60 Days Project

Principles From My Favorite Self-Help Book

Today I turn 37. Today’s post is a list of my favorite, most influential principles from my favorite self-help book, The Book Of Mormon.

Cover of The Book Of Mormon – Another Testament Of Jesus Christ

This post is part of the 60 Day Project – one post a day to help you prepare your business for success in 2021. Subscribe using the button below to get new posts sent straight to your email.

Sign Me Up!

Surprised that I would choose a book of scripture as my favorite self-help book? Then I apologize that I don’t talk about it more often.

In 2017 I wrote an entire book about the principles in The Book of Mormon. I was shocked to find that I had highlighted over 300 verses or sections during my research for the project and shared those in a daily email series that lasted more than 11 months.

The principles in The Book of Mormon, more than any other book, have improved my life, helped me to progress, and find joy and fulfillment.

I want to share those principles today on my 37th birthday, (I’ll try to get to 37 but I make no promises…) in hopes that they can help you as well.

In no particular order, here we go:

There Is A God

We have heavenly parents who love us, who know us, who we lived with as spirits before we came here.

There Is A Plan

This same God created a plan for us, his children, to be able to come here to earth, gain experience and make choices, and ultimately return to live with Him again.

There Is A Savior

Because the plan included agency – our ability to choose for ourselves between right and wrong, good and evil – there was also the reality that we would sin. Sin makes us imperfect, and so we needed a way to become perfect again to live with our family in heaven.

The plan required an ultimate sacrifice, one that could only be made by a perfect being. Our Savior, Jesus Christ, provided that sacrifice willingly, and by doing so he has made it possible for us to live with God again one day.

We Are Not Alone

God, in His infinite wisdom, didn’t leave us stranded here on earth to fend for ourselves. In this plan He provided a spiritual guide. A comforter, a source of truth and direction. A Holy Spirit that is one with Him in purpose – to help us live in heaven with our heavenly family forever.

Have Charity Towards Others

Charity is different than love. You can’t have charity for yourself – it’s an outward-facing attribute. This desire for the well-being of others is one of the most God-like attributes, and we should aspire to have charity for everyone.

There Is Opposition In All Things

This principle is essential when trying to make progress in life. There are choices to be made along the way, there are highs and lows, good days and bad days, love and hate, joy and sadness.

This opposition is important to remember – we wouldn’t know joy if there were no sadness. Our best days exist only because we are able to compare them to the hard ones.

Seek Joy

This life isn’t meant to be a struggle, a fight, a battle, or a war. We are here to have joy – joy in our work, in our relationships, in every aspect of our lives.

Keep Your Word

There is an emphasis on the importance of covenants in The Book of Mormon. A covenant is a promise we make with God – to keep His commandments, do His will, and live life in a way that shows Him how much we want to return to live with Him again. Our word is important – not just with Him, but with everyone with interact with.

Humility is Required

So many other principles – faith, hope, charity, repentance, obedience, etc. – are only possible if one is humble. Being humble means you understand a bigger picture – that without God nothing is possible. That we need to rely on Him, our Savior, and the Holy Spirit to get the joy we are after. That humility extends to the way we live our lives, treat other people, do our work, and more.

Avoid Pride

The opposite of humility is pride. It’s the belief that you can do it all alone, and that others – including God – should see things your way, rather than the other way around. Avoiding pride, entitlement, and the like is one of the best things you can do to have a life full of joy – because you’ll never be let down.

Seek Knowledge

Knowledge is mentioned many many times in The Book of Mormon. The desire for knowledge is important, to seek it, to nurture it, and to act on it. It’s a life-long pursuit that never ends, and can never be fully attained.

God Is Powerful

In moments that are hard, this principle helps me remember not only that I’m not alone, but that with God all things are possible. We can get so myopic sometimes, and just taking a moment to step back and see a bigger picture and remember the power that God has allows me to see and approach things a different way.

Faith Is Required

Faith, as I’ve come to define, is belief + action. Having faith means that I need to act in accordance with the things I believe in. My faith has not only allowed me to experience incredible joy through my efforts, but make incredible progress throughout my life.

Prayer Is Real

The ability to communicate with our Heavenly Father is an essential lifeline in my life. The responses aren’t always as quick as a text message or an email, but when I need Him, he’s there, and when I’m stuck, I can rely on Him to help guide me. Incredible blessings have come to my life through the power and act of prayer.

