I have learnt furniture making and I want to start my furniture mini factory. What are the steps I should do to start up?

January 8, 2020 Gavin

Build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Don’t think ‘factory’ at this stage – this is more about infrastructure, once you know what your market wants – think more about your market, and how that should guide your offering.

In terms of a working space, you should be thinking of any options that require zero commitment – where there are no minimum lease terms, no expensive rent, and no business rates.

Do you have a garage or a room in your house you could convert into a workshop? If not, do you know of any friends or family that might provide you with this space?

The last thing you want to do at this stage is start elevating your fixed overheads. Build your basic infrastructure in the most agile, low-cost manner. Anything that can be borrowed, favours that can be called in, areas that could be outsourced from the outset – look at everything that will allow you to keep your fixed overheads as close to £0 at this stage, as possible.

Then, once you have the most basic setup you need in order to create and deliver your furniture products, you need to focus your energy and attention on understanding your market.

What type of furniture do they want? What features are popular right now? What styles are ‘in’?

The most cost-efficient model you can adopt at this stage is ‘made to order’.

Perhaps have some visuals made and build a basic website (or if you have a friend with programming skills – you could go one better and build a furniture-customisation tool for your site, so people can design and visualise their own pieces).

Maybe the process could begin with them selecting the type of furniture they are looking for (drawers, table and chairs, cabinet, wardrobe, bed frame and so on), then they could select the wood or other material, then move on to sizing, then onto styling and features, then finally paint colour and finish type.

If you ensure the algorithm is fed with the right pricing information for every material type and the time it will take, roughly, to produce each piece, then the end-result could be a fully-visualised, fully-priced piece of furniture, with a specified leadtime on delivery, that the user can then either save to their account, or process through an online checkout.

Not only is this model the most efficient. Provided you ensure you have the skills to deliver on any customisation that your customers request, it could also be the most profitable model, since anything custom is seen as premium, and you can price your pieces accordingly.

If you’re taking online payments, and requesting that it is all paid up-front prior to production getting underway (or using a consumer-finance provider like Klarna), then it’s also a great model for your cashflow.

This is a streamlined, super-efficient model that you can take to market for little expense and commitment (especially if you have a programmer-friend or you choose a freelancer carefully on Upwork.com).

Then from here, if your initial vision and plan for the company was to wholesale pieces for resale in furniture retailers, you can use the customer order data from your bespoke order system to guide your focus in terms of furniture types, materials, and styles.

When you start to look at mass production, this is when you either need to explore outsourcing (if you want to maintain the agile model you started out with), or you can begin to scale things up in-house by purchasing or leasing a factory, employing staff, and so on.

This is way, way down the line though and not something you should spend too much time thinking about right now.

Now, your objectives should be as follows:

Create the basic infrastructure you need to be able to manufacture a small range of bespoke furniture pieces
Build a streamlined order model online (preferably one with visuals, to enhance customer experience and conversion)
Promote your website and furniture visuals across social media channels, maybe explore paid ads, PPC search ads, and so on (dedicate some seed financing to exploring paid channels of promotion, to discover what converts and where you should focus your promotional efforts going forwards)
Scale beyond this in a market-driven manner (use the data you collect from your early sales to guide your offering and the direction of the business)

I hope this helps you to get started, and I wish you all the best of luck in your new venture!

If you need any help along the way, feel free to drop me a message via my blog Gavin Edley – Build Your Own Online Business With Me in 4 Weeks or check out my step-by-step business startup course on Udemy Fast Track Entrepreneur.

Mindset Mastery – Episode 1: Death as a Driving Force

August 3, 2018 Gavin

2 warehouse moves, 2 new businesses, and a beautiful baby boy later – I’m back to my blog!

The Edley household is pretty hectic with 2 little ones running riot (or rather 1 running riot, the other one just causes a riot in his nappy for now).

We absolutely love it though, and wouldn’t change it for the World – it’s such an exciting time watching them grow, and being an entrepreneur gives the freedom to enjoy as much time as possible with them and my gorgeous Wife Grace.

Another amazing milestone was also passed in my absence from the blog, we’ve now surpassed over 3,000 students on my Fast Track Entrepreneur Udemy course, from over 120 countries, and it’s hitting 4.5 out of 5 stars on the reviews.

I’m just so pleased that I’ve been able to help so many people across the World to start and grow their own online businesses.

I have other courses in development, but with so many other projects ongoing, I haven’t been able to get them finished and launched.

So in the meantime, I’m focusing my video efforts around a new mini series of ‘Mindset Mastery’ videos – short informal insights into how I view business opportunities, risk, fear, failure, and my approach to life in general.

They are the philosophies that guide me in what I do, and I’m really going to enjoy sharing them with you – hopefully they help you in some way too.

Here’s the first of a series of ‘Mindset Mastery’ videos I’ll be producing. This one is around using the awareness of death as a driving force to take risks and live with purpose.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

How to Grow Your Business Like a Bodybuilder

January 8, 2017 Gavin

If you’re into bodybuilding, or know someone who is, you’ll have invariably heard the phrases ‘bulking’ and ‘cutting’ before.

For those that don’t know, bulking is the phase bodybuilders go through when they are attempting to pile on more mass during ‘off-season’.

Cutting, on the other hand, is the process of dieting that bodybuilders go through to strip their body of excess fat and water so they look as ripped as possible on-stage.

By now, you may be thinking, this is a business blog – why are you talking about bodybuilding?

Well, strangely, there are very similar parallels between the two.

