Welcome to our July 2016 ACTION report. If you are new here, make sure you read my June’s report, 

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Why am I doing this? There are a lot of bloggers out there sharing their income reports. I have decided to start a different type of monthly post, an action report. Everywhere we look online these days we hear about someone’s six figure launch and how someone else made a million dollars on a course, etc. Am I the only one ready for people to stop flaunting their incomes?

I have been growing an internationally recognized online career platform for 6 years. Telling you what I earn after 6 years of growing my business in detail isn’t going to help you as you start a business.

Why? Because the only way my business has grown each year is through ACTION and self-reflection. That’s why I want to help you take the action you need to take to create the dream business for you.Your ideal business is not what I have created here. My business is created just for me. I have my own purpose, strengths, passions and mission. But, I can tell you exactly what actions I am taking to grow my business and HELP people. I can tell you what actions are working and what actions are not working. I can tell you about the struggles I am facing and what I am 100% enjoying in my business.

That’s why I love these monthly posts because I get to reflect and plan ahead. I also take notes all the way through the month to make sure I capture everything. Well…it’s been another busy month here at CCG!

So, let’s dive in, shall we?

What worked well in July:

• Posting WAY more than you think on Instagram. I posted 4-5 posts on Instagram and 1 post every night before I went to bed. Doing this and networking (liking and making REAL GENUINE comments on other people’s pictures) helped me add 1,000 followers in July. I also held an Instagram contest and gave away some books I had in my closet. This led to over 400 entries into the contest and a ton of new followers and friends! I had people like, follow and tag their friends which were the requirements to join. Not a big fan of the loop giveaways since I don’t enter them myself. Wordswag, Picmonkey.com and Adobe Spark are what I use to post.

• Pinterest group boards are the number 1 way I get traffic to my site and increase my followers by over 100 people per day now. You can join our group board here. Just let me know your email address and we will add you.

• Personally: We got an anniversary getaway trip! 🙂 When you work with your husband, this is not easy! We hardly touched our computers! We also spent some time at the pool with our daughter which was a lot of fun too and I feel like I accomplished my goal last month to have more balance and downtime.

• Found a new lawyer to help us put some future big plans together! This was a big hurdle as our last lawyer disappeared out of thin air…..

• Finally found a great web developer who cleared our hack from last month once and for all! YAY!

• John and I had focused entire days on strategy with no administrative items. We focused way more on the big picture items of our business and really moved forward big in July.

• Going back to improve emails and sales pages that what we rushed to get up in April. I am a big fan of quality and making sure that all of my content is as good as it can be. I like taking fast action and then reviewing it later to make sure it is quality.

• Last month I fired my editorial assistant. This gave me a lot more work to do but my page views skyrocketed this month because I was more involved in the blog content and we got rid of our hack. Traffic increased percentages. 206K page views in June to 320K: increased by 55%!!! Firing someone worked out for the better so always look for the silver lining! The way that our traffic grew so much in one month was simply because I put out more content. I spent one day (for me every Tuesday) batching a weeks worth of blog posts and one day batching a week’s worth of social media (for me every Wednesday).  If you want more page views on your website, you have to put out more content. Increase the number of times you post or increase the number of posts you do on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. It’s really that simple. Oh and you have to make sure it’s GREAT content and very valuable. Make sure it has a great title too.

• We found an amazing location for our meetup event here in San Diego.  I reached out and asked a friend of mine who opened a store in South Park called Gold Leaf and she said we could host our meetup at her store on September 16th!! Stay tuned for more details soon! I am excited to partner with Sarah Argenal at the Working Parent Resource at this event and of course the owners of the store, another husband and wife duo power couple, Sonya and Kevin Kemp.

• FINALLY figured out that I was procrastinating my work until Sunday and it was stressing me out because I wanted the day to be a day of rest but really it was a day of stress.  I changed my schedule towards the end of the month and moved around certain things I did and days I sent emails. I also made Friday my catch up and planning day, not Sunday. So this past Sunday was way more relaxing. I still worked a bit. I am not perfect still working towards that day of rest, that’s for sure.

• We hired a new Community Manager! I am so excited about this! This is AMAZING and a long time coming. As our membership sites grow (now over 200+ members) I realized I needed some help answering everyone’s questions and making it the community that I really want it to be. So, I hired our social media intern, Aida, to be our Community Manager for CRP and LYCF.  Woohoo and welcome Aida!

