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So I didn’t write a single thing this week…. Not producing is simply not acceptable. I am still adapting to my new crazy schedule and it has completely thrown me for a loop. Without missing, I had to at least do my weekly quick post!

I finally received the order of shirts that were stolen from my home a few weeks ago and things are getting back on track with this little venture of ours. I’m still not sure how it will turn out, but it has greatly tested my patience. A launch that should have taken less than a month has been pushed to three without a soon end in sight.

I’ve also begun testing another substance (completely legal) to help me stay awake and aware throughout the day as it has been an issue with my new schedule. So far it’s working quite well with very minimal side effects.

Now on to the good stuff!

What I‘m Reading

• A Closer Look At MOBE MTTB – Live Case Study & Review – A few months ago I met a bunch of people in real life with little to no internet marketing experience that are making a lot of money with something called MTTB.

 

• Case Study: Anatomy of a $16k Website Sale – f you’re a sucker for nuts-and-bolts posts that include the gory details and insider stuff that goes on behind building and selling a profitable website for a great ROI you’re going to love this post. I’ve been watching the guys over at NoHatDigital.

 

• 33 Ways To Get More Clients – It’s the question every consultant asks. Because clients are the lifeblood of any consulting business.

 

• Viral Marketing Case Study: How a Brand New Blog Generated 17,584 Visitors In One Day – Today I’m going to show you how one entrepreneur used The Skyscraper Technique to generate 17,584 unique visitors to a brand new blog. In one day.

 

Tool of The Week

IFTTT – A very simple but robust automation tool i‘ve been using for years!

Video of The Week

If you don’t know who Grant Cardone is, you might want to come out from under your rock. A massive success, Grant has built multiple million dollar companies that he still owns. He started doing a video podcast via YouTube a while ago, but not so long ago teamed up with a young man who grew his own success within one of Grants companies to launch another video series called The Young Hustlers. Grant and Jarrod delve into amazing topics each week tailored to the millennial generation.

This is a weekly must watch series!

 
Share some of the amazing content, videos and tools you’ve discovered this month in the comments.
 

 

I wanted to have a more scheduled and consistent approach to my posting. The last few months I have seen a dramatic drop in my writing and by default, site traffic. In order to potentially increase my creative juices, I will bepost what I call my Friday Quick Posts.

Friday Quick Posts will include a few things: What i‘ve been reading Via Pocket, Site Anaylitics Via Google and whatever else I decide to include!

The main goal is self awareness in my weekly progress and activities as well as keeping you guys updated.

What I‘m Reading

 

• 16 Explosive Content Promotion Strategies – Have you ever spent hours writing a quality piece of content only to see it scrape in a few social signals and deliver a handful of new visitors to your site? We’ve all been there.

 

• Noah Kagan’s Rogue Marketing Strategies – AppSumo

 

• Strategize, Test, Measure: The Bullseye Framework – The research you did and ideas you came up with in the brainstorm step should guide your rankings. Usually, a few ideas you thought of will seem particularly compelling – these traction channels belong in column A. Channels with ideas that seem like they could plausibly work go in column B.

I wasn’t able to catch up on my reading with my Pocket App as this week was so crazy busy and awesome. I’ve been adding more clients, running a few experiments and reaching out to some industry leaders in SEO, Entrepreneurship and personal training to increase my actionable knowledge.

Tool Of The Week

• PushBullet App – Helps you send images and links from your computer to your phone!

 

Video Of The Week

 

I’m a huge design fan and Guardians of The Galaxy released this amazing video of all the dashboard scenes!

 

If you’ve read The $100 Startup then you know how amazing Chris (the author) is in every way. His blog is filled with stories of living a non-normal life. He recently shared an amazing video of someone living from a sailboat. It helps give you a completely different perception of what normal is for different people.

Keep pushing through each week making progress and working towards your goals!

Let me know what you want to see more of in these weekly quick posts so I can make them better and something you look forward to each Friday.

Twitter has quickly become the main focus of my attention. Not only does it account for the majority of where my traffic comes from, I’ve also directly profited from the platform in more ways than one. I’ll admit that I completely missed the ball on how to properly use Twitter when I first created my account.

I quickly found amazing tools to help me automate the process of increasing followers and by default, traffic to my site.

In order to gain the most from Twitter you will need to follow a few simple rules.

A Few Simple Rules

You should never Tweet a post without some sort of media. Visuals are key on any platform in order for your post to stick out from the billions of other tweets.

