One Year Down – Let’s Celebrate

​Celebrating one year of HumanProofDesigns, plans for the next year, and a prize giveaway

Last week I renewed HPD's domain name, signalling the start of my second year with this venture. It's amazing how fast time goes really. This year has been a crazy adventure, and I've learned an absolute ton, which I'll share with you today.

The first part of this post is going to be my reflections on the year. What were the best parts? What were the worst? And for those of you who haven't been here since the beginning, I'll detail the journey.

Next up, I'll talk about my plans for the next year and what I'll be bringing to you. I've got so many exciting announcements to make already, and I know that more things will come in the next twelve months.

Finally, as a celebration for how far I've come, and to thank you all for being with me at this time, I'll be announcing a little giveaway for you to take part in!

Don't just skip to the end though 😉 I've loaded this post with insights and a few guest appearances, so it's well worth reading the lot.

A Story Of Excitement, Enjoyment, Frustration, And Growth – The First Year Of HumanProofDesigns.

The idea for HPD has its roots with my first sale on Flippa. I sold a site for $1,000 USD and as you might imagine, wanted to sell many more after that! I did a fair amount of research and experimenting, selling a few more sites, but I didn't manage to mass-produce sites that would sell incredibly well.

One thing I did notice though was that Flippa was brimming with ‘ready-made' sites that offered very little value and would likely never see any traffic or earn a dime for their purchasers, yet people were lining up to buy them.

I decided to launch HPD as a way of providing those buyers with REAL sites offering real value.

Fast-forward a few weeks and I put my first sites up on flippa. They were template sites with no articles, but were fully researched and ready to go; people would just need to start adding content.

I figured that because I would be selling a fully packaged niche, including keywords AND training, people would love them….

They tanked!

I sold one for $125 in my first week and a couple more for varying prices after that, but overall people weren't interested.

Lesson learned: Flippa buyers either want all the work done for them (read: my sites needed articles) or they wanted to buy a promise of over night success; something I wasn't offering.

I ultimately decided to move away from Flippa and sell the sites myself. I figured I would be able to better show people the value if I had full control over the content, and I'd also be able to reach a different market.

It was slow progress, as you'd expect for the Make Money Online niche, but progress nonetheless.

The majority of my sales actually came from custom jobs though, and still do. People have been really great with reaching out to me for custom work.

Some people have just been looking for a makeover for their sites, and others have wanted me to build sites for them in a niche of their choosing.

I enjoy both of these, as it's really great to see people putting faith in me and us then building a site together.

Yet it still bothered me that I couldn't sell more ready-made sites. I'm convinced there can be great value to offer people through these products. Further down the post when talking about my plans for the next year, you'll see how I'm going to revamp these sites.

The Highlight Of The Year.

Back when I lost faith with Flippa, I wrote a review here. One day, Justin Cooke of EmpireFlippers fame came across it and left me a comment.

This was the start of me reaching out to him, and us having a pretty good chat via Skype. The EF guys also send me a fair amount of traffic now too.

I went into detail more on this post, so I don't want to repeat myself now, but basically that chat with Justin was the start of a new HPD.

A New Direction

I had new insights, new ideas, and I was introduced into a wonderful niche site building community containing greats like Spencer Haws and Jon Haver, among many other names (detailed here).

The last two months since that happened have seen massive growth in both my traffic, and sales. Check my quarter one and two earnings reports for details on this growth.

Lesson learned: Working online can be such a struggle initially and you might feel like you're not making any progress at all. It only takes one connection to change this.

Networking with others in your niche is something you need to be doing.

Another guy who's been great help from the beginning and also sends me some good vibes and traffic via his blog Onemorecupof-coffee is Nathaniell Brenes. I appreciate you all!

Other Successes

As well as offering sites, I also wanted to show people how they themselves could succeed doing it themselves.

A large part of how I do this comes with my blog posts and case studies, but even more comes when people join Wealthy Affiliate, the community where I learned Internet Marketing.

In the last few months, more and more people have been taking my advice and joining the Premium membership, which makes me psyched because the help they get is no longer just from me!

Moving Forward – The Future Of HumanProofDesigns

Those who know me well will know that I sometimes have trouble focusing on one thing. In the first few months of HPD's existence, I changed direction several times in order to find the balance between making a profit, and providing value for customers.

Even though I'm often ‘pivoting', the things I'm going to introduce in this second year have been coming for some time. I'm maturing and being more focused as my business does the same. Or maybe it's the other way around.

I'll be evolving HPD over the next 6 months and then spending the remaining 6 months monitoring and tweaking those changes.

Evolution number 1: Ready-Made Sites.

I think it was clear from the beginning that I'd need to sell sites with content on them. My main issue with this was how possible it would be to mass produce sites and how costly it might be without the promise of a sale afterwards.

Really I just didn't want to admit that it was necessary.

I'll make another blog post in more detail about this later, but here's a brief outline of HPD 2.0

·Sites will now come with 10,000+ words of UNIQUE content.

·They'll also still be fully researched around keywords from Long Tail Pro and Jaaxy.

·A new and improved guide for ranking the sites will be included.

·More features to be rolled out through the rest of 2014.

I'll be doing a soft launch of about five sites initially, so if you're interested in having first refusal, sign up here and be notified three days earlier than others.

Additionally, to celebrate this re-vamp, I'll be giving away the first HPD 2.0 site for free! More details below.

I'm really psyched about this change because now customers really will be able to buy a quality site and start ranking it almost immediately!

This service is going to constantly be evolving even more as well, as I roll out more and more aspects of the sites and the support that comes with them.

Evolution Number 2: My Guide to Building Money Making Sites is now FREE.

Whereas previously I restricted my guide to my customers, I've now re-written it and will be releasing it live on the site for public access. No sign-up or payment will be necessary. You'll get almost 10,000 words of free training.

I've detailed exactly how I build, rank, and monetize sites in this guide. It's been written for people who want to do it themselves, so it starts right at the beginning.

As the Internet moves more towards the “free” model, I want to be one of those ones at the forefront, giving you what I know for free. I have good faith that if I do this, people will see the value in the rest of what I offer.

Evolution Number 3: Article Outsource Service

Another of my popular services is the article outsourcing. I'm always looking to improve this though, so based on feedback I've received, I'll be rolling out some changes.

The main things of note will be the ability to order fewer than 10 articles where required, and the ability to make a monthly order, for even greater savings.

Once again, to make sure you stay up to date with all of these, subscribe to my newsletter.

Prizes, Prizes, Sweet, Beautiful Prizes.

Now it's time for the celebrations! Like I said before, as a thank you to everyone for being a part of my audience, I'm going to be giving away a prize.

All you have to do is enter!

Prize Draw – A ready-made site, valued at $299.

I'll produce my first five, and let the winner pick the one they want. More details about these sites will come in the next post, so stay tuned. You can still enter the competition today though. You'll have two weeks to enter.

How To Enter:

All you need to do is leave a message in the comments saying that you're entering the prize.

I will be announcing the winner via e-mail, so subscribing would be beneficial too.

There's no need to “share this post to win” or anything. After all this giveaway is a thank you.

However, if you WERE to share this post, that would be wonderful.

More details about the sites and prize draw will be given in the next post.

Closing Thoughts

It's been an exciting and crazy year. I think the word “roller-coaster” would be appropriate here. I'm very proud of how far I've come and all the things I've achieved. In this next year, I'm going to build on that, improve my services even more, and really get my customers maximum value for their money.

It's going to be another roller-coaster, and I hope you'll stay with me for the ride.