The curse of runing too many projects

Running too many projects?

I started with idea to make money online. I’ve read some books and created my first website in 2006 called Easy Site Guide. My plan was to sell 5 hosting packages each day for commission of $100! That would make me $500 a day or $15,000 per month! Not bad, huh?

But that never happened. I sold 5 packages per month, not per day! And no matter what I was trying to do I couldn’t sell more. I thought I am in a wrong niche, it is too hard to sell hosting services and CPC is too high for this niche. And I moved on and bought another domain for a great new idea that I got. Developed a site, did little promotion, no serious money got in so I tried to create another site.

And whenever a new idea popped into my mind I bought several domain names for the project. Jonathan Volk guest wrote an article called Shiny Ball Syndrome for Shoemoney’s blog that describes this state – it probably happened to you too. And soon I had dozens of domain names and no time to make money out of them. I was trying to do Article marketing, Forum marketing, learning how to do SEO, learning PPC, domain parking etc. all at once.

Along with a day job I didn’t have enough time to properly learn even one of these things – so I was jumping back and forth on my projects with no success.

Should I run several projects?

My first advice is don’t start even a second project before you don’t complete goals of your first one. Maybe this sounds a bit conservative. Some of you probably think you will be missing a lot if you stick just with one project. But the truth is: if you don’t know how to make money with your current project, you will be having hard time with another too.

So the solution is to focus on your goal and then read, learn, ask questions on forums to get answers! Then apply these things on your project. Think about joining a membership club that will teach you more about internet marketing (I personally use Wealthy Affiliate). You need to be persistent and really focus on your project, goals, target audience to get things done right. Don’t give up, just because you didn’t make $15,000 in the first month. Eventually you will. But you need to take action.

How to manage several projects at once?

In case you are in a similar situation that I am facing right now (too many projects and not enough time) here is what we need to do.

1. Cut the projects that are not making money! Take just top money earners and work with them. The rest will have to wait.
2. Write a to do list and make priorities for each project (A1, A2,A3, B1,B2,B3 – thanks Jonathan for this idea). We are running multiple projects, remember? So you need to complete no. 1 tasks first!
3. Track everything, then improve! You need to track your stats (analytics, sales, serp ranks, etc) on daily basis and improve your project fast to save time and make more money.
4. Kill the time wasters! Cut telephone calls, instant messengers and email while working. You have a limited time and you need to behave like that! Think of it as special mission with extra efficiency.
5. Store your new ideas! Every time a new idea pops – put it down! Good ideas will last. When you finish your project goals and put it on autopilot jump to your new idea!

That’s it! What you think? How are you handling several projects?