Q2 Review, Q3 Marketing Plan and A Free Consulting Offer

As some of you know one of the things that I like to do is look back and review the progress here at Skool of Life as a way of measuring how I’m doing in terms of my goals.  It all originally started out with a Q1 Marketing Plan, which eventually resulted in a  Q1 Review and Q2 Marketing Plan.  All of those are yours to download and use if you are a blogger and at the end of this post I’ll include my marketing plan for Q3.

One of the things that I abandoned in Q2 was a monthly report and the truth is it was just out of laziness. I do think you should be regularly tracking progress towards your goals and a monthly post is a great way to do that. It’s likely I’ll probably return to doing that in Q3. That being said there’s still many notable achievements for Q2.

Q2 Content/Traffic Review

Posts Here: I set a goal of 2-3 posts a week here at The Skool of Life, which I have more or less stuck to. One of the interesting things that’s happen in Q2 is the publication of posts that for some reason seem to have really resonated with people. My post about 8 failures that have lead me to where I’m at today is likely one of the most popular posts I’ve written. If anything it taught me that the more open we are as bloggers, the more our audience connects with our message.

Guest Posts: One of the things I’ve always set out to do is write a certain number of guest posts in every quarter. The average has turned out to be 2-3 posts per week even though I set the aggressive goal of 4-5.  One good thing about setting goals far beyond your current abilities is that you even if you don’t necessarily get to the exact goal you set, you get damn close. As they say “reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars.” Here’s a list of all the guests post I’ve written for various blogs in Q2.

• Why Your Day Job is No Longer Enough
• 8 Ways to Build Relationships With Bloggers
• Riding Waves to a Happier Healthier Life
• How To Turn Weaknesses Into STrengths
• Chose to Spend  Time on High Impact Activities
• How to Kick Ass At Your First Job Out of School
• 8 tips for Conducting Effective Interviews With Bloggers
• Don’t be a Paycheck Player: How 5,000 Dollars Cost me 5 Years of My Life
• How 8 Months of Unemployment Turned out To Be a Blessing in Disguise
• How Your Comments Can be as Valuable as A Guest Post
• How to Use a Blog to Accomplish Any Goal
• Self Imposed Limitations and How to Overcome Them
• 10 Lessons From A site Launch
• 7 Things I wish Knew When I started my MBA
  

There are an additional 3-4 posts pending, which would bring the total to about 18 guest posts. While I’ve thought about trying to up that number, I’m fairly happy with it

Interviews: Interviews have become my bread and butter at this point. It’s really the center of my personal brand and I imagine it won’t be long before I’m known more as the host of BlogcastFM, then the author of The Skool of Life. To date, we’ve done over 60 interviews for BlogcastFM, which launched in February. Interviews have been a phenomenal way to connect with so many interesting people and pick the brains of some highly successful bloggers.

Reformatted/Re-released Free Ebook: On the 1 year anniversary of this blog, I put together a simple free ebook called The Skool of Life Grade 1. About a week back I decided to reedit and re-release the book with a much better looking format.  Feel free to sign up for my newsletter for your copy.

Email Newsletter: One of the stupid mistakes I made early on was not using the Blog Broadcast feature of aweber. There are some bloggers who don’t use it, but I like the fact that I can automatically put every 3 posts into a newsletter. That alone has created a nice spike in my daily traffic.

Traffic/Subscriber Growth: My race to 1000 Subscribers has taken a bit longer than I thought, but it’s not something I’m really concerned with anymore. At this point I’m shifting my focus to actually building a business, and the writing is truly something I do for intrinsic benefit. But I’ve included a snapshot of my growth over the last quarter and you’ll notice that this seems the beginning of a fairly upward trajectory. On the days that feedburner isn’t out of whack, I have about 860 subscribers and email newsletter sign ups almost every single day.

