Goals for July 2017

[Ryuzaki]

Oh boy. It's official. We are in the middle of the summer (for us American continent members anyways). I just came off of vacation where I watched people happily blow gobs of cash on the most inane bullshit ever with zero marketing or value propositions behind it.

Imagine what this can mean for us, who carefully craft our words and websites with sales and conversions in mind?

It's also getting into our last chances to prepare for the upcoming holiday season, where lives are changed forever. Please, I beg of you, position yourself to rake in the dough to the point where your bank is calling you making sure there's not been a mistake in these deposits.

How do you plan on getting where you want to be in July? Will you pivot based on what happened in June? Check out how you followed through and re-check your annual goals so you stay on target!

 

[pfingy]

• Get 10 paying customers using my app
• Finish e-book and have everything ready to make sales.
• Kill it with my consulting client so that they'll be ready to renew my contract when the time comes.

These are the goals that effect my revenue. I also have plenty of side-projects and hobbies, plus goals in my personal life. I've gone back and forth between "focus on one thing" and "juggle a dozen projects until they all come crashing down".

Honestly, I feel happier and less stressed if I have a long list of projects that I can work on. Right now, my job and my app are top priority, followed by my info-product. After that, all of my projects are just there for me to have fun (for now). When I'm stressed with my normal work, sometimes it's more rejuvenating to work on a fun side project for a day, rather than waste the day staring at my screen in frustration or just giving up and watching cartoons. When it's time to get back to work, I know what my priorities are, but when I'm just fucking around, why not be kind of productive still and build stuff that I want to build?

Side projects (just for fun, for now):

• Memes website / social media
• Data explorer / visualization software
• Intro to programming course
• Guide on how to build websites
• Code reading / contributing to open-source projects

These projects are much cooler than they sound here - I'm being intentionally vague for now.

Plus, outside of the Internet: surfing, piano, weight lifting, improving my C programming skills, getting my wife pregnant

Over the past 10 years I've removed a lot of self-imposed limitations. My lifestyle has improved dramatically and my income is pretty decent too. This past 12-18 months I've worked a lot on increasing my productive capacity, and now I'm feeling like there's no limit on how much I can do and there's no speed limits. Basically, I might have gotten a handful of productive hours per week in the past, but now I feel like there's no reason not to complete dozens of hours of meaningful work per week. It's crazy to experience how much stuff I can actually get done if I just get to it and stop fucking around.

 

[Kay]

It's exam month over here and academically I've been a miscreant this semester. So for July, I'd be dividing my day into 3 parts -- a third of the day would be spent studying, the second third; sleeping and miscellaneous tasks (think bathing, brushing, chores, e.t.c.). The final third would be where I'd squeeze in IM activities.

For the month of July ...

1. Publish 6 cornerstone articles.

This site needs meat.

2. Spend an hour (~) writing every morning.

My wake up alarm is set to go off at 4:44 am. 5 am - 6 am would be spent just writing -- WiFi turned off!

3. Spend less than an hour on Facebook.

Rescuetime reported I spent almost 6 hours on Facebook in June

4. Publish 2 Linkbait articles.

I need to start looking towards traffic leaking and link building.

....................

I can't wait to go from quarter-to-broke to half-past-rich

 

[Concept]

This Months Goals

• Set up branded IFTTT network
• 6 new pieces of content
• Apply to at least 30 more Pinterest Group Boards
• Continued Pinterest Promotion
• Promote Skyscraper Content and get those links.
• Sign up to new affiliate (just found - perfect for my audience)

Non-work related

• Get health and wellbeing under control
  
• New job. - My mate is selling the site I've been helping him with. I've got a couple of months to find another form of income, but I'll start looking now.

 

[darkzerothree]

Non - entrepreneurial
We are moving house this month and work is crazy..

Nonetheless - entrepreurial
12 new pieces of content
- 6 news items
- 3 big articles
- 3 supplementary

1 big article on here - JOURNAL for me

 

[eliquid]

I don't have a word for most of what I'm trying to do this month, but it revolves around processes and time management.

For example:

• Looking to remove distractions. I work primarily on my desktop, but I have another desktop, laptop, and phone that I seem to always be on. Being on them is not the issue, but they create distractions.
  • I might be working on my desktop and then my phone rings or gets a txt message.
  • I might be working on my laptop and see a notification on my desktop.
  • I would be working on anything and a notification comes up on itself ( like mail, Skype, those damn web push notifications I never ACCEPT but still get ).
    