The Holy Spirit Knows ALL Things

No matter what I deal with in life, when things get hard, if I remember to be humble, to have faith, and to go to my Heavenly Father in prayer, there’s nothing that I can’t be taught or shown or directed to through the Holy Spirit. It’s – for lack of a better word – the ultimate “life hack”, to have the companionship of a member of the Godhead helping me in my life.

Remember Your Covenants

Similar to keeping your word, when you make covenants with God, they dictate the way you live your life. Covenants like baptism, receiving the priesthood, and marrying my wife are all things that inform how I live day to day. Remembering our covenants can help remove options in life that would only distract us from getting to where we want to go.

God Speaks To Us Through Prophets

Throughout the Book of Mormon we see examples of God speaking to prophets and leaders to guide groups of people. Following these inspired leaders gives me the direction I need at a high level to know what I can focus on to bring more joy into my and my family’s lives.

Scriptures Are A Source Of Truth

Truth is a knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come. The scriptures not only teach eternal truths, but help us apply those truths to our own lives and situations. As a bonus, the act of turning to the scriptures for knowledge and truth and guidance is a way to interact with the Holy Spirit to get inspiration and revelation that may not be on the page, but comes from the process.

Diligence Is Needed

Life is hard sometimes. And those hard times can last longer than we hoped or expected. By keeping a long-term focus and not giving up, we can get through those times and we can come out stronger on the other end.

Agency Is Given To Everyone

When we disagree with or are frustrated by the actions of others, it’s important to remember that all have this same gift from God, the ability to choose and act for ourselves. We’re not always going to choose good over bad, right over wrong, and neither are others. We have to remember that the freedom to choose is God-given, and not for us to take away from others. Remembering this makes it a little easier when others make choices I disagree with.

In the Big(gest) Picture – Life Is Fair

There are rules, there are laws, there are things in place that – in the big picture, the eternal picture – make life fair. I realize my privilege as I write this, but firmly believe that God’s plan and God’s laws are fair. They are based on truth and justice, and we can use that truth and justice to feel better about the work we’re putting in every day, even if things aren’t working out how we’d planned.

Repentance Builds Faith & Humility

If there were a “superpower” of a principle, it’s repentance. Going to God regularly to ask for forgiveness for bad choices, missed opportunities, and the like gives you more of two other essential attributes – faith and humility.

It requires humility to repent – you have to believe that you need repentance in order to repent – and the act of doing so builds faith.

Prosperity Comes To Those Who Do God’s Will

My experience has been that the more that I’m living these principles, the better my life is. I have more joy. I have more peace. More unexpected blessings come into my life from my Heavenly Father. I feel closer to Him and feel more guided and more clarity from the Holy Spirit.

We Show Our Love For God Through Service

When our lives are centered around benefitting others rather than just ourselves, it’s a way to show God that we “get it” – that we understand the plan, and we’re willing to be a part of it. Communities and families in The Book of Mormon thrived when things were common among them, when they looked out for each other, when they acted out of love and charity rather than pride and to “get gain”. God then rewards those people when they are serving each other and loving each other.

Work Is Necessary

In order to realize any of the principles and blessings that are outlined in The Book of Mormon, we have to put in the work. Not only for a short, set period of time, but for our whole lives. We need to be actively engaged, putting effort into things that are good, that serve others, that make the world a better place. The blessings flow to those who act in faith, not those who are slothful or lazy.

I lost count as to how many principles were covered there, but I want to end with my belief that these principles have served me well over the last 37 years.

Many were taught to me by loving parents who I am incredibly grateful for. Some were reinforced or reminded of because of friends or coworkers or people I follow online.

When you live your life according to principles that help you feel joy and love and certainty, you can’t help but experience those things.

Despite how crazy and uncertain this year has been, these principles have provided a foundation for me to build on. I’ve started two businesses this year. I have created more time with my wife and kids each day and each week. I have new friendships and have had new experiences that never would have come in any other year.

Overall I’m incredibly grateful to be alive, to be loved, to be able to do what I love, and to be right where I am. If you’re reading this, you’re part of that incredible feeling of gratitude, so thank you for your time and attention.

