How Much I Made in November
I had a lot of goals going into the month of November. To recap, I was going to:
- Update all video thumbnails — Complete
- Post 10 Scratch video — Completed 7
- Collaborate with a Youtuber — Not Complete
- Hit 250 Subs and 600 Hours of Watch Time — Actual 290 and 644 hours
- Publish 10 podcast episodes — Completed 3
- Have 250 downloads — Completed 161
- Have a guest — Not Complete
- 2 Competitions — Completed 1
- 1000 tweets — Completed 800
- 200k impressions — Completed 178k
- 500 followers — Completed 470
- Write 20 blog posts — Completed 3
- Read 2 books — Completed 1
- Freelance — Not Complete
- Jira Book — Not Complete
- SaaS — Not Complete
That summarizes what I set out to do and what I actually accomplished. Let’s dive into each category and talk about what happened, then we’ll set some goals for December. But before I start all of that, I just want to take a moment to reflect at a macro level. I had high goals for the month of November. But the week of Thanksgiving which to me was about 7 days, productivity hit an all time low. I literally felt no motivation to create content. It was just so much easier to consume content from the internet. As you saw with my numbers, I simply didn’t hit my goals at all. Let’s see what went wrong, what I’m going to improve, and share my goals for the month of December.
YouTube
YouTube was filled with mixed emotions. We started off the month very strong and had videos hit 100 views very quickly. But then towards the holidays, our videos start under performing. I spent some time trying to tweak titles and thumbnails and eventually the video got over 100 views, but I’m still not very sure what happened. I made a major modification to the thumbnail and the latest video appeared to be doing better, but then Thanksgiving hit and people just stopped watching. Surprisingly though, even as video views were at an all time low, subscriber growth kept steadily increasing.
For December, we plan to publish 10 more videos. This will get us to 64 videos before the end of 2020. I would have liked to get to 70 videos, but 64 will be good enough and we wont have to rush the quality of the videos. We are also introducing another thumbnail template for the month of December. I’ll be carefully monitoring this one to see how it does. Additionally, during the first minute of the every video, I’ll be adding more text effects to our videos to capture people’s attention out of the gate. And finally, I’ll be adding a custom end card that will encourage folks viewing to subscribe to our channel.
The goal is to hit 350 Subs before the end of the year and have 750 watch hours. The final goal is to get to 1000 subs, but we’ve been increasing at a pretty good rate. I’m hoping that putting out 10 videos along with new thumbnails and messages reminding folks to subscribe will help with subscriber growth. According to YouTube, about 80k people scrolled past our video. So, if I can figure out how to make them stop and click on the video and then subscribe, we should be able to hit 1k sub in no time.
Podcast
Here, I completely dropped the ball. I should have posted at least 10 podcast episodes and only got 3 out. I’m completely disappointed in myself but my excuse was the numbers. The last couple of podcast episodes just drew in single number plays/downloads and it was very discouraging.
But, the podcast remains the best platform for me to make money on right now so I have to double down. I already have the 10 episodes I’m going to make for December ready to go. I just bought a new microphone that should make recording and producing these podcast episodes much more fun for me. I plan on sticking with the cyber security topic for the podcast but will warp up the topics on passwords here in the next week.
My goal with the podcast, given current trends is to hit 225 plays on the podcast. At an average rate of 6 plays per episode and 10 new episodes coming out, I should be able to hit 225. Additionally, I’m hoping to hit the 2 dollar revenue mark. I’m currently at 1.34 earned.
Medium
I had set an aggressive goal of writing 20 blog posts on Medium. I finished like 4. Not my best work, but getting into the writing mood is something I really need to work on. I did manage to make 1 cent on Medium through my writing. Overall I had about 80 reads on all my November blog posts.
In December, things will be different. I have about 14 blog posts ready to go! I started reading a book about writing and I plan on writing every day to sharpen and improve my skills. I sometimes shy away from writing because I feel like I’m not very good at it. Well, this buck stops here. 20 posts coming in December!
Similar to last month, most of my focus was on trying to grow Twitter. I didn’t hit the numbers I was trying to get to, but I did manage to have good growth. Some observations from Twitter this past month. Focusing on growing followers is both physically and mentally taxing. It is extremely hard on the soul to see numbers fluctuate from day to day. Second, I haven’t quite figured out the Twitter game yet. But I have a plan. I’m going to focus my twitter efforts on 4 things.
- Engage with the people I’m following. Ask questions, provide good thoughts. I’m going to go above just a simple, congrats.
- Post only about Leadership, Agile, Scratch, and Cyber Security. I’m going to leave off the commentary about my personal life to see how things go. Less ranting and more thought provoking content.
- Utilize gif’s and pictures more.
- Utilize Fleets more.
I’d like to end 2020 with 500 followers. Let’s see how this goes.
TikTok
I’ve had a TikTok since the pandemic started, but I’m getting very serious about TikTok. Originally, I just wanted to figure out how to post Scratch tutorials on TikTok. I plan on still doing that, but will do it on my wife’s TikTok. For my channel, I’m going to focus on providing leadership content overlayed on videos of me drawing. I love drawing and I think people will enjoy my super weird drawings while listening to me talk about things at a deep level. Well as deep as 1 minute lets you get. So far I have 18 likes on my videos and I have about 5 videos posted. Goal is to have at least 50 videos posted by the end of the year.
Coding
This is where the money maker is going to be for me. I haven’t put much focus on this, but I’ll start making progress in December. The coding competitions have been fun, but they are discouraging because unless you really know how the tech works, you can’t really make award winning content. So, rather than focusing on competitions, I’m going to use competitions as inspiration to start coding more.
Books
I have 3 books and courses that I’ll be working on throughout 2021. My objective for December is to make significant progress on my How to Execute with Jira book that I’ve been writing. I already have it up for presale on gumroad.
In total, I’ve made 1.35 so far from this venture. Hang on tight though. I got a new planner and I’m really laying out some critical details on how I’ll be successful. I’m reading, writing, and producing content each and every day. Gone are the days where I just sit back and consume content. December and the rest of 2021 are going to be HUGE for apetech!
