I will first share our situation and then share our plan. I will update this thread 3-4 times/week minimum. All questions, requests and information will be shared right here on the thread. Again, NO PMs!
I have been involved in online marketing for well over 8 years. For past two years two of my good friends who are partners and I started doing offline marketing, providing SEO and other online marketing services to local business owners. It worked out great, we went from 4 man team to 50+ employees and from 1 city to 6 cities in less than two years and obviously making a lot of money. Dont assume that it was easy, none of you have any idea what all we went through to get there not taking into account the 20+ years of combined experience my partners and I bring to the table and during that time, we were newbies struggling just like most of you here.
Long story short, we thought we were invincible and we need to grow faster. We opened offices in 4 more cities and hired 24 more employees in last 2 months. We failed to replicate our success in the new cities at the pace we were expecting. End result was that we had to shut down the new offices and get rid of the sales team. We were left with 4 long term leases and 18 employees even after letting go of sales team and few other people. My partners want the employees gone and they are trying to cut our losses short but only one out of these employees was able to find another job and the rest started begging me to put them somewhere at the main office. After a lot of debate, meetings, arguments my partners and I decided that we can cover costs for upto two months and it will be my responsibility to cover costs within two months or everyone loses their jobs. Now my partners are not too happy with me and my employees are cheering for me. Some have even shown interest to work for less than minimum wage until we can get back on our feet. Anyways, after trying a couple of basic things and asking many friends for advice. I have been granted following from my partners
New LLC with $60k in account (enough for two months)
20 desktop/laptops
7 offices and all the furnishings
17 employees : 12 content writers and 5 data entry
All the tools and everything else you can think of to make this work
In addition to all the above. I also have access to as many offshore employees as I need if I can cover their costs from our budget. We have an offshore office for our main business so I can always use those people for grunt work. I believe our costs for a qualified person is around $200-$300/month fulltime
I have 60 days to start making atleast $30k if I want to continue. If I dont reach that target, we will have to let all these people go and I will be back working at main office. In the meantime, my partners will be managing the offline business and I will be focusing on this 100%. If I am successful, I will have to return the initial investment and I get to keep all the profits no matter how big this gets. If I fail, well I really dont lose much myself so its a win-win for me but I have a lot of responsibility on my shoulders. I am under extreme pressure and borderline depressed. I thought I'd share my story here and invite others to join in with us on our journey.
Lets just hope we can make it work.
Today, I will be getting the new offices setup (same building as our main offices) I will be meeting a few decision makers, attorney, CPA and others and from today on I will be the attorney and I will be the accountant or whatever else role you can think of. I will have until Monday to plan everything and have everything ready for everyone. Monday we start the work and from that point on I have 60 days or maybe less because I have already spent almost $5k today on lot of important stuff.
I will be sharing the exact process and plan on how we are going to achieve the numbers. It will be through building content rich websites and monetizing them through adsense and affiliate marketing.
60% small niche websites (I dont call these micro because they all will have atleast 10 pages of content)
40% big authority websites (these will be picked from small sites, best performing ones will be converted to bigger websites)
I will share more detailed plan later on tonight but thats the gist of it. 100% whitehat, adsense and affiliate marketing through quality content. I will share all the numbers and past experiences in next post.
Lets take a look at what all I have done today so far!
Wed Feb 04, 2015 10:56 pm by tranvanchienhn
