How to Retire in 12 Months

The Planning…

If I am going to make this passive income a reality I need to find a way to to sell my information product online, en masse! At this stage the product was taking shape and nearing completion, so we had to figure out how to distribute it. We wanted to create a website where we add blogs and articles regularly, aiming to make it a valuable resource for our readers. To achieve that we needed a website that:

• would facilitate sales
• we can easily update ourselves with new content
• can collect subscribers and distribute products
• looks good and is easy to navigate
• is SEO friendly

The plan was to get something up quickly and cheaply, so that we can get the product out there and then work on a more comprehensive site once we were generating revenue from product sales.

What we did…

With all our experience and knowing several great contacts you would think it would be easy to find what we want. WRONG! We had two main problems; the first being that we didn’t want to spend a lot on the website until it generated revenue… instant catch 22. The second problem is that there are too many choices out there and it is impossible to compare them; there are no apples to apples in web design/development… it’s more like a virtual orchard (where everyone speaks Japanese).

We looked at e-commerce sites, we looked at template sites, we looked at building sites from scratch, we looked at adding pages to our existing websites, we looked at shopping carts and Paypal services, we looked at merchant services and with every option there are pros and cons and new things to learn.

Then we came across WordPress, and choral voices sang from the heavens… After a little investigation we realised that WordPress was exactly what we wanted.

We had considered WordPress earlier but got confused with the options, so here it is explained:

WordPress is a free, open source blogging application that you can customise for your own purposes. There are two versions: wordpress.com is easier to set up but limits the amount of plugins available and changes that can be made to the look and functionality, but you can get it up within minutes and you can choose a wordpress.com address, so no need to buy domains and hosting.

wordpress.org is more complicated to install but far more useful and customisable and the only way to go if you are serious about selling something. If you have the patience to figure it out and are techie minded you can do it yourself with a little help from Google. We didn’t have the time to do it ourselves so we got quotes; after a few random and expensive offers we found Tess who has been the angel that makes it all possible! For $500-$600 we got a customised blog site and a friendly helpful person who really cared about it being what we wanted… such a good experience!

If you need graphic design or WordPress development contact Tess.

We chose Feedburner for RSS feed and RSS to email (more on that in another blog!). We chose E-Junkie for sales and distribution of paid products and we chose Mailchimp for subscription and distribution of free downloads.

Lessons learned…

First lesson learned… blog sites rock! I have put up another 2 in the last few weeks (including this one) and it is a simple way to get what you have to say on the web, nicely formatted in no time and with very little cost.

Second lesson, keep it simple… we will always have the option for a bigger better website later. In the last 5 years I have created 8 websites all with different kinds of design, programming and content management systems and the best ones are the simple ones. Unless you have a specific function in mind and a large budget (or you can develop it yourself) then go with something simple and upgrade it later once you know what you are doing!