Young, Dumb, AND Not Broke?! Business Goals – 2019
Happy New Year! 2019 has officially started and I have a whole lot of plans. Last week I outlined to you how I like to approach setting and reaching my goals. Since I’ve tried to be as transparent as possible since day 1 I want to let you know what my plans are for YD&NB and what milestones I’d like to reach in 2019.
My goals are always changing but I’ve thought long and hard of what I want to accomplish with this blog. Not only now but down the road in say 5 years. I came to the realization that this whole thing is still a baby. Because of that, I need to keep focusing on the building blocks and the basics to a great website. So, here are my goals for 2019.
Content Content Content
Content is the building block that I need to continue to work on the most. In 2018 I published 42 articles and over 60,000 words of content. In 2019 I’m bumping that goal up to 75 total articles with 10 of those being over 2,000 words. To be honest that terrifies me to see but we’ll make it happen. I want this content to be top notch so I’ve started using some new tools to drill down to the best keyword to fit your needs.
Along with creating content myself, I want to bring in some guest writers. These may be people that have started their own small business or that have expertise in areas I don’t. If you’re an HR professional, recruiter, or think you have some valuable knowledge to share then let me know! Andrea’s insights into How to Pay Off $25,000+ in Student Loans in 5 Years! and Marie’s, Before You Buy Your First Home Read This! were in my top 10 most popular articles for 2018 and for good reason.
I have a ton of article ideas, most of which came from my scholarship entries, but if you want to learn about something specific then drop it in the comments below. Or if it’s easier, shoot me an email through the Contact Us tab.
Weekly Newsletter
Another huge focus is my weekly newsletter. If the content is the building blocks then the newsletter is the mortar between them. To be honest I’m not really a fan of sharing articles on my personal social media accounts. Of course, I want everyone and their momma to read my work and share it but more importantly I want you to get value out of it.
My newsletter is extremely basic. It has the past week’s articles and one or two other suggestions from different places. Sometimes these are a video or just an interesting story. I purposely try to make it feel like I’m talking to you and not spamming you. The analytics for the list speaks for itself. The open rate and click rate are well above average and I hope to continue that trend.
For 2019 I’d like to increase my signups by 150% and grow my list past 250 subscribers. To do this I’m going to change some things up. I realized there really was no incentive to give up your email. So now if you sign up for my newsletter you’ll get the foreword of my book directly to your inbox. If you’d like you can do this at the bottom of this article.
Build One New Information Product
While it may not seem like it to the naked eye YD&NB is a business. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, I’m going continue laying the groundwork. I want to establish who I am as well as some credibility that I know what I’m talking about in the space of personal finance.
With all of that said I will be launching a new product in 2019. It will be information based so not a physical product like my book. Instead, it will be something that can help you over time and branches off the teachings from the book. I really want to tell you everything I’m planning with that but it’s in the baby stages. If you joined my email list, which you should have above, then don’t worry you’ll know about it first. Also, you may receive a pretty significant discount code when we launch it.
Give Live Talk/Presentation or Podcast
Relying 100% on the internet to send me new readers is not what YD&NB is all about. I want to spread good financial advice to anyone I can and that includes doing it the old fashioned way, word of mouth. I have very limited experience in public speaking but from the few times I have, it has been an adrenaline rush.
If I can give a great talk and inspire one or two people to start investing or to keep a budget then it will be a huge success. I have a long-term goal of giving a commencement speech at my alma mater someday so I better start practicing now.
I’m not quite sure how I’m going to approach this goal but I want to put it out there. So if you are a teacher at a high school, have a podcast that I could bring value to, or any other suggestions send them my way!
5000 Page Views Per Month
These last two goals are really the culmination of the work above. A website’s number one goal is to always grow their page view count. The obvious reason is that the more page views you have the more money you’ll make. This statement isn’t always true though. Especially for a website that doesn’t currently run ads like YD&NB.
It is true though that If I grow my pageviews then the chances of a person buying my book go up. More importantly to me though is that when your pageviews go up it is because you are getting more traffic from search engines. I’m trying to get away from solely using social media to drive traffic and instead have valuable enough content that Google finds it worthy to rank.
A musician once said (Geoge Strait I think?) that the best job you can have in music is a writer. Because if you write a few number ones that someone else sings you’ll be set for the rest of your life. You don’t have to perform, travel, or any of that famous person stuff. Instead, you just collect a royalty check for the song. That translated back to a website means if you have a couple of articles that rank number one on Google then you’ll have enough pageviews that it should support you. High page views equal higher revenue.
My page views overall have been increasing steadily. Last month I had a high of over 750 or 25 people per day. This won’t get me anywhere close to the 5000 I’d like to see or 167 per day. This is where more everything coming together needs to happen which I believe it will. To what extent? I’m not quite sure yet. All I can ask for is an increasing trend.
A DA Over 20 and PA Over 35
This one is geared a little more to the website nerds out there. But DA (domain authority) and PA (page authority) are ways to measure how your website is doing SEO wise. SEO is the last acronym in this article I promise, it stands for search engine optimization. All of this combined lets Google know how trustworthy you are as a source.
My goal as a content creator is to get these numbers as high as I can. They are currently 8 for DA and 14 for PA. When these numbers grow I will gain more organic traffic through search engines like Google. The pieces that go into compiling these numbers are things like page views, how long someone stays on a certain page, what page do they exit from, and a dozen other things.
To be honest I’m still learning all I can about SEO and how to make my website more search engine friendly without losing any of the value that it’s currently creating for the reader. Like everything, it’s a work in progress.
Wrapping It Up
Well, there you have it my 2019 goals. There’s a ton of work that needs to be done over the next 12 months but I can’t wait to look back on this article and see how well I did. If you read my last article, Accountability Partner – The Hidden Secret To Reaching Your Goals, then you know that I need to put these in a Google Sheet.
Don’t worry that’s done and my accountability partner and I are talking about them this weekend.
Talk soon