477 Days to Get to £12k banks and £1k/Month - A New Dad's Journey (incl local lead gen)

So it's time to dive into the depths of IM again. It's been a couple of years, roughly 18 months anyway. I was full time IM for a few years, as well as doing some freelance writing. Gave it up when I got married, what with planning a mortgage and a child.


The child thing worked out (my son is just over 7 months), but London prices are proving a little difficult. Back working full time but even with that and the Mrs earning very well it's a bit of an effort.


Being back in work for someone else is starting to chafe a little. I have decided I want to start my own business. But there's that whole mortgage thing, oh and baby's aren't cheap, and, tbh swinging working for myself again is going to need a little proof with the Mrs this time around.


The good news is that the business I want to start (recruitment) is not that capital intensive. I reckon I need about £12k in cash ($20kish), and about£1k in income a month.


IF I have those in place I am pretty sure the wife will be on board.


Ideally I'd like them ASAP, but September is often a good time to start up (my type of recruitment is very seasonable, from Dec onwards, so a few months to establish relationships and pick up the early starters is a good idea). This Sep is FAR too close to get £12k in the bank, which means that next Sep (2015) is my best bet.


477 Days till 1[SUP]st [/SUP]September


Of course nothing is easy in IM, and I have just a couple of hours a day MAX to spare. So that's the plan. In 477 Days I'll need to be £12k richer and have an income over £1k / month.


How Will I Get There?


So last time I was in IM I did a mixture of freelance work (not an option given my time restraints) and micro niche sites. Unfortunately whilst the sites did very well for me they got a bit of a SERPs slap down, hard to argue, they added bugger all value to anyone but me in truth.


Now my SEO knowledge is a little out of date, I was aware of Penguin and Panda updates, but Hummingbird is rather new to me. But I'm loathe to commit any money that is needed elsewhere to getting back into IM. So until there are some profits I'm only really going to invest in domain names at hand reg fees, and hosting (which I have already – I do run a successful hobby blog).


So that rules out paid traffic, so it's back down the SEO bunny-hole I go. But what should I build?


After reading around a bit I've decided to try my hand at lead gen. Specifically finding a local niche for high ticket items, generating the leads then selling them on. The details of which I'm still getting my head around, but the basic plan is below, obviously very bare bones right now

1. find a useful keyword for a local, high ticket item keyword
2. find either an EMD or a suitable expiring domain with backlinks
3. build out site that includes a phone number (see below) as a call to action
4. SEO
5. get a phone number for people to call
6. use a telephone answering service to answer the line, and answer a few basic questions to flesh the lead out
7. sell on those leads

There's a lot to be built out. Finding a company willing to buy the leads, for example,plus learning SEO and the like.


But I've made a start. A few days ago I bought an EMD for a keyword that gets 1,000 searches in the UK, and 400 in London (in the construction industry, VERY high average sale price), SEEMS to be low SEO competition. I just put up Wordpress and a front page article for my keyword.


There are a lot more steps to go, and one site is unlikely to be enough, the plan is to do dozens. But I have a habit of starting projects and letting them drop. This journey thread is a chance to for me to


a) hold myself accountable
b) spit ball ideas,hopefully people will be around to respond to questions and ideas
c) track my progress


That'll do for now. Thanks for stopping by, I hope to be updating a few days a week(ideally daily but let's not ask too much of ourselves...)


DAYS TO GO 477
Money banked: £0

 

Is your space bar broken?

 

Good luck, first post was a bit harsh.

 

that is odd, I wrote it up in Open Office and it had none of those issues, going to go through it manually and change now.

How embarrassing!

 

It was simply a joke, I guess the answer is yes. I would fix it, as there is nothing more annoying to me when one of my keys goes dodgy and you read back though one of your articles and it is a mess. The "R" seems to be a bit broke on my laptop.

 

I would not waste my time, it is only BHW.

 

Would have just annoyed me though, think I got most of it. Also annoyed with myself for "banks" in the title, should have been "banked", but can't work out how to change it.

Obviously been too long since I did freelance writing work, I seem to have forgotten the basics of editing one's own work!

 

Work done so far today.

1) Bought a new theme (think I'm too new to post links, but if I say it's a drywall theme from an offline business theme specialist then I'm sure those that care enough can work it out)
2) Started customizing that theme. I am in NO way a html/css person, so this is testing my patience a little, but in all honesty I could do with learning more (HTML/CSS/Patience). Suspect this is going to take quite a bit longer, but I like the themes they have so worth learning as should be able to duplicate quickly for other sites
3) In work (I'm counting "hours worked" as a metric below, I do not count any work done when in my "real" job, as that's on someone else's dime) I created a list of a dozen or so viable looking keywords that this site should be able to additionally target. Will help with article writing.

