The Million Dollar WordPress Business Challenge
In case you missed it, the The Million Dollar WordPress Business Challenge is a series following us, in detail, building a WordPress business with the goal of a total lifetime revenue of $1 million. The website and brand called is Tuff Money. Tuff Money is focused on the stock market and helping investors.
What did we do last time?
In the previous episode, we introduced the challenge as well as the brand. We then started to outline the business model & plan but it was incomplete. In this episode we look to further complete the business plan as well as give updates on other activities.
The Brand
Stock market news, expert market analysis, and investor education.
Our elevator pitch and focus (see above) still stands the same as day 1. However our colors, logo, and icon have changed. We’ve gone from a simple blue and green logo to the inclusion of an icon, along with the change to dark blue and yellow.
This decision came from both a gut feeling as well as the result of creating branded content for social media. We found the previous logo & color scheme a bit limiting when it came to social media profile images as well the branded content itself.
Key Activities
When we initialized our business model we left the key activities as TBD. Since then, we’ve defined the following high level items as key activities:
Content Creation
- Educational Articles & Blog Posts: Write regular posts about investing basics, strategies, market updates, financial literacy, and other related topics.
- Video Tutorials & Webinars: Create educational video content or host live webinars covering various investment strategies and market analysis.
- Infographics & Visual Guides: Develop easily digestible content that simplifies complex investment concepts using visuals.
Marketing
- Content Promotion: Promote content through various channels, including email newsletters, social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube), and investing forums.
- Lead Magnets: Offer free content like e-books or guides in exchange for email sign-ups, growing your subscriber base for ongoing marketing.
Technology & Website
- Website Management: Regularly update and maintain your WordPress website to ensure it runs smoothly, loads quickly, and is user-friendly.
- Analytics & Performance Tracking: Use analytics tools to monitor traffic, user engagement, and conversion rates, and adjust strategies accordingly.
- Hosting Management: Regularly monitor and update the website hosting infrastructure.
So in a nutshell we are creating content, promoting, and ensuring the health of the website.
For the content we are focusing on 2 strategies: daily news content & story line content. The first is regular daily updates about the stock market, i.e. what economic events are happening today, what stocks have news, and how is the market doing today. This will allow for easy content creation in a fashion that fits the audience’s needs. The other strategy is more driven on a story line. We have created a series called Million Dollar Retirement which follows the growth of a Roth IRA account.
The story or plot is the growth of the account to $1 million in value, following all the ups and downs, while providing educational value. This story drives engagement over time and provides anticipation for content.
We’ve been focusing on writing content for the series but will be adding video content soon as well. Actually, it was the planning of this video content that helped drove the change in brand colors. We needed to create a simple video intro to help brand each video in the series (see screenshot below).
Technology Updates
We’ve also been working on a few behind the scenes technology updates that we will go into details during the next episode.
- AWS & Application Load Balancers
- Custom WordPress Themes
- Google Analytics