Goals for January 2019

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The Engineer

Aegis Jaeger
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One of the best habits you can develop (or maintain) for yourself this year is to journal. It's not a diary to vent your frustrations and record gossip. It's to track where you want to go and how you intend on getting there. And as you execute, you can then record the results. Why is this important?

Not only does this provide accountability, especially when done on a public forum, but it's a record of data you can use to optimize your goals and processes. Success in business is a constant optimization of following the needle-movers, shedding the time wasters, and making everything more efficient.

“The intensity of your desire will depend on the clearness with which you picture to yourself what you want to be.” ~ Wallace D. Wattles
Desire isn't enough. You need an intensity of desire. Intensity can't be had without a clearness in your vision. You can't have a vision without goals, and you can't have goals without processes.

You can't keep plopping yourself in front of your computer and dealing with whatever needs attention. It's time to choose what deserves attention, and what kind of attention these things will get. You need to understand every step you will take along the way, the time frames in which they will be achieved, and every micro-task involved.

The best place to lay that out isn't in your head, but somewhere where it's recorded for your future reflection. The best place on BuSo to do that is here in our monthly goal threads.

This is it. The start of another year. If you say the same crap you said last January, then that means you wasted last year. You lost a year of your life to spinning your wheels, being lazy, or aiming at the wrong goals. It's time to put a paradigm shift in place, get a clear vision that produces intense desire, and wreck this shit. 2019 is going to happen fast. There is no tomorrow. There is only today.

Only you will make your dreams come true. Is that something you're interested in? Tell us about it.
 
Sage words as always @The Engineer and yes, I like that was me waving when you said: "you wasted last year".

Things didn't go according to plan. I decided to reinvest some of my earnings into regular content for my site but fell foul of the Medic update shortly after making that decision. Since then I have been in a spiral of despair, not knowing which way to jump.

My home life changed around the same time too. My wife gave up working to become a full-time student, so money is tight and what little I get from my sites now is being pushed back into the account. Going down to a single wage after all these years has been tough. Her extra travel and studying also mean I am more busy doing housework stuff too, but I am 100% supportive of her decision, so I am not complaining on that front.

So this month, I am planning to do the following with my site:

1. Concentrate on "overall quality" - prune away the irrelevant content and refocus the existing content on user intent. I previously went through a process combining several posts into larger single articles, which has left them dead - so I will be looking to reverse that process where I can.

2. As part of a general overhaul of my site, I will be moving from the bloated Thrive Themes and Thrive Architect to use BuSo Lightning and Gutenberg. I don't use many fancy layouts in my posts or pages, so Gutenberg should suffice. It does mean I will have to initially revisit each post to reformat it, but at least Thrive Architect leaves you with some semblance of a post when you deactivate it. I have the latest version of Lightning and have been tweaking a new child theme over the last few days.

Looking forward to the rest of 2019, I have an inkling that my 9-to-5 job may be at threat. Not that anything will really happen until the end of 2020, but the writing might be on the wall later this year. This has lead me to think of other careers where I can have a similar salary, autonomy, freedom and flexibility that my current role allows. This is the hard part.

I kind of have an idea which direction I would like to move towards and I am thinking of reaching out to see if I can find a mentor who can (at least) prove to me that I might be on the right track (hello Mr Imposter Syndrome!). The role is in the SEO field and is one that I find very interesting and where my current skill set (both from my 9-to-5 and from building sites for years) will help.

But - I want to at least improve the earnings on my current site before anything else.
 
I'm focusing on growing 3 businesses at the moment. I am aware of the fact that I could be spreading myself too thin, but I'm going to have 1 clear goal for each business. That should help keep things manageable. Everything I do this month will be related to the following:
  • Publish 40 new articles that support the main money making pages on my main site
  • Perform keyword research on my second site and create a list of 5 main pages and 50 supporting articles
  • Find 2 profitable products to add to my FBA business
 
  • Sign up for ad networks & traffic sources
  • Plan out content & promotion ideas for site #2
  • finish tool for site #1
 
Main Project
Keep working on solving this final indexation issue and hope that it solves the problem that seems to be holding me back. Even if it gets fixed there's a chance I won't see the results until the next big algo update. But getting it all solved now is the key. I need to drip some content too.

Service
This is going to take most of my time this month. I have a site to build from scratch that I'm real excited about. Not much to say. Nothing to it but to do it. As soon as this is done, all extra time will go into preparing to take the service public in terms of marketing. Referrals have kept me busy though.
 