• Looking to also hone in on my processes.
  • Instead of using Workflowly, Trello, Evernote, Basecamp, Notepad++, Todoist for all kinds of different but somewhat overlapping things, I need just a core process of 1 or 2 tools.
  • Instead of leaving the house every 3-4 hours for X Y or Z, leaving that to just 1 trip later in the day no matter what to do everything.
  • Instead of putting something off to focus on it in 1 core chunk of time, working on it little by little each day and THEN focus on the editing of it in 1 core chunk of time.
  • etc

I was once really good at this, to the point I felt like I hindered myself. I opened myself up to change and low and behold nothing really improved. I was right along before I made my changes and I should have stuck to them originally.

It's been a battle, but Im working to get my processes down to just Evernote and Dropbox for notes and collections of things. I might try OneNote but if I take it on, I need to ditch Evernote and not keep both.

I'm also going through and removing myself from newsletters, push notifications, and working in spurts where Thunderbird, Skype, and my cell phone are just not open and on to distract me.

What good is organizing your day into time task chunks if you are distracted every 7 minutes?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Missed this somehow!

JV Project:

• Dropped just under a grand on some link acquisition. It'll likely be a month or two before we see how this goes, and it'll be a huge determiner on whether or not we keep chucking money at this project. I'm having a hard time telling if it's insanely competitive (I mean... I know it is) or if we're still being throttled from the link penalty (recall someone had used this in a giant web 2.0 PBN as a co-citation, I got the penalty lifted but not sure if it's still lingering a bit).

Main Project:

• Back in the saddle here after taking on a design project and going on vacation. I've been editing outsourced content like mad and posting it. Just ordered 2 more expensive money posts and am trying to order about 15 blog posts (sourcing ideas is tough). I'm eager to get out of this outsourcing phase for a bit so I can write and do some serious marketing. I can pump out content faster myself, but I don't know the topics of this batch so I'm editor for now. I want to move the needle on this big time.
• I'm taking on a couple other jobs for the sole purpose of dumping the money right into this project, particularly some more outreach.

Anything else I'm involved in is going to just sit for now. I can't spread myself too thin.

 

[Concept]

How I went in July

• Set up branded IFTTT network - DONE.
• 6 new pieces of content - 4 only
• Apply to at least 30 more Pinterest Group Boards - DONE
• Continued Pinterest Promotion - DONE
• Promote Skyscraper Content and get those links. - NOT DONE.
• Sign up to new affiliate (just found - perfect for my audience) - DONE

Non-work related

• Get health and well-being under control - DONE
  
• New job. - My mate is selling the site I've been helping him with. I've got a couple of months to find another form of income, but I'll start looking now. - DONE

 

[Ryuzaki]

JV Project:

• Dropped just under a grand on some link acquisition. - Preliminary movements suggest this will be completely worth it. It already paid, I'd say... about 1/5th of it's cost off. We had our best month yet thanks to the boost.

Main Project:

• Just ordered 2 more expensive money posts and am trying to order about 15 blog posts (sourcing ideas is tough). - I ordered all that stuff, got it back, got it in draft form, dripped one out. Will prep and schedule all of it right after...
• I'm taking on a couple other jobs for the sole purpose of dumping the money right into this project. - ... the first job is nearly done. It's been a fun one but a doozy too. The front end design is more complicated than most jobs I take on, and the backend had a lot more going on than usual. It wasn't a challenge so much as energy and time consuming. These are much more fulfilling though. The 2nd job will start immediately after I finish the first and I'm thinking it's about 1/10th the work, and then I'll be right back to the main project's content.

Mission Success!

 

[Kay]

Shit. 2 weeks into August already!

From July:

• Publish 6 cornerstone articles. -- 3/6 in July but developed a spreadsheet based on the one /u/humblesalesman shared over at /r/juststart. This has cut down my time spent editing (and formatting) content by at least 2 hours. Published around 9 others in the past few days, based on this spreadsheet.
• Spend an hour (~) writing every morning. -- Bust. No excuses here, I just was NOT disciplined enough.
  
• Spend less than an hour on Facebook. -- Bust (kinda). Just checked in with Rescue time, I spent exactly 2h 33m on Facebook in July. Almost half that of June, but way more than my target for July.
  
• Publish 2 Linkbait articles. -- Err... Bust? Yep. I just checked my list of published articles, Total Bust.

Not a single green. Fuck. I need to work...on myself