Arkansas Gambler

When you read the title of this article, your first thought might be “well yeah, of course’. But, I think most people will interpret the title to say “Develop a Business Model That Meets Your Financial Goals”, and that’s not the key point I want to talk about.

When business people develop their goals, they tend to focus only on business goals. One of the benefits we’re supposed to have as business owners is the ability to create more freedom in our lives. If someone asked you why you started your own business would you reply “because I wanted to work 16 hours a day, never leave the office, forget the names of my children, make my spouse hate me, or so I could stop having fun? Of course not.

If we develop a business model that doesn’t consider our goals for personal time, we tend to develop businesses that own us, instead of the other way around. While I’ve known a lot of business owners, it is a small percentage of them who are not owned by the day to day operations of their business. Most entrepreneurs who have a fair amount of freedom have been busting their asses for years, having sacrificed a lot along the way.

With enough desire, anyone can develop a successful business. But, how many of them are capable of doing it the way they really want to? Making millions of dollars with no time to enjoy it is not success in my opinion. It’s self slavery.

The truly successful people are those who find a way to make their business provide them with the lifestyle they really want. We don’t get do-over’s in life. Wasted time is time lost forever.

Developing a business model that suits the lifestyle you want to live is crucial, which means that a very specific plan needs to be developed. The first step is to clearly define each of your goals so you know exactly what you want. Be sure to write them down.

Defining Your Goals

1/ How do I want to spend my time, and how much time do I need/want to allocate for that? For most people, this will be a list of things. Do you want to travel? Coach your kids soccer team? Is this business for the purpose of supporting you while you’re trying to get a novel written & published? Are you looking for semi-retirement and to work no more than 2-3 hours a day?

2/ What do I want this business to provide me with? Is the goal to make this business 100% of your income? Is it to supplement your income? Do you want to be able to buy a $200,000 house, a $1 million dollar house? A new truck? A new Ferrari? How much will you need to save and invest every month in order to be able to retire at XX years of age? After you figure this out, go to #3.

3/ How much money do I need to make? Based on #1 and #2, do the math. Figure out exactly how much money you’ll need to make in order to achieve each of your personal and material goals. Remember to consider taxes, business expenses, living expenses etc.. Bankrate.com has a number of great calculators for saving money, calculating mortgage payments, car payments, and other expenses.

4/ By what date do I want to be making the money I need in order to accomplish my goals? Again, be specific. This should be broken down into stages with smaller goals along the way. If your ultimate goal requires that you make $18,000 per month, yet you’re currently making $2,500 per month, that might seem far-fetched right now. You have to see the larger goal in small pieces. Achieving small goals along the way are easier to accomplish, build confidence and keep a successful journey moving forward. As Og Mandino says in The Greatest Salesman in the World, “I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking.”

Now that your goals are defined and written down, it’s time to develop a plan that will achieve your goals. This is the fun part.

Things to consider when developing your business model:

Remember, the idea is to develop a plan that allows you to spend your time the way you want to. If you want to own sites that require no more than a combined 3 hours of maintenance per day, the types of sites you build are the key component.

Is it smarter for me to develop a big authority site or lots of mini-sites? Both of these options have their pros and cons, too many to discuss them in detail in this article. Since this article is for the purpose of comparing time for development and maintenance, here are website elements that can add or remove hours upon hours of weekly management:

· Forums – Big authority sites generally have popular forums, and/or allow comments. Developing a popular forum from scratch is a huge endeavor in itself, and that’s before any maintenance even comes into play. Forums require time for managing things like spam, moving forum threads into their proper forum, and time for keeping up to date with general discussion.

· Comments – Allowing comments can create more commitment to management, deleting spam, and participation. If you allow comments and are using Wordpress, be sure to use the Akismet plugin to manage spam and save time.

· Newsletters – Although newsletters create loyalty and repeat visitors, they also require email management, and time for writing compelling content.

· Polls – Polls need to be changed often so repeat visitors see that the site is frequently updated. If you use polls on a number of sites, there will be a lot of time needed for managing them.

· News Content – If your sites provide news type articles, they need to be updated regularly otherwise people can see that your site is out of date. A nice option to this is to use promotional articles instead of news. Most poker room promotions run for at least one month, if not longer, meaning they’ll require less updating. Promotional articles allow you to create lots of relevant content for the sites you are promoting, which is also better for internal linking SEO strategies.

· Poker Videos – Adding videos are generally a quick way to add pages to a site, but unless you are writing a fair amount of content on those pages, the SEO value and traffic quality will generally be low. If you’re going to add video pages, make the most of them by adding internal links to important landing pages. Poker videos can be a nice feature for visitors, but make more sense on an authority site than a low-maintenance mini site. Video sections also need to be updated regularly, otherwise the site will look out of date.

· Self Updating Feeds – Self updating feeds like tournament and freeroll feeds can provide an updated feel to your site, while costing you little to no maintenance time. If the feed is reliable, this is a nice, low-maintenance feature that can be built once and generally left alone.

· RSS Feeds – Adding RSS feeds from poker news sites or other interesting sites can provide easy, low-maintenance content for your visitors. RSS feeds also provide an updated appearance, without any maintenance time. The downside is that unless your feed is showing the full content of each article, you are likely sending traffic away from your site.

· Countdown Clocks – Using a countdown clock for major events like the Pokerstars WCOOP, SCOOP, Full Tilt FTOPS series, or others events can provide a very low maintenance feature to your site that also helps to convert traffic. There are a variety of free countdown clocks available online that can be customized to look and work the way you want them to.

· Link Exchange Pages – While some spammy requests are sure to come through, using link exchange pages can also provide you with a time-saving way to generate links. Instead of doing all the work to look for your own link exchanges, let someone else do it for you. Then, all you have to do is accept or deny the link exchange and add the link (if you accept). Less time searching for links = time saved.

· Plugins & Widgets – Using good plugins and widgets can provide time saving features to a web site. While I think too many webmasters use too many of these, some of them can be great for adding features and saving maintenance time. For example: Why bother creating your own sitemaps when you can use the Google Sitemap Generator? This plugin works well, automatically updates the search engines, and requires no maintenance once installed. This is just one of many useful, time-saving plugins available.

A good SEO strategy, combined with quality content and good calls to action are the key components to making a site successful. While other features may create more return visitors, more gadgets for people to play with, or better discussion, they may also be the difference of working 16 hours a day, or 4 hours a day. If you lose 500 visitors per month by removing a feature, you can make up for it by improving SEO, building another site, adding content, etc.. You can build your online business to accomplish your own personal goals – you just need to define your goals and develop a plan to achieve them.

Many webmasters will try to tell you that your site ‘needs’ this or that feature. Some will tell you that only authority sites are worth a visitor’s time. That’s ridiculous. I could just as easily say that many authority sites are difficult to navigate and provide less focused content. Don’t let anyone tell you how to build your business. You aren’t building their business, and you aren’t trying to achieve their goals. When you are making the kind of money that allows you to live your dream life, you’ll be playing while those guys are working.

Define your goals, develop the plan, work the plan…achieve your goals.