How I made over $2000 Online: Q1 Review and Q2 Marketing Plan

It’s about that time to break forth the rhythm and the rhyme….. Well, actually it’s just time for a quarterly  performance review here at The Skool of Life.  If you run a blog, a business, or just have personal development goals I recommend you go back and consider the importance of conducting a frequent review of your 2010 goals. A few other bloggers like Nicole Crimaldi have embraced this practice and I’m betting you’ll find tremendous value in this process.

In fact, if you do a q1 review, let me know and I’ll link it into this post and maybe even do a summary post of all the Q1 reviews from around the web. It’s a great opportunity for us to learn from each other. The biggest part of why I do this is not only to share what’s worked, but to learn from everybody else in how I might improve things.  On to the actual review.

Q1 Marketing Plan Performance Report:

Many of you have seen this Q1 marketing plan and if you’re interested in putting together your own marketing plan, check out my post at Kikolani on why every blog should have a marketing plan.  For the sake of not repeating too much information, I’ll let you look back at my first review of 2010 goals.

I set many goals in this plan. The truth is I haven’t accomplished all of them, but as they say “shoot for the moon and you’ll land among the stars.”  For Q1 I had three main objectives, which I’ll go into detail about below:

Focus on High ROI Activities:

I would say high ROI activities really boil down to to three basics: guest posts, content for your own blog, and relationships. My goal was 2-4 guest posts a week and I think I will probably be almost exactly on target when all is said and done. I’ve included a list of all my guest posts below. After a chat with Adam Baker and an interview with Jonathan Mead, I actually decided to produce less content and aim for quality over quantity.

Relationships have played a big role in driving me forward this quarter. Through conducting interviews at BlogcastFM, conversations on Twitter, and even meeting people in real life, I’ve developed a number of great relationships. While blog comments have been a great way to get some exposure, I think commenting just for the sake of commenting is not only time consuming, but doesn’t add value to the blogs  that I read, so that’s something I probably will do less of in Q2.

Guest Posts from Around the Web:

• True Success: Finding Your Perfect Wave-@Serenity Hacker
• Faith, Patience, and Your moment in the Sun@QuestforBalance
• Using a MindMap to Dissect Your Goals@LifescapeArtists
• Why Networking Doesn’t end When Your Job Search Does@Under30CEO
• 7 ways that a slight tweak will dramatically change your life@DumbLittleMan
• 7 Personal Traits for Effective Lifestyle Design@LifestyleDesignForYou
• How to Work the Room at a Networking Event@WasabiBurger
• The First Year of a Surfer’s Journey- A  Look Back @StokedforLife
• Carrots, Sticks and True Motivation@LifestyleDesignForYou
• How to monetize your blog without advertising, affiliate products or any other products@Under30CEO
• The Difference Between Success and Perfection@MsCareerGirl
• 8 Essential Business and Careers Skills Developed from Blogging@LifeWIthoutPants
• 7 Reasons a blog is a Phenomenal Personal Development Tool@TheChangeblog
• Interviewing Bloggers and the Tremendous Value it Holds@Blogussion
• Why your Day Job Is No Longer Enough@Under30CEO
• Obtaining the Keys to Your Kingdom@Dumb Little Man
  
• 6 Ways to Get People Tweeting About Your Blog Launch@RemarkaBlogger
• The 3 Phases of the Bloggers Evolution and How to get Through them Faster@NathanHangen
• Why every blog should have a marketing plan@Kikolani

Total Guest Posts: 19

Achieve Substantial Growth:

Truth be told, I don’t remember what my subscriber count was when the quarter started, but I set a goal for 1000 subscribers and I didn’t reach it. I’m also not the least bit disappointed that I didn’t reach my 1000 subscriber goal. The good thing about setting goals that are far beyond where you are at is that they teach you to be a big dreamer and if you keep moving in the direction of the goal you’ll eventually get there. You really need to consider the fact that goal setting is like brushing your teeth. While I recommend reviewing your goals every day, I also think it’s important to stop keeping score for a while. The launch of BlogcastFM was also a major change that was completely unplanned and likely slowed my growth rate.

Develop Monetization Methods

This is the part of my goal setting that makes me smile the most. I had no idea how I would monetize. I just arbitrarily picked a number that I wanted to make, $5000.00 a month and decided I would get there. At this point, I don’t make $5000.00 a month, but it’s safe to say The Skool of Life is close to paying my rent.  It’s kind of nice when side income sources take care of major expenses and your major income sources like a paycheck actually get put into a savings and allow for purchases of new toys.  Below, I’ve broken down the income sources and included snapshots of my paypal balance and commission junction accounts.

