Growing The Blog
I mentioned one of my goals was to schedule all of my content past the first month of 2017. I didn’t schedule a single blog post. With that said, I wrote all of the content. It’s just a matter of scheduling everything.
Each month, I’ve posted the goal of getting 1,000 daily blog visitors. As the months have gone by, that goal has become more and more distant. I’m changing that with a new approach.
By the end of the year, my blog will get updated five days per week. Here’s how it will work.
- Monday: Guest post
- Tuesday: A blog post I write
- Wednesday: Podcast episode with transcript
- Thursday: Guest post
- Friday: A blog post I write
Getting two guest posts per week is currently the biggest challenge. I hired a freelancer to help me find the right guest bloggers. If you believe you are the right guest blogger, I invite you to fill out this form.
I have no problem with writing two blog posts. The challenge is scheduling everything. I find that part of blogging the most annoying of all. Just as I do with any annoying tasks, I outsourced that task to my freelancer.
By getting rid of other tasks, I increase my focus on the tasks that I work on. Here’s the other big part of my plan.
I’m Officially Back To Creating Udemy Courses
I had my first good month in a while on Udemy so I’m motivated to create courses on that platform once again. Mega course and membership site ideas like Total Social Media Domination and Unlock Your Potential will be self-hosted, but I’ll be putting up a few mini courses on Udemy.
More on that later.
The great thing about Udemy is that it plays very well with my blog traffic strategy. Right now, I have over 34,000 Udemy students. More than half of my Udemy courses have over 3,000 students. Within each Udemy course, I can send up to four educational emails per month.
For those of you who don’t know, you can promote blog posts and YouTube videos within these educational emails. However, you can’t promote landing pages or products.
The plan is to email something of value every day to different segments of my Udemy student base. I will email new blog posts and evergreen blog posts to fill my blog up with traffic. This strategy alone, although time consuming, will result in a big increase in traffic.
I don’t know how much additional traffic I’ll get, but I know it will be massive. I’ll come out with more details in the next performance report. The goal is to get at least 100 daily visitors from this method. With more Udemy courses on the horizon, this goal will only get easier and easier for me to reach.
The $0.99 Book Experiment
I recently came across Adam Houge’s work. He’s a successful self-published author who has sold over 2 million of his books. Many of his books are $0.99 and about 40 pages long.
Writing these types of books is very easy. At my maximum, undisrupted level of productivity, I could write one of these books in under three hours.
I’ve decided to write one of these books each week and charge $0.99 for it. I will continue until the first quarter of 2017 and then assess my progress. I thoroughly enjoy writing these types of books because it’s virtually impossible to add fluff.
The point of these books is to fill you up with knowledge that you can act upon within 30-60 minutes (the amount of time it will take for you to read one of these books).
With that said, I’m still in the process of getting Unlock Your Potential out to the world. That book will be an exception to the rule.
The Kindle-Udemy Combo
An intermediate tip that finds its way on many blogs is to repurpose your content. I do just that with all of my $0.99 books. Here’s how it works:
#1: I create the outline for my Kindle book.
#2: I write the Kindle book.
#3: I use the Kindle book as an outline for my Udemy course.
#4: I create the Udemy course.
I am repurposing all of my $0.99 Kindle books to Udemy courses that will be advanced, interactive versions of the books. I aspire to write one book and create one Udemy course every week. My freelance army is about to get bigger.
Learning On Udemy
Not only am I creating more Udemy courses, but I am also enrolling into more Udemy courses. With plenty of discounts and several free courses that I never went through, I can use Udemy to take my learning to the next level.
I bought three Udemy courses during one of their sales about the following:
- Reading books faster
- Singing (yes, that’s something I want to do)
- Growing a podcast
I already went through the course on reading books faster, and what I like best about Udemy courses is that you can quickly go through them by not completely going through them.
