Building an Empire in 30 Minutes
The title of this article might be a little bit misleading. It won’t take you just 30 minutes, but it will take you around 30 minutes a day. The idea for this came about because I have a pretty big project that I have been working on for several months that is now coming together and performing well for me. Someone asked me where I got the time to do the project and I told them that I work on it 30 minutes a day. So this article will outline what I have done and how you can do the same. You might say that a person can’t accomplish much of anything in 30 minutes. That might be true but when you string together a bunch of 30 minute sessions it adds up pretty quick. I worked 30 minutes a day Mon-Fri and 1 hr on Sat for this project. That works out to about 14 hours a month. You may not be able to accomplish much in 30 minutes, but you sure as hell can in 14 hours. This plan is mostly for people that have established projects and do things that already make them money, but want to expand out and don’t have a lot of free time to do so.
My project was building an SEO network, but this technique can work for any type of project. You will need a couple of things to keep yourself organized. First you will need some type of a calendar/scheduler program. I personally just use the calendar in Outlook. You may also need a spreadsheet program (I use Excel) to keep track of your work. Some people might say that project management software could handle both of these things well, but I didn’t want to have to buy or learn anything new and the stuff I already own has worked very well for me.
Step #1 – STUDY IT
I personally didn’t know much of anything about search engines when I started this project other than that I seemed to not get listed very high in them or very often and if I did it was dumb luck and never lasted. So I set out to learn as much as I could. I bought a book called SEOBook, which taught me a lot. I started reading search engine webmaster boards and I used Boardtracker to find SEO related threads on boards I didn’t read very often. Boardtracker is great because you can put in keywords and when people make posts with those keywords in them you get emails with links to the posts. I learned a lot just from there.
I spent 30 minutes a day (1 hour on Saturday) for about 3 months just learning. Reading what I could find, studying what I had learned and teaching myself how to make pages that were well optimized. After about 3 months I felt confident enough to start along my journey and jump into the water.
Step #2 – PLAN IT OUT
For me the best part about the 30 minute plan is that you aren’t devoting huge chunks of time to a project so if it fails to do as well as you liked and you have to relearn and rethink it, you haven’t wasted weeks of time that you have taken away from things that you already know make money for you.
After my learning phase was over I sat down and planned out what I wanted to accomplish. I decided to start kind of small and see how I did. If I had success I would expand out, if not, I could figure out what went wrong and work with what I had to make it better and get it right. My planning phase really only took me about a week (remember when I say this I mean a week of 30 minute days). At the end of my week I had a pretty solid plan of what I needed to do and how I was going to do it. This is where my calendar and spreadsheet came into use. I had the spreadsheet listing the sites I was going to build and keywords each of these sites were going to focus on. I then put into the calendar what I wanted to accomplish each day leaving my Saturday hour for catching up on anything I may not have gotten done. If I wasn’t behind, I used that day to get a head start on next week.
Step #3 – GET WET
I decided the best way for me to jump into the search engine market was with blogs. Not because they are the trendy thing to do right now, but because they are easy to install, have some great features that make optimizing them for search engines easy and they area easy to update. Wordpress really is a first rate content management program and it is free. Search engines like fresh, unique content and blogs seemed to me the best way to get this content published. I had done all my research on what plugins I wanted to use and how to use them during Step #1 of the project so when I actually got to the point of using them I was ready to work and didn’t have to learn as I went.
My days looked something like this.
Day 1 – Install blog software and plugins on site #1. Make sure it works and create a custom header for the site.
Day 2 – Write 4-6 good posts for site #1.
Day 3 – Write another 4-6 good posts for site #1.
Day 4 – Submit site #1 to various link sites and blog directories that I had researched in step #1.
Day 5 – Write another 4-5 good posts for site #1 and use the timestamp feature so they will auto post on my desired days ( I decided updating my sites every 5-6 days would be good enough to keep the site fresh for the search engines, more competitive keywords might need more updates). Also I added site #1 to my Google webmaster tools so I could track when it was crawled and how it was performing.
Day 6 – Install software and plugins plus design header for site #2
And it goes on from there. After a month I had four blogs that had been submitted to blog directories and link sites that list blogs and I had good unique posts in them all plus 1 months worth of updates. As month #2 rolled around I spent the first 3 days writing that month’s posts for my 4 existing sites and then on day 4 started site #5. After 3 months I had 11 sites up and running.
Once all 11 sites were up and running I spent a few weeks of my 30 minute days swapping links between the sites and seeking out link trades with other sites.
Step #4 – EXPAND IT
After three and a half months I was seeing some good results and I was getting some good search engine placements. Two of my blogs actually got top 5 spots in Google for the keywords I was operating in. The upkeep on the blogs now takes time. I write 5 new posts per month per blog so I am writing 55 posts per month. I can do 1 blog every day so I spend the first 10 days of the month (I do 2 on Saturday) doing posts. I was already starting to plan my expansion. I started going back and re-optimizing old sites of mine and bringing them into the network and I started planning my next batch of blogs. I have a lot of old sites out there that may not be updated regularly, but will certainly benefit from being optimized and sharing some of the traffic I have in the network.
Step #5 – START OVER
After the 6 month period I have built a pretty nice network of sites that get about 80 % of their traffic from search engines and produce some nice results for me and I still only work on it 30 minutes a day. I am now in the research mode again. I am looking for software that will make my blog posting duties go faster and scripts that will help me manage link trades. I am revamping some spreadsheets to include more details that will help me with linking the sites and keeping track of what is where. Once I have gotten some answers to my questions I will begin to grow again. As the network grows and gets more successful I will start to work on it more than just 30 minutes a day, but as of now I have built a nice little network, en empire if you will, and while it may not be the Roman Empire, it is still pretty good and I have only spent 30 minutes a day on it so all the rest of my projects haven’t suffered from neglect.
I challenge everyone to give it a try. When you sit down at your computer to work take the first 30 minutes of your work day and focus it on a single project. You will be surprised how fast it comes together when you give it small bursts of attention over a long period of time. You could even do it while you are having lunch this way you get paid to eat your sandwich.
Reader Comments: (2 posts)
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Rayonna says: This could not possibly have been more helupfl! |
December 10th, 2011 at 5:57am EST Rating:  |
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Mat says: very nice and concise article!!! |
July 29th, 2008 at 5:57pm EST Rating: |