Know what hashtags are worth including within your post by doing Five minutes worth of research into what is popular and relevant to your audience. Don’t use stupid hashtags…

Post at relevant times. Each platform has active and effective times to post for ultimate exposure. You can do a quick data mine of your past tweets to see what the optimal times to tweet are.

Automating The Whole Thing

Social media, no matter who you are, takes a lot of time to keep up with. Luckily there are plenty of startups taking up the challenge of making it all easier for the rest of us.

Plain and simple, if you aren’t pre-scheduling your posts on ANY platform, you are losing the social media race. There are no excuses! Get setup with Buffer and link all of your social accounts. Buffer is your mainframe, your social headquarters, your control center.

From your Buffer account you are able to create a schedule for each of your accounts and place any status/post in the que. You can also choose which accounts you want the status to be published on.

make sure you download Buffer’s Chrome Extension!!

The next question you may or may not have considered is what times are best for publishing your tweets on Twitter…..

I remember stumbling upon a post that showed exactly how to find the best times to post on Twitter and it was incredibly long and a waste of time. To keep it short, check out Followerwonk. It will research your past posts and compile the data to tell you what the best times to post are.

(The Article Explaining How To Use Followerwonk with Buffer – http://tnw.co/1o846zM)

Now you have the best times to post and a tool to help you schedule your post for the entire week in under Five minutes. What are you going to share?

Sharing is caring, especially when it is new, relevant and exciting. I will be the first to tell you not to scour the internet finding cool shit to publish. Instead, use BuzzSumo to search for your topic and find amazing content that you can quickly add to your Buffer que.

Tweets With Amazing Images

A recent discovery of mine, Twibble allows you to add your blogs feed and pull images within the post or featured image to be shared as a tweet. Twibble will scan your site as often as you post and automatically share your new posts with any hashtags you want and at the times we discovered using Followerwonk.

To increase the use of Twibble, find leaders and influencers in your niche/industry and add their sites feed to your account. Whenever they post, your account will be the first to let the world know.

Sharing great content is key.

Managing Your Twitter Growth

Our goal should be to provide as much value to our followers as possible while also decreasing the amount of time required of us to do so. I want to break this down as easily as possible so you can manage your growth with ease.

Daily

Every day you should be adding new followers using tools like the Chrome Extension Followr that will auto favorite tweets containing specific keywords or hashtags. You can also do this in bulk using Good Audience.

On top of adding new followers, we need to unfollow people who have not followed us back (how rude!). Just Unfollow will scan your account and create a list of people who don’t follow you back and allow you to unfollow them.

Your daily shouldn’t take more than Five minutes to complete and may only require your attention every few days.

Monthly

Use Followerwonk to determine influencers in your niche/industry and connect with them. You can also compare two influencers’ followers. So people who follow both accounts who, theoretically interested in your topic.

Take all of these followers and begin following them. As time goes on, you will build a HUGE audience of people interested in your content, product or service.

Twitter is paving the way and can no longer be left on the side in your marketing efforts. With the huge jumps in mobile purchases and Twitter driving most of that traffic, you cannot afford to not use the platform. Create a simple to follow schedule, automate most of it and drive a crap ton of traffic to your site!

Tweet: The Ultimate Step by Step Twitter Growth Guide http://ctt.ec/e9_k7+ via @Dillon_Carter

I wanted to start running small experiments over the course of a weekend or just one day and see what would happen (if this goes well, I will keep doing it). I’ve been playing with Photoshop a bit lately, although I’m terrible and wanted to do a little project.

The Forum Experiment

I’ve been a member of a “hacker” forum for the past few years. Don’t worry it’s not that hardcore. It’s mostly people my age talking about nerdy stuff. The best part about this forum is its Marketplace section. Here, you can buy hacking tools, gaming accounts and much more.

The sub section that has the majority of my attention is what’s called the “Ebook Bazarr”. This is a section of the marketplace where people sell (mainly “how to earn”) ebooks.

I’ve chatted with plenty of users who make insane amounts of money with their sales threads and ebooks. In the past, i’ve attempted to launch my very own ebook in the marketplace but with very little success. I think the most i’ve ever made was $20.

I blamed my terrible thread design. Most of these highly successful ebook authors have created incredibly designed sales threads that make you almost beg to purchase. Then, there was me with just text….. Embarrassing.

With my new found itch of testing another launch, I began gathering my resources. I wanted to create everything: thread design, product etc… without spending a dime.

Gathering My Resources

After a decent amount of Googling, I found tons of completely free Photoshop templates I could download and use within my design.

