30 Pieces of Advice for Myself for seelemons.com
30 Pieces of Advice for Myself for seelemons.com
Giving myself consulting advice for my own website
Random Observation/Comment #703: Follow your own advice. It’s harder to do than you might think.
Why this list?
I consider brainstorming a personal super power, but I’m really bad at managing my own writings. Writing lists of 30 were a big part of training my brain to think divergently and I think they’re useful for others to read, so why not try to make a business out of the almost 700 posts I have? Why not put ads up? I guess it’s just more fun to just write.
With all that said, hypothetically, if I wanted to make it into a profitable business, here’s the advice I would give myself wearing a consultancy hat. I wrote this post back in November 2020 and actually implemented some of these already.
Share your posts with different communities instead of just Facebook or LinkedIn to your friends.
Consider submitting posts to other writing communities like Medium newsletters with larger followings or directly to communities that like writing lists or look at productivity.
Create and manage a virtual community set of basics like social media fb group or sub reddit
Update the site to let people subscribe to a newsletter – Completed! It should be a pop-up so you can sign-up to www.listsof30.com
Try using substack for collecting emails of interested friends and hosting the lists of 30 – Completed!
Scrap all other posts and just focus a blog/book on lists of 30 in easy to search categories – I actually enjoy the other posts I’ve been writing in 2021
Remake a listsof30.com site that is mainly used for showing and searching different topics as well as highlighting books to go the author route – Completed! I plug my book on every podcast episode
Clean up the “about me” page to make it more professional – Working on this
Change seelemons.com to a personal portfolio space that also highlights work successes and personal brand – Considering doing this after I’ve migrated a majority of my Lists to substack. It’s a 1 year migration plan
Write lists of 30 that are more timely related to news, trends, or holidays
Share your posts as responses to any high traffic social media posts
Optimize the site with SEO tools and search terms for target audience – Started this with SEMrush and other tools
Actually review the reports to see which posts were most effective. Which keywords came up in searches? – This is a good feedback loop and guiding principle that I’ll review in a few months
Set ways to measure the growth and success of the site – Is it by number of opens in the newsletter? Number of subscribers? Unique traffic to site?
Consider ways of monetizing the site (preferably one without ads) – Still haven’t thought of this. I don’t like monetization as a motivation.
Open up an easy way for people to comment on the posts and provide feedback – Completed! Directly on substack.
Ask people for suggestions on lists of 30 to write and test demand for such lists – Mostly has been a small circle
Market the series of books to a publisher and offshore the marketing work to them – Probably a good idea at one point
Use your existing book of “My Life in Lists of 30” on Amazon to market the new book “Our Life in Lists of 30”
For the specialized Instagram account, use mindmaps to post the lists of 30 in an easier to read and share way – Mindmaps posting for each release – see @listsof30 instagram
Consider a 30 day challenge recording yourself reading your book one list at a time. Post as a podcast. – Thinking about this after the 30 episodes of podcasts
Make a YouTube video and post the podcast on there too – I’m on youtube!
Make it a live youtube video of you reading it and get people to tune in (maybe even make it a twitch account) – Haven’t tried Live yet. Seems like too much work.
Host recurring meetings once every two weeks to help people write lists of 30 – Maybe after I get enough interest
Consider running a special event for the community interested in list writing
Make a mobile app version of the site that let’s people easily search and read lists – I’ve been playing around with Bravo Studio and it seems pretty easy.
Use Roam Research as a live published journal for writing the book and market it as an idea to others in the #roamcult slack channel – I think there might be too much pressure to write daily. I am still using Roam for personal note taking.
Ask others to write lists of 30 and highlight them on your newsletter, channel, and to the followers – Makes sense when more people write lists
Go on a book tour to publicize (although it would be virtually right now) – I don’t really want to book tour unless it’s fun for travels
Hire someone to help with managing the sharing, hunting, reporting, optimization and other stuff so you can get back to the fun part and just write.
So why not follow these steps? Make opportunities for side hustles and do it once so it’s a passive income for doing something I’m already doing for free.
As a retro of reading this list, I think the hardest part is the Marketing. I am fairly good on the content, but finding the right angle with partnerships and networks-of-networks growth is key. I still find this the hardest part of any product and I’m slowly learning how important it is to work with intermediaries that might already have these existing connections.
~See Lemons Consult Lemons