Goals for June 2018

[Ryuzaki]

June 2018 Goals
​

This month is us wrapping up the 2nd quarter of the year, whether we like it or not. Last month came and went fast, as will this one.

No matter how much we've achieved up until this point, there is always a way to push the limit. Been grinding out content? You can publish double by introducing some outsourcing. Need more traffic? You can do some guerrilla traffic leaking. Everything can scale.

If you've pitter pattered around in the previous five months, that's on you, but all is not lost. There's more than enough time to pull it together.

Whenever I make these threads, I try to put a piece of motivation in it. Here's one I re-encountered recently that has a lot of wisdom packed into 1 minute of time.

"F--- You Money"​

Having "F. U. Money" isn't about making a boatload of cash and being able to spend it whenever and however you want. It's about your "Fortress of Solitude." It's about your assets that can't be taken away from you. At the end of the day, all you really need is a house that's fully paid off, a paid off car, and enough money to cover the taxes on both. Nobody can own you then. Nobody can disrespect you or take advantage of you, because you can walk away at any time.

That house and car can be of whatever quality you want. It can be a small two bedroom square and a "jap economy shitbox" car. I've been driving the same Japanese car for over 15 years and it's saved me at least $30,000 if not more.

Now, if you ask me, getting your Fortress of Solitude together is only step one. It's the step that removes all of the anxiety and worries. That's when you unlock the right to go for the next level, where you have so much expendable money nothing relatively reasonable is out of reach for you or your people.

A lot of people screw up and put the cart before the horse and forget to establish their fortress.

I think that we can take this concept, meant for life in general, and make it work for our projects too, but I'll leave that to you to think about. Can your website, SaaS, eCommerce store... can they have fortresses of solitude?

If so, how are you moving towards establishing that this month?

 

[Samwise89]

It's time for me to focus on money pages. Write a money page, write 3 to 5 supporting posts to link back in, and build links to all of them. If I pick the right keywords it and get through 2 or 3 of these "pyramids" it should move the needle on this project, which isn't earning much yet - just some Adsense. The money pages will be Amazon or another affiliate offer if there's good ones.

 

[darkzerothree]

June...

This is gonna be a weird month.

Job

Hating my 9-5, I will apply to ..well, a lot of jobs.
Goal:
Send out resume to ten jobs.

Entrepreneurship
Site: Floating Elephant

Will revamp the whole site.
All the small fixes didn't do it, I'll do over, preparing and positioning myself for the big run end of the year.
Goal:
Revamp completed

Freelancing: Red Chickens

Need to push GDPR and some other small changes to a tech unsavy client.
Fun.
Goal:
More work

Site: Cloud City

Reshaping content and layout to fit the vision I have.
(Also refining that vision)
Goal:
Final layout, content strategy done.
12 articles done.

 

[DD1]

I will push myself for:

• writing 20 shorter, 1500-word info posts for publishing on my money site. My main goal is to lower overall density of money posts. I spent parts of the weekend on KW research and I already have selected 21 article ideas to publish.
• publishing 20 short videos (1-3 min) on my youtube channel with supporting content for my site, so I can embed my own videos whenever makes sense on a written post

I have just published my first written article, but it's already 21:30 and I still need to get started on today's video. Thank Goodness for Lumen5!

EDIT: about my "Fortress of Solitude".

I see myself keeping this site till The End Of Time. I sign my name on it. I put my photo there. I want to grow both the website and the Youtube channel.

My FU Number is € 300k in the bank, plus a small apartment and a car, around € 450k total for a great life in Southern Europe. The €300k allow me to "lean FIRE" and earn around €1,000/month, which is enough to cover my basic expenses as a single male.

I still don't have the vision on how I'm going to arrive there yet - probably it'll involve selling my own product. My main focus at the moment is to simply grow my website and get me where I can get these €1,000/month, which already allow me to 95% tell the world to go fcuk itself and keep the other 5% very, very quiet. This is what drives me at the moment.

 

[Sisu]

I'm taking a break from site work to dabble in a different project. All three sites are on maintenance; the goal is to keep them online and answer emails.

 

[Cash Builder]

• Secure 15 live guest posts/link placements
• Post 20,000 words of content
• 10% earnings increase over May
• 10% traffic increase over May
• First sale from the new site
  

 

[dresden]

I'll get in on this. New launch and all.

• product hunt
• reddit, hacker news, indie hackers, growth hackers, inbound, designer news
• 25 links / mentions from buzz sumo alerts
• buso marketplace thread
• 2 podcasts (HMU if you have one)
• blast all of the emails from all of the previous projects
• start a drip campaign w/ over 150k verified emails for a specific platform
• finish up integrating intercom on boarding / engagement / retention flow
• 6 blog posts live
• Adwords, fb, bing campaigns live

Goal? 8,500 tests in June.

 

[TriForce]

TriForce June To-do List

It's time to start building out the content hubs and grinding out the links.

• 1 x pillar content piece live
• 3 x supporting pieces of content live
• Minimum of 20 outreach emails sent promoting pillar content piece
• 10 x blog comments

 

[Prentzz]

The site which I've been working on for the past year and a half or so is going well, but it's time for me to take some of that profit and spin it into a different business, something with more stability, instead of leaving it in a bank to collect interest and dust.

As a result, me and a close business partner are starting a local service business where we are competing with people who need to hire an agency to create their crappy site, let alone rank for anything. It should be interesting but more importantly, very profitable!

