Although I am still in the preparation phase, I have begun my 12-month journey to go from broke to a full-time income. Week 1 is complete and below is a summary of everything I completed.
You can read the background behind this project by reading the blog post ‘The Journey Begins . . .’ on my website.
How I will Summarise My Progress
I will summarise my first week by focussing on the sub-projects I have listed in Yanado, my project planning tool :
The subprojects are the list on the left in the black area.
I may change to a daily breakdown in the week 2 summary so I can gauge which format works best.
At present, in addition to Yanado, I am also using a whiteboard. This has been split into 7 daily sections with my tasks written on strips of paper and tacked to it to allow quick replacement within the plan.
This whiteboard provides a quick visual aid to my most pressing tasks and helps in planning the week ahead.
At the beginning of my project, I have over 300 tasks or subtasks recorded in Yanado and it was really hard to get a snapshot where my priorities were at any one time. This is the reason I use the whiteboard as an additional planner.
Using the whiteboard allows a highly flexible way to plan the week ahead and it provides the ability to react to changes and alter priorities each day as required.
As a large majority of the current pre-launch tasks are one time only setup steps and will not be part of my daily routine, using the whiteboard is a temporary solution. Once I come out of the current pre-launch phase, I fully expect to use Yanado to control all of my project management tasks.
Here is the whiteboard at the start of preparation week 2 (unfortunately, I didn’t get a snapshot of the week 1 set up):
In the weekly review below, I will be posting Yanado screenshots for each subproject. These screenshots will show Yanado after I have completed my Monday morning review, as I believe this will give a better representation of where I am in my project.
Here is a breakdown of what each of the 3 columns means:
1) Pending – These are tasks yet to be scheduled
2) Doing – These are the tasks scheduled to be completed in the current week (week 2 in this case)
3) Done – These are the tasks I have completed in the previous week.
Once this weekly review blog post has been published, I will ‘archive’ all of the tasks in the ‘Done’ section. This will make the tasks disappear from this specific Yanado view and reset the count of tasks in the system.
The purpose of this is to give a full snapshot of the work I have completed each week, the work I intend to complete in the upcoming week, and all of the tasks I have in my future pipeline.
One thing to take into consideration is that the tasks currently in Yanado are for the pre-launch of my business. They specifically highlight the tasks needed to launch my business.
Once I complete this week’s tasks I will have a better idea of how I will monetise my new business, so tasks covering the post-launch period will start to appear in the project plan.
Having over 300 tasks in my preparation phase, I didn’t want to overcomplicate the situation by adding post-preparation tasks to Yanado just yet. Once the number of pre-launch tasks reduces to a manageable level, hopefully by the end of this week, then I will consider adding tasks for my new business.
By the end of pre-launch week 1, I had identified a total of 301 tasks within the preparation phase of my business. Not all of these tasks are scheduled to be completed before the business launches, but it was important to record them all so I had full control of the project going forward.
Here are the key figures for week 1:
Number of tasks at the beginning of the week: 253
New tasks identified this week: 48
Tasks completed during week 1: 58
Tasks remaining at the start of week 2: 243
Note – The tasks visible in the screenshots I share from Yanado below may be broken down into several subtasks. These subtasks are not shown on the screenshots, but they are counted within the task count above. For this reason, figures in the weekly summary will not match the number of tasks shown on the screenshots.
. . .
So let’s review all 8 of the subproject sections in turn:
Website Development
I managed to complete most of the tasks I set myself for week 1 in this section.
I created my own logo using the ‘Art Text 2’ software I have on my Macbook Pro laptop and set up the additional email accounts I needed for the business.
I changed the WordPress theme on my website and added a couple of plugins I needed for my project.
Most of the remaining tasks are reliant on defining keywords for my business, which is an outstanding task planned for this week.
Overall I am happy with the look and responsiveness of the website. Once I complete all the SEO checks over the coming weeks, it should be in a strong position to rank well on Google and the other search engines.
Social Media & Citations
This was one area I excelled in this week, setting up a total of 13 social media and blogging platforms and branding each of them with my logo, a description of my business, and a quick overview of the business journey I am embarking on.
During the week, I identified the need to build a Facebook group to specifically cover the ‘My Journey’ blog posts and it’s evolving story because I didn’t want this key thread of posts getting lost in the general posts I was pushing out on my Facebook business page.
One area I was pleased with was my personal Facebook page setup. I wanted it to have more of a look of a landing page, with links to key pages in my business.
I was fortunate that I had previous experience of setting up most of these 13 accounts on other projects. This certainly helped in the speed of setup.
Tools Set-Up
This section covered much of the automation I built to send content to my blogging platforms and social media accounts.
