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E419: How To Analyze Your Data To Accelerate Your Business With AJ Yager and Meaghan Connell

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AJ Yager and Meaghan Connell are a data-driven power couple and the co-founders of Praxis Metrics, one of the fastest growing data companies in the world. They have built a team of over 25 team members who build dashboards to scale businesses and provide analytics consulting, resulting in exponential growth for their customers. They also provide online and in- person data education training that teaches founders and teams how to take action from their data.

Here are the key links from the episode:

Praxis

Jobber — start a free trial and save 20% off for your first 6 months

December 2019 Performance Report

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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.

PPS29: Designing Your Decade With Rosann Santos

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Rosann Santos is the Director of Alumni Relations at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She has worked in higher education for over 20 years and is now a career motivational keynote and among the best education keynote speakers for high school and college students in the nation. When she is not on a college campus, she is busy coaching clients as a trained and certified Gallup StrengthsQuest facilitator and coach where she focuses on leading her clients toward a strength-based approach to their lives and careers.

Here are the key links from this episode:

Rosann’s site

Schedule a free strategy call with me

Check out this episode!

E418: Why “Helping” Is The Key To Growing Your Business With Kimberly Weitkamp

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Kimberly Weitkamp is a successful marketing strategist and conversion copywriter and shares her experiences as co-host of the Chatting with Copywriters podcast. She developed the Concierge Conversion Method to help business owners and entrepreneurs draw in the right people with the right message at the right time.

Here are the key links from this episode:

Chatting With Copywriters Podcast

Travel Industry Copy

Healthy Living Every Day — get your copy today

Ocean Writing

Book a free strategy call with me

How To Self-Publish A New Book Every Month

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Does it even make sense to self-publish a new book each month? Let’s start with that question.

For some people, it makes sense. For other people, it doesn’t.

If you want a signature book that becomes a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, or New York Times bestseller, don’t publish a new book every month.

If you want a bunch of books that each earn you a steady stream of income, publish a new book every month.

It’s that simple, and when considering this logic, it’s understandable that some self-published authors publish a new book each month while authors with traditional publishers only publish a new book every 1-2 years.

Some self-published authors even operate under various pen names and publish 100s of books each year with the help of ghostwriters.

In my video The Math Behind Making $100,000/yr From Self-Publishing books, I explain how having more books will make it easier for you to make 6-figures through self-publishing.

To put it simply, if you have one book, that one book needs to make $100,000 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

If you have 10 books, then each book only needs to bring in $10,000 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

If you have 100 books, then each book only needs to bring in $1,000 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

If you have 1,000 books, then each book only needs to bring in $100 each year for you to make 6-figures from your books.

While 1,000 books is usually reserved for authors with a team of ghostwriters or authors who produce no-content books (i.e. journals, coloring books, etc.), the math is obvious.

More books makes it easier to hit certain income goals.

The only problem is that we have a limited amount of time, and publishing that many books is no easy feat. And there’s also that marketing part. Just because you have 100 books doesn’t mean all of them are going to make $1,000 each year to help you reach your 6-figure goal.

There are a bunch of different ways to promote your books and get more exposure. When you self-publish at least a book each month, the strategies change. Instead of a massive build up, you only send out a few emails and social media posts about your new book.

The strategy isn’t to get a surge of sales. The strategy is to get enough reviews to make your book look attractive to a potential buyer and run Amazon Ads to generate consistent sales and income.

This is how you write books that bring in a consistent $100+ each month instead of a book that gets a ton of sales during the first quarter of its release only for those sales to follow a downward trend.

Once you master the system, the more books you write, the more money you make. This is why some self-published authors advocate for publishing a new book each month (or much more than that under different pen names).

So now the question boils down to how can we find time to make this work? I managed to self-publish 25 books while in college and will be doubling that number to 50 books by the end of 2020 since I’m now done with college and have a ton of extra time.

The most important goal for self-publishing is to have a daily word goal. I set the goal to write at least 1,000 words for my books per day. I frequently hit 2,000 and 3,000 words on some days and that’s more than enough to write at least one book per month.

The thing with my books is I aim for concise knowledge. If you desperately want a 300+ page book with filler, don’t look at my catalog. I’ve only written two books that were over 200 pages, and each of those took me almost a year to write because I’m committed to not add any filler.

Most of my newer releases are around 80-100 pages which adds up to around 16,000 to 20,000 words. Let’s take 18,000 words as the middle ground to run some numbers.

  • At 1,000 words per day, it only takes me 18 days to complete a book.
  • At 2,000 words per day, it only takes me 9 days to complete a book.
  • At 3,000 words per day, it only takes me 6 days to complete a book.

And we are not including no-content books. I could probably write at least 3 of those books from start to finish per day because many of the journals are copy and paste the same page a bunch of times and maybe add a different quote on each page. This is how some authors end up with 100s or even 1,000s of books without a team of ghostwriters.

Word search books are also in the no-content category and take some extra time to create but not as much as a typical book. If you want to see me write a word search book, let me know in the comments.

But for the purposes of this post we’re talking about writing your typical book rather than a fill-in-the-blanks type of book.

As I just demonstrated through the numbers, you can very reasonably complete a new book every 18 days. 1,000 words per day is not a big ask. It’s perhaps 30 minutes of your day assuming you can type at 33 words per minute which is lower than the average pace of 40 words per minute.

If you manage to write 2,000 and 3,000 words on some days, you can trim that number down even more.

 

Post Production

The last things left are looking over your book and publishing it in its different formats.

I prefer to eyeball my book once and just publish it. This method takes a lot of time off from the post-production process and allows me to more quickly move onto the next book.

The more books you write, the easier it is to spot mistakes in your work. I will be honest and say that I don’t spot all of the mistakes. I’ll do the audiobook version of the original book a few weeks later and find some small Grammar mistakes. These don’t bother me because I can correct them as readers bring them up and simply re-upload the file.

For my recent book Build Your Authority Platform, a reader mentioned how much he loved the book and shared two small typos that were in the book. You could still read through the book and understand what was being said. You could still get a ton of value from that book.

I could have handed the book to a proofreader to address those issues but…

  • A proofreader won’t take your book as seriously as you do
  • A proofreader can still miss typos
  • If it costs $0.03 per word which is standard, it will cost you $540 to hire a proofreader to proofread 18,000 words

Less than 1% of people who buy my books ask for a refund. To me, that indicates as long as you provide value in your book, you can get away with a typo here and there.

And if someone doesn’t like my book only because of a few typos even if they like the value from the book, I don’t want that person as a client. Those are usually the types of people who get on top of you and micro manage everything that you do.

That’s really all you need to do to write a new book every month. It doesn’t take too much extra time to turn that into two new books each month. I go into more detail in the YouTube videos above and frequently talk about self-publishing on my YouTube channel, but this the basic framework.

Just find 30 minutes each day to write 1,000 words. Repeat that for 18 days and you’ve got a new book. 12 days is more than enough to eyeball 18,000 words and create paperback and eBook editions of your book for Amazon. An audiobook takes more time but is definitely worth it. I do hire someone on Fiverr to edit the audio files. You can find someone to edit audio files for ACX at around $15 per hour which only comes down to around $30.

Not bad considering it would cost $540 or more to have someone proofread that same book word for word.

If you want to accelerate your self-publishing brand and get more book sales, schedule a complimentary call with me to discover if we are a good fit.