I’m excited for what’s to come this next year, and looking forward to all of the people I get to work with and serve along the way.

Finding And Creating Leverage In Your Business

Pulling lessons from Naval Ravikant and Nathan Barry on creating leverage, and using it to get results in your business.

Several white arrows pointing upwards on a wooden wall
Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash

This post is part of the 60 Day Project – one post a day to help you prepare your business for success in 2021. Subscribe using the button below to get new posts sent straight to your email.

Sign Me Up!

I’ve thought a lot about the idea of leverage since reading Naval Ravikant’s famous Twitter thread on weath:

In it he mentions the topic of leverage a few times. I’ll share those tweets here, then get into how we can use this principle in our creative businesses:

Lets dive in!

How To Use Leverage In Your Creative Business

The idea with leverage is to use your time, your assets, your mind, whatever is at your disposal to get to a desired result faster.

You’ve likely heard of Archimedes’ comment on leverage –

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. ”

He knew, and could prove using math, that this principle is true.

Naval gives us an updated and specific call to action – arm yourself with…leverage.

It’s one of three things he says we need in this context in the pursuit of riches, or wealth.

For us creative types, we can look at a creative freelancer for a perfect example of how to apply this principle.

Creating Leverage – From Freelancer To CEO

Nathan Barry is someone I’ve been following for a long time, nearly a decade now. He started off as a freelance designer, trading his time for dollars. In this scenario, there isn’t much leverage. In order for money to be made, Nathan had to be working.

A few years into his career, he created some digital products that he could sell – iPhone apps and ebooks.

All of a sudden, he created a little bit of leverage. These products could be sold without him being present. He could code an app, or write a book, once, and sell it many times over.

Nathan made hundreds of thousands of dollars off of his products without needing to increase the amount of time he was working. He created leverage. Now, instead of 40 hours of work for a $3,000 project, he could spend a week writing a book that could make $250,000 in sales.

From there, Nathan created a company called ConvertKit – an email service provider for creators. The initial version he built was $50/month to use. I know because I was probably one of the first hundred or so users back in 2013.

Since that time, he now serves over 30,000 creators, has a company with dozens of employees, and revenues in the millions of dollars per year. ConvertKit’s business is open for anyone to view, and you can see the kind of leverage he has created through code, people, and media.

Creating an app and a company to leverage turned his time into millions and millions of dollars.

From $3,000, to a few hundred thousand, to millions of dollars. That’s what leverage looks like in a creative business. Nathan took the same principle Naval talks about and used all three forms of leverage – capital, people, and products – to create an incredible life for him and his employees.

“Code And Media Are Permissionless”

This part of the thread is where I want to leave off today. Creating this kind of leverage doesn’t require permission from anyone.

You can create assets like photographs, music, books, apps, courses, and more and no one can stop you. There are no gate keepers, no authorities, no one in your way.

The difference between being a starving artist and creating a six- or even seven-figure business for yourself starts by understanding leverage.

What does that look like on a daily basis?

You need to devote enough time each day to creating assets that can work for you while you work on other things. Products, for example, are a great place to start.

You could spend your time – like I’ve been known to do – writing another blog post. But you can also spend an extra few minutes ensuring that the post is set up properly for SEO, so that the content can be a source of leverage for you in the long term.

You can trade the time scrolling a social feed to build an audience there instead, something that you can leverage later on.

Take some time to think about the goals you are trying to achieve for you and your business, then think in terms of leverage in order to get there quicker and more directly.

If you want help with what that looks like for your business, you can always reach out.

Getting Traffic To Your Site Through Blogging And SEO

A longer-term approach to building your business through blogging and SEO.

person using laptop computer beside aloe vera
Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

This post is part of the 60 Day Project – one post a day to help you prepare your business for success in 2021. Subscribe using the button below to get new posts sent straight to your email.

Sign Me Up!

Identifying The Constraint

I had a problem.

I had spent months building out the “infrastructure” of my business, Craftsman Creative.

I created a course platform using Thinkific, created two courses, and launched them both within a month!

It was a TON of work, but was extremely fulfilling…

Until…

Crickets.

I had almost no traffic to the site. Even though I’d shared my new courses with everyone I knew on every social media channel and every email list…I sold only a handful of courses.

