I am feeling a bit silly making this post, so please be as kind and patient as you have been in the past ;)

The Background:

Recently I did a recruitment workshop with a major Managment-Consultancy firm in which it tried to sell itself as a great employer. I am very critical about this industry's practices, but have to say that the way they presented the process of finding a strategy for a business scenario ("case study") is quite convincing and keeps sticking in my mind.

How it Works:

The way they presented it, they approach every problem in the same stereotypical steps:

1.) Recognise the problem and write it down in two or three sentences.
2.) Build a so-called "Issue Tree", a diagram with all the factors that influence the problem, the factors that influence these factors and so on...thus a "tree"
3.) Do research and add branches, work out details, talk to experts.
4.) Cut off some branches that proved to be less important. Emphasise some main issue-branches that will be the key of your strategy. In short: Prioritise to find a good solution.
5.) Present the strategy to the client.

What it really is:

A mix of common sense and rationality, blended with expertise and a good structure that has proved to work well in many cases.

Why this bothers me:

To train this kind of approach, we formed teams and started working on "case studies" or business scenarios. A bit like "SimCity" in a team. After not being overly impressed at the beginning, I kept wondering to what extent one could apply this structure to WebDevelopment - after all, I can't see a fundamental difference between building a business and building a website (it often overlaps anyways). So I thought about a web-case-study...

The Case Study:

A simplified situation: A web developer has the clasic 100-Dollars-a-Day goal and got a website running: 500 pages of unique, quality content, 500 Visitors a day, makes him 10 Dollars in Adsense money. He wants 100 Dollars within two years. Off we go...

1.) The Problem

Maximizing the revenue of the website - very straight forward issue.

2.) The "Issue Tree"

Profit:
A.) Through AdSense
B.) Through Sales (to be implemented)
C.) Through Affiliate Programs

Priority AdSense:
A-A.) Increase Traffic.
A-B.) Fiddle with Ads to optimize CTR
A-C.) Target high-paying topics

Priority Traffic:
A-A-A.) Increase Content (10x500=5000 pages of content, attracting 10x500=5000 visitors, making 10x10=100Dollars..?)
A-A-B.) Increase number of links
A-A-C.) Conventional advertising
A-A-D.) Classic SEO if necessary
A-A-E.) Buy traffic (AdWords, directory listings, etc)

Priority Content (hey, we learnt that content is king, how new is that?):
A-A-A-A.) Write new articles (5000? Takes 15 years at a rate of one per day...)
A-A-A-B.) User driven content (wikis, forums, etc.)
A-A-A-C.) Buy content (is it worth it?)

3 & 4.) Cutting branches is redundant, since I sticked with the priorities.

5.) Present it to WW.

Well - first of all I would say that it is certaily not worth to spend thousands of dollars for a consultant to learn that content is king. Secondly, the solution doesn't really help to decide on whether or not an individual website is positioned well in its niche and neglects competitors. I also find it worrying to think of new technologies - I wouldn't trust an AdSense-only business; in that sense, after implementing more traffic, the solution would also be to look for alternative ways to commercialise the website.

The bottom line:

Did I forget about crucial things in my "issue tree"? There is a problem remaining: Too much content can't be written my an individual, nor could the ordinary web developer afford buying content on that scale. If the site is not suitable for for forums, what should the developer do? Look for an alternative career? Is it too late to start these days with a text-based website for really big money?

The thread-bit:

I would be grateful for some input: Do you ever work with tree diagrams? Are there significant factors I did not add to it? Can you come up with a better solution strategy based on the scenario?

PS: I see at least one big mistake in my tree...