Main Site
  1. Change Theme To Faster & Much More User Friendly Theme
  2. Reformat All Posts To Match New Theme Layout
  3. Update Any Date Sensitive Articles To 2019
  4. Extend Those Articles & Replace Outdated Product Reviews With New 2019 Reviews
  5. Upload 6 Articles To The Site
  6. Start Prospecting For Outreach
Secondary Site
  1. Go Through All Posts & See Which Are Worthwhile Keeping & Remove The Rest
  2. Go Through Remaining Articles And Rewrite Any Bad Eggs
  3. Create New Post Layout To Copy Throughout The Site
  4. Prepare Keyword List For Building Traffic
  5. Start Prospecting For Outreach
 
  • Working on weeding out some clients that have been a bit of a pain and replacing them with better ones.
  • Get back into running a few times each week like I was doing before the holidays when I started having knee problems.
  • Stay more on top of my social media stuff.
 
New year, and new goals for a hopefully more focussed me.

The Medic update smashed my sites and I lost a whole lotta income. I've had to resort back to freelance writing to supplement my affiliate income.

For 2019, the big plan is to scale content provision. I'll be creating a content writing service, which should help to increase my income X times. The profits from this venture would be re-invested back in my affiliate sites and other online ventures at the start of Q3.

For Jan, my goals are:
  • Build a website for my content writing service
  • Hire and train writers
  • Start prospecting for clients
 
Lots of stuff has popped up, and it is already the 14th!!

- Get client 1 site done
- Get client 2 site update done
- Update client 3 (NEW!) site updated, and meeting for next steps and contract
- Finalize use cases for software
- If possible - finalize V1 specifications

Privately
Lose 1kg
Start exercising
 
Month End Review

Main Project
Keep working on solving this final indexation issue and hope that it solves the problem that seems to be holding me back.

UPDATE: It's going good. This is what the chart looks like right now, where 580 are all pages I needed gone:​
doeX63g.png
A lot of this is happening by virtue of creating this extra sitemap. A chunk of it is also my manual intervention, asking Google to Fetch & Re-index. I want that number at ZERO as soon as possible (before the next big update).​

I need to drip some content too.

UPDATE: I published one new piece of content and updated about 8 old pieces that needed it.​

Service
This is going to take most of my time this month. I have a site to build from scratch that I'm real excited about. Not much to say. Nothing to it but to do it. As soon as this is done, all extra time will go into preparing to take the service public in terms of marketing. Referrals have kept me busy though.

UPDATE: The site design is almost done. I'm moving it to the new server today and putting on some finishing touches. The last two minor things will have to wait on the client to provide some pictures. It won't take long to get it in place once they do. So after today that should pretty much be considered done.​
I've learned unbelievable amounts about the new Gutenberg editor on Wordpress thanks to this project and doing a lot of studying and tinkering. I think I finally have it fully under my control. Everything is back to normal in terms of development now. Anything I knew how to do, I can do again the same or in a different way. That's a huge relief.​
 
  • Sign up for ad networks & traffic sources DONE
  • Plan out content & promotion ideas for site #2 HALFWAY [Original idea is not going to work, need to expand topic]
  • finish tool for site #1 DONE
 
Month End Review
-Built website. Some kinks remaining here and there but it's already live and good to go/
-Started prospecting for clients. Just created a list of 100 prospects I'll be reaching out to this month.
-Got a bunch of writers but none matches the standards I want. I'm not sure if I should continue looking or just train the ones I've found and hope that they'll get the gist of things.
 
Month End Review

- Get client 1 site done
- Get client 2 site update done
- Update client 3 (NEW!) site updated done, and meeting for next steps done and contract pending
- Finalize use cases for software done
- If possible - finalize V1 specifications not done

Privately
Lose 1kg done
Start exercising not done
 
So... I'm a little late to the party, but here is my month's review:

Main Site
  1. Change Theme To Faster & Much More User Friendly Theme - Done
  2. Reformat All Posts To Match New Theme Layout - Done
  3. Update Any Date Sensitive Articles To 2019 - Done
  4. Extend Those Articles & Replace Outdated Product Reviews With New 2019 Reviews - Done
  5. Upload 6 Articles To The Site - Incomplete ( 3/6 Articles Produced & Posted )
  6. Start Prospecting For Outreach - Underway
Secondary Site
  1. Go Through All Posts & See Which Are Worthwhile Keeping & Remove The Rest - Incomplete
  2. Go Through Remaining Articles And Rewrite Any Bad Eggs - Incomplete
  3. Create New Post Layout To Copy Throughout The Site - Incomplete
  4. Prepare Keyword List For Building Traffic - Done
  5. Start Prospecting For Outreach - Incomplete
 
I'm focusing on growing 3 businesses at the moment. I am aware of the fact that I could be spreading myself too thin, but I'm going to have 1 clear goal for each business. That should help keep things manageable. Everything I do this month will be related to the following:
  • Publish 40 new articles that support the main money making pages on my main site - Done, although half were not supporting pages
  • Perform keyword research on my second site and create a list of 5 main pages and 50 supporting articles - Done
  • Find 2 profitable products to add to my FBA business - Not Done, FBA is on the backburner
 
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