Now, I have to keep reminding myself that my decision to launch a brand new website and two courses at the start of a shutdown caused by a global pandemic may have attributed to the results…

Nonetheless, I needed to fix one of two things – the traffic, or the offer.

Since I didn’t have enough traffic to figure out if the offer was working, I decided I need to figure out traffic.

Here’s the results from that first month of the site going live:

As you can see, I only had 262 sessions and 161 new users. For context, I would need to sell 40 courses – more than one per day – to hit my target of $10,000 per month in revenue.

40 courses from 161 users would be a 25% conversion rate… in reality, my conversion rate was 4%. Not terrible, but also not enough to make up for the lack of traffic.

Having identified the issue – traffic – I set out to affect what I had control over and fix the problem.

Coming Up With A Plan

There are only a few ways that you can get traffic coming to a new website. You have paid traffic – using ads or affiliates to send traffic your way.

I didn’t have enough revenue or data to start pouring money into ads, but I did set up some affiliate partners. That earned me exactly 0 sales.

You can use partnerships, which I’ll talk about in a different post.

Then you have free/organic/earned traffic. This is the traffic that comes from people searching for you, seeing a link to your stuff, or coming directly to the site because they heard about it from you or someone else.

I narrowed in on the free traffic options, and realized that I had a lot of opportunity when it came to search.

My audience that I was seeking to serve was out there, and they were looking for what I was producing – courses on how to make something creative, how to start a business, how to create products, and more.

I just wasn’t doing anything to let them know that I existed.

After taking a deep dive over the last month into SEO and content marketing, I want to share the approach that I’ve taken. While I don’t yet have results to share – SEO can take 6 to 8 months to start seeing results – I’ll keep you updated as things progress.

Using Content & SEO To Get More Traffic

This is a summarized version of what I’ve done over the last month to set up my site(s) for SEO success in 2021.

Step 0 – before even starting the SEO strategy – was to define a goal.

I want to get 10,000 people a month visiting my site from SEO.

With that goal in hand, I could begin, and have a way of measuring the success over the next few months. (You can see how that goal resembles the one I have for this blog, and the 60 Days Project).

Step 1 – Set Up The Site Properly

You can see how my mind works. I always go to building the infrastructure first. It’s motivated from my experience launching things too soon and being “caught with my pants down” a bit when it comes to the execution.

While some people may say “launch before you’re ready” or before you even have a product, it’s just not comfortable for me.

Here are a few steps I took to make sure my site was set up properly:

Make sure that you’re using a site that can handle SEO and blogging.

There are certain sites that are better set up to handle SEO and content. Thinkific, for example, is not. They aren’t a blogging site. They’re a white-label course platform.

In order to hack a blog together, you’d have to use custom pages, but it wouldn’t really work and is a lot of extra steps to make it look, feel, and function like a blog.

Historically I’ve used WordPress to set up my sites. This site is build on WordPress. I’ve done it enough that I was able to get up and running with proper hosting, a lightweight theme, and all of the tools and plugins that WordPress provides.

(For those interested, I use SiteGround for my hosting, and the Generate Press theme, and the most important plugin for SEO – Yoast)

The reason I chose a self-hosted blog rather than something like Medium, is that I want the traffic to come to me, not to Medium.

It’s the same reason people are moving their newsletters from Substack to their own platform, because all of their traffic was going to newsletter.substack.com.

They were losing out on all of the benefits of SEO. (Though Substack now allows you to pay for a custom domain…)

I highly recommend using WordPress or even Squarespace for your blog, that way you have the ability to add important things like keywords and metadata that we need for each post.

Two other considerations – make sure that your blog posts end up with real words in the link, rather than a random string of numbers. So daren.blog/name-of-post rather than daren.blog/11/10/2020/postid12ANRUYkfty21.

That second option gives no context as to what the post is about, whereas the first one – and every blog post on this site – is very clear as to what it’s about.

There’s a TON more that you can do, but for sake of time I’ll link to my favorite resource I found during this process, which is the free course from Growth Machine, a content agency in Austin, TX run by Nat Eliason.

Step 2 – Find Keywords For Your Site

This is arguably the hardest part, as it takes a lot of time, a lot of focus, and a tool that isn’t free.

