July 2016 Goals:
June was good, with a trip to Denver to speak and a trip to Chicago that lasted through part of July.
It’ll be a busy month!
New copywriting resources page
I’m a huge fan of this classic layout of “Image, Headline, Text”. In practice it looks like this classic “Man In A Hathaway Shirt” ad:
The image captures the readers attention.
The headline allows them to decide if it’s something they’re interested in.
The text goes through the details.
Simple, elegant, & gets the point across!
In fact one of my favorite sites (Digg.com) has tested & iterated on this classic design to come up with a very user-friendly format for their stories:
Image.
Headline.
Text.
Repeat.
So I decided to take a cue from their playbook and layout a bunch of my articles in a similar fashion.
Check it out:
Lol….it almost looks like a child who can’t draw very well made that page :-)
What I’m curious to find out is how it will perform compared to my old resources page that was an all-text format like:
This all-text page performed “just okay”. It wasn’t super interesting, it wasn’t very share-able, and the stats were pretty low compared to other “main” pages. The time spent on-page was very low in comparison to the rest of the site:
I shall collect the data for the new resources page over the next 3 months and report back!
For now, the new resources page is where I’ll update articles!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora – Kurious Kopywriter
June 2016 Goals
Here’s my June 2016 goals:
Last month was super busy with the addition of the coding class I’m doing. It’s pushing the boundaries of how much quality work I can get done per month myself. Spending large parts of my days and nights on coding prevents other work from getting done.
However I still want to do this coding class….
When I first went to college in 2001 I wanted to major in computer science.
As you may recall, 2001 was a pretty big year in the internet bubble, and at the University of Texas at Austin over 17,000 students were applying for a computer science program with only 5,000 spots.
To manage that huge influx in applicants, they implemented a year-long “weed out” program where they put everyone through certain computer science classes, and only the top 5,000 students make it into the actual program.
I was one of the weeds :(
So I ended up getting a political science degree instead….which is essentially 100% worthless.
(To clarify, I think college = awesome…..political science = meh).
THERE WAS ONE SILVER LINING to this episode.
While I sucked at programming (in comparison to my much harder working student colleagues), I was constantly exposed to different technologies, computers, and in general got better than the average population at “computers”.
This allowed me to start a bunch of small businesses on the side, primarily on the web, and set them up quickly. This better understanding I had at technology allowed me to execute things faster, and understand things better. I would even hire my fellow students to complete programming tasks for me (and never paid over $50 for it)!
Last month I started a coding class in Austin.
In-person, two classes per week, 3+ hours each.
With additional homework, transit time, and brain capacity going into this, it’s taking up about 1/3rd of the total brain power I have dedicated towards KopywritingKourse.com articles and other content (if you noticed a slight slow-down in output lately, you know why).
I am taking this course for a few reasons:
1.) Probably as some sort of compensation for never hitting my aspiration of getting a computer science degree.
2.) My computer skillset is getting outdated. A refresh is welcome.
3.) “You don’t know what you don’t know.” When you learn about things you currently don’t know about, a whole new realm is opened up. You learn different ways of doing things, understand the world better, and can spot opportunities others can’t.
4.) Cuz I wanted to.
5.) All these cool-ass new toys like Artificial Intelligence API’s and stuff are coming out all the time, and I don’t even know how to use them :::throws tantrum:::. I enjoy building stuff and tinkering, and more and more of the stuff you can build nowadays is software-based.
HustleCon Notes 2016
I love taking notes, and at HustleCon this year I busted out the ole iPad Pro and took notes for about 75% of the talks. Here they are:
May 2016 Goals
My goals for May 2016:
1.) Going through this month and making sure I have created the best damn copywriting training in the world. It’s not 100% there yet, but will be very soon.
2.) I’m starting a coding class with AustinCodingAcademy. This is like a knowledge refresh for my coding skillset. I prefer outsourcing coding to other who are far better at it, but knowing the basics and having a good understanding of coding repositories and platforms is always good.
It’ll be 3+ hours every Monday and Wednesday in addition to my normal workload, so that should be interesting. Yikes :-|
Also this month I’ll be in San Francisco for HustleCon. I’ll be in town from May 12th – 16th. I actually wanted to stay in SF for the entire month of May, but had to cancel that due to the coding class.
I will also try to continuously update my calorie intake on this public doc:
Public Food Journal
Hmmmm….let’s see if this works:
Over the years I’ve tried all sorts of ways to eat healthier. What I’ve found personally works for me is tracking the amount of calories and grams of protein I eat per day.
This is actually far easier than it seems. I generally just jot down whatever I eat on my daily to-do list then tabulate as I go.
I’ve tried several phone apps that do this…..but for some reason those haven’t yet kept me in the habit.
I’m giving this basic Google Spreadsheet a try for now :-)
April 2016 Goals
Here’s are my goals for April 2016:
I always use this monthly goal planner style to make my goals because limiting myself to no more than 3 goals is super helpful.
March 2016 Goals
Saw Madeline Albright speak
My current interest in politics: 0.0000001%
I’m sure that will change throughout life, but currently it’s super low.
HOWEVER…..I do find the process of running a campaign fascinating. It involves:
- Fundraising hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Forming alliances.
- Playing strategies.
- A bunch of shady “scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-your-back” deals happen.
Plus I think this is what super rich people do.
It seems when each economic class moves upwards, they discover something:
Poor: “Oh wow! I can learn valuable skills that will make me more money.”
Middle Class: “Oh wow! I can create my own income and don’t have to work for somebody else.”
Rich: “Oh wow! I can actually switch out the people who make the rules.”
For this reason I went to go see Madeline Albright (former secretary of state) speak at a private house. I had to pay money to attend:
February 2016 Goals
Here are the February 2016 Goals:
For the last part of 2015 and much of January I was in New Zealand and Australia, so it’s awesome to be back in Austin getting work done again.
Thanks to the power of autoresponders (and my business manager forcing me to do pre-work all of December) I didn’t have to do any work on kopywritingkourse for 29 days straight and it still grew!
My work output during travel time is highly inconsistent, so it was a nice feeling to NOT have to do anything for a long time (though I still wrote a great deal on the looonngg plane rides).
Originally almost all of my Sydney trip was rained out (random 4 straight days of rain), so I extended it by a bit, got to meet up with a bunch of people I didn’t realize were in Australia, and got to surf in Australia on Bondi beach which was fun!
All my 2015 yearly goals were hit TWO DAY’S BEFORE NEW YEAR’S when I was in Auckland. ’twas a close one!