Cut away the intricacies, and strip them both back to basics – business and bodybuilding – and you ultimately have a situation where you are trying to build something. Be it your body, or your business.

And in building something, you inevitably face phases whereby you focus on growth, and also phases where you strip things back a little.

No business can continue to grow infinitely and uninterrupted, and no growth cycle is ever as smooth as it looks from the outside.

There are mistakes, strategic changes, recruitment drives, employment cuts, investment, and divestment – until the business reaches its optimal performance.

A businesses’ bulking cycle could be seen as the process of investment – through recruitment drives, property purchases, business infrastructure, more stock, and so on.

But, as with bodybuilding, you cannot go through a bulking cycle (regardless of how clean you eat or how hard you train) and not also gain some amount of fat and water retention. It is impossible.

In the case of a business, the ‘fat’ could be seen as overstaffing in certain areas, overstock on certain product lines that don’t sell that fast, excess/unused office or warehouse space, and so on.

These are the natural (and inevitable) side-effects of growth – it’s impossible to maintain perfection during a growth cycle. You WILL gain some unwanted by-products from the growth process – it’s precisely why bodybuilders go through the bulking and cutting cycle. If it was possible to maintain competition physique whilst gaining more mass in a bulking cycle, then these cycles wouldn’t exist – bodybuilders would just constantly ‘bulk’.

So, then comes the ‘cut’.

When the dust has settled during a growth phase, and the business can be analysed in the areas of profitability and efficiency, the business leaders will then go through a phase of stripping any unnecessary ‘fat’ from within the business.

They’ll cut staff, refine their stock holding and discount/discontinue slow-moving lines, they’ll re-organise processes to gain more efficiency, and they may even dispose of unwanted or unprofitable assets within the business.

Until, down the line, the business has retained much of the revenue it gained through the growth cycle, and has now stripped down to show a healthy profit on that turnover following the ‘cut’.

Just like a bodybuilder, following a cut, would look to maintain most of the lean muscle mass they gained during a bulking cycle, but have stripped away any excess fat and water during the cut – achieving an optimal physique for competition.

All businesses go through these cycles over time in order to ultimately achieve profitable growth – and it takes a careful balance and strategic management to perform successfully.

Focus too much on the growth phase of your business and you’ll have a high-revenue organisation that struggles to turn a profit (or even worse, makes a loss) or that turns a profit but struggles with cash.

Alternatively, focus too much on the profit aspect of your business (and be fearful of reinvesting for future growth), and you’ll see little to no growth in your business over time, and your profit will stagnate.

As a business owner/manager, you have to go through these cycles in order to progress, but you also have to be mindful of the downside associated with not achieving an optimal balance between the two.

What stage are you currently in with your business? Bulk or Cut? Please share your business growth story in the comments below.

December – A Month for Reflection

December 11, 2016 Gavin

I’m not a believer in New Year resolutions.

If you want to change something or set a goal, the time of Year should have no bearing on that.

Whether it’s January, February, August, or November – if you want to make a change or set yourself a goal, start today, this minute. Don’t wait for a New Year before taking action.

However, I do often view December as a great month for reflection.

As meaningless as the end and start of a Year is in terms of setting goals and taking action, it’s still a great time to look back and celebrate all your achievements from the previous 12 months.

Life goes by so quickly (especially when you’re busy running your own business) and often you don’t have much time to reflect during the Year – you’re busy taking action and forging ahead.

But it’s super important that we take time, at least once a year, to look back at our journey and celebrate the good times and the things we’ve achieved (however big or small).

When you are constantly challenging yourself – as an entrepreneur, as a professional, as an athlete, as an adventurer, as a parent, whatever it may be – you will undoubtedly experience failures and times of adversity. Times where it just feels so much easier to throw in the towel than to carry on pursuing your dreams and ambitions.

And if we don’t take time to celebrate the successes and the good times, then it’s often easy to become overrun by adverse situations and failures.

Naturally, we learn more from failure than we do success – we’re forced to if we want to overcome that failure we’ve experienced. We have to learn what caused us to fail, what could have been done differently, how to recover from that failure, and how to get back up and try again with a different approach.

But with success, we’re just pleased it worked out. We might celebrate briefly, then it’s on to the next challenge. You don’t need to spend any more time analysing your success, because you’ve succeeded in what you intended to achieve. In that sense, there’s little more to learn from analysing that situation.

So, even if you experience more successes than you do failures, your mind lends much more thought and energy towards failure – and as a result, your perception of self can become one geared towards failure, rather than success.

To combat this, we must consciously spend more time celebrating our wins. Even the smallest.

And I think December is a great time to spend some thought on your previous wins this year. To revisit them, and to remind yourself of the things you’ve achieved since January, and to re-balance your mindset going into the New Year – with a successful frame of mind.

So, on reflection, here’s my wins of 2016:

Spending tons of quality time with my beautiful Wife and Daughter (I’m constantly thankful that I’m able to do most of my work from home – so I don’t miss a moment of family life, despite how busy things get!)
Saving over £1m of healthy food and drink from going to landfill
Winning funding to purchase our own warehouse and continue to grow the positive impact we’re having on Food Waste with Love Health Hate Waste
Launching our new website for Love Health Hate Waste and introducing thousands of new lines
Transforming our high street store from loss-making, into making a small profit – to the point we can explore more sites for stores in the UK
Starting this blog! And my Udemy course, that’s now helped over 700 people start and grow their own online business since September
Starting my first niche site project
Revamping our catalogue for Vitalife Health and developing new revenue streams for this business

I’d love to hear what your wins were this year gone by. Please share them in the comments below.