Since I was determined to figure it out, I went with AHREFS, the industry standard tool for this kind of research.

They have a 7-day trial for $7, so I was sure to cancel the subscription before it kicked in at the hefty price of $99/month.

Since I’m not an agency, I didn’t need the full month subscription, so I just made sure to do all of my research in those seven days.

What this stage looked like was a lot of guessing, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of searching for some hidden nuggets.

I’d never done anything like this before, so initially it was a bit daunting but after a day or two of it I found it to be a lot of fun.

There are countless blog posts and youtube videos that can walk you through the process step by step, but here’s a breakdown as an overview:

  1. Come up with high-level topics that I would want to be “ranking” for when people search for them. I asked myself the question “what can I help people with” and came up with a list from there.
  2. I would then take each one of those terms or topics – known as “keyword prhases” – and enter them into the Keyword Explorer section of AHREFS.
  3. There are thousands and thousands of keywords that come up, so I narrowed it down using filters. I would search for keywords that had the word I was searching for, and then narrow down the KD, or Keyword Difficulty to be less than 30, and the Volume to be greater than 500. This meant that I was only looking for keyword phrases that were potentially easy to rank for, and had enough people searching for it each month to be worth writing a post about it. Here’s a video from Nat on that process.
  4. Go through that process for each of my high-level keywords, and write down the ones that felt like a good fit. For example, a high-level keyword I found for Craftsman Creative was artists and clients. It had a keyword difficulty of 1 and 3,000 monthly searches. I could easily think of a post about “artists and clients” that would be a great resource for those searching that topic.

Step 3 – Plan Out Your Content

With 100+ keywords in a spreadsheet, I could now sort them based on keyword difficulty, interest, and search volume. I planned out 3 months of content that way, in about an hour.

I knew the topics I was going to write on, and even organized them into groups so that one week I could write about coaching, another week about leadership, and so on.

The recommended frequency is about 2-3 posts per week. As you’ve noticed, I’m doing 7 posts a week on this site all under the same process. I’m very specifically targeting keywords with each new post, and writing a post a day will get me more posts faster, so that I can get to the results quicker.

Ultimately this blog will be a feeder for my other two companies, Benchmark and Craftsman Creative, while also encouraging people to work with me directly from this site.

(Remember how I said that Thinkific wasn’t set up well for blogging & SEO?)

Step 4 – Write Content With SEO In Mind

At this point it’s time to write the content. There are a few things that I check with every post to make sure that it has the best chances of “ranking” – meaning appearing on the first page of google’s search results – possible.

If your content isn’t on that front page, it’s very rare that people will find it through search. I read that 90% of the traffic goes to the links on the front page of Google. So we need to do everything right to show Google that our site best answers the question or is the right resource for that person who is searching.

Here are the main things:

  1. Title – include the keyword phrase in the title
  2. Headings – make sure to include it in at least one of the headings. Be sure to USE headings, not just bolded text. Ideally an H2 or H3 tag, as below that gets ignored, and the H1 tag should be reserved for the title of the blog post.
  3. Metadata – if you’re using a tool like Yoasts SEO plugin, it will give you fields to fill in at the bottom of a post where you can add your focus keyphrase, a slugline, and a meta description. These are the most important things, but it also gives you feedback on how to improve your post, as well as a simple green/orange/red scale for how your SEO looks.
Meta indeed – here’s the Yoast SEO section for THIS post…

Green = good, so it’s important to spend some time making sure that you get your SEO good to go before hitting publish.

Step 5 – Promote Your Content

It will take a long time to get your content to rank if you never share it with anyone. It’s like writing and publishing a book but never putting it up for sale.

Simple things I do each time I publish a post is to share it on social media. Facebook – as much as I hate the platform and don’t even like having the app on my phone – consistently does better at getting people to my site than other platforms. I have about the same number of friends on FB as I do followers on Twitter, but I get 10x the clicks from FB.

I share new posts to my personal profile, the appropriate facebook page, and any groups that might find it helpful.

I share it to Twitter and LinkedIn as well, all using a site called Buffer. Buffer lets you write one post and schedule it across multiple platforms, saving me time.

