Case Study 1: Affiliate Project: Project Schedule
February 12th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
If you look closely at the WBS, you will find that the tasks laid out in that document are laid out by week. The reason for this is because in this particular project, there are several research phases followed by week long depth phases. The tasks in this particular project lend themselves to a week by week layout. Not every project will follow a pattern this neatly laid out, but since this one does, we are not going to fight it.
So the project schedule is almost entirely laid out in the WBS. But it is still important to lay out the schedule in a separate document. The reason for this is because it is entirely possible that we will modify the WBS as we go along so that it better fits into the work that we are doing. In that case, the tentative schedule laid out by that WBS may not be valid. Therefore, it is important that we keep a separate document to follow the schedule.
In the case of this project, it will be something as simple as a google spreadsheet document with a formula built into it to create what is known as a Gantt chart. This is a chart that shows the schedule of a project in a linear fashion.
Check out the schedule I have created for this project at spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p1ghZqjlYBKffvxzlyFL-EA . If you have any questions regarding this or any other aspects to this project, please leave a comment below and I will respond with the best answer I can provide.
Cheers,
Chris
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Case Study 1: Affiliate Project: The WBS
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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Case Study 1: Affiliate Project: Initiation
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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Case Study 1: Affiliate Project
February 9th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
I’ve been thinking long and hard about how I can best help you to understand the importance of using project management techniques in your internet marketing projects. Well, I think the best way possible for me to show you how to use these techniques is to actually show you how I am using these techniques to run my own internet marketing projects.
And that’s exactly what I have decided to do. I’ve decided that it’s time to unveil exactly how I go about implementing, planing, executing, monitoring and controlling and then closing my projects. And the best part for you is that I will make all of the documents and information available to you. The one thing I will not do (at least at this point) is reveal the niche in which I am working. I don’t think this detail will be relevant, but I guess we will see as we move along.
So, the first thing I do, when determining a project is to determine which projects I have on the table to pick from. I always have a list of projects I keep to ensure that when I finish one I am ready to move into the next project, and as I think of new projects I add them to this list.
OK, I’ve decided among the projects I have on my list, and the one I determined I am calling my affiliate project. Now, this is not the first project I’ve done with this title. And it won’t be the last. But the title of the project is almost irrelevant. The most important thing is that the title lets you know what it is your project is intended to do. And that’s what this title does for me. The project is intended to find profitable affiliate products, and promote them through some proven methods.
The first document that I will be posting for this project is the work breakdown structure (WBS). The WBS is a document that takes the tasks involved in a project and breaks them down into specific work units. Essentially breaking them down into the smallest piece that can be tracked. This is essentially the task list for the project, although it can often be more than that. Because this is the fist time I am running through an actual project, this WBS will be essentially a task list. In the future I will endeavor to show you what more this can be.
Before I post the documents for this project, I think I should go over the process I use to initiate a project. I will post some information about that process tomorrow, detailing how I look through my project list and make a determination about which will go next.
Then I will post the WBS for this project. That should be on Monday. After that is posted, I will be posting a project schedule document, and some of my other planning documents. I’ll also include a post or two about how I develop my planning documents. Then we will be ready to begin execution.
At that point, I will go through what I am doing to execute the project, and of course monitoring and controlling will play a major role as we go through this portion. I’ll finally show you what I do for a closure process, especially since it is likely that at least some portion of this will require ongoing support. Therefore closure will occur by moving project management into operations.
I guess that’s enough for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with information about this project’s initiation process.
Chris
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Planning - Write It Down
January 29th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
The planning process typically produces a number of documents which will help you to execute your project and to monitor and control it as it goes along. What documents do you really need to effectively work your project plan? There are really only a few documents that you need.
In the last post we discussed resource lists and task lists. Your resource list is a listing of all the resources you need in your project along with their costs. The task list is the listing of all the tasks you need to complete, set out in an order so that you know which tasks must precede others.
You might at this point want to begin assigning resources to the tasks. In essence, you are combining these lists in such a way as to ensure that every task has at least one resource associate with it. If you are the only member of your project team, you might be the human resource assigned to all of these tasks, but you might also have other resources, such as specific software, that will also be assigned.
Doing this helps you to plan for when you will need some of the specific resources on the list. You might not want to begin the copywriting until after the first draft of the book is completed, so that you know what the book will offer. Or you might not want to design the graphics until you have the title, so you can incorporate the title into the header graphic.
