Current Projects

Trainforhoops.com – Revamp

This was my fist online project. I had a grand vision of this site being the go-to authority on basketball training. I found a fantastic, no-nonsense basketball trainer that knew his stuff. Plus, he was a published author of an authoritative youth basketball training book that was rocking the market. It also didn’t hurt that he graduated from my high school a few years before me and recruited me during my senior year of high school.

So, we went about creating an online basketball training program that was modeled on his progressive training method. It’s pretty simple, yet genius. There’s a set progression of drills and in order to progress to harder and harder drills, you have to successfully complete your current workout. We thought it was going to be a piece of cake, but it turned out to be a nightmare. Here are the pros and cons from our experience.

Pros:

After developing the blog and getting feedback from the coaches, parents, and players that bought my partner’s basketball development books, we knew we had a market. People were willing to not only pay attention, but they were willing to pull out their credit cards if the value was conveyed right.

- Market of willing buyers
- A funnel of new players coming through the pipeline every year
- Coaches with limited time and funds to devote to their players; they trust Brian’s knowledge
- Internet savvy enough to search for information

Cons:

The biggest con was that our team was incomplete and we had very limited funds. We had a marketer (me) and a trainer (my partner), but no tech lead. This is the absolute worst position to be in. It’s worst than having no money at times. So, I went about raising money. Well, I didn’t really raise money. I used my college graduation money and borrowed 5 thousand from an old high school buddy. I had done an earlier project over rent-a-coder.com and hated the experience. So I went about finding a local development shop to complete the project. Long story short, the company promised the world and delivered nothing and had gone bankrupt. There went my 17 thousand. Here’s the con list.

- No tech lead or partner to trust to get the job done
- Didn’t take the time to find out exactly what the market wanted; we went about building a super complicated flash program that only we knew how to use.
- Didn’t aggressively build a targeted email list of players, coaches, and parents that were interested specifically in basketball training. Most of the list we had wanted plays instead. We should’ve listened to the market, lol.

Well, what can I say. I learned a lot, and still continue to learn a lot from this project. I know how to keep my costs under control and build a product that the market actually wants. So, we’re starting out all over again, but with a much better plan. For coaches, we are developing a 6 module course on building their program from the ground up. There will be information for all levels; beginner, intermediate, and advanced. In addition to the coaching program, we’re developing the basketball training program again, but without using a programmer. I took the time to fiddle around with wordpress and wishlist member so we’ll being our training program utilizing a password protected page structure on the trainforhoops.com site. We’ll be using vimeo for our all of our videos and I’ll find a programmer on elance to figure out a way to have each workout downloadable to an Apple device (iPod, iPhone, etc.)

I’ll be using Aweber for our list management and paypal for payment processing. Like I said before, we’re going to keep our costs down, correct our mistakes quickly, and continually tweak our services to meet the market’s wants.

It’s a fun project to focus on after work everyday.

Garagedoorrepairresource.com

I’ve always wanted to know how to build traffic online. With my prior website, trainforhoops.com, my partner writes about what he wants and we end up averaging 2,500 uniques a month. Low bounce rate and the visitors read the blog posts most of the time. It’s great, but I was interested in seeing if there was a way to build traffic for specific search terms.

So, I went to the keywordacademy.com and signed up for their private coaching. They focus primarily on creating adsense websites and building targeted traffic for each post. After a year of setting up a couple of sites, I think I kinda got the hang of it.

My credit card is a little exhausted from purchasing all the domain names for the niche sites, so I’m going about building a supersite with 100 keyword focused blog posts. So far so good. I don’t have to worry as much about building backlinks unique article wizard, since each article will have about 7 links from different article directories. Plus, when you add in the internal linking, I should be good to go. The name of the game is getting quality links, so that’s what I’ll be focusing on.

Some of the posts are catching fire immediately, while others are coming along slowly. All in all, I’m finding all types of different ways of building keyword specific traffic that I can apply to my current projects and make some cash while I learn. Can’t beat that

Hey, what can say. It gives me something to do on the weekends.

Hoop Gains and Hoop Gains Strength

After learning from my trainforhoops.com debacle, I’ve partnered up with two of the best trainers in the country: Jeremy Russotti of 1% Basketball and Alan Stein of Strongerteam.com. The basic premise is a 12 month elite basketball and strength training program for high school and youth basketball players.

I’ll be using the skills I’ve picked up from developing adsense sites to develop keyword focused content and build targeted traffic for our main keywords. Plus, I’ll be making mini training programs focused on shooting, ball handling, strength drills as a ethical bribe to build our subscriber list.

We’re in the final stages of filming and editing the content, so I can’t wait to roll this bad boy out the market. I’ll be cross promoting it with the trainforhoops.com list and contacting our basketball buddies to guest post on their blogs.

The name of the game is to create relevant content that helps the reader play better, build our list quickly and aggressively with our ethical bribes, guest post on other authority blogs and websites and push the traffic back to our site, and make the roll out process a story telling event.

I will update you on the process as we finalize content development, building the website (I’ll be doing that, along with marketing), and building buzz for the service. Another fun project to keep my evenings and weekends busy.