Three other tricks I use that help – first is to tag anyone that I mentioned in the post. For this one, I’ll tag Nat Eliason on Twitter, since his resource is the one I’m linking to in this post, and he’s become “the guy” that I turn to online when I have a question about this, as he’s written extensively on the subject as well as runs an agency that does this for people. (I had a call with them last week to discuss working with them in the future…)

The other is to use a service called Quuu. Quuu lets you select posts that you’ve written and get them shared by their audience of people. I’ve only been using it for about a week, but it has doubled the number of views to my content.

The most important promotion strategy that I use though is to have an email list. I have over 1,000 people that have subscribed to get my content, and I can share any post with those that have given me permission to do so. Each week as part of my BCC newsletter, I can include links to these daily posts from the 60 Day Project and share them with those who may have missed them.

While right now I’m not getting a lot of search traffic, I can get people reading the posts and visiting the site, which signals to Google that this is a real site that real people are visiting, and depending on how many sessions are occurring over a given time period, it will help signal that I’m a site that’s ok to include in search results down the road.

Step 6 – Track Your Data

You may be wondering what my obsession is with data. Well – I have found it to be the fastest way to identify the constraints in a business and then take action in a way that gets results.

Want to grow your business? Use data to identify the constraint – in this case, traffic – and then get creative on how to turn it from a constraint into a strength.

Using a tool like the Benchmark App I created this year with my brother will help you do just that – identify the constraint and decide what to do about it.

You need to check in once a week or so on how your data is doing. Use tools like Google Analytics to see the site traffic, and you can use AHREFS or other tools to see how you’re ranking for keywords down the line.

Write down a few numbers and track the changes over time. Don’t just write a blog post and ignore it.

Had I figured this all out years ago with my other sites, I probably would have thousands of visitors a month to my content. Instead, I get an average of about 20-30 visitors a day, and nothing comes of it because I didn’t optimize those pages for SEO or for getting people to take action using a content strategy.

I’ll keep you updated as things progress, and will share the specifics for traffic and results when they start coming in.

Want help with your own blogging & seo strategy? Let’s see if I can help you get set up.

Why You Need To Know What’s True In Your Business Using Analytics

Any breakthrough in your business starts with understanding what is really going on – what’s really true.

white and black i am a good day print card
Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash

This post is part of the 60 Day Project – one post a day to help you prepare your business for success in 2021. Subscribe using the button below to get new posts sent straight to your email.

Sign Me Up!

My favorite definition of truth comes from a book of scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants.

The book is a series of revelations given to modern-day prophets that were written down for us to learn from and live our lives by.

Here’s the verse:

Truth is a knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come.

Doctrine & Covenants 93:24

In order to get what we want from our businesses, we have to know where we currently are. We have to know the truth.

Before any breakthrough can happen, we have to see things as they are – we have to know the truth.

Here’s how to get to what’s really going on in your business:

Take A Step Back To Get Perspective

It can be easy to get overwhelmed by the size of a problem or situation when we’re right in the middle of it.

Practicing prayer or meditation, taking a walk, physically stepping away from the problem – all of these are ways to take a moment to get some extra perspective.

You can also bring in outside help. A friend, fellow business owner, or a coach can help you see what might be in your blindspots, or the things that you aren’t willing to see because of things like sunk cost or the emotional attachment to different parts of your business.

Even the best have coaches. Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Tony Robbins.

They all have various coaches, mentors, peers, and partners that they rely on to improve their game. That process of improvement starts from getting to the truth through feedback.

It’s important to not just see things as they are, but also not worse than they are.

Beating yourself up, getting down on yourself, or adding emotion to the situation rarely helps. It will only keep you stuck where you are until you are willing to let go and get to the truth without the emotional attachment to what the truth means.

Use Business Analytics Data Where Possible

It’s easy to say that things are going well, or that things aren’t great.

But is that the truth?

Things may be much better – or much worse – than you think they are, but you’ll never know by how much unless you are analyzing the situation with data.

A common example:

Creatives I work with often say “I’m just not good at marketing”. That limiting belief keeps them from ever trying, because they believe that any effort spend on marketing their business will only come up short.

What if, instead, they tracked their effort over two months. The only thing they did was to post more regularly. From once a week to once a day.

Over two months, that’s the difference of 60 posts rather than 8. That’s more than 7 TIMES the effort. It’s hard to think that while each post individually might not be as successful as you’d like that you would have zero results from that sort of extra focus and effort.