What I mean is that you can look at the titles of each video and watch only the videos that most interest you. I didn’t watch all of the videos for the course about reading books faster. Rather, I simply watched the videos that I knew would serve me best.
There are plenty of courses I need to get through before I can even consider buying more.
The Different Mediums I Use To Learn
I am learning by reading books, listening to audiobooks, listening to podcast episodes, and watching training courses. I read before going to bed and listen to audiobooks while on the bike.
During the Thanksgiving Break I adopted two more learning methods, so I’ll have to determine how to fit them into each day.
Books I Read
I didn’t read 12 books this month, and that’s part of the reason I invested my time and money into the speed reading course. And the most important lesson I got from the course was to view a book as a tool in which you don’t have to read from cover to cover.
For reading, it’s better to spend 20% of the time to get 80% of the ideas than it is to spend 100% of the time to get 100% of the ideas.
But these are the books that I did manage to read:
Invisible Selling Machine by Ryan Deiss
How To Talk To Anyone by Leil Lowndes
Virtual Freedom by Chris Ducker
The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
This wasn’t my best month of reading, but I probably got the most insights from this book line-up.
Blog Posts I Wrote
How To Create A Content Calendar: Content calendars help you plan out your content production. Here’s how you create one.
5 Secrets For A Successful Blog: Some are secrets while the others are common knowledge that isn’t common practice. #2 is the biggest secret of them all.
10 Dos and Don’ts For Writing Smooth Content: Kate Simpson stopped by to write a guest post providing valuable insights you can use to write better content.
4 Keys To A Successful Blog: If you thought the secrets were cool enough, I’ve now got keys for you. Regardless of what niche you are in, these four keys to a successful blog apply to you.
How To Write Valuable Content When Pressed For Time: Andrew Howe stopped by to write an epic blog post on writing great content even when the clock is against you. This is an important skill because with life and an online business, the clock is almost always against you.
Podcast Episodes I Published
- Finding The Next Wave Of Consumer Demand With Mike Michalowicz: Episode 13
- How To Achieve Explosive Personal Growth With Aaron Walker: Episode 14
- How To Achieve Personal Freedom With Rob Cubbon: Episode 15
December Goals
Normally I have a section in which I look back at the previous month’s performance report, but I feel it is unnecessary for future reports since I look back at the previous month in various parts of each performance report.
With that said, these are my goals for December.
#1: Launch TSMD On December 30th
The membership site I’ve been talking about for months finally has a release date. Since I have been working very hard on this membership site, I am eager to share the final product with everyone.
While the focus of the membership site is to give you enough insight to help you take action, it isn’t one of those libraries of content that seems to stretch on for countless days.
However, you can ask me anything about your social media strategy, and you’ll get access to my expertise.
#2: Create Some FB Ads
While I have attracted hundreds of thousands of organic visitors to my blog from social media, for the first time ever I am attracting visitors to my blog and landing page with the help of paid social traffic.
Since Facebook is the superior social network for social advertising, it only makes sense for me to focus my efforts on Facebook first. I will create Facebook ads for Total Social Media Domination since it would result in recurring revenue that I can use to scale up my business.
#3: Learning Goals
Because I want to learn as much as possible, here are my specific goals to help me acquire more knowledge:
#1: Read 10 Books
#2: Watch 15 Udemy Courses
#3: Listen To 5 Audiobooks
#4: Listen To 20 Podcast Episodes
I’m all in with my learning.
In Conclusion
I place a strong emphasis on learning. Not only do I acquire more knowledge, but the simple act of learning motivates me to put in the work.
A few months ago, I had completely given up on Udemy and self-publishing, but now I’m returning to those two opportunities. When I wrote my first $0.99 book, I realized that I have a strong passion for writing books. Since I had neglected this passion for too long, it made me more susceptible to procrastinating.
And the same thing applies for creating Udemy courses.
So what are your thoughts on this performance report? Do you have any good book recommendations for me? Sound off in the comments section below.
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