I honestly thought I would need more but I only used a small amount of graphics and made the design to have a transparent background so it flowed with the forums design.

The product was a method I have been testing that is quite passive. I wrote an extensive ebook explaining exactly how to do this method. The product was priced at $9.99 and I gave away 2 free or “vouch” copies as they are called to help the thread take life and begin generating initial sales.

The Results

In total this took around Three hours from start to finish (mostly due to my lack of design/photoshop skills).

So how much did my ebook do in sales? $0…

This was a fun little experiment but I cannot seem to crack the forum ebook marketplace like others. I’ve reached out to other members who have had success to see if they would be willing to share some insights to help me if I ever get the urge to test this again.

You are going to fail from time to time. You can’t expect to hit home runs every time.

 

I wanted to have a more scheduled and consistent approach to my posting. The last few months I have seen a dramatic drop in my writing and by default, site traffic. In order to potentially increase my creative juices, I will be post what I call my Friday Quick Posts.

Friday Quick Posts will include a few things: What i‘ve been reading Via Pocket, Site Anaylitics Via Google and whatever else I decide to include!

The main goal is self awareness in my weekly progress and activities as well as keeping you guys updated.

What I‘m Reading

• Ecommerce Business Blueprint: How To Build, Launch And Grow A Profitable Online Store – Starting an ecommerce business is hard work with many steps and decisions that need to come together at the right time. To help, we have put together a comprehensive resource list, compiled from Shopify’s most popular blog posts.

 

• Finance Hackers – If you’re like pretty much anyone else on the planet, you’ve probably considered starting your own business at some point. At least every Finance Hacker does! But how do you make a business, not just any business, but a highly profitable business.

 

• 13 Actionable Ecommerce Marketing Tactics and Apps to Drive Sales – Want more traffic and more sales for your online store? Of course you do. That’s why we put together 13 marketing tactics – with the tools to implement each of them – for you to put into action today.

 

• Google Analytics For Ecommerce: A Beginners Guide – Google Analytics is a valuable ally in the ecommerce battle for consumer dollars. The insights it provides contains a wealth of information about your site, your visitors and where they came from. All this information can be used to find new customers and increase conversions.

 

• Ecommerce Shipping Toolbox: Apps, Tools, and Resources to Help You Streamline Your Business – You’ve spent months building your online store and preparing your marketing strategy. You launch your business and cha–ching!, you make your first sale. Now what? Many new ecommerce entrepreneurs tend to neglect their fulfillment and shipping strategy when they launch.

 

• Massive List of Web App Directories to Promote Your Startup – At the end of last year, I decided to get my first Software as a Service (SaaS) product underway called Workado after years of running an agency. I spent months planning it all out. Mapping out the marketing ideas, content strategy, design mockups, and ultimately how the software would work.

 

 

Site Analytics

 

Because this is the first of this post, I won’t delve into any increases or decreases in traffic. I will however share my Levers Forcasted and targeted pageviews.

 

 

The site is still making progress, although it is still very small. It is truly awesome to think back to my first post. The blog was never meant to really have readers. It started as a way for me to write out my ideas and things that interested me surrounding entrepreneurship. Now, I have subscribers (love you sexy guys!) and startups reaching out to me to help them out.

My pageviews is Forecasted at 2185 which would be an all time high and a 19% increase over last months traffic (which took a nose dive!). The more I write/publish, the more my traffic increases.

Weekly Progress

This week my co-founder and I were focused on launching our first ecommerce business. With our initial inventory in hand, and a HUGE Instagram following, we were ready to finally launch this thing. Then something happened in the middle of the night. I stupidly left our inventory in my car. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue as I live in a very nice side of town with very little crime. Little did I know it there was a group of people (still don’t know who) going around my neighborhood breaking into cars all night. They stole ALL of our inventory.

Being completely bootstrapped, we spent the remainder of our startup on this inventory and had nothing left. Needless to say, I was feeling the negative effects of the startup life. I quickly realized that focusing on the negative would not yield the best results and instead focused on what we needed to do.

Luckily our local manufacturer saw my Facebook post and reached out to help. He offered to reprint ALL of our inventory at cost. We were able to get enough money to cover the order and placed it.

Now we are waiting for the order to be delivered and launch the site on Shopify.

What did I learn? Never keep anything, especially business assets in your car…. Like EVER!

I hoped you enjoyed this first Friday Quick Post! As time goes on, I will add to the post and update you on my weekly progresses.