What I plan to do
Log lessons from a year-long social media / marketing effort in order to maintain consistency and boost productivity.
Background
I have a hairy scary goal to have 50,000+ combined audience before the 18th of April 2026, doing so will allow me a platform to spread messages I believe in, particularly about vulnerability, courage and communication. I believe it’ll also help me to normalise high quality, nuanced mental health discourse and many other things very near and dear to me. That gives about four years to build up audience numbers and content production skills.
This first year I’ll focus on productivity and cadence, not concerning myself with viewership / readership numbers.
Being an ‘Obliger’ (according to the four tendencies motivational style quiz) I’ve often found public accountability to be super helpful for productivity, last year during March I published a bunch of videos to my Instagram page, raised over a thousand bucks and did over three thousand push ups all in one month, I attribute most of that to the fact that I simply made the promise and the accountability tracking public (the burnout almost made it not worth it lmao).
As always with how I do stuff, the goal is less of a material goal and more of a gradient with bumper bars to keep me moving.
For now I’m more interested in productivity than results, optimising for results will come later.
Mostly what I want from this is to stick at it, have fun learning and help the people who help people.
Method
The year will break down into four phases of different lengths, each phase with a different goal of weekly content published.
Each Sunday I’ll review the week and publish a short summary of results. A summary might include the number and type of content published, maybe the word count or minutes of footage uploaded, things like this. These reviews will change as I go. My vibe is kinda… disorganised and relaxed.
The testing period below might change based on for example whether I really enjoy producing content of one form over another, or whether life has other demands on me.
I’ll keep a second and third post at the front of this thread for saving updates to the Meta and the Lessons. So this time next year this thread should be mostly full of reviews, with milestones being added to the two posts following this one.
Testing period
Phase 1 - Blog
- Jan - Apr
- Publish 3 blog posts per week for 4 months
Phase 2 - Video
- May - Jun
- Reduce blog frequency (by unfixed amount)
- Produce 3 short videos per week for 2 months
Phase 3 - Email
- Jul - Sep
- Reduce short video frequency (by unfixed amount)
- Produce 3 high quality, high value emails per week for 3 months
Phase 4 - Combination
- Oct - Dec
- Mix and match based on results, define next steps and plan for the future
Questions
- Do you have any suggestions or advice for my potential blind spots?
Obstacles
Getting promoted has been an enormous obstacle in the past, preventing me from going all in. I’m currently in a new position which has zero responsibility outside of hours I’m actually on the clock for, so I will be vigilant about keeping it that way - hopefully it lasts. I will resist taking on full time work, extra responsibility, etc. knowing that I’ve fallen into that trap before.
Time management has been a struggle for me in the past, and I do have a lot on my plate despite the new position having much less responsibility. In order to make the most of my hours I’m planning on producing a lot of content out in public where I’ll be able to also socialise and network (once I’ve recovered from this omni variant, I don’t know how long that will be).
Staying power has been an uphill battle my whole life, though if I dare to allow myself to dream I would say it’s starting to level out. I honestly believe that’s hugely to do with the time I’ve spent tracking things since discovering this amazing community. I know exactly what I want from this year, personally and professionally. I’m not going to start any other projects this year, building the brand is basically it for my personal time during 2022.
[edit]
I’m not sure why this post has been flagged as against community guidelines, if anyone could please let me know what about the posts has been flagged that’d be great.