I have a project that I have a team of people working on developing the product for 7 months now, and we have invested a significant sum of money. We have a beta version out. We still have a lot of things to get done, but it works and people learning (it is a hybrid e-learning business). This isn´t a commercial, so I won´t put the website url in this post.

Because of this, I got to thinking about where and when do you invest the time in your development cycle? Of course, everything is based on cost benefit. If the gain is great, the investment should be as well, but for newer entrepreneurs who are working on SEO for the purpose of getting their business off the ground, I thought some good time guidelines would be important.

Step 1: Define your market - 1-2 weeks
If you don´t know your market, you are screwed. Spend the time to define a market, and make it specific. Draw a picture of your target customer, with all of their attributes, up on a wall in your office, so you can remember that is who you want to buy your product. You can always make your market bigger once you have been succesful with your first market.

Step 1: Initial Product Development - 1 month
Of course your product is what you are selling and it needs to be good, but make sure that your product is not overly complicated to deliver. What I mean by that, is reduce the number of steps to the absolute minimum. Yes you can get into all crazy things, but remember KISS.

Step 2: Website plan - 2 weeks
Now that you know the product, who your market is, and the steps you need to deliver it. Build the website plan. Make it simple. Again, you don´t need to have 4000 pages and define all of the content silos perfectly the first time. You will get better at it over time. Get the wireframe done.

Step 3: Website built - 2 weeks/month
Depending on your design and development skills and the complexity of the site, you will either do this yourself or contract it out. If you contract it out, make sure you are writing all of the content for those pages. It is good practice and since it is your site, you will know what you want to say. Hopefully you reduced the steps to the absolute minimum, since this will help with getting the analytics funnels set up correctly.

Step 4: Promotions - 4 weeks
Spend a couple of days brainstorming promotional activities, and then spend the rest of the month, with your head down, churning out content for blog posts, participate in forums, making videos, you name it. Don´t pass go, don´t collect $200. Just move. My opinion, don´t even worry about traffic and sales. You will have very few to start, so it isn´t worth worry about. Get the word out. The only types of non-promotional activities that you should be doing in this month is customer service requests. At the end of the month, lift up your head! Great job.

Step 5: Review what has been done - 3-5 days
This probably shouldn´t take you 3-5 days, but since you are new, you probably will get bogged down in stuff that is really interesting, but won´t make much of a difference. Don´t worry, you will get more efficient over time. Figure out what the next step is. If you haven´t had any traffic, then review your promotions to see where you could improve.

The point with this post is that it takes 3-4 months to get a product "out the door" for a newbie. Sometimes we focus so much on building the best product in the world, that we forget about the rest of it, or we do so much keyword research, that you never get anywhere except a really cool list of words.

SEO Experts and E-business experts are not just that based on what they know. They are also experts because they know what doesn´t matter, so don´t waste your time. I am guessing that Neo, Brian, or CShell, could cut down this cycle by half, just based on their experience of knowing when to pay attention and what to pay attention to.

I would be curious of others experience on getting new projects up and running.

Ryan
Aprende de E-business, TecnologÃ*a, Capital de Riesgo — VirtualFrazee