Goals for February 2019

[Ryuzaki]

Goals for February 2019

​

Review
Month one has come and gone. We should take the time to revisit our January 2019 Goals and see if we achieved our intentions. Revisiting them daily or weekly is a great means of keeping us on the right track. After that, it would be wise to take a moment to try to understand the impact of the work we did last month.

Did that work move the needle? If not, we need to reevaluate why we thought it would have an impact and understand why it didn't. Then we need to pivot and set up different goals. This feedback mechanism is how we improve, shed the nonsense (or outsource it), and find the 20% of work that provides 80% of the results. That should be our focus.

Motivation
I've been seeing quotes like the one above a lot recently. "Motivation doesn't last, it only gets you started. Discipline is what keeps you going." These things are true. Why spend time creating and reviewing and sticking to goals when you could just grind out work? Because working hard means diddly squat if you aren't working smart on the right things. You don't have any boss or manager delegating tasks to you.

It's up to you to determine what the right work to focus on is as much as it is up to you to get it done. This is a critical aspect of owning and operating your own business. And if you resist that, you're failing the mental part of the game that @The Engineer discussed in Day 1 of the Crash Course. The mind game, the motivation game, the discipline game. You have to conquer these aspects of business before you'll meet any serious success or even get on the right path for serious success.

Goals
What's it going to be? Don't pull your answers out of a hat based on how you feel. Let the data inform you. That's why we keep these goal threads. Use your site analytics. Use your ecommerce cart tracking data. Review your pomodoro journal. Look at last months goals. Once informed by the data, and only after that, should we craft S.M.A.R.T. goals

It's crazy how fast time moves. 2019 is already 1/12th finished. Don't let your most precious resource pass you by. Win while you're young enough to boast about it and exploit it for mass depravity. It all starts with your goals.

 

[Hercules]

February Goals

Week 1

• Update my journey thread
• Build out structure for platform
• Set up tracking
• Write initial landing pages
• Plan marketing campaign

Week 2

• Finish marketing campaign planning
• Start driving traffic
• Optimize, build out campaign

Week 3

• Optimize, build out campaign

Week 4

• Start producing YouTube content for the brand
• Optimize, build out campaign
• Set myself up to burst into February with power to rapidly expand content on the platform

Personal Growth Goals

• Start waking up earlier
• Go to the gym 6 days every week
• Read some more of Eloquent JS
• Spend at least an hour before bed screen-free.

 

[Boy]

Main project: Double the number of firms using my service so I have 75 total

• Migrate from AgileCRM to Mautic
• Build a more sophisticated cold email campaign
• May hire a new VA to prospect for me
• Publish all new content as soon as I get it

New side project: Make an affiliate or drop ship revenue

• Build out the website this weekend
• Begin producing content, not useful for SEO but shareability (seeing if my automation is up to snuff with social media)
• Keep budget under $200 (virtual spend included like a theme I already own subtracts from it)

 

[infotech]

• Signup for required tools & services for paid traffic
• Ideation for site #2 [go for a web app or keep it a content site?]
• Take short vacation
• Either close small sites or promote them.

 

[KevinOH]

Writing Agency
-Prospect for clients for my writing agency
-Train writers
-Get my first client

Side Hustle
-Expand 10 pieces of content for my affiliate site. (Ref: The 6 Months Commit Challenge)

 

[Ryuzaki]

Main Project
I've still chugged at this when I could last month. I'm pretty much caught up on everything I can be in terms of making the entire user experience better, E-A-T stuff, lazy loading, speed optimization... I touched on everything. I think the next big thing I'm going to do is convert everything to Gutenberg and future proof development that way. But that'll be a long process occurring on a staging server. Other than that (and I'm not going to do that until I get confirmation from this) is continuing to get bad pages out of the index and wait for another big update and see if that helped get me out of this plateau. So this is really kind of in a "wait and see" mode at this point. The indexation counts only update like once a week too so I'm waiting on that.

Client Site
Today should get me to 95% on this client site I built. I'm moving it to their server and doing some final touches, then i'm waiting on them to get the last 5% of info to me, which I can then complete in probably an hour or two. We're all paid up and everything so, this one is about to be marked complete for the most part.

Incoming Service
Since the main project is in wait mode and the client site is about to be done, I'll have a lot of time to be cranking out the rest of this service preparation. I'd love to get this to 90% done, where the last 10% would happen over time after launch once it's in the real world.

Other Stuff
I do have some other things I'm involved in that will require some of my time and I'm more than happy for that to be the case. I need to coordinate with some other people and see about getting some help, rolling this out, and calling it done. It's been on the table for too long, and waiting on other people is the time killer. The problem is, I can't do it all myself, so I need to find new people. We'll see how it goes.

 

[darkzerothree]

February 2019

Hmm.. weird month ahead.

