What worked in 2020 and what didn't

As we say adiós to 2020, us entrepreneurs are looking ahead to 2021 as a clean slate and a fresh start, and as it should be. But I like to look back on the previous calendar year and make some notes about what worked well and maybe what didn't work as well. And I want to share that with you today in the hopes that it inspires you, it motivates you, or maybe even prevents you from making some similar you know, say, not say mistakes. I don't really believe in mistakes because I think you learn something from, from everything that you go through. But maybe there's some things that I'll impart to you today that you're going to say, oh, I'll think twice about that next time. Okay, so let's go through the calendar year starting with January. In January, I decided to switch my content focus from Facebook to YouTube. Turns out that was a great decision. I have 1 point— I, I've earned, uh, 1.5 million video views in 2020 alone. 14,100 subscribers in the last year from that decision, which is great. I've also earned $11,700 of AdSense revenue. So that's better than a kick in the head. I think that's awesome from making that decision. Turns out that switching and really focusing on YouTube as my core content platform from which I then repurpose those videos onto my blog, onto Facebook, onto Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., has turned out to be a really great decision. I believe that if you are an entrepreneur who needs to be positioned as an authority, expert resource in your industry or niche, YouTube is the answer, and you really need to start building a channel like yesterday. In February, I hired an OBM, which stands for online business manager. She is now my right-hand woman. I can't live without her. She's amazing and helps me with so many different things in my business, but largely responsible for helping me to further build my team. It turns out that you cannot grow or scale a business by yourself. You can start your business by yourself. You can start your coaching business or your consultancy. And bootstrap and get it going and start making money and build a very strong proof of concept by yourself. But when you get to the point where you're ready to grow, you cannot do it alone. Too many things, too many moving parts. So I'm at a stage where I'm ready to do that. I wasn't at that stage 3, 4 years ago, right? I'm ready now. So don't think that you have to start hiring a team if you're not at that stage. But for me, I am at that stage. So now we have a team of editors, we have a community manager, we have an Instagram person who's come on recently, we have a person who we can go to for motion graphics. So the team is growing and that's, that's been a really good thing. In March, that's when things started to go crazy, right? In March, I saw an exponential rise in speaking opportunities and it continued for the better part of right through summer and really for the better part of 2020, I estimate that I have done at least 35 engagements over the last, probably from March onward. That being whether I'm speaking on a podcast, a summit, invited to a livestream, invited to a virtual event, on a panel, a network, a global networking event, um, virtual speaking, virtual stages. And so speaking has always been a big part of what I do from a lead generation perspective, getting my name out there and getting people to know me. So speaking, it really started to take off in March and, and continued through much of 2020. In April, I really started looking at systems, and by that I mean technology. I had a CRM that I had been using for years. It was costing me, gosh, probably 5 times more than what I'm paying now, and I wasn't even using the tool to its maximum capacity. It really ended up being, frankly, a bit of a waste of money. So, or rather a big waste of money. So what I decided to do was to really look at systems and say, okay, what am I spending money on? What are better systems I could be using that are more appropriate to the level of business that I'm in, the type of business that I'm in? So I switched CRMs. I went and now I use Dubsado. I started integrating Airtable, which is like spreadsheets on steroids. And we also started to use a project management tool called ClickUp, which is amazing. There are others that are great out there as well, but we've chosen ClickUp. And what we're doing is using that integrated with Slack as a communication tool for our team. So systems overall is something we really started to take a closer look at in in April and continue to do now. In June, I launched a free live training and Q&A series. It didn't necessarily start off really strong because I launched it as a Q&A series only, and we had a few people coming, but it wasn't super successful. And then I had one of my loyal subscribers and supporters pull me aside and say, "Hey Cheryl, this format isn't working. Here's what might work better." I took her advice and started to add more of a training element to it, then Q&A. That turned out to be a really good idea. So we've had over 300 people register for this free live training series. Many people come week after week. They love it. And it's a really engaged community. I'm so proud of, you know, the people who come and gain something from what it is I teach every week. It's every Wednesday at 3:00 PM Eastern time. I plan to continue to do it in 2021. It's free. It's 100% free. It's really a lead generator, but more importantly, I think it's a community building tool and it's also a way for people to get to know me better. You know, many of my clients come from those free trainings and so the free live training series has really been successful. We launched it in June. In October, I resurrected a video challenge that I'd launched several times in the past as recorded video challenges. But now, seeing what's going on with COVID seeing what's going on in the entrepreneurial world, especially in 2020, and realizing that you don't have the time to learn how to edit videos, I had to think, what could I do to better support people? Ah, let's eliminate editing. So let's make it live. So we turned the challenge into a 30-day livestream. We call it the Go Live Challenge. And We've had 55 people since October go through the challenge. We plan to— we continue to plan, you know, for more of them in 2021. Every month we plan to do one. The Go Live Challenge is a— it's intended to be a place where you gain momentum, that you can get better at speaking on camera, and that you build your confidence. They're not necessarily marketing videos as much as it's intended to help you build your muscle of creating content consistently and thinking about video on a daily basis. We provide prompts and a whole suite of resources. That has turned out to be a really great decision. We launched it in October and continued to do it into 2021. And then in November, I— and this is the result of turning a bedroom into a video studio, which is clearly still in progress. You can see all the stuff behind me. But in November, I decided it was time for me to have my own dedicated space. Space. I did a video, it's on this channel actually, I'll link to it in the cards, where I show you my behind-the-scenes studio setup where I was previously in between the living room and the dining room and the kitchen. And that worked really well throughout most of 2020, but by November I really started to, uh, and I discussed this with my husband, I said, you know, I think I really need a dedicated space if I want to uplevel my live productions. I really want to build a show And so here we are in the makings of the video studio. So here are some things that I tried in 2020 that maybe didn't work so well. I kind of alluded to one of them in June, which was launching the live series of Q&As just solely as Q&As at the beginning, and it didn't really take off initially. It wasn't until I started to make it a training every week that it really started to work. So that was one thing that, that wasn't as successful when I first launched it. Another thing was in my community, uh, for those who register for the live trainings every week, they're part of my, my members site, my community. And within there, I thought, hey, it'd be really cool if I could provide a Cheryl Plouffe search engine that people could use like Google and be able to search through anything I've ever said and find the video that pertains to what they're looking for. I used the tool Searchie to do this, and Searchie is an amazing tool, but I wasn't— and I haven't been utilizing the tool other than for this search engine capability, and that didn't really take off very well. I think it was just a bit overkill for what it was, and people were a bit maybe confused about what it was and how to use it, and we didn't really do as good of a job of explaining what it was or how people could use it amongst all the other things that we were doing. So Searchie is a great tool. I think we could use it maybe in other ways, but as a search engine tool within our community, it didn't— it kind of fell a bit flat. And the last thing that I didn't do very well in 2020, in fact I probably didn't do at all throughout the year, was batch record. I really did find myself every Wednesday— my publishing day is on Thursday— every Wednesday I would say to my husband, it's Wednesday, I have to make my video. I just didn't do a very good job of pre-planning and pre-producing that content and scheduling it out as I had hoped I would throughout 2020. So note to self, I need to get more strict with myself on the batch recording if I want to be more efficient. So there you go, some good, some bad, some ugly. And if you're looking ahead to 2021 right now and saying, hey Cheryl, do you have anything that helps me plan 12 months of content? The answer to that is yes, and the video is right below this one.