This year is set to be one of the most productive years yet for me and my business. Late last year I decided to start moving my business forward which I’d been neglecting slightly due to the amount of client work I’d been tasked with. I have been so lucky these past 5 years that my business has grown from strength to strength. But one downside of this is I struggle to find the time to work on my business.
Challenge
I was given a challenge last year by one of my great clients, Phil from Positive Sparks, on the podcast we do together each month. He knew that I had been wanting to publish an eBook and I’d told him about my plans to update my eBook Marketing eCourse and publish this as a Kindle eBook. I’d been meaning to get round to it for ages… but it was just something I kept putting to the back of the queue behind everything else. Phil pushed me to do it because he made me accountable to the podcast audience! In September I decided that I had to get this done before the end of the year.
I tasked my great graphic designer Ryan to design me a cover and my wonderful writer James to go over it and make some improvements to my writing (basically editing it). It all came together just after Christmas and it went up on Amazon Kindle as a pre-order ready for the New Year. It was published on the 9th January and has been fairly high up in some of the Kindle store categories since then. I already have 5 reviews, all 5 star!
The eBook is aimed at newly self-published authors who want to get a head start in marketing their books. Having worked with many many self-published authors over the last 5 years I understood that they needed most help in this area, so doing the eCourse was my way of helping them out for free. Now I’ve published the book I hope that it will help a lot more authors get on with their marketing.
Themes
But back to the productivity. I came across Mike Vardy before Christmas, he runs The Productivityist… I took his online course through Todoist (my new project management tool of choice) and found that I really liked some of the ways he worked. I also learnt some great new things I can do with Todoist to make my days more productive. I spent a good few weeks following Mike and really taking on some of his ways of working. The one thing which has helped me enormously is to theme my months. You can read a recent article from Mike here about his year in preview and how monthly themes work.
I themed January as ‘My eBook’ – that meant I chose to spend my free business time on my newly published eBook. That covered things like marketing it, getting reviews for it and generally finding ways in which I can get the word out there. I have had a fair amount of success, but I feel that just having that month concentrating on one goal really helped me get things done.
In fact January was a great month for me, I earn’t the most I’ve ever done in one month (in 5 years), got my eBook published and I have also been #1 of #811 on The Executive Secretary Top 250 Social Media Power List for two consecutive weeks! Not only that, I also helped #MicroBizMattersDay trend on Twitter (with my VA helpers) for pretty much the whole event on the 13th. I felt I needed a treat, so I bought myself a Fitbit, it’s very rare that I buy something just for me.
So back to monthly themes… my theme for February is going to be the eCourse (and also to create my new home office). I am going to use the eBook to get the eCourse updated, there is no point in having an out of date incentive on my website! As for the office, I have a lovely mezzanine area in my house which is currently where the cat hides from the dogs and does most of his living. This is the second warmest room in my house in winter, so I am going to totally redesign it and create a fab workspace with a reading nook (for the cat mainly, but for me too!). I will be taking photos when I get started so I can share the transformation.
I already have a theme for March, but that’s some news I’ll share with you later on.
Tools
My Facebook group has also been growing and we’ve even had some app/tool founders popping in offering our members a chance to try out their new apps/tools. The monthly podcast I do with Phil has also been great, and the last one we did in January I was really excited about my latest app Blinkist. I paid for this app, which I hardly ever do, so you can see how much I like it. Blinkist has over 1500 non-fiction books available to read, but in short bursts (blinks)… so you get the entire book in something you can read in about 15 minutes. I have been devouring books most nights and learnt so much, my library of books to read gets bigger every day! You must check it out if you want to read but don’t have time to.
Productivity is my theme for the whole year… what’s yours?