Q2 Revenue

My revenue in Q2 actually did not grow substantially. But, part of that was intentional. I purposely didn’t post my weekly ad on craigslist., I did this for a few reasons. One of them was because freelance was getting in the way of my surfing schedule and the other was to focus on understanding how to develop products. While I will do a bit of freelance work here and there, I won’t take on any hourly work and my flat rates are substantially higher. The fact is that one client who pays you well is a far better ROI than 10 who don’t pay you well and take up a ton of time. I’m working on getting as far away from things  that don’t scale as possible. Here’s the revenue breakdown:

Freelance Revenue/Advertising: 389.62

Consulting Revenue: $1500

My main client still remains and pays a substantial chunk of my rent which is nice since it enables me to pocket most of my salary from my day job. I’m also in the process of exploring some other consulting opportunities, but will be looking at clients who can afford a significantly higher premium.

Total Revenue: 1889.62

My Q3 Marketing Plan/Strategy

Traffic Growth Strategy

Guest Posts: There’s no doubt in my mind that guest posts are the most effective method of growing your traffic and subscribers. My guest post on Dumb Little Man this quarter resulted in close to 38 sign ups for my newsletter. That was just from one post. I’m going to aim for 2-3 guest posts a week.

Content Collaboration: One thing that I urge everybody to consider is looking what I call a mini joint venture. It’s more or less a venture where you work on developing content together for the purposes of building your traffic. I recently wrote a post about projects I’d like to collaborate with people on and that work will be part of my Q3 strategy for growth. Simply put, you should consider writing a series, but rather than do it alone, you should find another blogger to team up with. The beauty of this is you can send traffic back and forth to each other’s blogs and generate some very high quality, relevant inbound links for each other. I think this topic deserves a post in and of itself which I’ll write about soon.

Product Development

Personal Development Podcast: After close to 6 months of running BlogcastFM, it’s become apparent to me that the core strength I have is audio content and interviews. Conveniently when I surveyed the audience here many of you said that product that would be of most interest to you is a personal development podcast. I’ve started the legwork for this and I’ll have more details in the next few weeks.

Free Consulting: I have to credit Catherine Caine at BeAwesomeOnline for this idea. She offered free consulting to about 10 or so bloggers. I’m throwing out the same offer to all of you with a few caveats. I’d like to take 3-4 bloggers and mentor you based on my own experience. Ideally we’ll have an hour call once a week for all of q3. What I’ll ask in return is that you provide a link to the consulting call we do to your audience at your blog. Additionally, what I’m hoping to do is to put all of your consulting sessions together into a paid product that and you’ll be an affiliate for.

Offline Activity

One thing I don’t think I’ve seen enough of and I’m kind of guilty of this myself is building your online brand in the offline world. Fortunately there’s some really amazing stuff that’s going to happen this quarter that I’m looking forward to.

Flighster/Way Below Status Quo: As many of you know for my day job I’m a social media strategist/blogger. Actually the much cooler and interesting self proclaimed job title is editor in chief of the Flightster Travel Blog. As part of the launch and growth of this blog, my company is one of the sponsors of the Way Below Status Quo Road Trip. So that will be the beginning of alot of connecting in the real world.  I encourage you to subscribe to the Flighster Blog because we’ll be doing lots of giveaways of cool travel related stuff.

Podcamp/Unconference: I’ve been toying around with this idea in my head for a while. I want to get the right parties together to pull this off. IF you are in LA and would be interested in creating such an event, let’s talk. If you have not read Mitch Joel’s book Six Pixels of Separation, then I highly recommend it. It’s got some great advice on connecting with your online network in the real world.

Speaking: One thing I’ve not done enough of is public speaking/presentation. I’ve actually reached out to the Pepperdine Business school about speaking at student orientation about social media, blogging, and building a personal brand while in school. Additionally I’ve submitted a speaking proposal to blogworld.

The Skool of Delivered to Your Inbox

Sign up for my FREE Course on the 7 Most Important Things You Never Learned in School