january 2018

When December of 2017 came to a close, I wrote my goals for the upcoming New Year down on my whiteboard. One in particular was a big, bold goal for Express Writers, which I’ve been running for six years now (seven if you count my first year as a freelancer). I’d never physically wrote this goal down before, although I’d been thinking of it for months. In my goal list, I wrote down “new system launch” first. That’s because I truly didn’t think our $100,000 month would come before our new build of Express Writers teamroom and ecommerce client system, which has been estimated to take 5-8 months as a custom development timeframe minimum, over 2018. We have a development team in place for this new build, and Josh our CTO (my husband) is leading the initiative. It’s costing a ton, but it’s necessary as a smoother machine to run our growing business. Well, in January of 2018, the little (big) goal I’d written down came true. To my shock, we surpassed $120,000. For the month, across all the content services we offer, our team wrote a collective estimated 1,851,200 words. In this report, first, we’ll go into a visual representation of what our January content accomplishment looks like: next, three core reasons from me on why we were able to successfully take this on, and stay light and agile: finally, we have a client reminder on our policy, turnaround and communication. Let’s jump in! The Data in Pictures: Express Writers vs. 1,851,200 Words (Infographic) In January of 2018, our content creation agency Express Writers had its busiest month ever! We had over 282 orders placed, and we served more than 50 clients, focusing on repeat clients (many of our repeat clients placed 32-40 orders throughout the month). We saw a 99% success rate on projects completed (we revise if our clients aren’t happy, and refund if the client is not a good fit). Overall, we completed: 625 blogs and articles 606 expert industry-specialized blogs and web pages 1069 product descriptions 7 press releases 7 social media packages Many of the blogs were long-form. If we average the word count at 800w to account for shorter items like social media copy, the total word count we wrote was 1,851,200 words. We even served customers in more than 10 countries! Why We Hit 1.8 Million Words in a Month: 3 Cores that Took Years of Hard Work, Trial and Error I know a lot of business gurus that say things like: “Write it down, and the universe will respond and make it true.” I’m going to get real for a second so I’m not misleading anyone. Listen in closely… Our major goal did not come true only because I wrote it down. In fact, the underlying structures, years of groundwork that we’d been refining for months, are really what made this goal come true. And everything just happened to fall into place finally in January, 2018. 1. We have the best staff I’ve ever hired finally in place, true role direction, and real capacity A new move that took a while to work out was expanding our Editor role into a Quality Assistant role, a staff role I brainstormed in August 2017 to replace our struggling, low-success Editor role. We monitored, trained, and added new QAs, eventually, this role grew to have 300% more stability and success than our Editorial role that I had for five years prior. Our expert writers, authority copywriters, content strategists, social media copywriters, continue to fall into place. Out of 200 interviewed writers in January, we added 15 new writers to our team. I live by the mantra “less is more” for our team, finding the right people and giving them full-time work is a winning formula. And the capacity we can take on with just one new writer is staggering: sometimes, 24,000 additional words/week. So, 15 new writers can mean that we can handle 360,000 additional words in a week, or 1.4 million words in a month. Because I remained focused on hiring this month (I interviewed daily), we didn’t even max out our writer team with the busy month we just had. Because of our role structure, I’m free to do what I do best: write thought leadership blogs, run a Facebook group that links to our Twitter chat, share Instagram stories, refresh and update all our marketing strategies, run my course and write my next books. 2. Our inbound content rankings and industry trust is through the roof, a combination of a 1,000-hour project and 6 years of work Industry positioning and organic inbound marketing takes time. This month, our organic rankings are coming in at 12,600 keywords. We recently crossed the 1,000-published blogs mark. That took 6 years of consistent, in and out, day after day, content creation. We outrank our competitors on Google by an average 4-6% visibility. These are big reasons companies choose us to write their online content. Next, my comprehensive course at www.contentstrategycourses.com and the accompanying book, Practical Content Strategy & Marketing, has been spreading like wildfire (89 copies of my book sold in the last few weeks with NO ads, and we’re nearing 40 students enrolled in the course). The course build took 1,000 hours of my time in 2017. Through guest speaking appearances, my Facebook group, Twitter chat and organic connections, I’ve been spreading the knowledge of the course I created. The only paid marketing is $5/day for Facebook ad retargeting (through an installed Facebook pixel). This ensures people who visit the course site once don’t forget about it. Since Facebook targets people who are in my group, they get a double-whammy reason to invest in my strategic training. The growth in trust has been confirmed every time I log onto social media. I received an Instagram story on my account at @fementrepreneur from a marketer who purchased my book, had his office read it, talked to JJ and bought $700 worth of content services within … Read more