Niche Site Income Report 1 – One Month On

November 16, 2016 Gavin

We’re already 1 month on from when I first started my niche site ‘Pizza Oven Hub’.

It feels like much more time has passed since I was first researching and trying to find the right niche for my site – so much has happened this past 4 weeks (and I was ill for one of the 4, so it’s more like 3 weeks in terms of weeks spent out of bed!).

Since then I found my niche, bought my domain, designed and built content for my entire site, and have managed to secure at least 2 high-quality, highly-relevant backlinks – and it’s already starting to show the impact of this in our search engine rankings.

That’s on-top of my regular commitments with Vitalife Group – where I’ve been sourcing some new store locations for one of our businesses, progressing things with the drawn-out warehouse purchase, coordinating and planning a new video ad for Vitalife Health, negotiating on some new stock bundles, chipping-in on customer service, and introducing quite a few changes and new, exciting features to the websites.

Plus I got to spend some good quality time with my lovely Wife and Daughter this month in Robin Hill on the Isle of Wight, and we’ve been out to eat quite a few times trying some newly discovered restaurants on the Island (The Pointer Inn in Newchurch do THE NICEST pie I’ve ever eaten – the Newchurch Pie – check it out if you’re ever on the Island).

Not to mention posting on here!

Phew.

It’s been a very busy, challenging but enjoyable month.

Cut to the Chase . . . How much Income has it Delivered?

Drum roll please . . .

Over the past 4 weeks, since I started my niche site, it has earned a grand total of:

£1.95!

And don’t laugh – I’m actually quite proud of this figure. It’s a success as far as I’m concerned.

Here’s my Adsense account snapshot (if you can’t believe your eyes!):

It barely pays for a cup of coffee, but it’s still a success.

Why?

Because 1, the only costs associated with setting the site up were the domain purchase (3 years at £27.12) and ebook cover/logo design (around £7 after currency conversion on Fiverr), so I’m already a whopping 5-6% towards reaching break-even on the project, and 2, more importantly (and seriously), niche sites have a compounding effect as your traffic builds – meaning they typically earn very little or nothing in the early stages, and as traffic grows, so does the income from the site.

Plus, your involvement and investment of time/energy tends to follow the opposite trend – so whilst I’ve invested a lot of time at the outset in getting things setup, as I get more backlinks and more SEO visibility for the site, my time and involvement should fall, just as income from the site rises.

This eventually leads to a situation where you are earning income from your niche site without any involvement whatsoever – which is the holy grail for everyone right? Fully automated income.

I actually added this site to my existing Hostgator hosting account that permits unlimited domains – so no ongoing hosting costs are incurred either.

Search Engine Performance

Whilst ranking for the (slightly more competitive than I realised) primary keyword of ‘pizza oven’ is still proving to be elusive, the site is ranking for a lot of derivative keywords like ‘Igneus Pizza Oven’ (position 14) which is a popular pizza oven model, ‘buy pizza oven online’ (position 83 now, following a position of 44 last week – which I’m guessing is down to the ‘Google Dance’), and many more.

All of these have delivered 14 sessions over the past 2 weeks from organic traffic, and it only started ranking for these derivative words from the moment the first backlink was placed.

Before this, the site didn’t rank at all – for anything – for the first couple of weeks.

Proving the importance of backlinks when it comes to SEO.

See the organic traffic pattern below:

This is just based on 2 do-follow links on high-authority, relevant sites, and a few social shares.

The rest of the traffic has come from the social shares we’ve had and a few visits from referrals from the backlinking sites.

I’m still convinced we can get the site to page 1 for the primary keyword ‘pizza oven’ with more quality backlinks.

If you want to learn how I gained the first 2 backlinks and how I plan to gain more, read my (more effective) backlink strategy here.

As you can see, organic traffic is still minimal, and in its first month, the full traffic figure came to a grand total of 215 sessions from 160 users.

So, again, next-to-nothing.

Which is reassuring, and gives me even more confidence of the site’s earning potential, because if the site is generating revenue of £1.95 against 215 visits, then if we do eventually land the first page of Google for ‘Pizza Oven’ with 22,000 searches per month, on a relative basis, this should generate £198.90 per month.

Plus, add in all the derivative keywords that will deliver a good deal of traffic too, and consider that the £1.95 figure only came from one of the site’s revenue channels – Adsense, and no consideration given for the earning potential from our Amazon affiliate store, then total earning potential could easily exceed £1,000 per month with the right level of traffic.

And for no involvement from me by that point, that truly would be passive income.

How to Make Your Adsense Ads Effective

One thing I have learned throughout this niche site process is you can go two ways with your Adsense ads – make them obvious, or subtly work them into your site content.

I’ve found that the latter is far, far more effective than the former.

My clickthrough rates on banner/graphical type ads have been much lower than my clickthrough on link-based or text-based ads.

People just don’t seem to click on ads when they’re very obviously . . . ads.

The best-performing ad groups I’ve seen have been link-based, where they mimic a navigation menu or something similar – you can see how I worked a set in on a screenshot of my niche site below:

This actually looks like part of the website navigation, and is also one of the first things the visitor sees, so is therefore the best performing ad group for me.

