Reflections on 2018 - My Best Year Ever in Business

I know everyone is doing a lot of reflecting on 2018 and I’ve been doing a lot of planning for the next year. I thought I’d share a little bit of what I’ve learned in this last year.

Best Year Ever for my business

So that’s awesome. But it actually came more out of necessity when Steve was laid off from his job in February. All of a sudden I thought – hey I have to step this up a little. So I got super focused and super busy on looking at where I was most profitable and did more of that.

I said no to many things that took a lot of my time but didn’t give more immediate return. I got more focused on growth. And I doubled my Net Income – SO cool but the growth wasn’t as high in the Gross Income – I got more profitable rather than spending too much.

And the great thing is that Steve got an AWESOME job working at NCAR where he’s wanted to work for years and he’s super happy there. I told him he should have gotten laid off a long time ago.

I ended the year fairly exhausted

I worked a LOT last year and traveled a lot. I had 42 travel days for speaking, 5 different business conference/mastermind trips, and 5 weeks of family vacation.

And I wrote a new book – Facebook Ads Made Simple (in case you want to go grab a copy right now 🙂

What I learned is that I need help. I have a great team but I need to put more systems in place so that I’m not doing quite as much.

Plus I had a lot of different income streams with speaking, consulting, Facebook Ads Management, and 2 different courses (launched a total of 7 times).

Next year will be about building my team and giving more to them rather than saying “I’ll just do this real quick.” I’m also going to focus on fewer income streams. I wasn’t able to give everything the attention it deserved and I probably would have been even more profitable (and more sane) if I had focused on less.

I tripled my sales in my Facebook Ads Course

Again awesome. I’ll be putting more focus there in 2019 and I’m super excited for some of the changes that are going into that course. Part of the growth was a focused effort in launching it and adding an “Agency” level to the course that I will focus even more on in 2019.

I think I could have done EVEN better if I had put more marketing dollars behind it. But there was a little fear of spending since Steve was out of work.

FYI, the course is opening again on January 23rd – you can check it out here: https://fbadvertisingsecrets.com/

My Facebook traffic is down and YouTube is up

I also look at all the marketing tactics that I’ve used and see what’s working best. I put more emphasis on YouTube this year and the traffic is up quite a bit compared to last year (but last year was pretty dismal.

Facebook was down 24%, Twitter was down 38% and LinkedIn was down 85% (that feels crazy to me and I still need to dive a little deeper into that number on mys site.

My overall traffic was a little down at 416,129 sessions this year vs 438,173 sessions last year as I didn’t blog the last couple months of the year due to writing the book. I wish I had planned that a little better and gotten regular content out but oh well.

I’m still going to keep consistent with social posting but probably not do as many link posts on Facebook. Link posts aren’t getting as much reach and I’ll focus on using Facebook Ads to drive traffic.

I didn’t do as much comedy as I would have liked

Because I was working so hard, I wasn’t writing as much and so I felt sad that I didn’t have new material. That is going to change in 2019. I’m going to put a regular writing schedule in place and put more shows on.