Bogusz PękalskiI’m excited to welcome you to my very first Zero to Hero report.
Zero to Hero is a series where I’m building online business from scratch showing you every step of the process. Read more here.
My blogs
Startup My Way is my main blog. First blog post on SMW was published on January 21, 2016 (2,5 months ago). Since then I wrote 5 additional posts and SMW had more then 15,000 page views made by 8200 unique visitors. Currently SMW is not generating any income.
Other stats:
Any ideas how to raise those values? Please share in comments.
I wonder if I should join additional social channels such as:
- Snapchat
- YouTube
Is it worth it? Please tell me in comments. I’d really appreciate it.
I also have a travel blog kingaibogusz.pl (in Polish), but it’s not updated very often. Although there’s a lot of cool content there. Maybe I make a use of it one day.
My products
I’ve built a startup called Groopmark.
My pitch line for it is: “Groopmark is a place where you can find groups of best links, picked and described by pros.” The idea behind this was simple. You create groups of similar links and share it with others.
Examples:
Site is up and running for almost two years now. Unfortunately it’s not growing and most likely I will shut it down soon. I think the scope of it is too wide, it has to be more focused.
But still, I have quite nice platform for building new products on top of it.
I’m planning to write separate blog post about building Groopmark and all experiences which that project gave me. Stay tuned!
My next step
My goal is to build profitable online business, so I need a way to make profit.
What are my options?
1. Pivot Groopmark / move it to a niche.
The idea is to rebrand Groopmark and focus it on a particular topic. For instance:
- groups of favorites YouTube videos (playlists)
- place for IT bloggers to promote their content
- groups of best resources for programmers
- ? (if you have any more ideas please share!)
2. Build new product
I think about building niche websites with a lot of information about ONE thing. Good content and good SEO can make miracles. 80% of the content would be free and for 20% you would have to pay.
Second option is building a small SaaS product with recurring payments. Something that can resolve real problems and doesn’t cost much.
Creating browser extensions is also a good idea. Like Ed and Harry did with Profile Hopper. In three months they reached $1,000 monthly recurring revenue.
What other products could I create?
- eBook
- online course
- mobile app
Being a software developer works to my advantage. I can build new applications myself or tweak and customize existing ones. It’s a good thing as long as I’m not spending too much time coding, since more coding equals more profit only you’re paid by the hour.
3. Start a podcast and get a sponsor
For 99% I’ll start podcasting (quite soon hopefully). Most of the good podcasts have some kind of sponsorship. Ergo my first step here is to create a good podcast 😉
4. Affiliate
I’m using a lot a tools that I love and can recommend. Why not create detailed articles and tutorials about them and earn something on affiliation programs? If you recommend good products which helps your readers with their problems then it’s a win-win situation.
5. Write a book
Awesome idea! ..but maybe I wait a bit with that 🙂
Brainstorm!
Do you think these ideas are good?
Where should I start?
Is it possible to make a profit that way?
Let’s brainstorm together in comments!
Grzegorz Jasionowicz
