Entrepreneurship and Development Research Complete Just in Time!

byLTidswell

253 followers

4 years ago

My unexpected but very welcome interlude to research entrepreneurship and development opportunities has come to its end. My furlough is over and I'm back to corporate tomorrow to finish my notice period before I launch head long into the world of entrepreneurship.

As devastating as the Covid-19 has been globally, I've really benefited from this time to explore and learn without the additional pressure of launching my business and needing to generate income. I now have a further four months of my notice to continue building my skills on this strong foundation that I have been fortunate enough to be able to build.

The things that I've learned:

Pinterest is an interesting way to grow traffic, but navigating it is a skill all in itself! My account ended up suspended briefly for "suspect activity". I think the take away from it is that the Pinterest algorithm rewards little and often, and gets suspicious of a lot (relatively) and infrequent.

1. Growing followers can be done strategically by following the followers of other people in your niche, coupled with having valuable posts on your boards.
2. Broken links abound, it's really worth checking that the link does legitimately go where it says it does.
3. Make sure you have a good mix of pinning your content and the content of others (general advice seems to be at least 80% other content), Pinterest is designed to be a sharing medium.
4. Optimise your titles and descriptions for both keywords and display.
5. Most people use Pinterest on mobile devices, so make sure that your pins look great and all text is readable on a phone screen.

YouTube has been quite fun to learn. Within my corporate role I have to do a fair number of presentations at various levels within the business, so I'm perfectly comfortable both creating presentations and talking on camera. The key tips I've picked up include:

1. Create an attractive and interesting thumbnail.
2. Make a plan for your video and undertake to use good presentation skills (make sure you're looking at the camera, not talking too fast and don't forget to smile!)
3. Use good lighting and make sure you watch your video back to check focus, lighting and sound quality.
4. There are free screen capture and forward facing camera cloud based programs that be used to record and edit your videos (and my Mac even has all the software required on it as standard!)
5. A great place to look for tips and tricks - you've guessed it! YouTube!

Graphic design, I've always loved art but have minimal formal training and haven't done much with it at all as an adult. But I've thoroughly enjoyed this period of learning new skills with fonts, photos and combining standard shapes together to generate new images.

I've spent the last few weeks really getting to grips with the intricacies of Canva, both for creating images for content, Pinterest and YouTube and to learn how to use it as a potential future income stream.

I've explored areas of generating income via graphic design from the following perspectives:

1. Providing graphics as a service.
2. Creating templates for sale.
3. Creating home printable downloads for sale.

But, valuable content is still the key...

The biggest benefit that I've had from this time of research and trial is the improvement in my content creation skills. While I still need to find a form of content planning and calendar that works for me (and I know the longer that I wait the harder its going to be to track down everything that I've already done).

I've started following a content plan that works for me, I came across a number of content plans in my research and ended up consolidating and tweaking until I found a way that worked for me. It also allows me to batch some content creation steps to improve my efficiency.

The steps I've come up with:

1. Plan
   1. Generate Ideas
      1. Try Creative Techniques
      2. Explore linkages with existing content
      3. Use Google Autofill
      4. Look at Social Media marketing in your niche
      5. Take a look at Quora Questions
      6. Use Ubersuggest to check what others in your niche are focusing on
   2. Define the purpose - are we creating Copy or Content?
      1. Are we trying to persuade our audience or inform them?
   3. Define the Audience
      1. Are we staying within our niche?
      2. Have we optimised what our audience is interested in?
   4. Optimise the Delivery
      1. Where can we promote it for our ideal audience to find it?
      2. What long tail keywords should we target?
2. Outline
   1. Create the Table of Contents (and all the headings)
   2. Add in any other key points and do the research
3. Draft
   1. Write the full piece, letting the words flow out
   2. Create the graphics at the end
4. Fact Check / Edit
   1. Edit in detail for readability
   2. Check all the facts
5. Create Ancillaries
   1. Create any necessary graphics for social media
   2. Embed the social graphics
   3. Optimise the SEO

And finally, publish the post and share to social media. If you're doing a YouTube video you can either publish them both at the same time, or embed your video into the post prior to publication.

So, now it's back to work

First thing tomorrow it's back to work (and early, straight into a 7.30 am skype meeting), but fortunately it is working remotely from home. So last thing tonight I convert my office space (dining table) back from Mac to PC and I swap over my notebooks - wish me luck!