Business

Anyone Else Feeling Stuck?

August 19, 2020

I think it is safe to say that this year has been nothing like what we had hoped for and expected 2020 to be like. As a husband, father, and business owner, not much has gone according to plan, and I have had to learn to let go of expectations. Most of our country and our world are in survival mode, taking things day by day until our current situation passes, and we can get back to business as usual.

I am not usually one to let the grass grow under my feet. I maintain an awareness of my current situation, and if I feel stuck, I pivot. I have never had an issue finding a new direction, it just comes to me. I have enough interests and areas that I keep an eye on that finding the next thing is easy, but this time is different.

I am forty years old now and desire more than financial security from my work. I want to do work that matters. It needs to matter to me, and it should matter to others as well. I’m not saying that what I am doing now doesn’t matter, but it just isn’t fulfilling me right now, and I can’t identify why.

Considering all that is happening right now in the world, I feel guilty about having these feelings. I should be content with the fact that people are still paying me for my work. None of us asked for the challenges our world is facing. However, I purposely positioned myself professionally to mitigate risk, so while I do sympathize with others going through tough times, I can’t really empathize with them. I could have taken many different directions in life, but once I started building a family, I wanted to make sure I could provide for them even in the most unsure of times.

All of us want to do things that matter. We want to be appreciated for our work while at the same time feeling great about what we do. Whether I am building a website, taking pictures, filming a video, or making YouTube videos, I am being appreciated for my work. I have spent a lot of time digging into that to figure out what I am missing. I wanted to make sure that I did not merely desire praise. Our mind can mislead us, so I often take Darth Vader’s advice and “search my feelings.”

Perhaps you are like me, you are not looking for outside affirmation, but you still feel like something is lacking. That is where I am at this point. I enjoy my work, the flexibility I have within it, and the freedom it provides me, but am I fulfilled? Is this work my legacy? These are the answers I am searching for right now.

I don’t expect the answer to simply land in my lap. Life is a journey, and I wouldn’t want it to be entirely predictable. If it was, I wouldn’t need faith in anything, and I believe that our world needs faith in something bigger than our past, our current circumstances, and whatever the future holds for us.

It is easy to blame circumstances for this feeling of being stuck. If we leave that unchecked for too long, we will place blame on others and start to build resentment towards them. When we do this, we are not taking responsibility for our lives, and beyond that, it’s not fair to those we are blaming for the choices we made.

If you are feeling stuck, know that in this moment, I am too. It is temporary, and we will get out of it. Spend this time to search within to determine what is causing it. Take ownership of it and develop a plan to get out of it, one step at a time. Here are a few questions I ask myself when I am feeling stuck to help with me discover the cause.

What exactly am I feeling right now?
Did anyone besides me contribute to these feelings?
How did I contribute to these feelings?
What can I do right now to move forward?
What needs to change to continue moving forward?
Am I placing blame on someone else rather than taking ownership?
Do the people closest to me know my desires?
How can I better communicate with those close to me what my desires are?
What are my next steps?

I hope that you find a way to get unstuck. It can be very challenging, but I know that we have it in us. The world is stuck right now, and it can’t afford to have all of us be stuck.

If I can be an encouragement in any way, share with me in the comment section below or reach out to me through social media.

Blessings!

5 Tips for Increasing Website Traffic

March 5, 2018

Looking to get more traffic to your website or blog? In this article, I discuss 5 tips for increasing your website traffic. The methods I discuss I am actively using to increase traffic to my websites and have used them to increase traffic to my clients’ websites.

Resource Links:
Getting Started with WordPress: https://learnwithjerad.co m /p/getting-started-with-wordpress-a-beginners-guide
Introduction to Hashtags in Social Media: https://jerad.courses/p/understanding-hashtags-in-social-media

This was originally a video that I converted to an article for my blog.

Hey it’s Jerad, and I have five tips for getting more traffic to your website. So, I’ve producing a lot of video content lately, especially on this YouTube channel. And, I’ve also am trying to grow traffic to my blog. So, what I’ve been doing is actually posting these videos to my blog, and that’s one of my goals to get more traffic to the website.

