September 19, 2007

The Importance of Planning

by Brian Turner

I’m someone who often moves on an ad hoc basis as to whether as project is a good idea or not.

Some ideas seemed like good ideas at the time, but I’m beginning to really appreciate the idea of having a plan of sorts to determine what my actual end goals are, and how I may reach them.

One example is that last year I bought into vbulletin forums big time – I have around 20 vbulletin forums. And paid for posts and generally tried to play the long term game of getting traffic to them via SEO to help develop their presence.

Unfortunately, without a plan, all that’s really happened is that my active forums have remained active, but the newer inactive forums – have remained inactive.

The main problem is that forums take a lot of work and there’s no way I alone can push 15 forums into activity on my own. Using paid posts hasn’t really worked, and when people have turned up and joined, I’ve usually been far too busy to actually be there on time.

In fact, I know there’s even a couple of forums I haven’t visited for two months.

I’m trying to reverse the trend now and build these up, but the lesson is sorely learned – the thousands I invested in developing these forums has not yielded any tangible results as yet.

So what have I learned?

1. Plan from the outset

Step away from the computer, determine why you are developing the project, and justify the reason. With my forums, I never really had a reason. It just seemed a good idea at the time. While I had expected to use these to promote SEO clients, the amazing truth is that I never did, and they remain too inactive to really do much promotion with.

2. Set targets

Set targets on short-term, medium-term, and long-term levels. If you find any of these targets look like they will fail to be met, then ensure you can and will do something about it. For example, with my forums, I should have set goals in terms of member levels, activity, traffic and income.

3. Promote!

“Build and they will come” is bollox. “Build and you will just be yet another entry to crowded markets” is more like it. You need to give people a reason to visit, and that often means taking the help personally and ensuring that you provide a reason with your content, interaction, and general promotional activity according to the goals you set.

4. Have passion

It’s hard to develop a project you have little interest in. So try and keep to topic areas you genuinely believe in and keep to these areas. In doing so, when it comes to meeting any targets, you can sum up the extra energy, and additionally tap into your interest and knowledge of the area, to help get you back on track.

5. Budget

You’ll probably have to spend at the start and during promotion, but don’t write yourself a blank cheque. Determining your gains to justify the expenditure, and if you need to keep spending on promotion and similar, do keep your budget justified. For example, paying for posts set up some level of forum activity, but by itself could not a community make. The expense, in the end, become expense for expense sake without any kind of plan or targets.

6. Have an exit plan

If a project fails to get off the ground, fails to meet its targets, and generally become a time and money sink, then think very seriously as to whether this is a project worth continuing with. Does it make sense to simply abandon it? Or can you reallocate the assets elsewhere? Already I’m doing the latter, by moving forums from being standalone entities to existing sites, or else developing sites with additional features around the forums. Of course, I should ensure that I set out a plan in every instance to ascertain what my aims and objectives are to start with.

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