SHP #16: Developing a Product
Because what got me where I am won't get me where I want to go
I'm a side hustle hoarder. Here are the side hustles I'm currently hoarding š¤£:
Several websites spanning personal finance, online presence, coin collecting, making money online, and weight loss
A number of domains
130+ stories on Medium
Followings on several social media sites
Two YouTube channels, neither monetized
Pinterest boards
Several Facebook groups, one with nearly 23k members
A mailing list of 300+ wonderful subscribers
Two newsletters (one daily, one weekly)
A website design and maintenance client
A reselling presence on eBay
Accounts with sporadic affiliate or referral income
And a piano student with leads on others
A few dozen musical arrangements and compositions
The boldface pieces are what I'm focusing on now, mainly around the currency collecting community I've built.
Developing some Obsidian templates for content creators
One issue I've had for quite a while is the following:
I'll sit down to write something (late at night)
I won't have any idea what to write about
It takes me a while to figure something out
It's mediocre at best when I do
This is my own doing.
I don't have a system to draw from when I need to.
But that's changing.
I worked this week to develop that system which is doing the following:
Reducing friction by standardizing my notes
Clarifying what each piece of content is in my vault
Simplifying things and leveling the playfield to allow me to combine more freely
This is part of a template creation challenge that Jamie Northrup put up in his Skool community.
We're getting a template product together in 7 days. This will be mine.
It's already helping:
I really wish I had a before/after picture but imagine a picture with lots fewer notes and many fewer connections and all one color.
In just a few hours of working with the templates I designed:
I have a lot more useful notes that I can inspect and link in the graph view.
There are a lot more connections, and I know exactly how they're put together.
The colors! That took me only a couple of minutes to implement after applying the templates.
I'm excited about this. If you want to be the first to know when the templates are ready, then comment "templates" and I'll make sure you know!
Three consistent pieces pretty much every day
I've been doing these things each day (or at least six times a week):
Sending out my Solid Cash Tips newsletter
Dumping at least 750 words into 750Words.com (67-day streak!)
The third thing I'm doing now is this:
Adding notes to my Zettelkasten (second brain)
And now with the templates I'm developing, this should go faster!
Learn from one Side Hustler's Progress!
Let's go!
1. Monetizing a YouTube channel: One short
I posted one short to my Cool Serial YouTube channel.
This makes 110 videos on the channel. Some statistics:
67 regular videos and 43 shorts
837 subscribers (+4 from last week)
144.2k views and 4.5k watch hours (lifetime)
The watch hours for the past 28 days are "less than usual" which isn't surprising because I haven't been posting much.
Continuing to add CTAs to videos
I have an ebook on Fancy Serial Numbers for Fun and Profit that sold a few dozen copies a few years ago. The sales had gone away for a while because the sales plugin had started to get a bit flaky.
(No sales yet from this but the more times I add it, the more likely someone will be to click. That's just numbers.)
I'm continuing to add calls to action (CTAs) to my videos, and I've developed a template to add it to new videos.
For the coming week: Two more videos and two more shorts.
2. Solid Cash Tips newsletter
I use Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to manage my minimalist Solid Cash Tips newsletter.
Issues 173 to 178 went out each weekday and Saturday. All of them went out at 8:40 AM.
Here they are if you're interested.
Solid Cash Tips continues to be consistent.
It's one of a few things I'm holding onto for dear life to as I build systems to put content out consistently.
The open rates are still a bit less than I'd like. For the past month or so they've been remarkably consistent, between 11% and 15%. Mark Thompson set a goal for me to get that number more like 30%, which he says that I can do by getting subscribers that are more aligned with my messages.
For the coming week: Get out an issue every weekday again and Saturday.
3. Creating long-form content: FIVE posts
I got five long-form article out this week. I had planned for three. First time in a while I've been an overachiever!
Here they are:
My Medium earnings have been laughable, but that's not surprising.
There's a glimmer that my regular posting will make a difference:
This is a graph of views and reads for June. For reference, the full scale is 12. I find myself restarting building engagement but Iāve only failed if I quit, right?
The pillars on my main blog:
Spend Less
Make More
Live Well
I've created two Medium publications, Side Hustle Progress and Less Spendy .
I'll re-publish posts from my websites to these two publications.
For the coming week: Get out three long-form pieces.
Continue with the calls to action!
I'll continue with the flywheel concept of using one asset to promote another:
Newsletter subscribers are led to check out YouTube videos as well as the Facebook group.
Community posts give people links to watch the YouTube videos, and to subscribe to the newsletter.
YouTube videos have links to the community in their descriptions, or offer to sign up for the newsletter, or offer to buy an ebook.
I did this on some YouTube videos, and in the Facebook group.
Summary of how I did, and what I'm going to do
For the past week, a little bit better follow-through:
Post two more YouTube videos and two more shorts. PARTIAL (one short)
Get out an issue of Solid Cash Tips every weekday again and Saturday. DONE!
Get out three long-form articles. DONE PLUS (five!)
I'll look to do the same things this week.
What other things would you like to hear about? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for subscribing and reading!
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