I want to also be blogging more and just doing more to build traffic to that website, because that’s kind of my hub for everything. Like if somebody wants to see what I’m up to, or know kind of what’s the latest stuff that I’m working on, that’s the website that I want them to go to.

So, here are five tips. These are things that I’m doing here and there with this website, and some of my other websites to build traffic to these sites.

1. Video Marketing

Now, video is huge, YouTube is huge. Google’s the number one search engine. The number two search engine is YouTube.

People are searching more often on YouTube than they would be searching on Bing, or any of the other search engines. And so, video marketing is super important. And, my goal is to actually embed my videos into my website. Now, I put these videos up on YouTube, and I know that people will come across them from YouTube because, maybe they subscribe to the channel or what not.

But when I’m actually sharing that video with other people through social media, or an email or something like that, I’m drawing that traffic to my website, and the video is embedded at my website. Google will reward a website for having people spend more time there. So, say somebody does a Google search for something, it ends up at my website because of one of my videos and they watch a video.

Google’s paying attention to that stuff. How long a person is on a website, how many clicks they click around a few times before leaving the website. All these things are better indicators that a person is finding information on that website and that helps Google rank that website as more relevant than another website that might have similar information.

So when you put a video on a website, you’re actually keeping people’s attention there longer because they’re watching that video in your website. So, for example, if it was a small article, somebody might come to your website and be there for a minute while they read that article really fast or, browse through that article.

But if they’re watching a video that might be five or six minutes long, then they might stick around a little bit longer to watch that entire video, which means more time on your website. And then, the links that you provide are also on your website. You can link to other resources from within your website. And also, link out to other locations so that people can find relevant information.

So, you’re keeping people at your website longer, and you’re also referring them to information that also helps them take the next step or, get more informed about whatever the topic is. So, I embed my videos in my website, in a post for that purpose, and use links to kind of get people to move throughout my website, to other videos or other resources that I mention.

2. Host a Give-a-way

Now, giveaways can be something very small, to something pretty big. I did a giveaway about a month and a half ago on another website of mine that just drove crazy amounts of traffic to the website. Got a lot of people to sign up for email and newsletter and, social media channels and all that stuff.

It doesn’t have to be a big giveaway. It could be something small. People get excited about giveaways. We used to do these giveaways where these companies were sending us cases for smart phones and stuff like that. They probably were less than $10 to buy in retail, but we were giving them away.

So, we would do these giveaways, and people would sign up for them. We’d get a bunch of people signing up just to get a free case sent to them. And of course, we had to cover the cost of sending that in the mail to them, which was usually only a couple of bucks. But, it got people signing up for our newsletter, it got people subscribing to our YouTube channel. It got people to come to our website ’cause that’s where the giveaway was being hosted, was on our website.

So you can do a giveaway, and make sure that you’re getting their email addresses, so that way you can send them out newsletters, or an email every now and then saying hey, here’s the latest post to my website from the last month. And it’s like, people aren’t just sitting around thinking hmm, I wonder what Jared’s posted to his website lately.

You have to kind of send them updates an keep them informed. And, doing a giveaway is a great way to get them on your email, to get an email so that you can actually send an email to them, keep them updated. Maybe get them to like or subscribe to your social media channel so that they can see the updates there as well.

So, do a giveaway, they’re extremely inexpensive to run depending on what it is that you wanna give away. Obviously, and whether you choose to make that an international giveaway, or just local in the country that you reside in, or like the United States for me. Giveaways are definitely something I’m going to be doing a lot more of this year, because people like free stuff and, it’s easy to get stuff to give away to people to where it’s not costing me too much more than just my time and organizing this for the people who are coming to my website.

3. Social Media

You wanna be useful and not spammy on social media. I see this all day long, people get spammy on social media. You wanna use social media to direct traffic to your website. Whether it be your personal social media channels, or ones that you’ve set up more for your business or what not.

Like a Facebook page, instead of your personal Facebook profile. Or maybe like an Instagram business profile, or something like that. You wanna direct traffic to your website, but you don’t wanna be spammy about it. Using social media, it’s very easy to look spammy. You wanna make sure that you’re providing value, that you are giving people things that are interesting to see, or to read, or to watch on social media.

