Recently I’ve had a mass of ideas for sites, advertising and promotion. Some of these ideas have come from some awesome bloggers, others have been from little old me. In the past I’ve had this thing where I spend hours thinking about how great a project would be if I did it, but then never bring myself to actually do it.
This is just what I’m trying to do now to make sure that great ideas don’t just stay as a few lines in Notepad.
Collect all ideas/notes for the project in one place
It’s not good having 5 different text documents splashed across your desktop, a few bookmarks sprinkled through Firefox, and a couple of scribbled down notes on your desk.
All the ideas need to be collected together in the same place.
This includes stuff that’s in your brain, make sure to download all that to the same place. Don’t worry about processing any of the information, just make sure you have every scrap of info about the project/idea written down.
Organise the Data
How?
Take the related pieces and put them together. Anything to do with the content generation of the site, group that together. Then anything to do with link building, put that in another pile. This process should probably happen naturally for more experienced marketers, but for me I find it helps to work exactly what I’m going to do for each project.
Create a Rough Guide
The natural progression is to get the ideas written down in such a way that you can refer to it by way of a quick glance every now and then.
I want to stress that this whole process up to now shouldn’t take more than an hour or two. If it does, you’re over-thinking - paralysis by analysis. The whole point of this exercise is to be able to get the projects off the ground as fast as possible, without making too much of a mess through lack of organisation.
The Important Step: Develop Content
This is the most important part of everything I’ve said in this post. If you remember nothing else, remember this. All that planning will not count for anything if you don’t put your back into making the content.
My past experience of starting a project has been something like this:
- Think about the project
- Day dream about the project
- Think about it some more
- Start designing the site, messing with layouts and cPanel and whatever
- Never get around to writing the content
It’s imperitive that we get the meat of the site done first. Perhaps this applies more to the types of sites I’m developing now, which would be blogs, but content is still one of the most important parts of the building process.
Before I even think about playing around with a layout now, I make sure I have at least a “base amount” of content first. For a standard blog that would be at least 30 posts. This way I ensure that when I start getting the site built up, registering a domain, and putting on the finishing touches, I actually have a site with which to send people to.
I don’t pretend to be a guru, I am more a noob than anyone at times.
If you’re also a noob reading this, take my advice and do what I’m doing. If you’re not then feel free to laugh in my face because of your awesome superiority.
