This is my last blog post of 2019…of the entire decade. I am extremely grateful and appreciative for all of the times you’ve taken the time to go through some of the work I’ve put out over the years.
Hearing from people about how my work has impacted them gets me through the challenging times…and I definitely had a few of those this decade (I’m sure we all have).
Yesterday I shared a video containing some of my goals for 2020. I’ll embed it below for anyone who is interested.
With that in mind, here is the Performance Report for December 2019.
I’m Done With School
The biggest reason I am excited to see what I can do in 2020 is because 2020 is the first year of me truly being a full-time entrepreneur.
Up until this point, I have been doing entrepreneurship, podcasting, book writing, coaching, virtual summit hosting, social media and everything else that I do part-time.
Now I can go all-out for the entire year rather than just in the summer.
It’s not like I was making excuses while in school, but now between the commute, homework, classes, and final exams no longer in my schedule, I have more time to do more things.
I enjoyed my time in school and got to learn a ton about finance, but I am excited to now see what I can do.
The Half-Marathon
To cap off my 2019 running schedule, I ran the Big Apple Half-Marathon in Central Park at a time of 1:37:57. I had just recovered from sickness and not able to get proper runs in two weeks leading up to the event. My fastest half-marathon time is 1:25:00.
But wow was that marathon scenic. I ran the half-marathon with fellow podcaster Debra Kasowski and we had a great time.
It’s been a great motivator now that my two week break is over and I’m back to focusing on qualifying for the Boston Marathon and other majors.
One of the ideas I’m throwing around for 2020 is to start a running channel on YouTube. Let me know if you’d be interested in hearing more about my running journey and get some fun videos in the process.
I’m not fully committed to the idea yet but I am getting somewhat close to that commitment point.
More Books On The Way
I enjoy writing books for you because they are a more affordable way to receive high quality information.
I haven’t charged $1,997 for a training course and only briefly charged $997 for one of them. I do promote affiliates who charge these types of prices for their courses if I believe what they’re all about, but I don’t like pricing my courses too high.
The low priced books create the possibility of one reader buying 10 of my books which has happened a few times.
With that in mind, I have more books on the way.
One of my 2020 goals is to write my 50th book which means doubling the current amount of books in my catalog.
My last final exam was on December 11th. In the 20 day stretch leading to 2020, I finished writing two books.
The first one, Build Your Authority Platform, has already been published on Amazon. As soon as I’m done writing this Performance Report, I’m submitting my dividend investing book so it’s submitted before 2020 hits.
My newer books are around 18,000 words which is around 100 pages. That’s all I go for in a book. Smaller books are easy to produce and are also easier for the reader to read in one sitting.
Since I write 1,000 words each day and bring that up to 2,000 or 3,000 words on some days, I can go from idea to published book in under two weeks.
Publishing books en masse gives me more books to run Amazon Ads for. Combine that with the experience I can provide in a book, and you can see why I’m focusing a lot of my attention on publishing more books in 2020.
YouTube Is My Key Social Network For 2020
I will still be active on the other social networks and grow on them. My Twitter audience is the largest and growing my Facebook Group to 2,000 members is one of my 2020 goals.
However, YouTube will be the social network I focus on the most in 2020. Now that I have more time, I can fully embrace YouTube without cutting back on podcasting, virtual summits, and the other stuff I am doing.
Since I’ve been on the school schedule for a while, I’ve had to learn how to be productive with less time. Now that I have more time, I can fully embrace more things.
The reason I am focusing more on YouTube is because a YouTube subscriber is worth far more than any other social media follower.
On Instagram, you’d be happy if a follower scrolled through their feed, happened to find your picture, like it, and leave a comment. Then that Instagram user keeps scrolling through their feed. Maybe they spend 10-20 seconds on your picture before moving on.
On YouTube, you can get someone’s attention for several minutes or even hours if you have enough videos that complement each other.
Getting someone’s attention for just 3 minutes gives you a lot of space in that person’s mind. Three minutes is enough to build a relationship and get someone to continue following your content…and that was the average view duration for my videos in 2019.
This is similar to why I started podcasting. Not only do I get people to spend more minutes consuming my content, but I’m also building relationships with the guests.
However, YouTube is different in the sense of the data it provides.
In fact, there’s so much data that it’s hard to figure out which data is important.
On YouTube, three pieces of data matter: the clickthrough rate, the minutes watched, and the retention rate.
If people click through your thumbnail and watch most of your videos, you are off to a great future on YouTube. Combine that with lengthening your videos, and people will spend more minutes on YouTube.
YouTube rewards creators who get their viewers to stay on YouTube over longer periods of time.
For 2020, I will be working on my retention rate and my clickthrough rate. The retention rate for most of my videos is around 35% which is average. I will be aiming to get this number as close to 40% as possible.
There are some variables that impact retention rate so I am not too concerned. However, if a video’s retention rate drops below 30%, I rewatch that video to figure out why so I don’t repeat the same mistakes.
Furthermore, half of YouTube’s channels and videos have clickthrough rates that vary between 2% to 10%.
The clickthrough rates vary for each video. Titles and thumbnails are the most important factors when optimizing for the clickthrough rate.
My goal for each video I publish in 2020 is to have at least a 5% clickthrough rate. This will involve me spending anywhere from 15-30 minutes working on each thumbnail to make sure it’s click worthy.
Below are two of my recent videos that have clickthrough rates hovering at around 8%.
Upon seeing the success of the dividend investing video’s clickthrough rate, I decided to create a similar thumbnail for my Math Behind Making $100,000/Yr From Self-Publishing Video.
That video’s clickthrough rate hovers at around 5% which is good, but not at the same level of the dividend investing video.
I created a thumbnail with that set-up one more time and got a clickthrough rate closer to 4% which is more average.
Fast forward to my video of How I Self-Published 25 Books Before Graduating College.
The title is good and the thumbnail was customized. I didn’t use any preexisting templates to create the thumbnail. I recorded a brief video of myself posing for that picture and took a screenshot of the video.
I put a lot of thought into that thumbnail and now it has an 8% clickthrough rate.
I’ll be creating custom thumbnails like this rather than exclusively using a thumbnail template and up the frequency to two videos each week and build from there.
Right now dividend investing, self-publishing, YouTube growth, and podcasting seem to be three topics that will frequently find their way on the channel.
I was pressed for time when creating the thumbnail for the 2020 Goals video and used a thumbnail template for that video. So far the clickthrough rate isn’t that great but it can get a little better over time. I currently don’t expect it to have a higher clickthrough rate than the videos I’ve mentioned so far.
I even started new YouTube channels for each of my podcasts…and the running channel may come into play later in 2020.
In Conclusion
Thank you so much for all of the support this decade. This journey has been incredible and it’s about to get so much better.
Please let me know your thoughts about this Performance Report in the comments and your thoughts on the 2020 goals. I’d also love to hear what you’re doing.
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