Case Study 1: Affiliate Project: The WBS

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Monday, February 11th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

You are now at the point where you have chosen your project. The initiation process has been completed and you are beginning the planning process. The first document you should create, in my opinion, is the WBS. The WBS, or work breakdown structure, is a document in which you will break the work of the project down into the smallest unit of work feasible.

What does this mean, really? Well, for an example of a WBS, you can refer to the WBS I have created for my affiliate project. You can view this document at docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfsfcq73_36fsk89h8c .

In reviewing this WBS, you will notice that I have broken down the tasks into product research tasks and marketing tasks. The product research tasks are those tasks I follow to reserch a total of over 100 products in a four week period to determine if I get any sales. This type of research is called campaign blasting, and I will post more on this in a future post.

The marketing tasks include some research tasks designed to dig deeper into the products that prove to be winners in the initial research using campaign blasting. The research I do includes research into keywords and into competitors. I will post more information about how I conduct this research into a future post. The other tasks included in this are basically creating the content pages in the various places I have determined will work best for this project.

In other words, I make a determination, which is based entirely on experience, to begin marketing this product in Google AdWords, eBay Classified Ads, on Craig’s List, in USFreeAds, in niche specific ezines, or in other places where I expect the product to have customers. I will also usually be creating a domain and a landing page for all of the marketing efforts, so that I can collect email addresses in a list specific to that niche. If I don’t have experience in the niche, or if I am just not sure what will work, I will try a bit of everything, and make sure that I am testing along the way to see what works.

If you have any questions related to the WBS posted at docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfsfcq73_36fsk89h8c , please post them in the comments below and I will endeavor to answer all questions that are posted.

Cheers,

Chris

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