Lots of ‘commerce’ work next couple weeks
Next couple weeks I’m going to be focusing on commercializing Mind Body Spirit Journal, which is long overdue. Believe I’ve got enough editorial categories started to give me something to work with.
This site really doesn’t work until it begins offering useful self-help products and opportunities that readers are eager to hear about and invest in. And until it begins drawing folks because it delivers really useful and valuable offerings. When the site is clearly a vibrant marketplace as well as an inside information source and community, it will instantly command the kind of respect I expect it to grow into and deserve. And I’ll be able to easily draw big names from the greater world of Mind Body Spirit for interviews and online workshops and meetups and other cool offerings. To get to that place, I must make it commercially sound.
So it’s likely I’ll be writing about e-commerce strategies and WordPress challenges as I focus in on getting the business model in place and working. Some things to come:
• Setting up my tracking and split-testing system on this server so I can track and test ads and, in a quick glance, see what’s drawing the most readers from day to day.
• Adding sidebars within posts — fine-tuning the coding for that — some of which will contain links to carefully checked-out, highly recommended products, a la Seth Godin.
• Polishing off and uploading a strong introductory Spirit of Wellness course onto the autoresponders.
• Subscribing to a commercial email and autoresponder service, rather than using ListMail Pro as I have for six years. This because between 20% and 80% of my mass emails no longer make it through and that’s totally unacceptable. The email environment has changed drastically due to the spam overload. The reputable commercial emailing/autoresponder services have established relationships with all the major ISPs and can quickly resolve unjustified blacklisting problems. I don’t have time to mess with that stuff or with trying to learn all the intricate technical things one must know how to do to get your IP whitelisted by an ISP once it gets on the bad hitlist for one reason or another. I’ve been on blacklists for no good reason a lot, off and on, for the last four years. So I’m going to oursource email distribution.
• Do some copywriting and set up a couple product pages. At least two in the next two weeks.
• Set up a system for quickly creating product pages (an html template I like and can easily re-use, along with 1, 2, 3-step instructions for quickly setting up a new page for a new product).
• Systemize affliate-program linking for ads, set up my kwcreccs script on this server, list all my various affiliate program IDS on one page so I can quickly reference them.
• Consider how I want to use email capture on Mind Body Spirit Journal. Probably will write about this separately as I puzzle it through. Think I will have different tracking for the Holistic Living Project sign-ups (probably free) and for those who buy an introductory course at a huge, huge discount. The latter will be a much stronger list, in terms of continuing commercial potential. I may sell the $37 introductory course for only $3 to those who sign up for the Holistic Living Project, just to qualify serious students and colleagues from freebie seekers. Those who are willing to pay something — anything — for my materials are much more valuable to me as I build a viable mind body spirit business and community here. Am very much leaning toward building a “qualified” list, rather than a “freebie-seeking” list. I’d rather have a list of 1,000 people who were willing to spend $3 for an in-depth report than a list of 10,000 who signed up to get a freebie.
• I’ll be adding audio to some Sections. An important component — especially since man of the courses Wellness U is developing will have short audio modules. Plus audio personalizes a site. Plus I’ve enjoyed working in audio — in journalism and in advertising and music and speech and story-telling — pretty much since I first got to play a Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder my daddy brought home on loan from his school in 1958. I like working in audio. Have enjoyed video, too, but have no immediate plans to introduce that here. Though might be persuaded to change my mind if you can show me some mind-body-spirit-related video that downloads very quickly and has high entertainment and personal-transformation value.
• Probably dropping — to a great degree — my earlier intention to create customized sidebar columns for Section pages, which would have unique links relative to the content of each Section and which could have unique advertisements for each Section. It is looking like this is something that WordPress is not designed to allow me to do conveniently. I’ve hung onto the idea for 10 months and have posted to forum after forum after forum trying to find out how to do it with WordPress. It CAN be done, but will require much hoop-jumping. Therefore I will pick one or two Sections that are drawing the most traffic and which seem to offer the greatest potential commercially from delivering unique sidebar content and will jump through the hoops to see just how difficult this really is. And will document the process as I figure it out so that I can systemize it and replicate it more easily, should I want to with other Sections.
My original intent had been to do that with every Section as each began to grow and develop multiple articles. At build-out (for Sections), I anticipate Mind Body Spirit Journal will have close to 200 unique Sections — each a niche of its own that I find fascinating and regularly monintor within the greater Mind Body Spirit niche, and each of those Sections will have an unlimited number or articles…. will be growing anytime I find something to new to report or comment about and each time someone comments on an article within it. Eventually, I envision this being a pretty comprehensive site and a potentially pretty lively community. (I haven’t even officially announced it yet. That’s coming just as soon as I have the basic business modeling in place.)
