Platform by Michael Hyatt – The Experiment

I just finished reading the book Platform by Michael Hyatt. I enjoyed it so much and found it full of so many practical tips that are relevant to what I want to accomplish that I’m going to try an experiment. For the next 3.5 months (through the end of October, 2013) I am going to apply as many of the tips from Platform as I can, and let’s see what happens. No, let’s not just see what happens, let’s set some goals:

1. Traffic. Here’s what the traffic for donloper.com looks like per Google Analytics for the past 12 months.

As you can see the traffic has never gone above 200 visits in a single day, although it spiked to almost that number on July 9th…hmm, what happened on that day? Looks like I made three posts that day, one about relaunching this blog, another about how it works being a contributor to Forbes magazine, and one more about how to get your photo showing up in Google search results next to the content you produce. Ah, it’s also the day I wrote on Forbes about how to relaunch a blog, a post that might have gotten a lot more traffic had I named it 10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins For Your Business Website.

I would have assumed the bulk of the traffic came from the Forbes article, but that only sent 20 visitors as I look at my stats. The rest came from social media, search, or “direct” which could mean all sorts of things. Interesting.

Back to the point, you can see that a year ago I was getting 100-150 visits per day on a consistent basis. Something bad happened in September, I don’t remember what, I think my blog was hacked or something. Then Google’s Panda hit toward the end of September and got me. I wasn’t posting very much here, which was probably a weighty factor.

So what’s a realistic yet ambitious goal? Shall we say an average of 400 visitors per day during the month of October? Sounds good.

2. Email subscribers. Right now there are 65 subscribers receiving emails whenever I update this site. Let’s get that up to 200. If you’re not signed up, use the simple sign up form here.

3. Twitter followers. I currently have 504 people following my @donloper Twitter profile. I’m going to set a goal of doubling that to 1,000.

4. Revenue. I’m not going to put banner ads on the site anytime soon, but I am an Amazon affiliate and get a commission whenever someone clicks on a link to a book or other product from this site. Over the past 12 months I’ve earned a total of $124.40. Yee-ha. How about getting that up to $50/month? That seems reasonable. Hey, we’re just getting started, kids. My ultimate goal is not to make a living off of direct revenue from this blog, but it wouldn’t hurt if it could at least pay for the hosting fees. Mostly I’m just interested in it for the sake of experimentation.

5. Clients. A big part of the reason I relaunched this blog and am focusing on it is in order to get clients for MWI, my online marketing firm. Let’s set a goal of getting at least three new clients as a direct result of this blog by the end of October.

6. Speaking engagements. I’m interested in doing more public speaking. But I don’t have much experience, yet. I’ll be trying to get speaking gigs outside of this blog, but I’m going to set a goal of getting at least one spontaneous speaking invitation from this blog in the next 3.5 months.

7. Lives changed. A bigger part of the reason I blog is because I hope it does someone some good. Every once in a while someone will say something to me along the lines of “I read your blog all the time. I never comment, but I really like what you write and some of it has helped me change things in my business for the better.” That makes my day. In part I write for myself. I would continue writing even if I knew nobody were reading. But it’s a big dollop of icing on the cake when someone tells me that what I write matters to them, even if only in a small way. I’m flattered just to know people read what I write. I’m even more flattered that anyone likes it. And I’m blown away when someone actually changes their behavior as a result of what I write.

I’m going to set a goal that three people will spontaneously tell me they’ve changed their behavior as a result of what I’ve written here. That means if you’re reading this and then you tell me, you don’t count. Of course you count in my heart, you just don’t count toward the goal.

Alrighty then, let the experiment begin. Of course I’ll be posting about everything I do. The first thing will be to create a checklist and post that. If you want to stay up to date on the experiment please sign up using the email signup form here.