Update To Yaro’s Timeline

I just spent some time adding a few months worth of updates to my business timeline and I thought you regulars might not realise the additions are there so I’ll re-post here. This is pure Yaro indulgence, nothing too educational.

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My side projects, Yaz.com.au and Student-Marketing.com.au have been dropped. The main reason for ceasing work on both projects is this blog. I have a lot more fun and find it more rewarding to work on tasks that improve this blog or are spin-offs from it.

Student-Marketing faced some resistance from universities and I never did like the feeling I got from putting up posters – it feels illegal, like you are breaking the rules – so I want to do less postering, not more. Despite how much I’d love to have an Australia-wide national postering network and how much that would help BetterEdit grow, it’s not the right path for me. At the same time I started Student-Marketing I hit a bit of negative resistance to the business and conversely, the positive reinforcement I received about this blog was so more powerful that it was an obvious choice regarding what way to go in the future. I always follow what feels right to me and in this case the choice was a no-brainer.

While the Yaz! website is still online I am not working on it anymore. It was to be turned into a Facebook for Australia, which I still believe is a fantastic opportunity for any web entrepreneur. For those who do not know the Facebook concept, it is student social software service much like LinkedIn, Friendster and Ryze that allow people to make social connections online and leverage contact networking. Facebook targets the university and school demographics and has experienced explosive growth in the USA. I expect whether Facebook itself or a copycat service launches in Australia it will do equally well.

I would love to be involved in a project like Facebook, a true start-up Internet company, but I just don’t have the tech skills to build the site nor the time to devote to a project of that size. It really deserves the focus of a full time team and since my partners and I were not going to get it launched anytime soon the project was shut down. We all had conflicting interests and personal situations pulling our energies elsewhere. As with anything in entrepreneurship you need the right combination of variables to occur at the same time and for Yaz! this is not the case, for the moment. I have slapped some AdSense ads on the Yaz! site so it should make a few dollars a month from search traffic to justify keeping the domain in case of future opportunities.

Where to now?

I have decided that I want to find an alternative method of marketing for BetterEdit to move away from the current dependency on postering. Placing posters has been by far the most cost effective and successful marketing channel I have used but besides doing it myself, which is quite labour intensive, it’s just too hard to coordinate. The ROI of paying professionals to poster for me is not ideal, it’s not bad, but I’d like to experiment with some other marketing methods. I’ve begun testing to find a reliable online or less labour intensive offline marketing method for BetterEdit, starting with Google AdWords site targeting and other online advertising methods. Hopefully I will stumble upon a method to reach international students that is equally effective as posters but not as difficult to maintain.

Right now my focus is on two things -

1) Double the revenue of BetterEdit.com.

I’d like to either sell the business or hire someone to manage it for me within two years and to do that I need to double the current income level. If I double it I can afford to hire someone or hopefully sell the site and earn enough to not worry about income for a few years and invest the money in other projects. As I recently wrote about in this blog, I just finished a redesign and refocus of the BetterEdit sales process, which provides some additional tools such as a free report lead generator to make use of to test different marketing techniques. The result of the redesign has also seen BetterEdit vault further up the global search engine results, which always helps.

2) Writing and podcasting, and loving it!

At the moment I am loving nothing more than writing and podcasting for this blog and other websites. I have a hundred gazillion different topics I want to create content for and many different ways to package this content up, but for the moment the best tool I have is this blog, so I’m using it. I’m braindumping as much as I can so that eventually I’ll have enough content to do all kinds of things, and as a great benefit I grow a nice readership along the way. I must admit if it wasn’t for the fantastic feedback, comments and participation I get from my readers and the blogging community in general I wouldn’t find this work nearly as enjoyable as I do, so thank you all! I can honestly say regardless of how much money I make everytime I get a piece of feedback that makes me smile I realise more and more that money, or the desire for more, is such a waste of energy. The feedback is so much more fulfilling and I expect in the long term the finances will handle themselves. I’m taking my own advice and keeping my focus on this blog as a creative expression of me, rather than worry about how I can make more money.

That’s not to say I’ve totally stopped attempting to make an income from what I do online, I’m still chasing the dollar, I’m just not creating all that horrible frustration energy (or at least keeping it minimized) by wanting more more more, right now now now. That being said I’ve seen some promising signs regarding affiliate income growth and I’m going to start experimenting with some advertising on this blog to find a balance I’m comfortable with (content vs ads) that eventually leads to a full time income as a side effect of indulging in my writing and podcasting. If I can help some other entrepreneur’s gain exposure for their enterprises by promoting what they are doing on my blog, and they are willing to support me with income in return, then it’s win-win.

I’m also about to launch a web development service in partnership with two friend’s companies. I’ve realised that a lot of my readers and listeners would probably appreciate it if someone like me handled their SEO, website and online marketing so I should at least make these services available. One friend runs a quality web design and web development business and the other an online marketing service. Having access to my friend’s resources means I can offer services that I have good faith in to my audience, so if you don’t feel like putting into action what I teach yourself, you can pay someone do to it for you, and someone with the Yaro seal of approval to boot!

Keeping focused

Those two goals above look nice and clean don’t they? To be honest it’ been very hard to stay on track. I currently have at least two other blogs that I’m just itching to flick the ON button on, but alas, I must keep the focus simple to avoid repeating past mistakes by taking on too many projects at once. I was so close to buying a website at auction recently that I just knew would be right for me and would probably be a long term earner, but I decided to hold off like a good entrepreneur and keep the focus tight. Those things will happen in the future, when I’m in a place I can devote time and energy to them. Man patience is a bitch though!

Yaro Starak
Internet Business Entrepreneur