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New Direction, Again…

March 9th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

It has been nine days now since I last posted here. I think I have allowed myself to get caught up in too many things all at once. I have been contacted by a recruiter regarding a job that would probably be a very good move for me, and I’m getting pressure to move quickly on it because they want to fill the position quickly. I’m also working on several highly visible projects in my current job, meaning I’ve been putting in more hours than usual.

So, where am I going with all of this? Well, first, I’ve decided to postpone the list building project, and when I re-initiate it, it will probably focus on only one site rather than all 5. One at a time, with a very clear objective. However, in the interim, I’ve decided I would like to work on a smaller and more manageable project, which will include some outsourcing of labor. Actually, the ability to farm out many of the time consuming tasks is one of the reasons I’ve decided to do this project.

The basic process and plan comes from one created by Justin Brooke, the owner of siteflipacademy.com. I’m sure I’ll talk some more about this membership site as this project progresses, but it should be no more than a two week project, and should be something which I can outsource much of the labor and put in only an hour or two per day on average.

I will be putting together my own project plan, complete with WBS, schedule, and other documents, and I will make them available for you to view. I haven’t completely decided, but at this time I will probably only post the progress weekly, with a status of what was completed and where I am in relation to the plan.

I will post again later today with the link to the documents I’ve created. Hopefully once this project is done I will find myself with more time again and can pursue the list building project, which I expect to take up more of my time on a daily basis.

Outsourcing: Yea or Nay

February 29th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

One of the big considerations when you are planning your project is whether or not you will outsource (or out-task - topic for a different post). As I’m sure you know, outsourcing is the hiring out of work. This is done primarily to free up your time to work on the more important parts of your business, such as the marketing.

Many things can be outsourced, including content creation, web site design and management, security, and the list goes on. But why are we discussing this here?

When you are planning your projects, you need to know who will be doing the work. Not necessarily the exact “who”, but will it be you or someone else. If it is someone else, this is another resource you need for your project, and should be accounted for in your resource list.

Actually, the way I prefer to do this is to list out all the resources you need anyway, and then assign jobs to the resources, whether me or someone else. This way I can more easily reuse parts of my plans in future projects.

To explain another way, if you are the writer, and you are the web designer, and you are the graphics designer, and you are the script installer, and so on, you fill each of these roles. However, that doesn’t mean that your project didn’t need a script installer resource, or a graphic designer resource. Do you see where I’m going? You might be the chief cook and bottle washer, but all of these jobs still require a resource, even if that resource is you.

And often if your just starting out, they are all you. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take each job into consideration separately in your plan. Besides re-usability, there is another good reason to do this.

If, in the middle of your project, you determine you can’t complete the content in time. You can make the choice to hire this out. You have these tasks separated in your plan, so you can easily determine what you need him to do. On small projects, like what I’m showing you in the case study, it may seem obvious what is needed from each resource, but in a larger undertaking you might not find it so easy.

Anyway, just wanted to throw out this topic. Remember to always define each resource based on the job performed, even if you are the only actual human resource involved.

Cheers,

Chris

Case Study: The Project Objective

February 26th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

I stated in a previous tips post that every project should have one primary objective. That applies to this project as much as any. So, what is our project’s objective?

The primary objective for this new list building project is, as you might have guessed, to build up a subscriber list. In reviewing these sites, I determined that for most of them it is almost as though we are starting from a standing stop. So, to be fair in this case, I didn’t want to make the objective too difficult to achieve, nor did I want it to be too easy.

Since we are dealing with five sites, the objective is going to be to gain 10 sign-ups in one month’s time for each site. I think that in order to do that, I will need to improve each site, and drive the traffic up to at least 50 targeted visitors to the site each day. Right now only one of the sites is averaging even near 10 a day, the others are much lower. (That is, if there is such a thing as “much lower” than 10, but I guess everything is relative.)

OK, so the primary objective is to add 10 subscribers to each site’s list within one month, and that will be done by improving the site and increasing the traffic. Sounds easy enough, right? I guess we’ll see.

Cheers,

Chris

The Case Study: A New Beginning

February 24th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

I mentioned in my last post that I needed a few days to sit down and reassess the plan I have for the projects on this site, specifically the case study. I’ve done that this weekend, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll be presenting you with what I came up with.

To start off today, I’d like to go through some of the reasons I made the changes, and what I hope this will give you as you read through these posts.

The major driver for making the change is that things had already started to get out of control. In order to make things right, I decided to start right from the beginning, and draw out my overall plan for an entire year starting from today. This was to give me the big picture.

You should always view everything you do in terms of your overall big picture. As a marketer, your goals and objectives may not be the same as mine. Your situation in life is probably differs from mine. This list could go on. So be sure you understand where your project fits in with the rest of your life. This goes for anything you do, in my opinion.

However, as I stated earlier, I wasn’t following my own advice. I created this project, and it wasn’t the best fit for my situation. If you had been anxiously awaiting the affiliate project, well the information I will present will still be close to what that was, but slightly different.

This new project is now a list building project. We are going to be fixing up five sites I already own, and using them to generate subscribers. These sites currently make no money, and have low traffic.

I’ve laid out a detailed project plan already, but it is all on paper right now. I’m going to transfer it to the computer to update the WBS and schedule to show the new plan. I’ll also be posting some other documents that you might find helpful.

So, that’s it for today. Thanks for stopping by.

Chris

Working Off The Cuff - Lesson Learned

February 20th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

I feel like I’ve been all over the place. As I was sitting down tonight to write up some posts for this blog, it occurred to me that I wasn’t listening to myself. I love to teach, but I don’t have much experience in teaching. I realized that someone coming here to this blog would be inundated with an enormous amount of information, without any logical order to it, and without an overall cohesive message.

This got me thinking. In my day job as a project manager, I would never dream of starting a project without having every duck in a row. This doesn’t mean that everything is perfect there, but it means that I have a better vision of where we should be, and I can adapt, correct, report and do all the project management tasks more efficiently.

So, what does this mean for you, and for this blog? Well, good things are coming in the near future. First, however, I need to stop for a few days and regroup. One of the big mistakes I’ve made here is that I failed to treat this blog as a project. Actually, the blog itself, since it should be around indefinitely, is not really a project. However, things like the case study being presented, and presenting the things you really need to know as a project manager, need to be treated as projects, and need to be planned and worked as a project. And that is exactly what I intend to do.

By this coming weekend, I will have a plan laid out for the case study. Not just the revised and update plan for it, but also my plan for reporting status and for using what I’m doing there as a teaching tool. I expect to have regular status reports to go along with the other posts of what I’m doing for this project.

Well, that’s all for now. The next post should be on Sunday, February 24, 2008, and should give you a much better picture. I’ll lay out everything related to initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closing the project.

Cheers,

Chris

Project Risks Are Not Always Negative.

February 13th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Most people consider risk to be a negative thing, or at least have negative connotations. However, when considering risk in a project, you have to consider opportunity risk and other possibly positive risks as well.

Lets say your project is to build 1000 content pages, based around a single theme. In planning this project, one risk you identify is finding decent PLR content on this theme. This is a risk because now you have to consider modifying your project to incorporate this PLR content, and change the project plan, and the schedule, and even the budget.

Often times project managers get stuck in the thinking that risks are bad things that could happen outside of their control. The reality is that risks are anything that could happen outside your control which could impact your project, whether good or bad. Therefore it can be beneficial to make a point of trying to think of potential positive risks for every project. Even if there aren’t any, thinking this way will at least help you to find these positive risks when they do exist.

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