The end of January is a good time to put out an update of where the plans for the year have settled. I’ll keep it brief, which, as you’ll see below, is part of ensuring 2022 goals are hit.
There are three major projects on at the moment:
- Freelance work, move to direct and better quality clients
- Trading/productivity Youtube channel
- LanguageOps the “productized service” for translation
The first is my priority, my job of 15+ years. The second is the growth project I’m hoping can supplement and one day become the primary source of income and the third was a test from Nov ‘21 that I’d like to keep around and try to promote once the second is underway.
Both the YT channel and the productized service offer a more scalable way to earn than straight freelance work. However, they both require large marketing efforts. This is always the challenge with these projects. I need low friction and scalable processes to be built into the workflow or it just won’t happen.
Q1 2022
Over Christmas, despite having to work a little on some worthwhile projects, I managed to really knuckle down and plan out what direction to go in this year. I read some great books on setting and keeping to goals and made a decision on the best approach.
That approach centered around building my network by hand, principally via social media, and going from there. It became quite a chore almost immediately though to come up with enough interesting things to say every day, or every other day, and that wouldn’t make my network feel they were being marketed to.
In mid-January that approach changed for good on further reading among the flurry of new-year advice. Someone mentioned how most of the (highly) successful businesses in their private group had very small social media audiences. This made sense immediately. Focus on sales and marketing of actual services rather than build an audience to potentially sell more “audience building” content back to them.
So I switched tacks. Now I will grow the second project in the list above and sell to that audience directly where appropriate. It will take time and effort to generate the videos and blog posts required, but I’ve been meaning to do this for years and have had enough of dreaming about it.
I’m employing some of the strategies found in the habit and goal books I read to make sure I get this done. The products and content themselves will use the marketing strategies I’ve picked up on too and we’ll take stock again in 6 months. Hopefully I’ll have ironed out the wrinkles and made a decent start by then.
Q2 2022
Hopefully by April I’ll have further refined the direction of the channel, kept up with and improved the freelance client base and maybe even started to see the fruits of the output early on.
I can’t believe it has taken me to middle-age to figure out what works and what doesn’t in this online business world, but the stats show entrepreneurship actually increases up to 49 before tailing off again, and this is specifically successful online business, it’s somewhat reassuring to be following the average curve for this sort of thing. It’s easy in this age of curated perfection to think you’re constantly behind and catching up.
That’s about it for the update. Thanks for reading. I’ve mostly done this for myself, to get the habits rolling and to mark a line in the sand, but if it’s any use to you I’m glad of it.
Oh, before I sign off, I’ve also started an “office hours” type of meeting that anyone is welcome to book onto. I’ve scheduled it for 25 minutes, 2 minutes of which you’re free to rant on any subject. One slot per day, out of two available for the various timezones.
Click here to book: https://calendly.com/walkwithme