in what you have to say on your website.

You’ll also be using this time to see how your ads are doing. Play around with tweaking what the ad says and the picture being used to see if you can get the cost per click down. If you can get your CPC down below 30 cents then you’re doing great. If not then try tweaking the ad like I said or try narrowing down the people you’re targeting with the ad.

The budget for this month for ads is $61 so you have plenty of playing room and hopefully drive a few hundred people to your site. Just remember to set a limit on your ad spent so there’s no nasty surprise bills at the end of the month!

WE’RE ROCKING AND ROLLING NOW

Now we’re making some progress with our business! We’ve got our website up and running with content being released every week and a great lead magnet that’s going to attract people to sign up to our email list. We also have traffic coming to our site via our Facebook ads that’s going to give us a boost until Google starts showing us some love and traffic starts coming organically.

I’ve created a cheatsheet you can download that’ll help keep you on track for this month and ensure you don’t forget anything important. You can get your hands on that completely free of charge… Because I’m that nice 🙂

Let’s quickly recap what we’ve covered for month 2:

We’ve scheduled our blog posts for the entire month in the first 4 days.
We’ve created created all our social media accounts (but we’re only focusing on using Facebook and one other).
We’ve used Fiverr.com to create our logo.
We’ve created our lead magnet to attract people to sign up to our list.
We’ve scheduled our social media posts every week, checked our ads (remembering to place a limit on them) and tweaked them to see if we can get our CPC lower.

In month 3 we’re going to be reaching out to other bloggers and people in our niche to see if we can work together in some joint ventures. Guesting posting is going to be a way of expanding our audience and reach within our niche.

We’re going to spend a little more time on our About Me page tweaking it and adding some more sign up forms for people to join your email list. This is most likely the most visited page on your website so we really need to make sure it shines.

We’re also going to start brainstorming how we’re going to monetise our site by either creating our own product or by promoting someone else for a commission.

Some exciting stuff coming up!

Remember don’t skip ahead on any of the tasks set in this series. I don’t want you to miss anything because all of this adds up and becomes the foundations of allowing your business to sky rocket. Here’s the other posts in this series:

Keep working hard dudes and dudettes! This is going to become your ticket to your very own laptop lifestyle and give you the freedom you want for yourself. Any questions and comments leave them down below and I’d love it if you could share this if you truly thought it was helpful.