Just saying hey, go to my website, check this out, blah, blah, blah. You don’t wanna spam people, you don’t wanna trick people into getting to your website because when they come to your website, and there’s nothing interesting there, they’re gonna feel like you tricked them, or tried to scam them, and they’re not gonna come back.

So you wanna provide some sort of value. One way to do that is actually to put a little bit of something on your social media, and then have the rest of the resources on your website. For example, Facebook doesn’t necessarily like it when you link outside of Facebook to another website. So I tend to try and put a bunch of information in a post, or something like that. Share a much as I can in a post on my Facebook page.

And then, I’ll mention that the rest of it is on my website. I want Facebook to organically show that post to other people. And when I’m including links and things like that, trying to send people outside of Facebook, Facebook doesn’t seem to show that post to as many people. So I try to provide as much value as I can on social media to basically wet the palette and get people excited about something.

And then, they can get more over on my website, and that’s how I drive traffic from social media to my website.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Websites need to be optimized so that the search engines can crawl them, find the content that’s on them, and rank them as relevant for whatever keywords people would use to search.

So, say you have a website , like a technology website and you write reviews and post reviews and stuff, and talk about smart phones and what not, just like my website StateofTech.net. I wanna optimize that site so that when Google is crawling and looking for information to show people for maybe say, an iPhone 10.

Somebody wants to know something about an iPhone 10, they’re gonna look at all the websites out there, that have information about iPhone 10, and Google is reading all that information, seeing the links that are in that post that are linking to that website, that are linking away from that website.

They’re looking at how fast the page loads, how much text and photos, and maybe there’s a video on the page. All these things are part of what Google is crawling. So you wanna make sure that the page loads relatively fast when somebody lands on that website. You also wanna make sure that the content is good there, and that you’re not cheating with the content by just trying to make sentences longer than they need to be, or what not.

You wanna make sure that you’ve got links going to other pages on your website. When appropriate, you wanna make sure you’re linking to other websites. Optimization also means getting people to link to your website. So, if there is another blog or another website, or maybe you’re doing a product review, you would wanna ask the manufacturer of the company that’s selling that product to link to your review on your website, so that you have those inbound links.

There’s a lot of ways to optimize your website. The term is like search engine optimization, but it’s kind of become a lot of different things. Search engine optimization, if you do a Google search for that, you’ll find a lot of things that you can do to get started optimizing your website.

The better optimized your website is, the better chance Google’s gonna send traffic to it.

5. Join Online Communities

There are a ton of communities out there that you can join around the topics of your website, that you can take part in conversations, and drive traffic to your website.

Now, you don’t wanna join these communities and spam people in the same way I was talking about spamming and being spammy with social media. You wanna provide value, you want to answer questions, you wanna provide your expertise, and help these people in the community. That way, when they wanna find out more information about you, they can go to your website.

Or, for example, if you have a answer to their question that you may already have on your website in the form of an article, or some photos, or a video, you can link to your website from those communities, and share that information with them. That part is okay. People are fine with you linking to your website from forums, and from Facebook groups, and stuff like that, if you’re providing additional value.

When you’re just trying to get somebody to leave that community and go to your website, that feels a little spammy. But if you have valid information, stuff that’s gonna help them with their problem, or their question, it’s totally fine to send them to a link to your website. So that’s gonna do it for this video.

I just wanted to give you five tips on how to get more traffic to your website. How to increase that traffic. It’s important to get more traffic to your website because without viewers … You want viewers to your website. You wanna build that traffic, you wanna get more people excited about what you’re doing. And without traffic, that’s kind of hard to do.

So if you have any questions, definitely ask them in the comment section below. I’ve got a couple of links for you in the description of this video, so make sure to check those out. They’ll help you with this process of trying to increase traffic to your website. If this video helped you, share it with a friend, link to it from your website, embed it in a post, write a review about. Whatever you can do to boost it, I would definitely appreciate that.

I’m also trying to grow traffic to my website, so I hope that this video did help you with that process of getting more traffic to your site. Click subscribe on my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos come out. I’m trying to post as many of these as I can, as I have good information to share. So thanks so much for checking it out, and I hope to see you back in the next one.

