Case Study 1: Affiliate Project: Initiation

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Sunday, February 10th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

I have mentioned this before, but I keep an ongoing list of projects on which I want to work. I highly recommend that you do this as well. While you are working on a project, or just too busy to work on any, you will inevitably come up with projects on which you want to work. When this occurs, write down the details of the project as best you can. Basically, you want to record what it is the project will accomplish, and any other details you already have in mind for the project. This will become somewhat second nature after a while.

So, once you have your project list building, you will need to periodically choose a project from the list to work on. To help you with this, you should have a list of the criteria on which you wish to judge the project. These can include such things as time to cash flow, cost to implement, expected cash flow from project, time required to implement, technical complexity, desire to work on project, anticipated success, required assistance, and any other factors you determine.

My personal criteria begins with desire to work on the project. Since I have a full time job, I need to be sure I am only working on things I want to be working on, so this is the number one criteria. Since I don’t want to spend too much money to make my money, the next criteria for me is the cost to implement. This criteria includes any outsourcing costs for content creation, or graphics creation, or anything I will be outsourcing. If I am doing it all myself, the time is more important that cost.

The next thing I look at is how long it will be before I can expect to see cash flow from this project. I have worked on projects that are expected to take up to 90 days before any cash flow will be realized, and even at that time it is not enough to cover the cost of the project. In these cases, I will analyze the time until I expect to see a profit (rather than just cash flow).

So, in this case, the best project for me, from the list I have going, is one I am calling Affiliate Project. The objective is to promote five affiliate products which I have previously tested through another project, which have shown to be effective as far as sales.

The specific project is to research the products more deeply and then promote them through any means necessary to build up the sales. One of the ways I will be researching is by doing more in depth keyword research for the products to find as many keywords as possible that fit the products, and testing to determine the profitability of the different keywords through each of the different promotions I will be using.

I will also be doing research into other affiliates who are promoting these products and trying to determine how they are promoting them. I will then try to do whatever is working for them in a way that outproduces them.

I expect that this project will cash flow within six weeks. That determination was made by determining that the projects I am working with here pay out their affiliate commissions every two weeks, based on the previous two weeks sales. I also assume at least two weeks for delivery of the check for payment, meaning that sales made today will be recorded on a check to cover the next two weeks, which will be paid out two weeks after it is earned, and will take an additional two weeks for delivery of the check. I expect to see immediate sales for this project, so six weeks to cash flow seems very reasonable.

The time this project is expected to take is somewhat complicated, but I’ll try to lay it out here. First, the overall project is expected to take about 17 weeks. Part of that is because of one week in there where I am going to be on vacation. It is important to plan your vacation time, as well as that of any contractor or employee you have working for you, if possible. So this project includes 16 weeks of work for me, with one week of vacation built in.

Also, this project will be taking advantage of some previous research I have done, to work with five affiliate products in the first week to create the expanded marketing. But starting in the second week, I am using a technique for research that will take four weeks, followed by another week of expansion, then four more weeks of research and another week of expansion, then four more weeks of research, then the final week of expansion. Add in the week of vacation and you will find 17 weeks. The overall project schedule has me working on this project until 6/5/08.

Now, this doesn’t mean that this is the only project I work on until then, but it means that as of now, this project has priority for that period of time. There are actually two other projects I will be working on during this time, but their priority will fall below this one, so if I do not have enough time in a day or in the week to complete tasks, the ones that will fall behind are the other two projects.

I hope this has helped you understand what I go through to initiate a project. The next post will detail what I have done to create a WBS for the affiliate project, and will also include a link to the WBS that I created.

Cheers,

Chris

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