Some people might consider this underhand and sneaky – and whilst I’d agree that it does encourage people to click on paid ads, I’m still comfortable with this tactic because:

It still delivers content that the visitor clicks on and expresses an interest in, so it isn’t misleading in the content it delivers
It still makes it clear to visitors that these are ad-based links since the ‘Ad Choices’ link is placed to the side of them
It ultimately delivers my goal as the website owner – to get visitors off the site, via an ad. And it’s very effective at it too

So, there you have it – my month 1 update on my niche site progress and income report.

Whilst I’m not quite making a fortune with it, things are looking promising and I’m really confident and excited about the future of this website and where it will go with a few more backlinks.

If you’re also going through your own niche site journey, please share your progress and income in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

Niche Site Step 3.1: My (More Effective) Backlink Strategy

November 8, 2016 Gavin

So, it’s been all of 1 week since I posted my backlink strategy for my niche site pizzaovenhub.com and . . . sorry guys, I’ve changed it all up already.

Sorry to rock the boat!

I’ve never professed to be an expert in this field, and that’s what this journey is all about – learning what works and what doesn’t, so I can teach my readers, and be the crash-test dummy of backlinking and SEO.

The broken link approach that I mentioned in my last post only seemed to work for social sharing, and quickly started to lose the initial momentum and conversion rate I mentioned in my previous post.

It also became fairly obvious, rather quickly, that well-ranked blogs and websites are wise to the templates high-profile bloggers like Neil Patel provide you with, and they are sick of them! So to get a link from the guys that matter – it’s going to take a lot more than good content and a template outreach email.

So I changed my strategy, and now I have something that works – and I’m already seeing the impact in rankings on derivative keywords from just one powerful backlink placed under this new strategy.

So, here it is . . .

My (Effective) Backlink Strategy

My effective backlink strategy ultimately comprises 4 parts (with a bit of thought in-between – hence the 5 steps above), just as my previous strategy did – except the approach is much different:

Find relevant links
Outreach, but in a different way (see below)
Develop and post agreed content
Get your link

So here’s the 4 steps in more detail:

1. Find Relevant Links

Forget resource pages and links pages this time – we’re delivering much more value to the link target than ‘useful information’ for their readers, so we don’t just need to hit the sites that actively link out on resource/links pages.

Plus, this new approach is going to get you high-quality contextual links (embedded within the link-target’s site content) – just the sort that Brian Dean from Backlinko says you should be aiming for.

To find my relevant links, I started with a brainstorm – I brainstormed all related keyword terms, derivative (including your primary phrase but not exclusively your primary phrase, so for me, things like ‘wood fired pizza oven training’ and so on) and semantic (not including your keyword phrase but linked to it in some way, so for me, things like ‘firewood’ and ‘outdoor cooking’) keywords.

Then, when you have a list of derivative and semantic keywords, do some Googling on these terms to see what sort of websites come up.

Now, before you jump into step 2 and contact them, you need to think about what sort of value you could add to their site and their business.

Tune in to WI FM (What’s In it For Me), from the website owner’s perspective. What can you deliver to them that helps them meet their business/website/blog’s objectives.

And I’m not talking vague things like ‘providing a valuable link to show their visitors’ – these website owners really don’t care about this. They’re either selling something, trying to raise their profile with potential customers, or communicating a particular message to their audience, or all three.

You need to therefore deliver something to them that will help them sell their products/services, raise their profile, or communicate their message.

And to do that effectively, you’re going to need to develop your content after you know who you’re trying to get a link from – so you can customise the content down to actually mentioning them in the piece.

This is where running other ecommerce businesses through my position at Vitalife Group came in useful – it gave me perspective of how I’d feel about bloggers contacting my companies for backlinks by using the broken link and ‘valuable content’ approach.

To be honest, I’d probably fix the link and not bother sharing the content – because I’m wise to the approach now, and I know their primary motivation for getting in-touch is not to help me by finding broken links, it’s to help themselves by getting a backlink from my site.

And the same applies to authoritative websites and blogs – they’ll receive tons of these emails, and they’ll be wise to your motivations for contacting them, so even before they’ve started reading the content of your email, the barriers are up.

So instead, once you’ve found a few ‘link targets’ by searching Google for your derivative and semantic keywords, you need to take the following approach . . .

2. Outreach, but in a Different Way

Don’t use templates for your outreach! Start every point of communication with link targets from scratch.

I know, I know. It’s laborious, and takes a lot of time.

BUT, if you are focusing on highly authoritative, relevant sites, attaining just one quality link like this can rocket you up the rankings (as I’ve already experienced this early on – but more on this later in the post) – so don’t worry about this process taking time.

Backlinking is about quality, not quantity.

Put all of your efforts into attaining each link you outreach for – it should never be a case of copy/paste, hit send and repeat. Do this, and you lose the whole impact of this highly-effective strategy.

So, start with your first link target, make sure they are ranking well for either a derivative or semantic keyword in your field, and think carefully about what they want.

I did this, and my first target was a pizza oven retailer.

They had an exclusive, slick-looking pizza oven for sale – and it was available only from them. This meant, if I wrote a feature about it, it would only ever benefit them in terms of the awareness it generates – which would deliver a high level of value to them.

So, I went ahead and dreamed-up a new concept of announcing our ‘Pizza Oven of the Month’ on the blog. It was the 1st November, so seemed the perfect time to start something like this.

I wrote a very flattering piece about the oven, covering its features, and what I ultimately thought of it and why it was November’s Pizza Oven of the Month (which was all actually truthful – by the end I did want one of them myself!).

I then contacted the website and told them about the review and the fact that one of their exclusive models had made our Pizza Oven of the Month award. To which they shared socially, and also placed a contextual link to my niche site on their HOME PAGE of all places!