My Give-a-way got 50,000+ Entries

February 6, 2018

I am giving away a Cryptocurrency Mining GPU and that give-a-way has blown up. It has over 50,000 entries and it’s only been live for 8 days. The total length of the give-a-way is 9 days so it will end tomorrow. I’m excited to see who won and am even more excited to have so many new YouTube Subscribers, Instagram and Twitter followers, Facebook likes, Email subscribers, and more. What a successful campaign!

50/50

January 18, 2017

If you went 50/50 on something instead of just 100% on one thing, how could that change your life?

This may be a weird statement coming from a person who is self-employed, but my goal for 2017 is to transform my income stream. My goal is that by the end of the year, at least 50% of it will come from self-generated projects or products. This means that at least half of the income I earn this year needs to come from projects or products that I have generated, not from client work.

You see, since I started this journey as a self-employed person, I have made my income doing work for other people. Whether designing websites for businesses or photographing weddings, I am doing work that I was hired to do by someone else who had a need. I may own my own business, but I am working for others.

There is nothing wrong with doing work for other people. Our country runs on the trade of services for dollars. Ultimately, I want to get to the place where the majority of my income is generated from products and services I have created. I have spent the last 19 years of my life pouring my energy into the projects of others. I would moonlight occasionally on my own projects and have had some success with a few of them, but they always ended up on the backburner because client work paid faster.

So how do I plan to transform my income stream this year? Glad you asked.

I have a couple of projects that I will be working on a lot this year in an attempt to tip the scale toward self-generated income. A couple of these projects are still in the conceptual stage and I am not ready to share much about them. The other projects are already live and I will pour into them even more this year.

The first project is Ditch Auto. Four years ago, I filmed a course to help people get out of auto mode on their cameras so they could unlock the true potential of their cameras which are found in manual mode. Pro photographers use manual mode to properly expose and capture the image they see rather than the image the camera sees. I filmed this course in a day and did not anticipate it growing into a thriving photography community. Today, over 125,000 people have taken the course and we have a pretty active Facebook Group as well. Starting the beginning of this year, we launched a weekly photography challenge, which kicked off strong and is growing larger each week.

My plans for Ditch Auto this year include the modernization of the original course, creating additional courses, and growing the community to help people grow as photographers whether they want to be in business as a photographer, or enjoy it as a hobby.

The second project is State of Tech: In 2007 I started a blog where I reviewed iPhone Apps. Over the years that turned into a podcast that diversified into a variety of different mobile technologies. The last 10 years in the mobile tech space has taught me that many people still do not understand the technology they are walking around with each day. State of Tech has a small, but growing online community on Youtube and I intend to grow that following through the production of valuable content. State of Tech will also expand into a variety of educational courses geared toward helping people better understand and use their smart devices. I believe that Ditch Auto has more promise as far as generating an income goes, but there is a huge gap in educating people on mobile technology.

Project #3 is not a product that is going to help me meet or exceed my goal as mentioned above, but it will eventually contribute to my bottom line.

As I mentioned before, I have spent the majority of my adult life doing creative work for others. During that time, there are many tools and services I have become a professional in using. A few years ago, I started to work towards shifting the income stream of my company Hill Media Group. For years I was doing project-based work for a fixed fee. Once the project ended, I was paid and I had to find a new project. I still do a lot of project-based work, but about 25% of Hill Media Group’s income comes from ongoing work we do for our clients.

I realized that we are really good at handling tasks for our clients. When our clients deliver a clear task to us, we often can turn it around for them in a short period of time. The relationship we have with our clients that retain our services on a monthly basis makes it easy for us to prioritize their tasks and get them done.

Project #3 will be a new company that specializes in handling a variety of digital tasks for small businesses and organizations. I am partnering with a long-term employee and friend of mine to launch this. I am really excited about the concept and have already begun developing the infrastructure needed to manage this new startup company.

Growth through actual products, not affiliate marketing.

It’s not that hard to create a ton of average content and link to products to generate income. Nobody will make much money doing that. If you want to generate income from affiliate marketing you have to create fantastic content and a lot of it. While there is nothing wrong with generating revenue from affiliates, I prefer to generate content to market my own products.

