Goal for October 2017

[CCarter]

Ahh the beginning of the 4th quarter. You can smell it in the air.

The countdown begins...

8 weeks to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

You've got 8 weeks to prepare for the biggest online hustle there is - the superbowl of making money online. Right now it's time to get planning on creatives, offers, bonuses (discounts - yuck!), and figure out what you can do to drum up your userbase in preparation to sell them any and everything in sight.

This is what you trained and prepared all year for.

Don't get left behind by waiting till the week of to figure out a promotion to push, or a contest to start, or a plan to execute - start NOW!

- #1 Warm up your lists - Don't have one? = start one and grow it.

- #2 Get the promotions scheduled started - Don't have one? = Look up what competitors did with past holiday promotions and see if you can mimic and then exceed it.

- #3 Make sure to not do anything stupid that costs you your brand in the long run - Huh? = Once I saw a competitor offer a 90% discount for 6 months - lolwtf.

Clearly they didn't think ahead that people would still be coming around asking for that 90% discount after the 6 months, and then 12 months, and 2+ years later. Lesson learned - once you give a discount THAT PRICE is the new value in the minds of customers of your product.

Think about all the products that get pushed on APPSumo, and then when the sales is over you constantly hear "I missed the AppSumo offer so I'm not going to buy it until there is something similar" - there is a reason for that, the offer lowered the brand's value in the eyes of consumers OR they "don't want to feel like they are getting taken for a ride cause they are paying $XX monthly while someone else is paying $X one-time for the same access."

- #4 Need visual ideas? Browse the old Holiday Marketing thread on what the big boys did right and what they did wrong.

- #5 Remember emails are still the only one-to-one connection (unless your customers have your mobile App) that you can utilize to get their attention - in the span of 48 days Walmart sent me 88 emails! - that's almost 2 a day - they weren't messing around. Target sent 74, Bloomingdale's sent 59 (More details: post #77)
​

I have some follow ups I'm working on to help everyone out with ideas. (Update: Holiday Marketing - Cha-Ching Edition thread)

September is gone and now October and the Holidays are here. It's time to re-align your 2017 goals and focus in on what's important since were in the home stretch for this year.

There are no days off until that New Years ball drops... Lets get to work.

My question to you is - how do you plan on attacking this holiday season and making a killing? And I mean a KILLING - not a couple extra dollars here and there. The consumers are ready to pull out their wallets for you and even go into debt to give you their money - are you going to take it? Are you man enough to take it?

Meet me on the frontlines.

 

[Asad]

For the purpose of continuity, I am posting BOTH my goals from last month and my goals for this month. I want to build on the progress I have made with my biggest priorities. My goals are "SMART" with an assumed the deadline is November 1.

Project 1 (Codename Booker)

Last Month: Before the end of the month I will reduce site speed to ~3s and page size to a maximum size of 3mb. After conducting a full site audit I will then outsource all the issues revealed to a qualified VA. Outsourcing these tasks will set me free to maintain the site content production schedule. I am doing this for the purpose of selling the site for a 20X+ valuation on an income of $4,000 per month.

This Month: I will do a full shopping season dry run through each of my sales channels. That means looking at my platform, taking the steps my customers would take to go from first contact with my content to finishing a purchase. I will then eliminate hangups, needless steps, and programmatic problems using a VA. This is going to take a hell of a lot of work, but I want to get it done now so that all of November can be spent pre-loading my offers into my sales channels. In other words, I am making my Facebook ads right now. I am creating my marketing emails and scheduling them right now. I am using Hootsuite to schedule posts for Black Friday -3 to January 15. I want to be ready to storm these goddamned beaches well in advance.

Project 2 (Codename Legacy)

Last Month: Map the entire system I use to take a "production" from concept to completion. I am doing this for the purpose of outsourcing or automating as much of the process as possible and hiring a General Manager to handle the rest.

This Month: Hire a Senior Name Partner for the company to manage the process of bringing on the associates that will handle parts of the process. This is my only task for this project this month since I am focusing on the holiday shopping season.


Project 3 (Codename Garvey)

Last Month: Create the framework and guidelines for turning this site into a multi-author platform. I'm doing this to introduce new voices to my audience and keep fresh content coming while I focus on my higher priority sites.