That’s a 100% conversion rate right there. This was the first target I’d approached under this strategy, they were ranked highly for my primary keyword and other derivative keywords, and I’d just attained a juicy backlink from them on their most important page of all.

The impact of this link was immediately apparent, in a few days it made my site rank for lots of derivative keywords (although, strangely, it’s still not showing for my primary keyword ‘pizza oven’ – but a few more links like this and I’m sure it will).

From not ranking on anything other than ‘Pizza Oven Hub’ – which is ultimately my domain name, and noone ever uses this as a search term – to ranking at the following places for these words:

Buy Pizza Oven Online – Rank 44 Worldwide

Pizza Oven Recipes – Rank 127 Worldwide

Outdoor Pizza Oven Recipes – Rank 153 Worldwide

How do I know this?

I use a combination of my Google Webmaster account for my niche site, which tells you what search terms your site is showing for, then I run these search terms through SERPs.com’s Rank Checker Tool, to find the precise rank at any given time.

The above data is interesting, not just because I wasn’t ranking at all prior to this single backlink, but it’s also interesting that the best ranking keyword is related to buying pizza ovens online – which is the primary focus of the site providing the backlink, to sell Pizza Ovens online.

Although I have an Amazon affiliate store on my niche site and a ‘Buy Pizza Ovens Online’ page, this is certainly not where my textual content is focused – it’s more around the types of pizza oven available, and also quite a lot of keywords focused around building your own pizza oven. So it’s definitely not my on-site content that’s guided this ranking.

Now, as I said before, I’m no SEO expert – I’m just crash-testing theories – but perhaps this suggests that Google takes the relevance of sites that are backlinking to yours not only seriously, but it also guides your ranking in searches based on your backlinking site’s content (perhaps even more so than your own on-site content?).

Or perhaps it’s simply because competition is less fierce in this long-tail term? And I haven’t surfaced that well elsewhere because the other terms are more competitive?

I dunno.

I just found this a very interesting point.

I think, in truth, Google’s algorithm is probably so complex, with so many layers and variables, that even the boffins that built it and maintain it couldn’t explain specifically what single part of the algorithm leads, primarily, to ranking for a particular term.

I also heard they were using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to allow the algorithm to adapt to new search terms never used before and so on.

That’s all a little bit too complex for me – I’m just trying to get my little Pizza Oven niche site ranked well – and the common consensus, and my own data, show that quality, relevant backlinks are the general direction you need to head in to achieve this.

I digress . . .

Back to the strategy.

So, in my example I kind of did things backwards to what I prescribe in my 4 step guidance, I created the content prior to contacting the link target – but I thought in that particular instance (and probably in many others) it would add more credibility to build the content and publish before discussing it with the link target.

It’s more credible to say, ‘hey, I just featured your product on my blog and it won our Monthly award’, than to say, ‘hey, if you provide me a link on your site, I’ll say one of your products won our Monthly award’.

It all depends on your particular approach and the type of custom content you’re building – it’s a judgement call you have to make on every link target before you approach them. Is it more credible, and therefore more likely to get shared, if I build the content THEN share this with the target, or is it safer to contact them first and build a feature with their involvement/awareness of it, to better guarantee a link placement once published.

I’ve used both techniques, and both are proving to be effective.

3. Develop and Post Your Agreed Content

So, if you’ve approached your link target at this point, and they have agreed to link to your feature if you build something around their product/service – you’re now in a position to type out your content and give them something worth sharing.

When writing your actual content, remain mindful of what your link target wants from the piece (to sell more products/services, to raise awareness of something, etc) and ensure you get this across effectively, but also remember that the target will not want the piece to sound as though you are affiliated with them, as it then loses credibility for sharing amongst their readership and visitors, so try to keep it sounding independent and unbiased.

4. Get Your Link

When you’re happy with the content, it’s often a good idea, provided you have contacted your link target beforehand and they are aware of the feature being built, to get their input before publishing.

Ensure it meets their needs and get their stamp of approval before you send it live.

Then all you have to do from here is let them know it’s gone live, provide the link, and kindly ask that they link through to the piece from their website as agreed.

BINGO!

You’ve got your high-quality, relevant link.

Plus, you’ve just built yourself some relevant, unique, fresh content for your site at the same time – it’s a win-win.

The approach not only wins more backlinks at an incredible conversion rate, but it also commits you to continually developing new content for your site – which is often hard to keep up when you have other commitments beyond your niche site.

And that’s that!

Give it a go, and let me know what success rate you have with it by sharing your story in the comment section below.

Good luck! And remember, this is a time-consuming approach, but a very rewarding one.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather spend an hour or two building custom content and pretty much guaranteeing a quality backlink than spend an hour or two sending template outreach emails to ‘hopefully’ get one or two responses and maybe a backlink from someone.

This is a high-quality, high-impact approach that works – it adds genuine value to your link prospect’s sites, and also to your own.

Let me know how things go.

Niche Site Step 1: How to Find Your Niche

October 18, 2016 Gavin

I originally set-out on this journey to create a niche site following Pat Flynn’s original Niche Site Duel.

I wanted to prove that anyone can still do this, and that evergreen niches (ones not based on short-term fads or crazes) could still be found and capitalised upon.

So, 6 years on from Pat’s original Niche Site Duel, is it still as easy to find a niche for your niche website?

Quite frankly, no!