I have had some limited success in affiliate marketing. When the Hoverboard was new and exciting, I filmed a review of my Hoverboard for State of Tech and the Amazon Affiliate link generated between $1,800-$2,500 for several months until Amazon removed all of them from their inventory. What I learned from that experience was that your affiliate income stream is only as good as the product. Technology changes quickly, and fads move even faster than technology does. It takes a lot of effort to stay ahead of the curve to assure you always growing.

Why do I need my income to be self-generated?

I’ll say it again: There is nothing wrong with doing work for other people. The products and products I want to create will be consumed or used by other people, but there is a difference. The effort I am putting into my projects and products are generated from ideas and inspirations that I had. I saw a need and created something. These projects and products will be for others to consume, but they will be something that I saw from conception to delivery. If it succeeds, it will be because I saw the problem and executed on a solution. If it fails, it will be a lesson in which I can not direct a complaint at anyone but myself. I need that kind of challenge in my life. It will be an exercise in generating more control over my destiny by executing on my own ideas instead of focusing on others. It sounds like a selfish move, but it’s really not. I will do more good this way.

For years I have also had a desire to share my financials publically. I used to be held down by debt and seemed to always be carrying a balance somewhere. Whether it was car payments or credit card debt, I had it, and somehow justified it. These days I try to keep my family as close to debt free as possible. Though it is not always possible (yet), we are closer than ever. I plan to share some of my financial information as it pertains to achieving the goal mentioned above. Stay tuned for more information on that.

Goals!

Shortly after turning 30 and having a few kids, I made this list of things I wanted to achieve over the next few decades. I called it my challenge list and I have not done a very good job of working on achieving those challenges. Now I could give myself the benefit of the doubt and blame it on being a busy business owner, husband, and father, but I’m not going to do that. The whole idea behind this list was that I would attempt to achieve some of these things while maintaining the life I am living. No excuses. So in 2017, I am going to start crossing off some of the challenges from the list. I encourage you to check back often and if I seem to be slacking, please call me out on social media.

A Challenge

My main goal for 2017 is to slide the revenue scale away from client-based work to my own projects and products. If you could slide the scale away from 100% and closer to 50/50, what would that look like, and how would it change your life? I’m not just talking about income, but anything. Perhaps you want to change your diet or travel more. How can you slide the scale toward doing that more?

If you could, take a moment to think about that. If you have a thought or an idea, share it in the comment section below! I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for sticking around to the end of this post. If you want to follow along as I work toward my goal, make sure to follow me on social media. You can find the links on this page.

I Almost Shut It All Down!

November 15, 2016

I have been self-employed since I was 18 years old. I went full time self-employed when I was 21. Perfect timing considering that it was 2001 and two months after I quit my job to go full time after my business the biggest attack on American soil ever took place.

Since then I have had my share of setbacks as an entrepreneur, and a lot has changed in my life. When I quit my job and went full time into my business, I did not have any responsibilities. I lived on my own, so I had rent and a car payment, but that was it. If I ate ramen three meals a day because I had to put out money to order more product, I did it. I started my business with $2,500 in inventory and grew it in less than four years to a business that grossed $1.5 million in sales. In 2003 I was shipping products internationally from orders that came through my website when most companies were just learning what a website was. It was fun, but it wasn’t what I saw myself doing for the rest of my life.

My online business taught me more than just how to run an online business. Through that process, I taught myself how to code and that set me up for my next business venture as a web developer. Though I have had a few other ventures since such as Photography and running a Tech News and Review website, website design and development has been my constant since 2005.

In 2008 I had a rough year. The economy was down, and nobody was spending money. Businesses were cutting back on marketing expenses and Brides were spending less on wedding photography. I almost took a job with a company in Southern California handling search engine optimization for a large corporation. I stuck it out, and the market returned.

It has not been easy running a business and trying to grow that business. I have had some success, but it has been matched by frustration and some failure as well. Nothing has come easy.

During the slow days of 2008, I started reviewing iPhone Apps on a blog I set up and that turned into a business that generated an average of $13,000/mo over the course of six years with the best month earning me $32,000. It was pretty amazing.

