Upping the ante in 2010

Happy New Year everyone! How were your Holidays?

I hadn’t planned to be off-air for almost two weeks, but that’s how it has worked out and, boy, did I have a ball. One of the most amazing things about living in the heart of the English countryside is, well, the countryside. Yes, it’s been freezing cold, and yes, we’ve had snow, frost and ice. But I’ve loved wrapping up warmly, putting my walking shoes on and getting into the Chiltern Hills. The air has been crisp and clear, and on sunny days the views of snow covered fields have reached right over to Oxfordshire. The steaming glasses of hot chocolate in the cafe at the bottom of the hill just added to the toasty atmosphere of it all. Sheer bliss.

So, my batteries are recharged and I’m buzzing to get back into things.

Before Christmas I did some thinking about what A Different Kind of Work was going to mean for me in 2010. I’ve been building it slowly since mid last year, and my ambition now is to take it to the next level and really get it humming. So, what I wanted to do in this post was share my plans with you and invite your feedback. Where have I got it right? And what else could I be thinking about?

1. This blog IS a business. Yes, Michael, I know you’ve been making this point to me for a while now, but the lightbulb has just gone on! Some people (clearly not Michael) have given me the advice that I should think of my blog like it was a business, or as if it were a business. This did not engage or inspire me. It’s too conditional, too intangible. Deciding instead that A Different Kind of Work is a business brings out the latent entrepreneur in me and allows me to see possibilities I hadn’t before. This has been fundamental to helping me shape the other activities I’m about to list out.
2. I’ve developed a manifesto. It’s really rough at this point, but in the next little while I hope to share the detail of it with you. I’m calling it The New Work Manifesto. I began writing it as my own call to action, helping me define more clearly my purpose in developing A Different Kind of Work. In the process I realised I was developing something I could share. Something that defines the challenges and the opportunities for what I’d call The New Work Pioneer – the person at the forefront of making work a different experience. Wherever and however they choose to work. This has also served the purpose of helping me think through the kind of things I need to write about, and what products I need to be both developing and affiliating with. Watch this space.
3. I’ve set goals. Because I’ve got clear now about the purpose of the blog, I am clearer about what the blog needs to deliver. So I’ve set goals for myself in terms of content, traffic, subscribers, products and income. I’ve also set some critical milestones – things that help me to know that the blog is developing in the right direction.
4. I’m tracking my analytics. Using Google Analytics, I’m keeping track of my key metrics: visits, pages per visit, bounce rate and percentage of new visits. These are all currently going in the right direction, but I’m going be looking at them at least monthly. Also, I’ve identified a couple of role model bloggers who are in my niche, and are running six figure businesses. I’m getting some idea of their metrics via Alexa. This is giving me a picture of what good looks like. In business terms, they’re my benchmarks.
5. I’ve put together a work routine. It’s one thing to put goals together, and quite another to work in the focused way required to achieve them. Well, it can be like that for me. So, keeping my business hat on, I’ve put together a little work routine for myself that I hope’s going to help me crack things. Some of the fundamentals are weekly and monthly blog reviews. These are diarised appointments with myself. To make this fun for myself, I do them in my local cafe which tends to be buzzing and plays hot music. I use a Paul Smith notebook that my friend Mandy Lehto gave me, and some funky coloured pens. I look back on what’s gone well, and not so well in the last period and I create action lists for the time ahead. My monthly reviews focus on bigger items, like my site redesign (more of which shortly), metrics and what to discuss in my next blog coaching call. My weekly reviews focus on more tactical things like the posts I’ll write each week. My daily routines are less defined. Instead I have some targets I’m setting myself around the number of pages of writing I do each day, the amount of other people’s stuff I read and comment on, and the number of personal interactions I make. I’m not precious about these numbers, but they give me something to work towards.
6. I’m putting a bloggers yearbook together. I got this idea from IttyBiz and thought it was inspired. What it involves is looking at the year ahead and noting all the key dates and events, both from a public and personal perspective. Then thinking about what products and blog posts I can develop for different times of the year. A post for 25th January – the year’s most depressing day. An e-book offer for my birthday in June. I think you’ve got the idea. And these things, of course, need to find their way into the action lists too.
7. I’m revamping the design of the site. Half a year or so ago when I started blogging as a personal experiment, I had enough of an idea to develop a site on WordPress, and launched it on the unadapted Thesis Theme.Now the design needs to say more about me and my brand than it currently does. So I’ve hired Grant Griffiths and G2 Web Media to shake things up. I’ve seen some great early logo designs from their designer Mikhaela Craig and am pretty sure things are going to be rocking a whole lot differently soon.

Ambitious? Sure. But I’m also up for the challenge and ready for it. What do you think?

Related posts:

1. How am I doing?
2. Paving Your Own Path
3. A Month of Birthdays