You would think with a ‘how-to’ breakdown from Pat, that following the same process in a different topic/industry, you’d be able to quickly and easily source your own niche that meets the same criteria as Pat set for his own niche site (at least 100 potential organic visitors per day and a maximum of 40,000 SEO competitors – more on this later in this post).

Well, it isn’t so – or at least not in the areas I selected for my niches.

I suspect the difficulty I experienced was down to two factors:

Pat’s original niche site was developed over 6 years ago – therefore a few of the techniques he shows in finding a niche are no longer relevant/applicable. I had to adapt his approach in order to successfully find my own niche
The internet becomes more crowded with each day that goes by, and this, teamed with the fact that online marketers like Pat have publicised how you can set-up your own niche website, has undoubtedly led to many niches being filled over the past 6 years

New niches are always opening-up of course, with new crazes and trends – but I’m trying to find an evergreen niche, not one that fizzles out along with the trend.

I want my niche site to generate a passive income for decades, not just a few weeks.

However . . .

I have found my niche!

It took a lot longer than I originally expected – over 7 hours of solid researching, in fact – but I got there, and I’m pretty pleased with the niche I’ve selected.

The process would have been a lot faster had I realised the adjustments I needed to make to Pat’s methods earlier on – I spent at least 4 of those 7 hours following his exact method which only led to dead-ends.

Ultimately, Pat uses the software Market Samurai exclusively to find his niche – following an initial mind-map of ideas.

I too own a copy of Market Samurai (if you don’t, you can download a free trial version here) and set-out to follow the exact same research criteria as Pat did – only to find that absolutely no keywords ever came close to meeting this criteria (at least 100 potential organic visitors per day and a maximum of 40,000 SEO competitors).

See the screenshot below on how you set this criteria in Market Samurai (more info on how to use this software later in the post):

All the keywords I tried, that had over 100 daily organic clicks, had a minimum of 500,000 SEO competitors. Indicating that these keywords were too competitive to tackle.

However, after many hours of searching and finding 0 keywords that matched Pat’s criteria, I started to question the usefulness of the SEO competition data.

What this ultimately shows you is how many websites use this keyword phrase across the web. It doesn’t necessarily mean that these websites are focusing on this keyword and that they are optimised for it.

Pat even mentions in one of his later posts that the SEO competition data is pretty useless, since it doesn’t matter how many sites mention your chosen keyword, what matters is the strength of those sites that occupy the top 10 places in Google for your keyword.

So, I started to disregard this metric.

I also began to realise how unreliable the data is from Market Samurai’s keyword research function – I’d perform a search on a keyword one time, and it would show 300+ SEO traffic and 500,000+ SEO competition, then the next time I search for this exact keyword, I’d have totally different results.

So, I also threw in an alternative process to ensure the data I was basing my decision on was accurate – I’ll cover this shortly.

Here’s my full revised process for finding my niche:

Step 1: Mindmap

I began my process much like Pat did, but instead of creating a mindmap around fears, problems, and passions – I just created mine around passions.

I see the logic of focusing on common problems and fears that people have – because there’s a demand for knowledge to overcome those problems and fears – but I just couldn’t see myself writing content for a site that focuses on a problem or fear-based subject.

Given I’ll be writing all of the content for this site myself, in order to maintain my interest, and allow me to speak in an engaging way around the subject, it has to be about something I have a passion for.

So, here’s my original mindmap (I used the free trial version of a software called SmartDraw to build it):

After failing to find a keyword to match Pat’s original metrics, a fresh set of eyes really helped (in this case, my lovely Wife Grace) in coming up with even more keyword ideas, that eventually led to my chosen niche.

I also switched-up the method I was using, by doing the following:

Step 2: Keyword Generation and Research

Here’ where I decided to ditch Market Samurai, and opt for data right from the horse’s mouth – or Google’s mouth, rather.

If you have an Adwords account, you’ll already have access to Google’s Keyword Planner. If you don’t have an account, you can quickly set one up, and you’ll get instant access to the Keyword Planner.

Just pop in a search term, and it will show you exactly how many monthly searches take place for this keyword, how competitive the PPC arena is for this keyword (which is a generally a good indication of competitiveness in SEO too), and give you a ton of high-volume, alternative and longer-tail keyword suggestions that you could focus on.

I ran keywords related to my passions mindmap through this tool, and came up with a condensed list of potential keywords that I could focus my niche on.

The two keywords with the most potential following the keyword planner exercise were ‘non-alcoholic wine’ and ‘pizza oven’.

These both had relatively strong search volumes (5,400 and 22,000 respectively), meaning ‘pizza oven’ was the highest volume, but the PPC competition was also ‘low’ and ‘high’ respectively, so this kind of balanced-out the prospects of these two keywords.

Step 3: Competitor Strength

I then took the 2 keywords I identified in step 2, and ran them through Market Samurai’s ‘SEO Competition’ module – I found this to be much more reliable and helpful than their keyword research tool, and really gives a good overview of the strength of the competition in Google’s top 10 search results for your chosen term.

Ultimately, when using this, you want to see as many greens as possible, and as fewer yellows and reds as possible.

A lot of greens is good news – and means the competition in Google’s top ten results for your keyword term are relatively weak. Reds and yellows on the other hand indicate strong competition, meaning it would be harder to break into the top 10 results for your keyword term.

As you can see from the screenshot above on my term ‘Pizza Oven’, although domain age is pretty strong on the Global results, the other metrics for these sites are quite weak.

I also performed a local search by changing the project settings, to see how competitive the UK search arena was for this term, and it returned similarly weak competition.

