Trying to Figure Out My Internet Journey

Morning all,

I was just sat randomly getting lost in Nat Eliason’s content and the following the dude has built online.

Very smart guy, who built a 7-figure content marketing agency, Growth Machine – and is in the process of moving away from that.

Then I discovered he has gone Elk Hunting, written a book on how to have great sex, and a load of other random stuff where I’m like ‘bloody hell!’.

Seems like a very cool dude – and of course as per the title of this blog – has got me trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing with my internet journey.

I know a couple of things for certain at least –

Pearl Lemon is cool, but I want to focus more on other projects. I’ve built the agency up to a certain size – and now I’m looking to see if I can continue in my absence completely.

Replace Myself Within Pearl Lemon

With this in mind – here’s a couple of things that I need to do:

Identify key players within the business:

CEO – currently me

Head of operations – Lydia?

Head of client relationship management -?

Head of lead-gen – Prishani?

Head of sales – Ion?

Head of SEO – Semil

Head of the placement programme – Federica?

These are the roles that I need to fulfil to make sure I’m able to step away.

I think I’m about 6-months away from being able to get out of the day to day runnings of the business.

Today I’ve got a call about the client relationship management and lead generation positions.

If I’m able to nail those two, the others become less critical.

It’s managing campaigns and managing clients that is the most time-consuming – and if we can get those to a place of goodness then fantastic.

I started the agency journey in October of 2016, and it’s hit just over 4 years now, and my growth has been so-so.

I think I’m ready to make the thing I think about now NOT agency stuff; or rather NOT the parts I don’t enjoy as much – which is having to deal with client problems, and managing sales questions.

Working on building the company content, the brand overall is definitely things I do enjoy and would like to keep with – but I’m looking to minimise my involvement to maybe 1 hour per day.

It’s also because I don’t want to have to worry about remembering stuff like this:

Grow My Blog Readership

That’s this thing that you’re reading right now. Last year was the year that I started writing, and this year is the year I’m beginning to treat it as more of a priority and not solely an afterthought.

What has been put in place first of all – is my commitment to write each day. Ideally, I’d like to hit 2,000 words per day but I won’t set that as a goal – I think I’ll just stick with putting ‘pen to paper’ so to speak to ensure the words keep coming.

There’s a quote actually from a book I just finished reading by Anthony Heston called ‘10x’.

To paraphrase – it’s that in the end – action will always unlock perfection.

I love this quote because I think it’s such a truism of anything you do in life.

There are multiple things I’m doing WRONG with my blog at the moment – but there also ALL quickly being changed.

Here’s the changes that are pending/already happened since I decided to just start writing each day –

Removing all old blog content not written by me:

Unfortunately, there was a time where I didn’t care about sticking my own actual content onto my blog and had a ghostwriter when it came to content production.

As you can see – that was when I thought it was sensible to produce content about SEO.

Last year I stopped giving a f*ck about writing stuff to rank on Google and that’s it and so I started producing my own stuff regularly – and of course, this played upon my mind.

This stuff is still on the site – but by the end of this month (Jan) it should be gone.

Removing all those silly service pages:

Again the same rationale as above. I had these built out when I had different ideas about my blog.

But now – no, I don’t want to talk to people about any of these things other than SEO – so now all those service pages (and blogs) are getting a fat 301-redirect to my main company page.

[convertful id=”197358″]

The Book A Call Button

That’s also going to go. Atm it redirects to my company page on Pearl Lemon – but I’m going to kill it completely

The Whatsapp Chat Option

That’s also going. I don’t want people to contact me/the company via Whatsapp

Free Stuff

I’ve reorganised the menu a little to highlight the free stuff people can get from me:

Ads

I’m running some $5 per day ads to my website to grow the traffic.

Also, I just want to see what happens if I do this for one month – to see what kind of result I get

Website Speed Up

I’ve got a new developer in that is going to work on improving the website speed and solve any other big technical issues

Other Sh*t

So the above is a smattering of things that are in progress and there’s more besides this such as:

• Adding an opt-in form at the bottom of my blogs
• Maybe adding a blog popup for my newsletter – I’ve not decided this yet
• My designer wants to redesign the whole blog – knowing him that will probably take months

Repurposing framework

• Repurposing content from my blog to post on Medium and grow my Medium following there
• Repurposing content from my blog to post on LinkedIn and grow my LinkedIn following there
• Repurposing content from my blog to post on Amazon as ebooks and grow my following there

Keyword Research

I’ve tasked the SEO team with doing proper keyword research so I can actually grow this damn blog.

Although ideally I just want you folks to follow all of the random crap I write about haha.

The Blog Then Generates Actions:

It’s definitely the case that where attention goes energy flows – and all of these pieces will help my plan to grow my personal following in 2021.

Writing each morning like this:

It’s been like 45 minutes now. But here’s an interesting thing – whilst I’ve been writing this – I wonder how many emails I’ve sent in the middle.

Let’s check quickly:

I sent 7-emails as well lol.

Make that 8 now :p

If you were to actually cross-reference some of this blog with those subject lines you’ll see that the writing of this actually translates into actions for my team.

What happens often is that my musings will end up generating ideas which precipitate actions that I’ll send out over on email.

It’ll all begin with me writing in the morning and coming up with some new ideas – but mostly reinforcing habits I’m trying to build.

Like writing this blog, in combination with wondering what the hell it’s going to be about.

The Longest Business You’ll Ever Be In

What’s fascinating if you think about it – is that if you read my 2020 in review blog – you’ll see that there are loads of project I’m in the midst of trying to build.

No one – with any certainty can say which of those will exist in 10 years from now.

However, it is with almost extreme certainty we can say that in a decade from now…deepakshukla.com is likely to still be around.

Heck in 30 years it should still be around right?

So in fact, when you think about business ventures – there should ALWAYS be some time allocation to the building of your personal brand.

Once people actually like what the frick you talk about and what you have to say on things – it’s ONLY ONLY (repetition felt important here lol) going to be for the betterment of your business.

As I was saying to my good friend Daniel Botcherby – and as I tell multiple others – people follow people first, and companies a distant second.

So bring your story to the fore, share your stream of consciousness on ideas with others – and if people find your stories meaningful then yes they’ll absolutely become your fans.

And that’ll help in every aspect of your professional life.

Winning Deals, Building Lists And All That Good Stuff

Becoming a content marketing machine – at one point will pay off.

Fact.

And it’ll happen much much sooner than you think.

Take me and my blog – I’m making about every mistake in the book.

So much content being written that is no longer needed.

Removing old content.

Doing zero keyword research.

I’m sure you’ll find multiple other problems.

Yet, we’ve closed about 25% of our deals because people check out my personal brand – and in a saturated and commoditized market such as SEO – where it’s pretty damn difficult to compete against others on a product/service differentiation basis.

Your brand and your identity can be your differentiator – and all this stuff I do keeps coming up in calls.

So given 2020 was our best year – it’s been of massive help to us – even with all of those mistakes.

Final Thoughts

So the title of my blog is ‘trying to figure out my internet journey’ – I’ve got no doubt my SEO team will hate me when trying to understand how to rank a page like this.

But in truth – it really IS what I’m doing – trying to figure out what I want to do, what my next steps are, and well, in 2021 figure out how to grow my personal brand.

And again, even this morning I’ve asked Lydia to learn Quora ads, Rebecca to launch Pinterest growth, in parallel with the YouTube content push I’m making with the cadence of ‘record two videos per day’ that I’m on at the moment.

I’m excited for whatever my internet journey may hold as this year unravels and I maintain my commitment to trying to grow my personal brand.

By writing about whatever I want, whenever I want lol.