• Our first official member’s meetup was held this past weekend here in San Diego. I cannot even tell you how much it motivated me to make it my new mission to meet every single one of the over 200+ members in my communities in the near future. I know we have a virtual and international community but I encourage you all to get out and connect with one another. Start a mastermind or hold a meetup at a coffee shop on a Saturday at 10am. This all started because Meredith was in town from Germany and posted it here in our private Facebook group one day.  It was so great to meet these ladies. You are all doing amazing things in the world and really making a difference. I look forward to watching your businesses and careers take off and seeing you impact thousands of people along the way.

What did NOT work well in July:

• Sponsored posts. We were getting urgent posts and then we would spend a lot of time improving the article and adding images and publish them and they said, oops! That has already been posted elsewhere. So I practiced my own advice and started saying no. Even though they were paying us and that was all nice, sometimes you have to say no to money to make room for other opportunities.

• My husband getting sick when you run a business together. We made it work but it definitely made us see that we need more help managing the community and running the business, hence our new community manager!

• People are commenting on my Instagram feed with hearts and nice pic! I hate it. I can’t stand it. It’s so unauthentic and I will not follow you or respond to you if you do this. I actually called out a girl who posted a comment within 2-3 seconds of me posting. I said, hmm…automated? She hasn’t been back. So I say a big fat no to automatic posting or bad commenting on Instagram. Actually use what I teach here about networking. Think of Instagram as a network. Meet people. Be genuine and really read their comments when you comment! Thank you to all of you who comment on my posts with genuine long comments. I so appreciate you!

• Stressed Sunday evenings prepping for the work week which is why I changed this planning time to Fridays.

• Worked a lot of late nights. I would much rather shut down by 8pm…..

• Our website hack came back. This crap happens. Delete old sites and plugins. Find a good web developer. Like really, really good.

• I turned down a big opportunity to get my brand in front of a lot of people because it didn’t feel right. Sometimes you have to go with your gut and you can’t say yes to everything.

• We have way more guest posts to publish but not enough time to get them up. We need an intern or support person to help us with getting our guest articles up faster. Sorry for the delay if you have submitted one.

• Rethinking our advertising plan.  Every month I encourage you to see what funding you are spending on advertising and how much you made. We usually do better with word of mouth and organic social media posts. Our advertising dollars this month didn’t add up to how much we wanted to. We will stick with organic reach and word of mouth and look at other ways to advertise moving forward. Still a BIG fan of Facebook Ad re-targeting though.

• Our Facebook groups have grown too big. Not a bad thing, a growing pain. People are promoting too much. I need to create some new rules for the Love Your Work and Life Ladies group which has now reached 2,000 members. I also need to re-think about the goal of that group.  It’s on my list to discuss this with my mastermind group tomorrow afternoon so stay tuned for an update next month. (UPDATE: We changed the name to the Classy Career Girl Network. Make sure you join us!)

• I didn’t get as many CCGTV episodes as I would have liked to get out.

Actions:

• Blog posts on CCG (including editing other guest contributors): 36

• Podcast episodes: 6

• Membership site trainings:  The Grow Your Email List challenge and Expand Your Network Challenge in our membership community.

• YouTube CCGTV episodes: 4

• Facebook Live events: 2 for our members in our membership communities. It was so fun getting to know the members better and really answering questions and helping them move their careers and businesses forward! Loved this!

• Phone calls made to my community: 0 (We worked on big picture strategy this month so I wasn’t able to make these calls. For me, I have to do one or the other. Either network and connecting or focus on strategy. Hoping to do more of these calls next month!)

Goals for Next Month (August 2016)

• Get the word out about our networking event on September 16th.

• Re-think the goals for our free Love Your Work and Life Ladies Facebook group to make sure members get more of what they want and less of what they don’t.

• Work on some fun long-term behind the scenes stuff to get our career training in universities and career centers across the country. If you want Love Your Career Formula at your university or high school, let us know as we are working on a way to make that happen sooner rather than later! It’s exciting!

• Find interns!!!

• Put a plan together for Corporate Rescue Plan 2.0.  re-launch.

• Prep for a free FALL in love with your work and life challenge in September. Just like last year but even better!

• More Instagram giveaways. If you are a brand and want to partner, let me know!

Thanks for listening!