The competition was stronger for Non Alcoholic Wines, which was contradictory to the PPC data provided by the Google Keyword tool.

So this, combined with the fact that ‘pizza oven’ had almost 4x as much organic traffic potential as ‘non alcoholic wines’, means ‘pizza oven’ is my chosen niche!

Insider Information: At Vitalife Group we’ve been working on developing a nice-tasting, non-alcoholic wine for quite some time now (it’s more difficult than it sounds! Most currently on the market just taste like grape juice), so the ‘non-alcoholic wine’ focus would have tied-in nicely for when we come to launch this product.

But I want this niche site to become a separate business in its own right and not rely on other parts of our group to become successful – otherwise it’s missing the point of showing that anyone can do it.

So the pizza oven niche fits the bill perfectly – and the work is now on to build the site, monetise it, and start promoting it.

Like Pat Flynn, my only rule in this process is to not use paid advertising to promote the site, so it all has to be done from link-building and SEO.

I’ve got the domain (which I’ll announce to you in my next niche site post), now I’m on with getting a logo designed (using Fiverr.com), installing WordPress (using 1-click install with Hostgator), getting a cool free theme, getting the site online, and building the initial content.

If you’re taking the niche site challenge too, and you’ve never set up a website before, I cover all of the above processes in one of the sections of my ‘Fast Track Entrepreneur: Start an Online Business in 4 Weeks‘ course over on Udemy, and I’ve also made this section publicly available on Youtube for you to follow here.

Please share your own experience with finding a niche, and share your tips and techniques for finding a high-traffic, low-competition keyword to focus on in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

What is a Niche Audience and How Can I Make Money From it?

October 16, 2016 Gavin

A niche audience is a specific group of people where you choose to focus your communication or marketing/promotional efforts.

Niche audiences can be super-specific – like focusing on people with an interest in playing the didgeridoo, or they can be broader, like focusing on people in a particular age range like 18-30yr olds.

Building a niche ultimately ensures you can communicate effective material that serves their particular needs and interests. It keeps promotional costs down, conversion rates high, and limits the competition you go up against.

And why do I ask this?

Because just recently I was catching up on Pat Flynn’s progress over on his Smart Passive Income blog.

I was amazed to see that he still includes his Security Guard Training adsense income on his monthly income report.

And although it’s now a relatively small part of his very healthy $150,000+ monthly income, at just $1,300 per month – it’s still a very rewarding and realistic starting point for most people looking to start an online business.

Pat started this niche website back in 2010, so I’m a little behind the times covering this in 2016 – but there’s a method to me revisiting this far on.

The fact that Pat is still earning a healthy monthly income from his own niche sites is testament to the fact that building niche websites is an evergreen way to make money online.

Once they’re up, capturing a good amount of traffic, and they’re optimised for monetisation, they are a great way to make consistent passive income – pretty much for the rest of your life.

But have all the niches now been taken?

In an age where the necessary information to start your own niche website and to research the most potentially rewarding niches is publicly available, are there still gaps and niches that haven’t yet been tapped and that you can make money from?

Of course, new niches can appear all the time with the latest fads and crazes, but I’m talking about the evergreen niches – the ones that deliver consistent income, for decades, not just for a few months.

So, Pat, 6 years on, I’m taking you up on your challenge to take part in your niche site duel – and I too will document my progress throughout, from selecting the niche, to setting up the site, creating the content, getting the site ranked in Google, and monetising it.

The aim?

To hopefully prove that there are still endless niches that people just like me and you can use to quickly and easily generate a consistent online income.

In my Udemy course ‘Fasttrack Entrepreneur: Start an Online Business in 4 Weeks’ I teach people how to start their own business from scratch, across a broad range of business models (ecommerce through to blogging and vlogging) – so I see this experiment as an extension to this – I’ll go back to where I started, from scratch, and with less than £20, I’ll show you how you can create a profitable online business (I hope!).

I’m putting my reputation on the line, and I’m willing to do this to hopefully prove how anyone can set their own business up online.

When I’m done, I’ll use this post to link to each post I create to show you every stage of the process I follow.

But for now, just stay tuned to my blog for updates as I start my journey towards creating a niche website.

Fancy taking the challenge too?

I invite you to start your own niche site and to document your progress – updating me and readers on your journey, strategy, and steps to building a successful niche website in the comments below.

Why Online Marketing is Like Dieting

October 15, 2016 Gavin

Neither are an exact science.

Both depend on other variables to be successful.

And results take time.

Being an advocate of health, fitness, and good diet, and also running several successful online businesses, I have a fair bit of experience in both online marketing and dieting.

A recent article I read really highlighted to me the similarities between the two.

You can find the original article here.

Have you ever been on a diet and become frustrated with how the scales fluctuate from day-to-day with no real reasoning?

You stick to your diet rigidly each day, but yet some days still show an increase on the scales or no movement at all.

Well, this article explains why this can happen, and the scientific reasoning behind these frustrating fluctuations.

Ultimately, there are a number of factors that can cause your weight to fluctuate on a day-to-day basis – sodium levels, glycogen stores, water retention, and much much more.

The lesson of the article is to not become obsessed over these daily fluctuations in weight when you are working towards a goal – weigh yourself maybe every couple of weeks instead of every day.

This allows the, sometimes unexplainable, daily fluctuations to iron themselves out without you even noticing or having to worry about them.

In dieting, as in business and in life as a whole, there are variables – often too many to comprehend – that will affect your short-term progress.

In business, it could be not getting anything crossed off your to-do list on a certain day because the kids need to go swimming, or you’re ill and need a day in bed to rest.