My intention is to develop quite a number of more-journalistic articles than I have done so far. And to invite really qualified writers to post pieces. And to invite readers to post pieces about their personal experiences on very specific matters. But in start-up phase, my goal is to open as many Sections as I can, whether just with my personal observations or with strongly researched journalism or with something in-between.
• While not a strictly “commercial” aspect, am thinking of locating and pulling in a journalistically strong mind-body-spirit headlines feed so that even on days when I don’t personally post, the site still updates with breaking news of interest. So every time you visit, there is significant and interesting new material to read. Welcome suggestions for a mind-body-spirit news feed. The “health headlines” feed I used in the late ’90s out of India on a couple other sites still exists but focuses pretty narrowly on health issues and has a substantially more conventional-health focus than I want for this. I want to find a good eco-holistic feed. One MUST exist. Suggestions?
• Soon as enough basic business modeling is in place, I will officially “launch” the site — announcing it widely to start drawing targeted traffic. (Media buzzwords, sorry. To start building a loyal, interested audience and community.) I’ll share what I’m doing, as I do that, and share with you the kind of results I’m getting and how I’m fine-tuning efforts, so you can learn from this, and so we build a case study here, (and so you can advise me, if you see me making some really silly wasteful effort).
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That’s a pretty ambitious agenda for two or so weeks. Am sure I won’t hit it all. At all. But that’s the direction I’m heading. And since my thinking and exploring will be wrapping around those sorts of things, I’m sure much of what I post will be about them, as well.
– ken winston caine
• Probably dropping — to a great degree — my earlier intention to create customized sidebar columns for Section pages, which would have unique links relative to the content of each Section and which could have unique advertisements for each Section. It is looking like this is something that WordPress is not designed to allow me to do conveniently. I’ve hung onto the idea for 10 months and have posted to forum after forum after forum trying to find out how to do it with WordPress. It CAN be done, but will require much hoop-jumping. Therefore I will pick one or two Sections that are drawing the most traffic and which seem to offer the greatest potential commercially from delivering unique sidebar content and will jump through the hoops to see just how difficult this really is. And will document the process as I figure it out so that I can systemize it and replicate it more easily, should I want to with other Sections.
My original intent had been to do that with every Section as each began to grow and develop multiple articles. At build-out (for Sections), I anticipate Mind Body Spirit Journal will have close to 200 unique Sections — each a niche of its own that I find fascinating and regularly monintor within the greater Mind Body Spirit niche, and each of those Sections will have an unlimited number or articles…. will be growing anytime I find something to new to report or comment about and each time someone comments on an article within it. Eventually, I envision this being a pretty comprehensive site and a potentially pretty lively community. (I haven’t even officially announced it yet. That’s coming just as soon as I have the basic business modeling in place.)
My intention is to develop quite a number of more-journalistic articles than I have done so far. And to invite really qualified writers to post pieces. And to invite readers to post pieces about their personal experiences on very specific matters. But in start-up phase, my goal is to open as many Sections as I can, whether just with my personal observations or with strongly researched journalism or with something in-between.
• While not a strictly “commercial” aspect, am thinking of locating and pulling in a journalistically strong mind-body-spirit headlines feed so that even on days when I don’t personally post, the site still updates with breaking news of interest. So every time you visit, there is significant and interesting new material to read. Welcome suggestions for a mind-body-spirit news feed. The “health headlines” feed I used in the late ’90s out of India on a couple other sites still exists but focuses pretty narrowly on health issues and has a substantially more conventional-health focus than I want for this. I want to find a good eco-holistic feed. One MUST exist. Suggestions?
• Soon as enough basic business modeling is in place, I will officially “launch” the site — announcing it widely to start drawing targeted traffic. (Media buzzwords, sorry. To start building a loyal, interested audience and community.) I’ll share what I’m doing, as I do that, and share with you the kind of results I’m getting and how I’m fine-tuning efforts, so you can learn from this, and so we build a case study here, (and so you can advise me, if you see me making some really silly wasteful effort).
——
——
That’s a pretty ambitious agenda for two or so weeks. Am sure I won’t hit it all. At all. But that’s the direction I’m heading. And since my thinking and exploring will be wrapping around those sorts of things, I’m sure much of what I post will be about them, as well.
– ken winston caine
