Staying Focused on What Produces REAL Revenue!

I am a very disciplined person. It is very difficult to knock me off my routine of progress and success.

I wake up early, I eat very well (with exception to chocolate chip cookies) and I exercise regularly. I don’t waste money on indulgences, I don’t drink, I don’t party and my life is fully optimized in a way that puts me in the best position to achieve my goals.

But there is a glaring weakness in my psychology that I am constantly battling.

Here is my problem.

My mind is constantly running out in front of me. I have so many ideas, fears, insecurities, dreams and aspirations that a lot of my life is spent stuck in my own thoughts, thinking of things that aren’t important and dreaming of problems that I will never have.

I want to have more control over my mind and I want to get better and KNOWING that the course of action I am taking is the right one.

Because that really is why I second guess myself or change my mind, isn’t it? I cope with uncertainty by hedging my bets and creating lots of options for myself, in case the “main thing” doesn’t work out.

No more. I know this. I know this lesson to be true and every time I have recalibrated my focus, I have proven this to myself. But every once in a while we all need a bit of recalibration.

So here it is. I am writing out my EXACT business priorities. If I focus on only these goals for the year, I will dominate.

Main Focus - High Ticket Sales

The vast majority of my revenues (and profits) come from high ticket agency work.

• web design

• SEO contracts

• advertising contracts

• consulting deals

• GMB work

The amount of profits (in relation to stress) when dealing with high ticket clients is unlike anything else.

This is why I believe in agency work so much. A lot of people dislike agency work because they think that dealing with clients is too stressful. In reality, working with high ticket clients is the least stressful of all the work. It is small businesses and direct to consumer models that carry the most stress because small businesses and consumers need more service, more updates, more attention and have more fear over spending money.

So in reality, everything I do (including my other priorities) all funnel attention to Stodzy, Digital Commerce, and TGS Digital.

Second Focus - Copyblogger Academy

The Academy is a critical aspects of my product line.

The reason why this is such a focus is because of the scalability involved. Running a high level membership site is unique in that the work required to manage 10,000 customers is almost (not including customer service) the same amount of work required to manage 1000 customers.

As of right now, the MRR for Copyblogger Academy is ~ $6000 a month. Considering all the mistakes I hade and the HUGE learning curve of learning how to manage digital products, I’m really happy with it. (You can read about the mistakes towards the bottom of this article).

In my eyes, the product only became “finalized” in December. So $6000 in MRR over the course of 3 and a half months is pretty damned good.

The goal is to be at $30,000 MRR by the end of the year. That means I will have about 670 paying customers. That is TOTALLY doable.

Third Focus - My Free Content and Advertising Business

Between my TimStodz newsletter and my Copyblogger newsletter, I have the potential to add another $15,000 a month in revenue.

When the sponsorships are coming in, this is a breeze. My brand is growing and so I get quite a few inquires and deals for businesses who want to sponsor my newsletter. This makes me happy because writing my personal newsletter is probably my favorite work that I do and I would do it even if I made no money from it.

But, the bottleneck for this part of my business is the sales.

I admit, this is one of the areas where my mind can take off on me. I get in my head about the fact that I don’t have a well run sales machine that can constantly do the outreach and sales, and all that time I spend tinkering and planning and developing a sales machine for selling ads is time I AM NOT spending on closing high ticket deals, making relationships, and marketing the agency work.

So this is it, this is my manifesto.

My intentions are clear and now all I have to do is execute.