Whatever it may be, there are distractions, other priorities, and unexplainable factors that can influence our short term progress.

But in the long term, provided we are consistent and persistent with our efforts and drive, we will see progress.

It’s rather like monitoring the currency exchange – you can micro-analyse all those troughs and peaks in the graph, but ultimately it’s about how things go in the long term.

Provided that point on the graph ends up higher than when you first started out, you’ve made progress towards your goal.

Forget about the turbulence in-between – this can be ridden out with consistent effort.

I liken this approach to online marketing – particularly with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising – in the short term, you might blow a fortune on campaigns that aren’t quite working out.

But you build on what works and what doesn’t for you and your business.

You ditch the expensive keywords that aren’t converting and you spend more money on the keywords that are converting.

You consistently tweak and improve your campaign using the data it delivers back to you over time – until, in the long term, you’re left with a very effective and profitable campaign.

If you start trying to tweak your campaign too early though, you may end up scrapping some potentially high-converting keywords because they don’t start out too well for you, and you don’t have enough ‘meat’ on your data to make an informed and accurate decision.

Dieting is similar. What works for one person may not work for the next. You have to follow a process of trial and error – ditching techniques that aren’t delivering results in the medium to long term, and focusing on what is working for you.

Until eventually, in the long term, you reach your personal weight loss goals.

The Lesson?

Consistency leads to success.

But micro-analysing data too quickly can often be contradictory to achieving consistency.

You need to give it time for accurate data to show, in order to make informed decisions and changes/tweaks going forward.

This applies to online advertising, dieting, and almost all other aspects in life.

By all means take corrective action when things aren’t heading in the right direction – but don’t analyse things too quickly, give them enough time to deliver actionable data, or you’ll lose your direction and consistency that ultimately leads to long-term success.

Do you have your own tips and techniques to share on these topics? Please share them in the comments below.

The 11 Best Business Startup Twitter Feeds to Follow

October 11, 2016 Gavin

Twitter is a busy, noisy environment.

So much so, it’s often difficult to filter through your feed to retrieve necessary, useful information from the other waffle.

So I’ve done the hard work for you.

I’ve sourced 11 of the best, most useful Twitter feeds for small business owners and entrepreneurs to follow.

These feeds are packed with juicy information about running and growing a business, developing your promotional strategy, where to reinvest in your business, and much much more.

They consist of some of the World’s leading entrepreneurs and business owners – providing you with tried and tested techniques and tips to grow your own small business.

Marc Nager (@marcnager)

As the founder of Startup Weekend you can naturally expect a plethora of entrepreneurial tips, networking (mainly US) and collaboration opportunities, and other interesting stories from Marc.

He posts around once or twice a day, so is not one to hog your feed!

Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

As the owner of his own media agency, Gary knows a thing or two about online promotional strategy. With his motivational quotes and business tips, he’ll have you fired-up with energy each day to hustle.

A frequent poster, and not one for haters of profanity – he likes to use the F-bomb . . . a lot!

Pat Flynn (@patflynn)

Pat is someone I followed about 3 or so years back, and I remember reading his passive income blog – seeing his transparent income reports, and that he was making several thousand pounds each month through passive income techniques.

Now, revisiting his blog 3 years on, I see he’s now generating over $150,000 per month! And he’s still showing people his income reports on how he achieves this income.

Pat is very open and honest about his techniques, so there’s a lot to be learnt from him by following.

Seth Godin (@thisissethsblog)

Seth consistently blogs every day – mostly short snippets of a motivational and philosophical nature, so they are quick and easy to read.

You can use his Twitter feed to stay up-to-date when his new posts go live.

Neil Patel (@neilpatel)

Neil is the co-founder of CrazyEgg and KISSmetrics – so he knows a thing or two about online marketing and data processing.

Follow him for some useful tips and techniques on how to build your email lists, improve your SEO, make sales on social media, and many more.

Richard Branson (@richardbranson)

Needing no introduction, Mr Branson shares his thoughts on legislation, shares his insight and life stories, and also inspires an entrepreneurial mindset in everyone.

A must-follow for any aspiring entrepreneur or small business owner.

Brett Bernstein (@bhbern)

CEO of Gatsby, a self-service technology to design ecommerce promotions, Brett regularly shares business news, insights, and health-related tweets.

Inspiring, insightful, and a very useful follow for the small business owner.

Tim Ferriss (@tferriss)

The man behind the 4-hour work week, Tim is experimental and exciting to follow.

He isn’t afraid to try new things, so you can learn what works and what doesn’t, from him.

Mark Suster (@msuster)

Entrepreneur turned investor Mark now runs Upfront Ventures – a VC that has none other than the rapper Chamillionaire as an Entrepreneur in Residence.

Sounds strange, I know, but aside from the political tweets, Mark has a lot to share about the entrepreneurial journey and investing. Worth a follow.

Anil Dash (@anildash)

Ethically-motivated entrepreneur Anil shares his insight from the World of tech and retweets even more useful articles and quotes from other entrepreneurs.

Fred Wilson (@fredwilson)

Simply describes himself as a VC. He also posts some very interesting information on tech, politics, and of course, investing.

Also a big advocate of Twitter itself.

And that concludes my list of who to follow if you are an entrepreneur.

Following these people will ensure your daily feed is filled with useful, helpful, and insightful content – allowing you to build on your own entrepreneurial journey and success.

Know any more good Twitter accounts that small business owners should be following? Please share them in the comments below.

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