June Goals:

• Finish business paperwork etc
• Open bank accounts and deal with financing
• Create website, logos and social media accounts
• Integrate a handful of backend software solutions
• Hire our first employee
• Purchase necessary equipment and employee clothing
• Start AdWords campaign
• Upload at least 5,000 words of blog content
• Outsource some citation building

Should be a fun month! The biggest challenges I see are likely to be with hiring and AdWords. Our first hire needs to be stellar because they will be responsible for training future employees. Fortunately, my partner has operated a business in the industry before and has experience hiring this type of employee.

My experience with AdWords is relatively limited, but I'm pretty competent with Excel and my statistics knowledge is good, which hopefully will come in handy. I'm going back and reading everything I can find from @eliquid as well as a few other people because paid traffic is going to be important in this industry.

 

[eliquid]

I'm going back and reading everything I can find from @eliquid as well as a few other people because paid traffic is going to be important in this industry.

I have a podcast coming to you, today as a matter of fact. On the last rounds of editing it now actually

 

[seoauthority]

This month is full of tasks

1. Especially a social media presence
2. Blog weekly articles
3. Send out bi-weekly newsletters
4. Create one new high value customer every week
5. Begin making YouTube videos

The shift to social media will be a big one and will require a complete shift in my thinking and srategy

 

[Ryuzaki]

I managed to miss out on this again. Every time I start the thread I forget to respond later.

This month is fairly simple for me. I took on a big web design project so that's getting 95% of my output. I want to make as much progress as I can on that for the rest of the month, while lightly touching my other projects (dripping a post here and there) and posting here as usual. But the game is to get this site done and ready for production.

That includes all the:

• technical SEO
• web design
• on-page site-wide setup
• page speed optimization
• security
• training an employee for on-page optimization.

I should have the site done before halfway through next month, then the rest should be training for however long that takes us, with most of it front-loaded then checking up afterwards.

As always, I keep getting distracted from my main project but it'll also accelerate things on that end once this is done.

 

[DD1]

I will push myself for:

• writing 20 shorter, 1500-word info posts for publishing on my money site. My main goal is to lower overall density of money posts. I spent parts of the weekend on KW research and I already have selected 21 article ideas to publish.
• publishing 20 short videos (1-3 min) on my youtube channel with supporting content for my site, so I can embed my own videos whenever makes sense on a written post.

I was on track for reaching the first goal, I wrote 5 articles during the first week of the month. Then I read this thread. I found similar content.

So I scrapped the previous goal and went gray on my white hat site by adding another 58 "new" articles and new images/illustrations, so I almost doubled the amount of content published on my website.

The amount of content containing affiliate links was 71% in early June. Now it's 31%. (I keep an Excel sheet where I add page title, address, last update date, number of words, links to the page, inner links to other pages on my site. This percentage changes as I update it, so it's easy to keep track.)

I consider this first goal a win, even if I changed it mid-way.

As for my second goal, I did not reach my YT video publishing goal. I aimed for 20 videos, and I only published 5 new videos. The channel is already getting some minor traction, so I'll put more energy on publishing videos during July.

 

[TriForce]

• 1 x pillar content piece live
• 3 x supporting pieces of content live
• Minimum of 20 outreach emails sent promoting pillar content piece
• 10 x blog comments

June was awesome.

I failed to achieve two of the bigger goals but I learned a tonne!

I'll update my journey thread with all the details but what I realised is that a pillar content piece doesn't have to be content so I've got something in the works that's just taking a bit longer than expected to get out!

 

[Ryuzaki]

But the game is to get this site done and ready for production.

Re-cap: Took on a site design project again.
Goal: Get as much done in June as possible. - CHECK

I managed to knock out the homepage and post templates. I always start on the homepage, because what happens is that sets the tone for the rest of the site. You end up with a global header, footer, and containers done, with most of the CSS for the design details done as well. In this case it made the inner posts fairly quick to knock out. Today I'll do the page template and a full width page template at minimum, which should be even faster. I'd guess I'm halfway through the design part, which include some custom coded stuff as well. Then it's on to security and speed.

Once this wraps up I'm going to be outsourcing a ton of content for my main project and spending the time editing and posting it, with nearly all my output there. I have to translate some of this "lost time" and revenue into a reinvestment to play catch up and boost me ahead on the passive income side of things.

 

[Cash Builder]

• Secure 15 live guest posts/link placements - Done
• Post 20,000 words of content - Done
• 10% earnings increase over May - 5.7%
• 10% traffic increase over May - 6%
• First sale from the new site - Not done

Slow growth this month, but growth nonetheless.

 

[darkzerothree]

Recap
This is gonna be a weird month.
..and it was!

Job
Hating my 9-5, I will apply to ..well, a lot of jobs.
Goal:
Send out resume to ten jobs.

Sent out five (need a fit, too), and got headhunted by an agency. No new job yet.

Entrepreneurship
Site: Floating Elephant
Will revamp the whole site.
All the small fixes didn't do it, I'll do over, preparing and positioning myself for the big run end of the year.
Goal:
Revamp completed

This did not happen

Freelancing: Red Chickens
Need to push GDPR and some other small changes to a tech unsavy client.
Fun.
Goal:
More work

Sold everything (see July thread)

Site: Cloud City
Reshaping content and layout to fit the vision I have.
(Also refining that vision)
Goal:
Final layout, content strategy done.
12 articles done

Yes - rough layout, content strategy
No - Articles