What's my Mission?
In my years I've been part of several small and medium-sized businesses and ministries. The leadership of these endeavours would spend days, weeks or months pouring over a Mission and Vision Statement. Having a clearly defined mission is critical for any business. It guides your daily decisions and gives direction to where you place your energy and resources. Without it you can work really hard and be moving in tiny circles without any intentional movement.
I just realized that I started this business about a month ago without a clear direction. To be honest when I started the training I didn't really understand the business well enough to have a clear direction much less a mission and vision. But now, after completing most of the training and having my site starting to take shape I feel it's time.
I need to spend some time considering the mission of my site (not just to make $$) Where am I going with this? How will it help people? What will it help them do? How can it encourage others? What can I do that will make them want to visit my site regularly? - If I can define that mission the $$ will follow.
Then, what will it look like when I consider my site a success? How may visitors? What type of engagement? That's the vision.
So this is my side homework - to start writing a Mission/Vision statement for DaneStuff.com. I'll be sure to post my final statement when it's complete. But for now, I have some homework to do.
Talk to you again soon...
Dave
Recent Comments
3
Hey Dave, so I just took a sneak peek at your site and it's obvious you really paid attention to the training! It looks bloody brilliant! The images are great, your keywords are buyer-focused and your personal story really shines through and builds trust with readers. I love your eye for clean and crisp design. A very strong start indeed, it's clear you're gonna do very well at this.
As a fellow Christian leader, I'm obsessed with vision. Did you ever read the book 'Simple Church'? I'm at the point now where I won't do anything without knowing the reason behind it, which is completely counter-culture to life here in Thailand where people just 'go with the flow' and are often told not to think too much.
Of course, when you first start you're just getting all the pieces together like walking through a dark room to get to the light switch. As you very rightly say, now you've got a decent understanding of the whole process (your light bulb moment!) you can start being more intentional about your business strategy going forward.
I honestly think you'll look back at the time you started your first niche site and say it was one of the best decisions you ever made.
I sincerely wish you every possible success and please just holler if you ever want to bounce anything off me.
Simon :)
Simon,
Thanks for reaching out. I was just looking for your contact info when I saw your comment on my blog.
I have not read "Simple Church" but I've heard it referred to several times and I know Thom Rainer is a great author - so perhaps I need to download this onto my Kindle. I need a good read for the summer.
I appreciate your encouragement. I've learned a lot in my first month but I have SO many more questions!
Let me start with this one. I noted that you referred to this as my "first" niche site. And I've read between the lines in other comments and training that it's typical to run multiple sites. I'm a designer so the layout and pictures come naturally but the writing is time consuming for me. So the idea of writing content for several sites is daunting to me.
How many sites does it take to make a living? How many sites do you manage? Could you share your URLs with me? I'd love to see the work you're doing.
Let's start with this question then I'll cue the next one.
Hey, Simple Church is a very easy and worthwhile read!
Great question and a really important one. The typical newbie mistake is to start a site, get bored a few months down the line and have a new and exciting idea and on and on it goes until you have 2, 3 or 4 sites, none of which are making money and you're left feeling totally overwhelmed.
The truth is running ONE website is a full-time job and yes, a single website can earn 6 figures a year and more. Just to clear up some jargon, internet marketers often refer to niche websites and authority sites. Typically, a niche site is based on a smaller, more limited topic (like guitar effects pedals or dog toys for example) and, since there's only so much you can write about in such a narrow niche, inevitably you're going to run out of things to say.
What WA tends to teach and what I prefer is the authority site model. This is a more longer-term strategy resulting in a bigger site based on a broader niche. Cookery, gardening, language learning are a few examples.
So I have 2 authority sites - http://GrowChurch.net, about church leadership, practical ministry how-tos and church growth. As you can see this is very broad and I'll never run out of things to talk about. The site can have as many 'sub-niches' as you like (these are only in your mind) for example: youth ministry, worship leading, preaching tips, evangelism ideas etc.
I also have http://TheMakeMoneyOnlineBlog.com, again an authority site based on a broad topic of making money online. The sub-niches are paid survey sites, affiliate marketing, freelancing, cryptocurrency, blogging, local marketing, SEO etc.
So don't worry, one site is definitely enough. It's like asking if you want 5 small businesses making little to no money or is it better to focus your energy, time and resources into making one business a huge success.
In terms of writing, I totally hear you. I've written 600 posts in the last few years and it is not easy, especially writing reviews! There are options though...
My fiance and I started a language learning site called http://FightForFluency.com (Thai) which has about 30 posts published on it in the last 3 months. Our aim for that site is that once it's making $2,000 per month consistently, that we're going to hire a full-time writer. Here's some brilliant training on how to hire a writer full-time (from the Philippines) for around $400 a month who writes 5 articles a week: Hiring Writer Like a PRO Even If You've Never Hired Before Ready for your next set of questions! :)