Web Development started to pick back up in 2013, and I started focusing more heavily on what I knew would carry me over the long haul as a business owner. The app review site had garnered a ton of competition, and I could tell I would need to focus my attention elsewhere after that.

I have always found it necessary to reinvest in my company. If I am not reinvesting in myself and my business, I am stagnant. The revenues from the app review site allowed me to do this more freely. This was also a challenging time for me as I had started growing my family in 2010 and by the end of 2013 had three children. Yes, three kids in three years.

Now I love people, and I love my clients, but not all clients are easy to work for. I am very thankful that I have had more good clients than bad ones. The problem with bad clients is that they suck the life out of you and leave you beaten on the side of the road. I have always taken my work seriously and being that I don’t have a traditional education to fall back on, I always took myself very serious as well. Bad clients can make you question yourself and your core competencies. Like finding out that your significant other doesn’t love you anymore, it makes you question yourself and your self-worth. It’s hard not to get emotional about business when it’s your work and your business you are putting out there. I have never been able to believe anyone who says they can completely separate business from personal life. Business is personal. I do not trust anyone who does not take their business personally.

As I mentioned before, I have celebrated plenty of little wins in business, but I have also taken quite a few jabs to the ribs both from clients and from the logistical aspects of running a business. I have a wife and three kids. We don’t own a home, not because we don’t want to, but simply because it is very challenging for a self-employed person to purchase a home. We are a single income household by choice. We made the decision to provide our children with a Christian education. We are considering adoption.

I am closer to my 40’s than my 20’s, and my personal responsibilities will only continue to grow. My goal since closing my retail shop and starting web agency was to provide myself with more freedom. Running my shop, the online store, and a small parts distribution center was time-consuming. I found myself working 14+ hour days. I closed my store on Mondays simply so I could catch up without customers coming through the door. I knew that I could not live that way if I was to get married and start a family, so I shut that down. I pivoted in my life toward something that offered me more freedom, and since then, freedom has been my goal.

My professional life has allowed me a lot of freedom. Those that have known me since I started having children know just how much time off I have been able to take to be with my family. At the time of writing this, I currently work a regular 8-5 day, but I am working every day to change that to provide myself and my family more freedom.

About a month ago I was offered an opportunity to work for a fast growing company in my area. I always recognized that if I were going to quit working for myself, I would probably have to move to the Bay Area or Los Angeles to find a company that could afford someone with my skillset. The idea of working for someone else was desirable to me because it was something constant. There is not much in my life that is consistent other than the needs of my family and my clients. The concept of money getting deposited into my bank account every two weeks and only having one client to deal with sounded great.

Over the course of three weeks, I was all over the place. I was all for the job one moment and then the next I was totally against it. I was a wreck. I constantly prayed over the opportunity. I knew that if I took this job, I would not have time to run my business any longer. I didn’t want to run my business on the side while working full time. I was not going to let my work cut into the time I wanted to spend with my wife and kids. Whether I worked for myself, or another company, freedom still had to be my guiding cause.

If there were any time during the year that a consistent income would be welcome, it would be the holidays. I think anybody can relate to that. Being that my business does the majority of its business with other businesses, holidays are notoriously slow. Nobody wants to start designing and roll out a website or a new online marketing plan in December. Most of our clients are small businesses, and they are focused on the holidays. Turning down the job offer was very hard to do going into the holiday season.

Ultimately, I decided not to take the job because I have not yet had the time to flesh out all of the ideas I believe have a lot of promise. I often get too busy to work on my ideas because I am focused on my clients, but I never stop thinking and dreaming. If I wanted to start working on one of my ideas, I could by simply cutting back on client work. If I was working for another company, I would have to be all about that company during work hours. To moonlight on other ideas while on the clock would be giving less than 100% to the company I was working for. I am not ready to turn off that part of my brain, and I am not going to divert that energy to time I am at home with my family.

I am not going to say that this is the last time I will consider taking a job, but I can honestly say that it is the closest I have come to working full time for someone else. I work for myself, but I have clients whom I work for as well. My clients have expectations of me just as an employer would have. People often comment on how nice it must be to be my own boss. I explain that it is nice to be my own boss, but I also have a dozen clients I have to answer to as well, so it’s not always all it’s cracked up to be.