The important document that all of this leads up to is your schedule. You want to ensure that you develop your schedule so that you are taking into account the availability of resources or the time you expect tasks to take. Use your calendar and assign tasks for each day you will work. In your schedule you should set up check points or milestones. These will function to make you aware of how you are doing with the schedule. When you complete the task that marks a milestone, you’ll want to check it against your original schedule to determine if you are on, ahead of, or behind your schedule. Ideally, you will be tracking this more often than that, so you know if you are going to hit your milestone date before you get there.
That’s all the documents you really need to effectively plan most projects. The resource list with costs, the task list set up to show precedence and with assigned resources, and your schedule. While there are many more documents you could put together, there is no reason for them at this time. There are a couple you might want to be aware of which might be useful to you in larger projects.
One is a scope document. You might want to have a document outlining the detailed scope of the project if you have a couple of team members working with you on the project. It helps to write out the scope to ensure that you are all on the same page with regard to what the project is, and what it is not.
Another would be a change control process. When you are working by yourself, you probably don’t need a formalized process for reviewing and approving changes, but as soon as you add additional team members into the mix, this can become very important. You always want to be in control of changes happening to your project, and this document will give you some of that control.
One final note I wanted to touch on regarding documentation. Having all of the project documentation written out will prove to be very important. It will allow you to track changes to your original project plan. Everyone knows how important testing and tracking is to the success of their business in general, and it is just as important to each individual project. And like a grocery store list, it can help you stay on budget and help ensure that you complete everything.
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Planning - Just Do It
January 28th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
This project is too small to require a plan. I don’t know how to plan a project. I don’t have MS Project, and don’t know how to use it anyway. These are all excuses. I can’t think of too many projects, especially in a business, that are too small to plan. The previous post touched on how planning a project is no different than planning your vacation, except maybe in your level of experience. So give up all your excuses and come on over to the dark side.
The reality of planning is that you need no more specialized tools than a pad, a pen, and a calendar. And actually, these are the exact tools I would recommend you start out with. With just these three tools, you can create a very powerful project plan. Lets dive right in, shall we?
Take out your pad and your pen. Now write down at the top of the first page what the objective of the project is. Remember, a project should have only one primary objective. Lets say we are developing an info-product such as an ebook. Our objective for this project is to develop this ebook and its sales process. This may sound like two different objectives, and maybe it is, but without the product a sales process is useless, and vice versa, so I would consider this to be one objective. If we started trying to throw in marketing the product, I would say that is another project.
Once you have your project’s objective written down, it is time to start brainstorming a task list. So turn the page and start writing down all the tasks you can think of. Off the top of my head: write the ebook, editing, create pdf file, develop sales letter, determine payment processor, create other pages for site, test the operation of the site, upload the product. I know there are a lot more tasks, but this is just a quick list to start working with here.
Now that you have your task list started, start looking through it to determine what resources you will need. Again, shooting from the hip: Hosting, domain name, site template and graphics, pdf writer, payment processor. Some other potential resources could be a copywriter, a graphic artist, a web page designer, developer, ghost writer. I think you get the point here. You need to know what resources you will need to complete the project.
Going through these lists a few times will help you expand them. You can always ask for some feedback or input from other members of your project team if you are not working alone. If you are, you can ask for input from other internet marketers in forums or other places where you might network with them. You might have an ebook you purchased that has information about what this would involve. Use the information you have available now to develop the plan, and be prepared to change it as you go along.
You now have a task list and a resource list. The next step is to add some costs to your resource list, so you can start planning the budget. A little research goes a long way here. If you are not confident yet, you may want to plan this as a worst case scenario. What is the most you can expect a resource to cost? You are not hiring anyone yet, or buying anything. All you are doing now is setting the budget.
You can also take your task list and start to determine if any of the tasks have predecessor tasks. In other words, is there a task that needs to be completed before the next one can start. An example of this would be that the ebook would need to be written and then made into a pdf file before you upload it to the server. That would make writing the ebook a predecessor task to making the pdf file, and making the pdf file would be a predecessor task to uploading to the server.
Go through and look for these relationships in your tasks. Rewrite the tasks in such a way to show which ones have to come before others. You can also do this by numbering the tasks in the order they would need to be preformed, however you should be aware that it is likely there are tasks that are not dependent on any others. An example of this would be writing the ebook, which is not dependent on any other tasks to begin.
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