A long way to go yet, but it's headway. Hope to finish up the site tweaking tomorrow and have a couple more articles to add.

Stats

Hours Worked Today: 1
Hours Worked Total: 3
Money Earned: £0
Days Remaining: 476

 

Good luck with your journey!

 

When my daughter was 7 months old, all I wanted to do in my free time was sleep. Good luck in your journey, I'm pulling for you

 

If you are in London and you are a nice writer hit me up via pm

 

Subscribed. Look forward to following this.

 

Bit of a random day for me today. I got a head hunt call (very common in recruitment, other recruitment companies are always interested in new staff) and was about to shoot them down when they mentioned an old boss of mine had joined them, a boss I rate very highly.

Long story short; I had a 2 hour interview that went well this evening, 2nd interview scheduled in 10 days or so. Meant that IM work barely happened, though I did do a bit on my lunch break.

Wrote up 2 articles (1 x 600, 1 x 700 words) for long tail keywords in my niche (one has 400/month searches, on 150) and posted them up. That's about all I've managed. Got back, posted them up, had dinner, writing this then going to bed.

Need to do some more html/css work as I mentioned, but that's going to have to wait until tomorrow (though I did manage to tweak a "get a quote" form to fit the site just now).

Decided to keep track of the hours worked when in the office as well as the point is really to see what RoI I get from my time, hence the small jump in hours in the stats below

Stats

Hours Worked Today: 1
Hours Worked Total: 6
Money Earned: £0
Days Remaining: 475

 

That's pretty much how I'm feeling, especially as his sleeping has been a nightmare this week.

But the point of all this work, and starting my own company, is for him. My parents were awesome when I was growing up, but we were dirt poor (as in I got shouted at once for making a sandwich, as we couldn't afford bread the next day), and I don't want my son to go through that (my wife earns enough that we wouldn't, and I do pretty well myself, but the motivation is still the same).

Where we live in London the only good schools are private schools, and they cost £20k tuition (secondary onwards). Not sure if we'll stay in London another 10 years but if we do I want to make sure he can go to a good school.

 

Your last post is interesting. I personally tell myself I would never want children, but it is inspiring to see how much having a child can drive one to find motivation to push through and work harder than usual for the sake of giving them a better life.

I will be following your journey, good luck!

 

Didn't get a chance to post an update yesterday and bhw is fire walled in work so will keep this brief from my mobile. Spent all last night wrestling with CSS and HTML, but finally have the site looking like I want it to.

shattered now as was up till 11 (I know many of you start work then but ask any one with children what time they went to bed when the kid was 7 months) and my boy decided to wake up every 90 mins or so.

Plan today is to get 3 more articles up, and speak to a telephone answering service to set up a number and some one who can take a lead message down. Also need to order a logo from fiverr

 

So 3 articles done, bringing me up to 6 articles. No articles yet ranking in top 300, don't think that site is indexed by Google yet. But I haven't done any linking/seo work yet. Want to get at least 10 articles up before I do.

Logo ordered from Fiverr, says 3 days.

Didn't get a chance to call a couple of the answering service companies I have my eye on, I'll try that tomorrow.

Plan is to get this site finished up looks and initial articles wise by Sunday, and then start some backlinking as well as more articles next week.

Hit the 10 hour worked on site mark today. Longer than I would have liked given where I am at but next time should be quicker now that I know what I'm doing in tweaking the theme.

Hours Worked Today: 1
Hours Worked Total: 10
Money Earned: £0
Days Remaining: 473

 

It's amazing how motivated you become once a child is involved. Well, when battling through a haze of sleep fog anyway.

Having a child is no picnic; but you know all those parents that say "you never know how much you can love someone until you have a child" and you always half thought were just saying it because they should? Turns out they weren't making it up.

I love my wife to pieces, but there is nothing like the unconditional love you have for your child to help you want a better life for them.

Sorry, all a wee bit soppy there. Normal service shall be resumed...

 

Small update as currant typing this on the tablet with my son asleep on my chest.

*now at 8 on site articles
*linked to a blog post from a new hubpages hub (my profile has pr 3, need laptop to check other metrics)
*site finally indexed in Google. Nowhere to be found for main keyword. Best is 172 for the keyword linked to in hubpages

Going to get 2 more articles up, and spend free time today looking for likely domains for a pbn.

 

Good luck mate! Interesting lead Gen process. I was wondering how will you sell these leads? If you could elaborate I would be grateful!