First Muse Failed
I am a big fan of the 4 Hour Work Week, I maintain one of the largest 4HWW groups on meetup.com and started the 4 Hour Work Week Forums as part of a bigger marketing plan. By following the rules of the book, setting goals, defining the ideal outcome and testing the product before I invest too much TIME into it. (As we know time is money in 4hww terms)
My original plan for the site was to create an offshoot community of 4hww readers and provide them with the most up to date content on the net about Timothy Ferriss and the 4 Hour Work Week. I hired a freelancer to do utilize blog / rss and internet searches to find the most current and up to date posts about the New Rich, Dream lining, mini-retirements, DEAL and other peoples 4hww experiences. I had them post the articles to the site after a few short weeks I started to build a community.
My goal was to have 200 active members by December 1 2007 and then start introducing some affiliate programs and other resources into the forums. Each of these outbound links would give the readers of the forum a discount on a relevant product or service and I would get paid a referral fee if they purchased. The type of products included marketing and PPC resources, e-books on how to start a virtual company, coupons to freelance sites, web hosting accounts and the like. I ended up with 84 total members, a huge disappointment for me.
Process and Planning
The setup of the site was pretty straightforward. I setup a web hosting account at MediaTemple, ordered vBulletin and a theme called Coffee. I then purchased and installed what I think is a must have plugin for vB called VBSEO, which allows the site to have static pages urls and link backs. I then setup an RSS / Blog search for common 4hww terms and head to elance.com to find a subcontractor to make posts for me. Pretty easy to this point.
I then setup an Adwords account with specific keywords and within a few days I am getting a 3.5% CTR on my terms and traffic starts coming. New members are signing up at the rate of about 1 per day. Not good enough for what I need, I up the ad spend a little change my keywords, broad match some competitive terms and now I have a CTR of over 6%. I do a ton of A/B testing for ads and I am happy with the traffic but not the new signups. I am tracking conversions with Google Analytics and I know exactly what each new user is costing me, in both time and money.
The amount for effort required to maintain the site is not an issue, it maintains and polices itself and with my Indian freelancer it was costing me about $16 per day to have dozen of current and relevant posts updated to the site. I am getting Google PR, tons of backlinks and I am in the Google index. I have 376 indexed pages in less than three months; I have 301 redirects from common misspellings of the domain and I am getting good traffic. From an execution perspective I have done everything right. I am just not meeting or exceeding my plan.
Knowing when to say when
Having a plan about what I needed, an execution road map and plan helped me to plan my attack for this muse. It did not work out, but I also have not wasted time in pretending that it will eventually work. The NR plan, check, test and execute. We also need to know when to say when.
So what to do? I have tested. Retested and have changed variables that have given me great responses, but I need to move on and focus on more muse creations. For those of you who have read the book I am sure that you can appreciate the “why??? I am doing this. For those of you who have not read the book, do yourself a favor grab it. It might just change your life.
As of December 1, I am 301 redirecting the forum to my personal blog. I will keep updating the blog with 4hww news. Same information, just a different format.
Brad