• Freelance Consulting Revenue: This details revenue generated through consulting from Jan to March. It also highlights money that I generate through Text-Link ads which anybody can sign up for by clicking on the banner in the right hand column.

• Affiliate Revenue: Below is a snapshot of my commission Junction account. For clients who are purchasing new domains, I encourage them to use my affiliate link for hosting and if any of my friends are interested in setting up blogs or buying domains I offer them help in exchange for using my affiliate links.

• Bio Ionic Retainer: Bio Ionic is a consulting a client who I run Facebook promotions and contests for. They make Ionic hair care products and every week I give away their products in a drawing. If you are a female reader or  male who wants a hair straightener I encourage you to become a Fan on Facebook.  Monthly Revenue=$500.00 x 3 Months

Q1 TOTAL REVENUE: $2250.57

Q2 Marketing Plan and Strategy

Q2 is going to be an interesting because I’ll hit a one year anniversary here at The Skool of Life. I’m going to be doing some strategic experiments in Q2 and here’s just a slight overview of what’s in the marketing plan.

Shift focus of High ROI Activities

• Aggressive Guest Posting: I aimed for a guest posting frequency of 2-4 times a week in Q1. For the most part I came to about 2 posts a week. For Q2, I’m going to take a lesson from Henri at WakeupCloud after reading how he got to 1000 subscribers in 100 days and I’m going to shift to a much more aggressive guest posting strategy. Basically I’m going to give away all my best content for the quarter. If I think a post is one of my best yet, I will submit it somewhere else for publication.  The idea is to do more guest posts this quarter than posts on my own blog and see what the results will be.
• Change in comment strategy: We’ve all heard the saying that we are the byproduct of the people we surround ourselves with. So, for the purposes of this, I’m going to try to focus my commenting strategy on blogs that are bigger than mine and write lengthy insightful comments.  Does that mean I won’t comment or read smaller blogs? Not at all. I get alot of inspiration from reading those blogs so I will definitely be doing that.
• Publishing Frequency: As my publishing frequency here has gone down, I’ve noticed a few patterns. The engagement level in  any post I write goes up quite a bit. I finally figured out why. Many bloggers don’t read blogs every single day. So when a post is up for 2-3 days, it gives people more time to comment on it. The other thing is that I write much longer more substantial posts. The subscriber count spikes in much bigger jumps.
• Substitute Teachers at The Skool: As many of you know when I was running interviews with up and coming bloggers, I would have a guest post weekly here at The Skool of Life from the bloggers that I interviewed. You also are probably aware that we’ve been heavily focused on trying to get the most well known names around on BlogcastFM so we can provide the most value to our listeners.  One thing I want to do here at The Skool of Life is open up guest posting opportunities to people who are early stage bloggers. In fact I would prefer that you are a blogger who has less than 500 readers or has been around less than 6 months. Sounds like a strange experiment huh? Not sure what the purpose is, but this is the plan. So, if you meet the criteria, hit me up with your guest post and I’ll get into the queue.

Aggressive Growth

• Launch a free ebook: I will be putting together a fairly extensive free ebook more than likely called “ A surfers’s guide to personal development.” I’ll be outlining it over the next several weeks and probably make it available to you by early May.
• Increase newsletter subscribers: The goal of launching this free ebook is also get more email newsletter subscribers as part of my aggressive growth plans.  I also intend to actually write a newsletter more frequently because I’ve been really lazy about it.
• Offline Promotion: This is one I just thought of, but I’m very interested in eventually getting into public speaking so I’ll be joining a local toastmasters club and attending meetings on a regular basis. I’ll also be on the lookout for volunteer public speaking opportunities. I also will be attending many more networking events and finally got my hands on some business cards for BlogcastFM.

Development of Passive Income

• Affiliates: I do plan to be more active about promoting some of my affiliate products and I will only be promoting those things that I use extensively. Feel free to check out my Skool Supplies page for all the things that make the wheels on the bus go round .
• AdSense Test Run: I recently had a chance to interview Pat Flynn from Smart Passive income and if you haven’t seen his adsense tip, then check it out. My plan is to run adsense for 30 days and keep track of who the advertisers are, what kind of clicks they are getting, and then go directly to the advertisers and offer them a better rate than Google. I believe a one month test will provide all of the necessary data to show them why paying me directly makes more sense than paying Google.

I know that was quite a bit to digest in one blog post. What I’d love from you guys is the following:

1) Write up your own Q1 Report
2) Share your Q2 Plans
3) Send me a link to all of it and I’ll write up another post with all of the plans from around the web.

Let’s go kick some A@#@ in Q2.

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