Finance Training Courses: From Inception (Text) to version 3.0 (Finance training videos):
A number of friends asked if I could put a post (or a series together) time lining the Finance Training Course adventure. For those of you who have just joined us, Finance Training Course is a business that grew out of a conversation last December with a friend about making money from selling content online. The conversation triggered the experiment which sort of became a text only finance resource site which spawned a store that to the surprise of all of us actually started generating revenue. Not enough for me to go home and retire but certainly enough to keep things interesting.
There were a number of core points this “experiment was supposed to prove”. In another life I also teach a course on entrepreneurship and after running a number of startups into the ground I became a fan of the 3 month sudden death model (aka the Y-Combinator) model. Finance Training Courses was supposed to be the case study that illustrated, proved or disproved a contested and counter intuitive points of the sudden death entrepreneurial model. In simple terms you define life and death decisions for your startup in 3 month milestones. At each milestone you evaluate progress and decided to extend the lease of life or pull the plug.
We decided to take the list of simple questions and see if we could answer them with our so called thought experiment.
- Starting from zero can you get to revenues in 3 months? The answer is yes.
- Can you cover your operational expenses in the next 3 months? Once again yes.
- Can you build an international base of customers with multiple orders a month? Short, yes.
- Can you redefine your core business around this experiment? Possibly yes, but still trying to figure this one out.
- Can you grown traffic from zero to 10,000 visitors and 25,000 page views a month in less than 10 months? Yes.
- Can you monetize and convert some of that traffic to cash? Yes.
- Can you build all of the above without logistics and supply chain and just deal in electrons? Yes.
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Can you scale this up in a year? Working on this right now, will know within the next three months.
In terms of background I am a computer scientist who lost his way and ended up on the business side. When I first setup the Finance Training Course blog I hadn’t touched serious programming for over 12 years. I didn’t know anything about SEO except some curiosity about how the entire cycle worked. But I had a lot of great help and mentoring. There were three core members who contributed part time to the experiment and three primary advisors that helped when we hit a road block. I discovered a lot of really cool technology, fell in love with WordPress and Google and I am trying to see if I can get the experiment to a level where I can simply quit my day job and do this full time. It has been a great education.
The chronicles are laid out below:
Starting up, motivation and basic Q&A
Building an Online Business – Finance Training Courses – The beginning
What it took for us to rank on some core key words
Building an Online Business – My daily SEO task list
Traffic trends over the year
Building an Online Business – Growing Traffic at Finance Training Courses
Thinking about doing a new product
Building an Online Business – Thinking about Video courses
The Video courses are live – launch email
Building an Online Business – Launching the Video Training Course product
Risk Training Courses- Year in review – Traffic, Products, Customers, Orders Enchantment – Persuasion, selling and making a difference for startups by Guy Kawasaki
9 Responses to “Finance Training Courses: From Inception (Text) to version 3.0 (Finance training videos):”
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Hi Jawwad,
Good luck with your course. The results you given, are they specific to certain markets, businesses, products or services etc. If they are can you share them with us?
Hi Susan
Thank you very much for your comment. I think the results are valid for a small business with a product or a service that can be launched in a 3 month window.
In this specific case they refer to a technology business that sells online training courses and supporting materials. In my prior lives I have used the same concepts for new product and services launches focused around training, risk management, content and outsourced analyst services. But I am quite sure that they would not work for a capital intensive business or a business that has a heavy element of sourcing and manufacturing involved.
The idea is basically can you make it work in 3 month intervals and at the end of each 3 month cycle you can evaluate if the business deserves to live or not. The 3 month focus creates an urgent push to get to a customer and to revenues and hopefully allows you to work with both to further refine your product or service rather than doing it on your own dime
Jawwad,
SEO has long been a source of confusion for me. However, I know that I have to set aside some time to become more familiar with the concept. When I write, I rarely think of SEO. I simply try to focus on the subject at hand and write from the heart. Realistically, that is not enough. I will definitely check out the links, especially the daily SEO tasks and try to foster a habit of doing something constructive everyday. Thanks for the push!
Thank you Renee. You are lucky in that you have cracked the most difficult piece of SEO – writing great, heart felt content.
All you need to do now is figure out the key words that are important to your audience when they search for what you have written. If you run a travel site for people with limited funds what are the primary key words they search for. Once you have that list, use those key words selectively in your titles, in your post summaries at the beginning and end of your post and in your headings.
I was just as confused when I started but with practice it finally started to make sense
Good luck with your effort. Start ups need a good business and marketing plan. Just met with one today that had a bad business plan and no marketing plan at all.
Rob
Thank you Rob. Completely agree with you on both.
I read through your Q&A section and am inspired by what you have accomplished through your experiment. I’m going to take your words of wisdom regarding key words and start to incorporate them into my posts.
Good luck with your business. How did you get 25,000 page views a month? In what countries did you get customers? How did you promote your business?
Thank you Catarina for the wishes. I think a few things helped.
a) We generate a lot of content as part of our training and consulting work and we simply started putting that online. This was the initial text dump site and for the first few months nothing happened despite the fact that it represented about 18 year of my professional life.
b) We did a round of directory submission in May and June 2010 and that sort of set off a jump in traffic.
c) The clincher I think though was the switch to press play theme, a landing page redesign to give better directions to our readers and possibly the related post plug in. The three changes doubled our average page views from 1.x to 2.x. If i were to pick the top two, they would be the landing page redesign and possibly press play.
d) In terms of traffic we get it from about 175 countries and 3,700 cities. The top countries are the US, UK, India, Pakistan, Canada, Singapore, Australia and Malaysia based on visitors but the rankings change dramatically when you switch to time spent on site or pages viewed.
I did two posts on traffic trends that have more details below as of December 2010 and end Feb 2011. You can see that there is a clear different in stickiness based on the switch I spoke about earlier.
http://blog.alchemya.com/2011/03/risk-training-courses-year-in-review-%E2%80%93-traffic-products-customers-orders/ and
http://blog.alchemya.com/2010/12/20000-page-views-eight-thousand-visitors-and-200-dollars-in-revenues-%E2%80%93-corporate-finance-blog-november-update/
Right now the site has more than 600 posts, 120 pages, 30 – 40 video based training segments and about half as many free video training snippets focused on finance, computational & mathematical finance, risk management and entrepreneurship – my primary interest and the focus of my consulting work.
I hope this helped. Please let me know if I can answer any additional questions.