Morning all,
I’m starting my writing block much later today so I feel pressed for time.
That’s why I’m curious to see what I’ll output today.
And this is inherently what’s wrong with my blog I’m sure.
I make things up as I go along.
This was something I was justifying to my friend Courtenay yesterday. I was talking about my love for writing and when I discussed it – upon showing my blog has something like 80+ entries…
I felt the need to explain why I didn’t have a bigger readership.
What’s clear then – is that I feel like I need bigger readership.
And it’s for reasons such as “I make things up as I go along” (I’m quoting myself now – just up above) that I don’t make the headway that I should.
I’ve just been diving into content from Nat Eliason, Matthew Woodward and Glen Allsopp – and all of the talk about the importance of keyword research when it comes to producing content.
I’ve – as you can see from my writing – have done zero of that and instead just wake up, figure out what I feel like writing about – and then I write.
I feel like being constrained by having to decide upon a subject based upon its competitiveness constrains my life-force.
That’s fine if I accept that it’s also going to limit my audience. But heck – I’ve written over 80,000 words – so I feel like someone should be commenting…
Or do I?
I can’t tell LOL because I’m still here, writing, and enjoying myself anyway.
It’s an interesting old mix anyway, thinking about what a tiny bit of planning (it could end up being a hard couple of hours) – could do to the skill I do have in spades – which is massive execution.
I probably should take a course (and I think I will in fact) – on becoming a more effective planner.
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Regardless, I will at least attempt some planning I hope in the coming week.
My process, in respect of driving new ‘routines’ or actions in my life, is by consciously making a big fuss about it.
For me – that means writing about it somewhere. And telling people about it.
It’s that act of moving it from the conscious recesses of my mind, and putting it into words.
Table of Contents
Habit Formation
That’s the interesting thing about building new habits – the aim is to ultimately set a ‘hard rule’ and try and burn it into your routine.
Habits – btw, are much much more useful than goals.
The goal I have is to make sure I stick to my morning routine, even if it sets other things in my day back.
That’s 30 minutes of reading (done), writing a blog (what I’m doing now), watching a couple of videos of subject related content (SEO/SaaS), and then recording 2 YouTube videos.
The pressure I feel then is that I started my day a couple of hours later than I intended to because I drank last night and went late to bed.
I regret both now and will tell Courtenay the next time we hang out – I want to have a go at not drinking – and also look at making that a new habit between us.
That would be a cool one.
The reason I’m so gung-ho with this routine I wish to instill – is as explained yesterday I think it’ll see me to success – and I want it to become more important than even responding to client emails.
Powerful routines have led my father to being fitter at 65 than most men his age. And feeling happier and healthier than he has in decades.
Looking at what he does – he doesn’t have any goals – his secret is having the same routine that he follows almost without fail.
And it’s not a brutal routine but a very casual one.
He’ll wake up between 8-8.30, have a cup of hot water, relax for a little bit, then go ahead and pray for 90 minutes, once he’s done that he’ll relax for 30 minutes again and then head into yoga for another 60 minutes.
Every day he does this (or a very close version of it without fail).
This extends into two walks per day he’ll do – one alone and one with my mum and I can see what impact it has upon his happiness and mental health.
And it’s a very relaxed routine to follow – which I’m now trying to emulate with my relaxed morning routine of waking up learning and reading.
The Results Of Some Newly Formed Routines
I was able, even yesterday – to see the fruits of such routines:
Lydia, my head of internal growth, was able to show me what’s happened after just two days of running ads on Facebook to grow my YouTube channel.
We’ve seen 912 link clicks at a cost of $8.24.
This is going to be a campaign I’m likely to never stop running in a bid to grow my YouTube following.
I’ll also be replicating this on our Pearl Lemon Official channel as a means of growth.
So rewards do come out of building new habits.
Let me walk you through what’s happened here:
- I was having weekly coaching with Craig Campbell which also made reference to growing YouTube
- I made a promise I’d record a certain amount of videos – which I initially failed to do
- Eventually, I got up to speed and recorded 3 videos for Craig to watch
- He said they were generally good, and with some minor tweaks I could continue
- I asked about ‘planning well in advance’ and doing keyword research etc – and he said he only planned a day or two out and sometimes would decide on the day what he would be doing
- As part of my new year routine I decided every morning I would record a video
- Quickly I ended up deciding that I would record two videos
- Once that happened I asked Lydia to launch ads and get the Facebook pixel on my site
- After some shuffling she got the ads live, and the Pixel is meant to shortly follow
- I then told Lydia to ‘improve the consistency across my channel in terms of video optimization and branding etc’ asap
- We’ve already seen some initial growth in that period – daily views went from 17 to 47 within 2 days
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Furthermore – since I’ve started publishing videos on the channel: 
Retention is shooting up as well as you can see.
In fact – as a consequence of this activity – I’ve decided to dump some more money into Facebook ads as you can see from this email I’ve just written and sent to Lydia:
Seeing results come in this fashion so quickly is really rewarding for me and as you can see – success begets success and is something I wish to pour more money and time into.
In fact – I think the video I do today might be ‘the power of running ads to grow your YouTube channel’.
(This is an example of taking inspiration and deciding to turn it into a video for my now growing audience).
Things I Still Need To Do
Now we return to this blog and the things I must work upon to help grow my audience.
- I need an email popup on my website to get people over towards signing up for my newsletter (which is also around 100k words).
- Once I’ve got that popup – I need to in the Welcome email itself also have an option to sign up for emails whenever a new BLOG gets published on my website.
- I SHOULD really do some keyword research to at least plan out some elements of what to write about so I can at least ‘choose’ to go after a keyword – in fact I might allocate this to one of the team right now
Writing out the above 3 bullet points took me like 10-15 minutes.
Here’s why:
I basically wrote it down and then immediately allocated the relevant actions to different members of the team to ensure that wheels start turning.
The Power Of Writing Things Down
Well, that’s probably the power that I draw from writing each morning at the moment then – if offers me the opportunity to start generating actions because I’m reminded me of the things I’m excited about and the things I need to do in order to move the needle.
I’ve had my frustrations that Google is not rewarding the team’s hard work when it comes to growing the Pearl Lemon website in terms of traffic and all.
But by writing these things down they get pushed into my conscious mind.
And by NOT checking my emails apart from sending messages out, and NOT jumping onto Whatsapp before 10.30 am each morning…
It gives me up to 6 hours to just get everything I want, in the time that I have – done.
And here’s the time.
And here’s the wordcount:
A good hours work considering I also in tandem shot out 6 emails with I think 3 videos and wrote some email copy.
And it’s exciting that my mind wants more.
The last couple of days I’ve been crossing the 3,000-word mark, and I’m afraid to whisper it – but I want to try and work on one new ‘shorter blog’ like this one, and then continue writing one monster blog (my hair transplant one) daily also.
Well – let’s see what happens.
Until next time amigos 😉
