For two and a half years, every two weeks I sifted through over 140 blog posts and podcasts that talk about how to build successful online businesses. I found the best content, summarized it, added a bit of my commentary, and delivered it to the inboxes of entrepreneurs around the world…for free. I’m no longer writing Signals in the Noise issues (because my business partners and I are focusing on other parts of Clarity Lab), but please enjoy these archived issues. There’s a ton of useful information in them!
This will help reduce your money stress.
Consistency. It’s one of the most important attributes of a successful content marketing strategy. Pick a publishing schedule and stick to it, every time.
I managed to follow that advice with this newsletter for almost two full years. Until this week. I publish Signals in the Noise every other week (and used to do it weekly in its first year.) Two days ago was publish day, and this issue is just now arriving in your inbox. Such is life with two businesses in our house. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Last week, my wife and her team realized that they were missing a key role on their team. Someone we didn’t hire to replace the three or four roles I was filling in the Art of Money business before I left this past June. They didn’t have anyone to design, update, and build the sales page for my wife’s year long Art of Money program.
That program, which has helped thousands of people around the world to change their relationship with money for the better, opened up for early bird registration a few hours ago.
Today is launch day. Five days ago, the sales page for the program was not ready. At all. So I jumped in, pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and built a new one, which you can see right here. Our amazing copywriter, Angela Raines, jumped in right along with me and wrote a bunch of new copy for that page as well.
I worked straight through the weekend pausing only for 10-minute meals and hour-long training rides on my road bike. It ended with an 11 hour straight through push yesterday. I finished testing the page and all the payment workflows at 10:30 pm. The early bird launch email went out 8 ½ hours later.
Why am I sharing this with you? Because I’ve always found it incredibly helpful when business owners lift the curtain and show exactly what it takes to pull off things like launching an online program. This is one little vignette from one part of the launch. The journey of the early bird registration period will continue for another ten days.
From the outside, all you will see on a day like today, if you’re on the Art of Money email list, is a simple email in your inbox that leads you either to the first piece in our free series of money teachings (which we all Money Mochas), or to the sales page for the Art of Money 2017 program.
But you hardly ever get to hear or see what goes into making something like this happen, and being aware of the behind-the-scenes work involved can both make you feel less alone on your journey with your own business and give you a more realistic picture of what’s involved.
In the case of the Art of Money program and business, it takes Bari, my wife and the main teacher of the program, our copywriter and co-writer, Angela Raines, our virtual assistant, Ali Willoughby, our business manager, Amber Kinney, and me, stepping in to help with marketing strategy and implementation as well as sales page and customer experience design.
That’s five solid, talented people working their tushies off for weeks and months to get ready for a day like today.
We’re incredibly, deeply grateful for the three powerhouse women that help make Art of Money such a solid business.
Today is also the day when we start to see if publishing a book helps increase the number of amazing folks joining the Art of Money program from around the world. (Bari’s book, which was published four months ago, is nearing the publisher’s sales goals for the entire first year, meaning, it’s selling really well.)
It’s too soon to make any conclusions about the positive effects of publishing a book and having Bari go on a big book tour over the past 4 months. However, as of right now, 7 hours into the first day of the early bird launch, we’re already quite a bit ahead of the total number of sign-ups for the Art of Money program (compared to the first day of the early bird registration period from last year.)
The other reason I’m sharing these things with you is to explain why, after almost two years of not missing a publishing day of this Signals in the Noise newsletter, I missed a publishing day two days ago.
All we can do is do our best, though, right? Aim for consistent marketing efforts and do your best to stick to them, knowing that life will sometimes get in the way and cause you to miss your target.
Hopefully, these little behind-the-scenes snippets from our family’s other business will make up for the delayed publishing schedule.
As for me, I’m more than a little fried from the unexpected work sprint over the last week. Part of me wants to disappear into the woods and stare at the ground and trees and sky for a while. That will happen soon, but for now, sharing some things that could help you in your business brings me such joy, that I’m staying right here in front of the computer.
Here we go…(right after I have another mocha.)
Pain in the button
If you suck at graphic design, like me, creating buttons for things like sales pages is always a challenge. Did you notice the lovely green “Start changing my money life” buttons that have a nice color gradient and a different color state when you hover over them on the sales page I spoke about above? I made those with a new button creation tool I just discovered a few days ago: The Button Optimizer. That site really knows how to press all my buttons.
Category: software
Finding your happy Medium
Medium, which is a site that, as Larry Kim describes, is “sort of like Twitter for long-form content,” continues to gain popularity, particularly among content marketers and bloggers. Why? Larry explains 10 good reasons you should publish on Medium, but one of the biggest reasons is the large amount of traffic you can get from Medium to your website. That, and it’s one more place for us to obsess over how many likes our posts get. Anything over 50 likes and I start to feel really good about myself again.
Category: content marketing
The grapes of math.
Here’s Ramit Sethi, founder of I Will Teach You To Be Rich, with a great video about the path he took to go from selling a $4.95 ebook to a $12,000 course. Ramit is a refreshing voice in the sea of online marketers teaching people how to build online businesses. In that video, he goes into the math of online businesses. Thank God there’s no calculus involved, because I burned all my calculus books after my one semester in aerospace engineering school.
Category: online business building
On a wing and a share.
“‘Even if I say, this is going to be really interesting, nobody is going to skip to 15:42 to hear one audio clip from an hour-long episode posted on Facebook,’ says Stephanie Foo, a producer at This American Life and the project lead for Shortcut.” Wired magazine, with the story of a new method for increasing the shareability of podcast content: an app the lets you share snippets of audio shows with the world.
Category: podcasting
Zuck you, startup world.
“Fuck your crazy work hours. Nobody gives a fuck that Elon musk is working 100 hours a week, and that Marissa Mayer is pulling in a 130 hour work week while still breastfeeding her newborns. You’re not Elon Musk – you ain’t Marissa Mayer, you’re not going to get to space, and you won’t build the next Space X. Do me a favor, put your fucking Mac away and go play with your kids.” That’s a programmer named Shem, with a new, wildly viral post on Medium. He’s flipping the bird to the whole startup scene, and it’s freaking hilarious.
Category: humor
Okay…that’s it for today! Sure hope your week is going well and that you’re cranking through your to-do lists and moving the needle of your business.
I’m off to dive back into my Art of Money program launch task list, and then get back to working on building Clarity Lab with Chris. Booyah!
All the best,
~Forest Linden
Editor-in-chief @ Signals in the Noise
Co-founder @ Clarity Lab
P.S. You can find past issues of this newsletter right here.