This Month: I hired our first writer and put him on a tiered plan last month. 2 cents a word for the first 10 articles then going up to 10 cents for the next ten and so on. I can test him out without a big investment. This month, I want to round out our roster across 4 more areas.


Project 4 (Codename Grail)

Last Month (and this month) : Write the 7 cornerstone articles for this sites categories, recorded the audio version of each article, and completed 4 podcasts(episode cover designed, engineered, uploaded to itunes and Play, with social media promo queued up using Massplanner). This project wont be ready until January and wont be rolling until Q3 of 2018.


Project 5 (Codename Tumbleweed)

Last Month: Get AWS S3 configured to take uploaded videos on site, produce a thumbnail, and stream content from buckets instead of locally. Im doing this to improve UX and because Amazon is a better (read:more cost effective) delivery option than storing videos on my server.

This Month: Multiple Indian programmers have so thoughly screwed up this project that I am forced to start all over. I will have to shell out big bucks for a legit developer, but my pride is on the line so fuck it.

Project 6 (Codename Tenet)

Last Month: Before the end of the month I will have increased the number of completed modules for I course I made rom 30% to 60% and implement an affiliate program using a premium wordpress plugin (not that WPMUDEV crap)

This Month: Affiliate program is in place. I have to do the course live since again I had some programmatic issues. I am using zoom.us to teach the course. Once I am done with the live version, I am going to upload all the recordings and pdfs to teachable.com and be done with it.

Personal Goal:

Last Month: Before the end of the month I will stop ducking this doctors appointment. I cant achieve my goals if Im dead.

This Month: Turns out my chest pains were related to stress and anxiety. Multiple projects will do that to you. Plus I am getting over a really bad breakup with a beautiful girl that I found out was a whore. Stumbled into her facebook messenger. She was servicing at least 40 different guys. Sometimes minutes after I left her house. I got a few other issues, but I also have a followup appointment this week. I will man up and make these appointments.

 

[built]

My goals:

1. Finish Python course
2. Write 4 buyers guides
3. Make $50

Starting at 0 again, bad decisions all around.

 

[Cash Builder]

Affiliate Site

• Build 15 strong contextual links
  
• Upload 4 Pieces of content

Link Building Service

• Increase number of sites to 110
• Add some testimonials to website and design a homepage

 

[backinblack]

Hell yes, ready to own October. Let's go!!

Work

• Double September's sales for the bitcoin MLM platform by October 31st
• Double September's sales for the zombie MLM platform by October 31st
• Transition that one irritating, time-wasting software client off of our services
• Integrate the new webinar software
• Have the entire updated Spanish training series done for the zombie platform
• Do three webinars a week myself
• Have platform X's Spanish site completed and live

Personal

• Buy Christmas presents for the kids this month.
• Make 2 new friends this month

 

[darkzerothree]

My question to you is - how do you plan on attacking this holiday season and making a killing?

Project 1 - Floating Elephant

The REAL season for this is after the holidays - you got it - diet related.
Giving the site a COMPLETE makeover right now.
Adding interactive tools, informative texts, new design, etc...

Project 2 - The Zoomies

Adding some more products here, but no big plans for this.

Project 3 - Cloud City

This is where the real work is happening!
Adding a notification service in the background - this is still not working as it should.
Grinding away at content.
Upping the social media game.

 

[shaunm]

My current main site is still growing and aging in so my main goal is to keep adding content to it this month and try to get it over 1000 organic hits this month.

I also started reading up on Cryptocurrency a few days back and want to expand my knowledge into that space too.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Keeping it real simple this month, only worrying about my main project:

• Fill up my categories to the new threshold number of posts. Will use these opportunities to create relevancy nets for my money posts.
• Watch the rankings of all the new money pages and see how they do with these new links. As time gets a little closer to holiday period and it feels positive, I may try to get more links to them. But links in combination with interlinking from relative content should help.
• Start prepping the method of attack for traffic leaking like mad for the holiday traffic. I want that Black Friday / Cyber Monday money. Gonna go into full Cookie Monster Mode.

 

[ScrapingLab]

I haven't really been working for the past 2 months, took some time off to re charge myself and see where I'm going.

Some goals for this month:
* Setup my main site as a static site with gohugo, still learning go, but I knew I wanted to keep it simple. Blogging will be done through markdown, and I will just grab a template from themeforest and customize it for gohugo.