Another thing this opportunity has given me is a renewed drive to grow my business. I can not honestly say which direction I will point all of this renewed energy, but I do have a renewed focus and am excited about the future.

Who knows what will happen with Trump in office, but the last almost decade has brought more regulation and difficulty to small business owners than ever before in the history of our country. Regardless, challenging and uncertain times are often some of the best to start a new business. I am blessed to have been able to direct my own professional direction for the last 15 years of my life and I am not quite ready to give that up, even if the opportunity is great.

I have had job offers from other clients in the past, but I appreciate this one the most because I believe in the company and it’s potential. Even if I had taken the job, my life as an entrepreneur wouldn’t have been over; it simply would have been paused. I am looking forward to finishing this year strong and focusing on new things in 2017.

How Did I Get Here?

May 10, 2016

Do you ever stop mid task and ask yourself how you got to where you are in that moment? I have had that happen to me a few times over the last few months. Since moving out of my home office in 2011 I feel like I have been chasing after too many things. When I worked from home and was only responsible for my own wellbeing I could do whatever work I felt was right in the moment. As long as it resulted in getting paid for my time, I was ok with it. Now having tried to scale a couple of things with a roller coaster ride of limited success, I have been finding it hard to focus lately.

Lately I have felt like my own worst enemy. I have taken focus off of a few long-term projects that have not been producing as much fruit as they once were but still allowing myself to be distracted by some of the aspects of those projects. In my mid twenties, I was good at limiting distractions. I had laser focus, but it had to be that way. I was so busy with the company I was running at that time that I had to pull late nights and work 7-days-a-week to keep up. Somehow I was fine with that. Busy is easy because you can see what needs to be done. When you are busy, the work comes at you and you can take it on full force. The real struggle is when you are caught in between busy and slow. That middle ground can be dangerous and it has been eating away at me like a cancer for the last year.

I have some great clients. We have been blessed with clients that have fun products and they trust us to do the work they hired us to do. At the same time we have had a few stinkers that have made it hard for us to do our work. It is all part of being in business. Over the last year specifically, we have had steady work from regular clients and a small amount of growth, but nothing that has stretched us too thin. Being in this place is what allows my mind enough energy to dream but does not leave me with enough time to execute on any of those dreams. I have always been a dreamer and often find myself laying in bed at midnight considering a new idea. Late night thought sessions as I lay in bed is what led me to at one point having owned more than 350 domain names. I have my own representative at GoDaddy who calls me from the office of the CEO. That might be some marketing ploy to make me feel important but I do know that I own way too many domain names. Every domain name was purchased because of some idea I was mulling over in my head. Most of those domain names never made it past a GoDaddy Parked page and expire a year later.

When I was 18 and almost out of high school, I was utilizing everything I had some knowledge in to make money. Besides working in retail management at the local mall, I was building computers for people, setting up small office networks, and trying to start an online business selling cell phones and accessories. I was going in too many directions. I found myself prioritizing what I enjoyed doing the most. The retail job was a constant paycheck. Building computers was fun, but being available for any and all questions that my customers had was not. I enjoyed setting up small office networks but when AOL didn’t load fast enough, I got a call. It was an early lesson in doing too many things at once. Now almost 20 years later, I am having the same problem.

As I have written about before, I started building websites to give myself more freedom. The business I was running prior to that was taking too much time and was not going to scale unless I could clone myself. I started a photography business to fund my desire to buy new camera lenses but that quickly turned into a business more profitable than my website design business was at the time. During my later twenties, having both businesses was nice. I was single for a few of those years with plenty of time to work when needed. After marrying, my wife worked on some weekends so shooting weddings on weekends was not a big deal. After we started having kids, I wanted more weekends available, which meant shooting less weddings. Having moved out of my home office, one of my goals was to grow my website design company as well. I have had some measurable success there but I have allowed myself to be distracted a lot along the way which has stifled growth of Hill Media Group.

