One of the great things about having clients is that they provide a financial platform you can use to reinvest in different areas.
That means building and promoting sites in your target vertical – but also reinvesting some of the cash into building and promoting sites into other verticals you may want to get involved with at a later date.
For example, more than two years ago I decided – without any business plan or justification – a set of finance content sites. They are skewed towards the investment industry which I have a real curiosity for but little experience, having recently invested everything into a house.
I then paid for a writer to write content and trained them up in publishing it.
The result was that over a couple of years I ended up investing a couple of grand in cash developing sites I had no use for. The sites were pretty low quality, too.
Then I got my first finance client and it was a big one, too. I basically recouped two years investment within two months, and because I had developed sites with content, links, and history, I was able to really leverage these for the client’s targeted keywords.
Of course, because the sites were required I revisited every one to develop value for them and a total overhaul – new design and CMS where required, refocusing on unique content and focus for each, and taking on multiple writers to boost the content value further.
Point is, it took looking ahead to what I’d like to be involved with and invest in it on nothing more than a gut instinct.
I still develop sites I have little use for in client terms. For example, for some reason I’ve ended up developing a few sites relating to TV markets – HDTV, IPTV, and home entertainment. They are useless to me at present and a money sink.
But – at some point in the future, because the markets for these products areas are growing – it’s only a matter of time before I take on a client who’ll need them. Until then, it’s an investment risk worth taking.