* Research and write 7 articles about Scrapy. These will be the first 7 articles that will go on the site. I've decided to first focus on writing the initial content then build the site, which would be from 1k-3k words per article.

* Do email outreach and start getting links from other bloggers/technical writers/scraping providers to get some linking back to my content. This should be easier once I put out the articles, I've seen that getting links to technical content is really easy if the content is technical sound. It requires a greater deal of expert knowledge to write about these topics as you must know programming and have some experience with what you are writing about.

* Last and not least possibly start a journal here, but I will put that as the last thing once I accomplish some sort of work and get the momentum going.

 

[infotech]

• Outreach. Outreach. Outreach. (min 30 links)
  
• Money Target: $500
• setup something on dormant domains.
• Prep up for holiday season.

 

[CCarter]

October Goal:
- Drop 2 blog posts
- Drop 2 more posts in the Holiday Marketing - Cha-Ching thread
- Drop 1 new feature on SAAS #1
- Drop 3 updates on SAAS #1
​

 

[contract]

- Prepare for the holidays.

Hustled so hard, 7 months straight for the year preparing for these last 3 months... I was in grind mode 24/7, every second of the day/night. Smashing goals left and right. Unfortunately life happened, and the past 2 crushed me with health problems.

Finally healed or near healed, and have been working non-stop grind mode again. It's a rather gloom feeling knowing what you are capable of, actually wanting it, working towards, etc... Meanwhile your organs are all fucked up, your brain can barely keep you standing up straight, and the only thing you can think about is not dying in the middle of the night alone; while your biggest goals remain unfinished.

With that said, October is my favorite month. I'm back..

- $100 Million in my bank account.

 

[CCarter]

October Goal:
- Drop 2 blog posts Partial - both are over 50% complete
- Drop 2 more posts in the Holiday Marketing - Cha-Ching thread Not Done
- Drop 1 new feature on SAAS #1 Not Done
- Drop 3 updates on SAAS #1 Complete - WHOIS, PageRank, and Social Signals are back and refreshed for top 20​

I got side-tracked the whole month with red alerts due to Google updates, and non-stop action. We're in rough waters right now, but we'll get out of it stronger and better than before. I haven't had a day where I slept more than 4 hours in a long time. Been running on fumes for a while...

 

[darkzerothree]

Project 1 - Floating Elephant

The REAL season for this is after the holidays - you got it - diet related.
Giving the site a COMPLETE makeover right now.
Adding interactive tools, informative texts, new design, etc...
-- Not done

Project 2 - The Zoomies
Adding some more products here, but no big plans for this.
- DONE

Project 3 - Cloud City
Adding a notification service in the background - this is still not working as it should.
-- not done, weird issues
Grinding away at content.
- DONE
Upping the social media game.
- DONE

 

[Ryuzaki]

• Fill up my categories to the new threshold number of posts. Will use these opportunities to create relevancy nets for my money posts.
  • Update - Working on it. Was going good, still dripping posts but stopped to do some link building too. I'll be pursuing both for now.

• Watch the rankings of all the new money pages and see how they do with these new links. As time gets a little closer to holiday period and it feels positive, I may try to get more links to them. But links in combination with interlinking from relative content should help.
  • Update - They're moving up! All is going well in this regard. I hope they really pop in the next couple of weeks.

• Start prepping the method of attack for traffic leaking like mad for the holiday traffic. I want that Black Friday / Cyber Monday money. Gonna go into full Cookie Monster Mode.
  • Update - I've got some old winners I'll toss back out there, and will likely craft some new ones if I get a clever idea. It doesn't matter if they're new or old. I can rotate targets. I'd love to get high up on Reddit on Sunday-Monday though and drop Amazon cookies on tons of unsuspecting victims.

 

[Cash Builder]

Affiliate Site

• Build 15 strong contextual links - Not done, I got 13 which I am still happy with.
  
• Upload 4 Pieces of content - Done, uploaded 4 exactly. This is just to keep the site ticking over until I go on a big content push at the turn of the year.

Link Building Service

• Increase number of sites to 110 - Not done, I keep adding more sites but I am also removing sites that are not meeting the quality guidelines.
• Add some testimonials to website and design a homepage - Not done