Running your own business is very emotional. Some people refer to their business as one of their kids because it is that close to them. I have always been able to work for myself and stay motivated. Motivation has never been the problem. The problem has been allowing myself to get stuck because of decisions I have made or allowed myself to be distracted by. Let’s take a quick inventory of what I currently do or offer as a service. Some of these services are related and this definitely is not an exhaustive list. What follows is a list of services that I offer and deliver on at least once each week in one form or another. This list also includes jobs performed to maintain our own projects and websites at Hill Media Group.

Website Design
Custom Development/Programming
Website Hosting
Email (Google Apps for Work)
Google Adwords (Paid Search Marketing)
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Social Media Management
Social Media Marketing (Paid Social)
Website Technical Support
Project Management
Data Management
Commercial Photography
Wedding Photography
Photo Editing
Video Production
Wedding Video Production
Video Editing
Product Testing
Product Reviews
Editorial Writing

I will have to come back to this list. I know there is more. This list does not include tasks required to run a business, nurture new and potential clients, manage employees, and whatever else I can’t seem to think of at this hour. Some of the above listed jobs I share responsibility with employees and occasionally outsource from time to time, but for the most part, I have my hand in all of those things. I recognize that I am not a top level professional in all of those areas but I am a professional in each of them to the extent that I believe I could focus on any one of them specifically and make a good living. The problem is allowing myself to do that.

It’s hard to avoid doing everything that I have a professional understanding of because there are so many people out there offering substandard service in just one area. In online marketing, there are a lot of scam artists out there who might as well be selling snake oil. Companies take advantage of naive business owners who simply want a professional to handle their online marketing for them. When you know that you can offer a better service and more value, it’s hard to just not do it.

This leads me back to the question, “How Did I Get Here?”

Just about all of these services I offer came from me needing them as a service from myself. I taught myself how to build Google Adwords Campaigns that perform using my own money attempting to market my own businesses. Though this article is all over the place, I developed my writing style from years of writing. My formal education stops just above high school level. I taught myself how to film product reviews by making videos and striving to improve along the way. Where I have led myself astray is that I turn that knowledge into a service and make it available to others.

When you turn something into a service you are stating that it is available for anybody. When I offered my website design skills for sale, I had to build websites for anybody who wanted one. When I started filming projects for clients I needed more gear, so I started offering those services to anyone. Hill Media Group has become this agency that has the knowledge and tools to be a full service agency handling everything from website design to film production but we don’t do end up doing enough of most of those services to justify the costs associated with them. What I mean is that we have everything we need because we have invested in the tools we need to produce quality work. The problem is that some of those tools end up collecting dust because we are not focusing on that specific area of business enough. People have short films in festivals and own less equipment than we have.

All of the services that my company offers are services that I enjoy spending time working on. There are so many cool things out there and so few hours to get to spend doing them. What I truly enjoy is learning something and deploying it. It really doesn’t matter if I am doing it for myself or for someone else. I just enjoy the journey. But I do understand that specializing in a smaller subset of things leads to being better at them. This goes not only for me, but for those who work for me. Most people get bogged down when they are jumping between multiple unrelated tasks. It’s impossible to get into a grove when you don’t know where you will be next.

I have already started making changes to limit what types of work we do and will offer. I removed a once very profitable offering from one of our websites because it has been more of a distraction over the past several months. I plan to make more changes this year as I attempt to discover what areas I would like to specialize in and cull the rest from our offered services. About a year ago I started selling off some of my equipment I use for video production projects and simply rent the gear when I need it. I am already doing the same with my photography equipment. I simply don’t do enough volume to justify having all of the equipment I have. I love having the latest and greatest equipment, but I can no longer justify owning all of it.

I am thankful for this clarity I have been praying I would receive for over a year now. Sometimes you end up down a rabbit hole and are not quite sure just how you got there. Working for yourself or being an entrepreneur is a constant lesson in understanding your strengths and recognizing your limits. I am looking forward to further clarity as I continue to remove things from my work life that have stretched me too thin. I love my business, but I love my family more. Anything that takes away from that is theft in my opinion. Allowing myself to go in too many different directions has robbed my family of my focus and attention. Narrowing my scope will be better for everybody involved. When I stopped building computers for people I referred them to another local business. I look forward to doing that with some of the services I have provided in the past. Sometimes you have to cut the fat, which leads me to a blog post I really need to write about being more healthy.