I have a lot of tools at my disposal, but most of them don’t add a great amount of value. The tools I have set up here are the cream of the crop that will not only help achieve my business targets but tools I have confidence in using in my business. Not least, because I want to be relatively assured they will still be around in 5 years time.
You can get more information on how I am using many of these tools in the other blog posts in this ‘Journal’ category, especially in the ‘How I Designed My Blogging Setup’ article and the social media content article I will write following this article (see the link at the foot of this article).
Other things to note:
Cloudflare is a Content Distribution Network (CDN). It has some worthwhile benefits:
1) It stores copies of your website in various locations around the world. This speeds up the delivery of your web pages to people viewing them.
2) Because people are not accessing your website directly, Cloudflare can help recognise and minimise hacking attempts.
3) Cloudflare provides an SSL security certificate for all of your pages. Search engines tend to penalise your website if it does not have a valid SSL certificate.
Resultflow is a tool I have recently discovered that helps bring people to your website using Facebook ads. It works differently to how most people run Facebook ads and automates a lot of the process.
I am currently 2 weeks into a 4-week training course on how to use this tool. Look out for a review of ResultFlow once I see the results.
Similar to the social media section, I was pleased with how much progress I made in this section of my business preparation.
In week 2 I want to get my video production tool(s) selected and my video content distribution network completed. Look out for an article on this coming soon to a blog near you.
Project 24 Blog
Project 24 is a training course on blogging run by a company called Income School. It is my go-to training for everything blogging and, as you will see in the next section, YouTube also.
The snapshot above is just part of the 60-step action plan that is set out in Project 24, so it doesn’t show all of the steps involved in the training.
I will be writing a review of Project 24 in the coming weeks once my business has launched, so look out for that article too.
I didn’t complete a lot on this project last week as most of the steps will be undertaken after my business launches, but you can see I have a good chunk of preparation work scheduled in this subproject for this coming week.
Project 24 YouTube
As per the blogging section above, this is part of the Income School Project 24 training. It too is broken into 60 steps. The majority of this training will be implemented once my business launches in October, but I did use the training to set up my YouTube channel correctly.
As you can see, there is nothing planned for this week. I need to get my video tools and content distribution in place first.
Marketing
This section if fairly irrelevant at this stage as I will not be doing much marketing, except through social media, until I launch the business in October 2020. As such the diagram above is minuscule.
I did manage to cobble together a nice lead magnet though. Look out for it enticing you to leave your email address on my website sometime this week.
Affiliate Marketing
Again this section is pretty irrelevant until I launch my business.
I have purchased John Thornhill’s Ambassador program to bring in affiliate sales once my business launches. The tasks you can see above relate to setting this up and tasks from the training.
You can expect the number of tasks in this section to increase dramatically once I launch my business as I expect to be planning product reviews a couple of months in advance.
Content
I published 4 blog posts in week 1 as follows:
- The Journey Begins – 1,406 words
- Preparing My Business For Launch – 2,515 words
- What Online Business Tools Do I Use? – 1,758 words
- How I designed My Blogging Setup – 2,493 words
That is a total of 8,172 words.
It is quite an achievement considering all the other tasks I completed, but I had planned at least one more.
The ‘Social Media Setup’ blog post was due to be written over the weekend, but it fell foul of my not feeling too well (see below). As you can see, it is now scheduled for this week as the first article to write following this weekly summary.
The 2 ‘schedule’ tasks for this week are to get posts published to social media for the 4 articles written last week. The reason this has not happened so far is I want to include the Facebook group in the planned schedule and this is still to be set up.
As you can see, I have an ambitious schedule of posts for the coming week – 5 in total.
Income School has a blog writing challenge running during this month (September 2020) as part of their Project 24 training. The target is to write 2,000 words a day, every day in September. A total of 60,000 words.
Although I have put myself forward for this, I have been hampered by changing my project 5 days into the month.
You see, this project was not my original plan, but I was forced to change due to my partner’s health. My previous project relied on her knowledge of the subject.
With having to set up this business partway through the month, it has seriously impaired my chances of achieving the target. By the end of today, I will be 21 days in and have written a total of just over 15,000 words.
That leaves 9 days to write around 45,000 words. With the other tasks I still need to complete, I am going to be pushing it to write an average of 5,000 words a day for 9 consecutive days. Wish me luck!
. . .
So there you have it, the summation of my first week’s work preparing my business for launch.
I was pleased overall. I think I covered a lot of ground.
My only disappointment was I lost a full day over the weekend due to feeling unwell after taking some new medication prescribed by my doctor. The blurb for the tablets says the effect will wear off after a week or two. Hopefully, it will be a lot quicker than that.
Anyhow, on with this week’s work. I have a lot to do . . .