Okay, it’s time for me to confess something. I have been focusing a lot of attention this month on this blog and my wife’s business. This is a good thing, but it has come at the expense of my dropship site.
This month, my wife and I spent about $1,200 on startup materials for my wife’s business plus I purchased the Earn 1k on the Side course. After all of these expenses, we didn’t have room in our budget to take on some expenses from the dropship site, namely: the $175 annual fee for one of my wholesalers, and credit card processing fees.
Quick Side Note: I’m currently experimenting with Google Adwords for driving traffic to this blog via a free $75 coupon that I received. This is helping me better understand key word usage and will be knowledge I use to get traffic to my dropship site.
I still have a lot of free SEO that I could be doing, getting backlinks, updating the blog, updating meta tags and keywords, etc. But I haven’t.
Time management is one issue. We’ve gone from having nothing to do in the evenings (other than household chores) to getting 3 businesses off the ground at the same time. It’s a change that I enjoy, but it is a challenge to adjust our behaviors accordingly.
As a result of the time management issue, something has had to suffer. We could either split our time between the three equally, not getting great effort on any one, or we could let one of the businesses take a backseat.
The dropship business took the backseat.
Two reasons: The results of our work are much more visible with this blog and my wife’s business as of now, which is motivating. And, in terms of possible upside, the lowest – as surprising as it may be – is probably the dropship site. How do I figure? Well, I never planned to turn the dropship site into a full-time business. My goal is to either make it into passive income I didn’t pay much attention to, or sell it once it got SEO optimized and making some decent income.
My wife’s current business model doesn’t have huge upside (I estimate the max at $25k/year) as it doesn’t scale particularly well, BUT it opens a lot of possibilities for moving into retail, etc. This blog is very similar – I don’t ever expect to make a ton of money from this blog (probably lower max $), but it is developing a skill that I think will be very valuable in the future – building my reputation, opening up possibilities to write a book/paid speaking events, etc.
Ultimately, I know that I need to get back to paying attention to the dropship site and then means breaking down the big tasks into smaller, bite-size tasks, and setting some deadlines for myself. So, here goes.
- By Halloween night, October 31st, 2010 – the dropship site will have at least 10 blog posts (0 thus far – 1/week), 30 directory listings with links (have 9 already), and 50 products SEO-optimized (only 1 so far).
I’d like to commit to December 1st for having the site fully operational – accepting credit cards and products updated, but that’s really more dependent on cash-flow at this point, so we’ll see how October & November go.
Also, I have recently been thinking that flipping the site may be the best way to go. I think I bought it for a good price, and if I can make it profitable it would be easy to sell it and put the cash towards our other businesses.
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