Even if only one new client or customer came from that effort, it would still be worth it, would it not? Because now you can take the next step which is to imagine how to make things better. How to optimize and maximize those efforts so that they’re more effective.

When you start tracking these things, you’ll see that a) you aren’t as bad as you think you are at the “business stuff”, but also b) there’s a ton of room for improvement when it comes to your business, which means it can become more resilient, profitable, and fulfilling as you start working on it in this way.

Use the data to verify what’s really going on so that you can take action based on truth, rather than your limiting beliefs.

Make Things Better Than They Are

When you know the truth, you can then start to make conscious decisions based on that truth.

It’s like trying out a new diet or workout plan without first understanding the unique truths about your body.

If you’re allergic to certain types of food, you would want to avoid those foods in your diet, right?

With this new, intimate knowledge of your business, you can create a plan to get the breakthroughs you’ve wanted for your business.

The results you want are 100% within your control. We often just get stuck believing things that aren’t true which hold us back from getting those results we really want.

Choose now to make decisions for your business based on truth, and use that new knowledge to get what you want even faster.

Content Is King, And Distribution Is Queen

Mastering and optimizing your content is essential, but if no one sees it, it has little – if not zero – effect.

people using phone while standing
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

This post is part of the 60 Day Project – one post a day to help you prepare your business for success in 2021. Subscribe using the button below to get new posts sent straight to your email.

Sign Me Up!

If you’re following along, we start with a working content strategy and check all of the boxes there when it comes to how we create our content.

But if we don’t take the next step and work on distributing that content properly, we’ll be frustrated with the results that our content gets.

Let’s quickly look at three ways to increase the distribution of your content so that not just more people see it, but more of the right people see it.

By that, I mean people who will engage with your content, and take the next step in that journey to subscribe, follow, or even become a customer or a client.

Publish To Existing Channels

Important to start with what you have, and get it working as much as possible. Most people encourage posting three to four times per day to try and reach as many people as possible.

That doesn’t mean that you should be posting calls to action or asking for things in each of these posts. But onec per day or so it totally within reason.

Look at the profiles that you follow and engage with online and see what they do. What do they post, how often, what do you click on and comment on?

Reach Out To Potential Partners

Whenever you post, are there people that you can reach out to who might be able to help you share it with their audiences? Whether it be on their profiles, or in groups or forums, who else would benefit from sharing your content?

If you’re sharing their work, it helps them look good to re-share your content with theri audience.

If you have a big launch or a piece of content you really want to get out there, you can reach out to people who have a similar audience to you to help promote it at a specific time, right as you launch.

In marketing circles this is called a “joint venture”, and often there’s a financial incentive for partners to help promote content.

These partners, or affiliates, are incentivized to share your product or company by getting a percentage of any sales that come from their referral or link.

Giveaways is another form of this – using people who you may not even know to share your work with their audiences.

Who do you know that might help you share your content with their audiences and can benefit from doing so? It’s rare that people will share your stuff without any direct reward or incentive, so think about that when you reach out and ask them to share.

Pay For Reach

There are also ways that you can pay to get more views on your content. You can boost a post on Facebook, or run a post as an ad. You can drive traffic to your work using ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit – any number of platforms.

It can be expensive, but it is an option that can work, and is often used in conjunction with other strategies.

Get Resourceful

Think about how many people need to see your work in order to get the results you’re after. For example:

You sell an online course for $99. You want to make $10,000 per month from your work. In this case, you need 101 people per month to clear that threshold. One of out every 50 people that visits your website will purchase a course, so you need a little over 5,000 visitors per month to your site.

Working backwards, you can determine what your needs are, and measure what is currently working or not working.

If you’re only getting 500 visitors per month, you know that you’ve got to do something to get 10 times the traffic in order to get the sales you want for your business.

How are you going to do it? Get resourceful, work with what you have, and make sure to measure what works and what doesn’t.

It is also important to be patient – many of these distribution efforts can take months to start working. SEO, for example, can take 6-8 months to start showing signs of the work you’re doing at the beginning. Don’t give up too early.

The results in your business are completely within your control, if you take the responsibility seriously. Figure out what your business needs, and get to work.