Butterfly
The talks with the client 3 - called "Butterfly" from now on - were nice.
They had a 100+ daily Phillipine spam email problem that needed to be solved foremost.

Went ahead and solved that and left a good first impression.

Outlining the next necessary steps, and putting a price tag on them is next order.
This will probably go into negotiations.

SaaS
The SaaS is on hold, as my partner is snowed under with his company work.
I can't finance this myself, so I need to see when he is able to communicate again.

So... long talk, here are the goals:

"Cheese" and "Cow"

• add some more things, like move to https, etc... small stuff, but basically got carte blanche from them to do what I see fit.

"Butterfly"

• Outline services and price, have contract set up end of month.

"Floating elephant"

• update part 1

SaaS

• ON HOLD - get appointment with partner

Personal

• Lose more weight (1-2kg)
• Start exercise

 

[pfingy]

Review
Around Thanksgiving I had an idea for a series of ebooks and completed the first version of the first book within a few days and put it on Amazon. I spent some time in December trying to improve the concept and execution, and when I finally checked my Amazon stats around Christmas, I saw people buying the first book.

In January I nailed down the execution of books for the series, produced 20 books that are ready to publish, set up a website with email collection, and started scoping out forums in the niche to pull traffic from.

Sales are both exciting and disheartening, my biggest day was 7 sales and I'm averaging about 1.5 sales per day. I make about $1 per sale. The good news is that I've done zero marketing yet, so there's still hope that there's plenty of room for growth. People are finding the book on their own right now, and it seems like most customers are buying more than one book. On the other hand, I sometimes get worried that the niche is too low-traffic. It's okay though, there are millions of people interested in my niche, I just need to connect with the ones that want to buy Kindle books, I can't rely on Amazon to provide the traffic.

Goals
- Bring my catalog up to 100 books
- Create a legit landing page on my site to get email signups
- Build 2 JavaScript apps for the site to facilitate traffic leaks
- Establish a presence and start leaking traffic from all of the communities in my niche
- Look into feasibility of paid traffic... depends a lot on knowing the lifetime value of my customers, so kind of early for that right now, but want to at least get some numbers to look at.

My content production for this project is scalable and streamlined thanks to a lot of work in January, so now I want to get my marketing efforts on track. Then I'd like to either find more ways to monetize this project so it's more profitable, or be able to keep it on auto-pilot and start thinking about the next project. But I don't want to stop pushing too soon, I want to know for sure how much opportunity there is here and I want to go for it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

MONTH-END REVIEW

Main Project
"I think the next big thing I'm going to do is convert everything to Gutenberg and future proof development that way."

• I started this and knocked out an entire section of this site. I'm now waiting on a tool I use to update to the next version which will aid in creating custom blocks, which I need. I have a lot of stuff stored in meta fields that should be in the post content. Wordpress did get this one thing right, so I'm waiting on that now. After that it'll be full scale insanity and grinding until all posts are blocks. I've done a TON more improvements on the staging server too, so I'm excited to port them over when everything is done.​

"Other than that is continuing to get bad pages out of the index and wait for another big update and see if that helped get me out of this plateau."

• The coverage report didn't update but twice this month I think. I yanked my temporary sitemap and waited forever to see an update. Finally yesterday it refreshes. Three validation reports completed and the sitemap was removed. I'm left with exactly 49 bad pages to get out of the index now, which is down from about 570 at the start. So now I'm just hoping for some kind of quality score / Panda refresh and see what that does.​

Client Site
"Today should get me to 95% on this client site I built... then i'm waiting on them to get the last 5% of info to me."

• I finished this entirely except the last 5% that they have to provide. The ball is out of my court and my hands are cleansed of it.​

Incoming Service
"I'd love to get this to 90% done, where the last 10% would happen over time after launch once it's in the real world."

• I made some decent progress on this. My sales copy is pretty much done, graphics are done, and I made progress on my skeleton framework I'll be using. Nothing exciting to say, but it moved forward.​

 

[darkzerothree]

February Review

As I said at the beginning - weird month.

Another bout with sickness got the whole family knocked down for almost 2 weeks - just unreal.
Now we are all up and about again, and it seems for good this time.

So - recap:

Butterfly

• Outline services and price, have contract set up end of month. - Nope

Got the offer out, talked to the client, but she is a flake.
She will be on your case all the time, and then just vanish.
Seriously considering just dropping this.

SaaS
The SaaS is on hold, as my partner is snowed under with his company work.

"Cheese" and "Cow"

- Some small changes - YEP

"Floating elephant"

• update part 1 - Nope - this went under with the sickness

Personal

• Lose more weight (1-2kg) - YES
• Start exercise - YES

 

[infotech]

• Signup for required tools & services for paid traffic [DONE]
• Ideation for site #2 [go for a web app or keep it a content site?] [FAILED]
• Take short vacation [DONE]
• Either close small sites or promote them. [FAILED]