Back From The Dead! – What’s Next for NHD

I’ve been away from the blog for the last several months, and I thank Greg and Nate for keeping it alive.  I am back now, and I want to use this post to give everyone an update as to what I’ve been up to.

I’ve had one single objective thus far in 2015, and that’s been to recreate the systems that I had.

For the last few years I had a system that allowed me to match both of my online goals: Make good money and help others to achieve freedom and location independence by working online.

I got to the point where I had systems and processes and just needed people to manage them.  Internships were a direct response to that need to clone myself, and I partnered with 50+ people and we all made a good deal of money (hence the “bosses fired!”).

The party ended with a combination of the PBN update, and a general lack of interest in continuing to build micro-niche sites.

Our new project

We’ve been at it!

I spent the month of December reflecting and dealing with the standard business-blow-up mourning period.

Come January, I dusted myself off and decided I needed to create a similar system, but one that was evergreen and not dependant on Google.

I also decided it should start with monetization, and that whatever product I make had to be scalable enough to apply to thousands of niches through the NoHat internship.

So I invited a few of my best previous interns back to Mexico (Max Harland, Scott Moses and Glen Thomson) and we went to work.

We’ve tested a ton of different systems, and many of them do work to varying degrees.  I’ll be posting about them in the weeks to come.

But I realized if I wanted to do this with any real success, I needed to innovate.  So I asked myself:

“How can I tap into other people’s traffic and other people’s content”?   What can I provide a blogger that provides enough value to them and their users that they would be willing to send traffic my way?

My answer was in content upgrades (which you can read more about here, here, and there). I realized if I could transform the content experience in a unique way and allow other bloggers to impact their audiences more, I would be rewarded with traffic.

And if I could create a framework that altered the experience, I wouldn’t actually need to create content.

I looked around in other markets to see how they were changing the content experience.  The coding education niche in particular seemed to be really advanced, and I went through a Javascript Codecademy course to test it out.  My mind was blown!

The immediate feedback, the distillation of complex ideas into bite-sized pieces, and the gamification made learning so much more fun!

And I had seen no-one else really do this outside of coding.  The closest thing was quizzes, but in their current form they are one-off gimmicks, not educational tools.

So, that’s what I’m working on.

I have created a content framework and am working with many partners to create courses across a plethora of niches.  And I’ll be using the framework itself to capitalize on other blogger’s content.  Shameless plug – if you’re interested in becoming a partner – you can apply here!

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In the true NoHat manner, I will be creating an online entrepreneurship university with this platform, and my current plan is to disrupt the marketplace by giving everything away for free.  I will have the first course out next week. [ Tweet it out! ]

The Process

Turning your ideas into processes is key to being successful

I will post an example of the content framework in action in case you’re interested, but the real point of this post is to give a bit of an update of things past and things to come, and to share the thought process I went through when coming up with this project.

Some readers will find the process helpful, so here’s a breakdown.

As always, I started by analyzing my assets:

• The NHD list and the traffic from the site itself.
• The Internship / Partnership model, which is the best monetization method I’ve ever used and provides real value to others.
• Relationships with bloggers in the entrepreneurship space.

Then I gave myself some boundaries:

• I wanted to start with monetization, creating something that could systematically scale out to thousands of niches through strategic partnerships with interns.
• It had to provide real value and be something innovative in the space.  Not just exploiting some market inefficiency.
• I knew I wanted the traffic source to be evergreen and NOT reliant on Google.  My choice was to create a way to capitalize on other blogger’s content and traffic for outreach (the marketing vehicle had to be within the product itself).

Once I had all these boundaries in place, I could freely reject ideas with ease.

Not many product ideas are scalable through internships, and through the LevelUp experience I realized that people new to business were best suited working on either a course or a productized service.   The latter doesn’t scale effectively to hundreds let alone thousands, so I decided I would create a course platform.

I knew I had to provide real value and innovate, so I started researching how others were doing it in niche spaces.  Codecademy gave me the solution.  Boom.

The final question was how to piggyback on other blogger’s content and traffic.  Obviously this is a value exchange, so I started listing all the blogger’s problems to see what I could solve easily at scale.  The three that I came up were:

• Getting more subscribers (most blogs only convert at a paltry 2-3%, I’ve experienced how you can do it at 15-20% through content upgrades).
• Making more money directly from their blog (especially if they don’t have a product). Duh.
• Having people actually take action on their content, and tracking how impactful that content is.

From now on, I’ll try to post once a week

The 1st two were obvious, but I wanted to validate the 3rd.  Glen and I interviewed a dozen bloggers on the phone to validate the content impact problem.  And blogger’s truly cared! So I knew I was on to something.

This along with the research on course frameworks gave me the idea of creating an interactive, step-by-step version of blogger’s content, that included exercises so you could learn by doing.

It would be more impactful, more fun, and everything could be tracked by the blogger.  They could see where people drop off, and it could have a feedback loop built into it.

It also gives a great reason to put in an email, as you’d want to save your progress and get all your inputed data emailed to you.

So that’s what I’ve been up to!

If you have any questions whatsoever feel free to leave a comment, and I’m sorry for the extended absence from the blog !

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