Morning all,
Sunday here and we’ve hit day 24.
My plan with these blogs is to make it to day 100 before I actually break for a while and assess what they’ve done for me.
The SEO team say for two months they’re not going to run actual ‘SEO’ on my website blog
If you take a look at my website the main pages I’ve put together a load of service pages that my team and I can technically deliver – but they’re items that I think are best kept on my company website Pearl Lemon or kept to a blog perhaps.
To list them as main services of ‘Deepak Shukla’ feels grossly inaccurate given the things I write about just via this blog.
Right now 24 days into this – my blog is beginning to index for over 100 keywords:
This is great to see because it means Google has indexed my blog and is beginning to rank it for certain keywords.
At the moment there’s not much to do with this but watch and wait.
As I produce more and more daily content this indexation will increase and what I’ll probably start tactically doing is every 5 Quora answers I’ll include a direct reference back to somewhere on my blog to start generating some relevant links.
After two to three months, however, we will assess where Google is showing favourability and perhaps start link building correspondingly
Fundamentally the plan longer term is to build ‘Deepak Shukla’ into more of a news style site. It may be the case that’s a terrible practice in terms of building a brand but then I have Pearl Lemon and my agency growth coach to help me with those elements.
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The other idea I had as of yesterday is that I’d like to take my newsletter to 125 pieces, which brings me to today’s blog.
(Click here to read more on how I’m using LinkedIn Outreach to build my newsletter)
Half the shit I do is basically for fun and an outlet.
A way of being able to communicate with the world.
I’ve been working alone since I was maybe 21 (I’m 33 now)
That’s 12 years I’ve spent by myself for large periods of time, and that fundamentally changes you.
For several years I went through bouts of depression I think. No one would know it because I was still busy being productive and being ‘depressed’ in my family (like many others) isn’t something that you do.
You just got on with it, which is exactly what I did.
But it relates to simply just being alone.
Being someone who used to be extremely social and spend my time in the company of others through university and all of my travels (which I still actually did solo mostly) – switching to being actively alone was difficult.
Many things have happened since which is a story for another blog but fundamentally I’d say now that I prefer being alone, I’ve totally adjusted to being by myself (or around Strawberry) for most of the day – and I can happily stay home during weekends.
Now that I wake up so early, going out in the evenings doesn’t hold much appeal to me and I’ll have friends such as Adrian who come and hang out with me in the daytime more heavily than the evenings.
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Which finally brings me to the newsletter I’ve just made reference to.
Now the newsletter as you know it relates to some type of marketing funnel that we put people through.
I’m literally building one now with my agency growth coach about ‘e-commerce SEO’ as a means of targeting a niche in a bid to scale my agency to 100k a month.
What with Corona massively affecting my business I do need to make a push for it.
We’ll run ads to put people into the e-commerce funnel and grow it that way.
However, with the newsletter I’ve built I’ve done something completely different.
With it, I wanted to build an evergreen funnel that would contain stories and interesting things about my life that would never go out of date.
I.e still relevant in 5-10 years (think about that by the way 5 or 10 YEARS)
They would perhaps need adjusting over time, but fundamentally – I wanted to build something more akin to a TRUST FUNNEL
A funnel that would pull back the curtain of my life and walk people through some of the random stuff I’ve done and more.
It has been really fun writing it.
At first, the idea was to call it 52k words in 52k days – so the newsletter would then effectively last for a year.
Here’s the content in a Google Doc now:
If you want to sign up just head here
However, as you can see come day 54, I ended up pushing past and continuing.
The newsletter spans a vast range of topics and doesn’t have any ‘one’ singular focus.
This is why it’s a trust funnel.
It’s the one type of newsletter I can introduce ABSOLUTELY anybody to and they could well find it interesting.
A snapshot of the sign up page:
And this is why it has proven so effective – because of its wide casting net.
I’ve got several of my team signed up, strangers, distant friends and more.
It’s the type of newsletter that you can give to anyone who takes an interest in you, or you’d like to take an interest in you.
It’s a newsletter that NO-ONE can compete with because it’s punctuated by my personal stories of my life – which will NEVER go out of date
As a consequence of it, everytime I fall into good conversations online, in person or anywhere else I have an opportunity to introduce my newsletter as a means of building trust.
So let’s go through some numbers:
(btw if you’re wondering where I find the time – well you see what time I wake up:
And it means I’ve got the time to spend on things like this.
[convertful id=”197358″]
I started writing my 52k words project here:
The 5th of December was when I had the idea.
It was pretty much done two and a half months later, the bulk of it got done over the holiday period as not much business was happening then.
It’s likely (60 x 1.5k words) around 75,000 words.
(interestingly I’m now going to REPOST a status update about this and see what happens)
Here are some examples of the feedback I’ve gotten:
The people in the list above from top to bottom – the first one explored a job with Pearl Lemon, 2nd is my friend’s old flatmate (whose gone on to discuss a £25k marketing project with us), 3rd person is an agency owner, 4th is an investor (whose just signed a £9k contract with us for SEO).
Outside this if you refer to yesterday’s blog I actually have had another SEO contract spring from this as well as around £100,000 worth of Forex investments that have been made with my broker.
As people have asked for introductions.
Then there are others who have been keeping up with the newsletter that have randomly reached out to me to discuss business or otherwise.
So I have several business interests:
- My SEO & B2B Lead Generation Agency
- Property Investing
- Forex Investing
- My WordPress Content Publishing Tool (it’s how I post this blog)
And as a result of a general newsletter, I have built immense trust and when people feel they need something I am very close to top of mind.
The guys who have made Forex investments are introducing friends now and scaling their own investments, and it seems a couple of introductions come in each month totally passively via my newsletter.
This is how I came to the $250,000 mark.
I’m really proud of the newsletter because I’ve never seen anything like it; writing 75,000 words for fun whilst in business isn’t an easy task – but I’m also confident it’ll drive tons of business for me over time.
This is how I promote it – messaging my entire 1st-degree network on LinkedIn:
And adding it as a popup on my two sites:
Right, that’s all for today – if you have comments/or want more details leave a comment below and I can update this blog.
But here are today’s final thoughts:
- Don’t build a funnel around a niche unless you’ve got true insights, and it’s the 1 thing you do (or build separate ones as I am with the e-commerce piece)
- A trust funnel is a huge differentiator – no one does that
- Build it over a long period to keep an active email list
- Building it is quicker than you think. Just wake up earlier.
Catch you tomorrow 🙂
