Listen to our full episode on our 30-Day Content Challenge Stats and Lessons Learned below (with full transcript) or find our podcast by searching What is it all for? in your favorite podcast player.
Four Key Takeaways for our 30-Day Content Challenge (Calm Business Encyclopedia)
1. Reflecting on the Calm Business Encyclopedia project
We wrapped up our journey through creating the Calm Business Encyclopedia, which is our A to Z guide to building a profitable, predictable, and peaceful business through 26 different videos or articles. We reflected on our 3-pronged strategy and in the short term, we aimed to amp up excitement for our Fall Enrollment.
2. The numbers behind the videos and crafting content strategies
Taking a peek behind the scenes, our videos garnered 5,700 YouTube views, averaging a cozy 221 per video, with a total of 113 comments. We covered a variety of topics, from finances to productivity, and learned the importance of not letting these videos exist in isolation. We’re looking at including them in our weekly newsletters and finding other promotional strategies for the Calm Biz videos moving forward.
3. Quiz engagement and connecting with the audience
The new lead magnet we created, our Calm Business Score Quiz, saw 249 participants, from which we welcomed 53 new subscribers. Direct conversions from YouTube were a tad low, teaching us the importance of strategic callouts (don’t put the CTA at the end of the video). Lessons learned include the need for a more robust form of promotion, timely exit pop-ups, and perhaps a sprinkle of creativity in our quiz formats, making them more specific.
4. Social media’s role and future plans
While we acknowledge that social media has the potential for increased views, we’re also cautious about not compromising our own values. One of the takeaways we mentioned was making sure what we are doing is fun and we cite an example of a SaaS company’s social media profile to contrast with what we would love to do instead. Looking ahead, we’re considering the idea of bringing in SEO and Pinterest consultants, balancing investment with experiment goals, and contemplating the long-term presence of this content project on our website.
Show Notes for Episode 181: 30-Day Content Challenge Stats and Lessons Learned
The Calm Business Encyclopedia project reached its finish line and we’re equal parts excited and exhausted 😂. As with any big, DAILY, content project, the repetitive nature of it can wear you down. While we are a bit worn down, we’re also stoked to have a great resource out into the world to help online business owners (and our own biz!)
We go through the nitty-gritty of how many views our 26 videos have gotten so far, the 21% YouTube surprise, how many people converted from our quiz lead magnet, our website stats, AND the number of direct new conversions to our WAIM Unlimited program. This project wasn’t about the initial stats, but they are fun to share.
Lastly, we go through some final takeaways, some FEEEELINGS, things we would’ve changed, and future steps we want to take. You get all of those in this ep!
Full Transcript of Episode 181: 30-Day Content Challenge Stats and Lessons Learned
⬇️ You can also download the .TXT file of the transcript
Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All For? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We are your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an unboring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What is it all for? Thanks for listening and now let’s get into the show.
Jason: And I’m here, too. Hello and welcome to the podcast. Here’s my radio voice. Haven’t used it in a while. WKLM 93.1. The smooth yacht rock. I only learned what yacht rock was a couple of years ago.
Caroline: You do not know what yacht rock is.
Jason: Michael McDonald is yacht rock.
Caroline: I think that’s right.
Jason: I would say John Mayer is some yacht rock. He has a whole album called Yacht Rock, doesn’t he? Didn’t he do that?
Caroline: Called sob rock.
Jason: Okay.
Caroline: Which I think is a commentary on yacht rock. I’m not really sure.
Jason: But it’s music to listen to when you’re on a yacht, right? A yacht.
Caroline: As we all do.
Jason: None of us… We’ve never been on a yacht. Do you even have any interest?
Caroline: Are you kidding? No.
Jason: Oh, really? But you’re a boat lady. You like going on boats.
Caroline: Yeah, now that I said it out loud, I’m like that’s kind of interesting.
Jason: Yeah. Interesting.
Caroline: Hey, maybe I’m a yacht gal.
Jason: You’re listening to this podcast?
Caroline: No. Because you know what?
Jason: Go ahead.
Caroline: My love of boats. I like boat activities.
Jason: You grew up on boats.
Caroline: I grew up on boats. I love a little boat ride.
Jason: You were Captain Ron growing up.
Caroline: I was Captain Ron. Especially, like, a sunset cruise. I like that, but you know what I dislike more than I like that? Very, very rich people who are very precious about their things. Like, did you know that you’re only supposed to wear certain shoes on yachts? I’m immediately out.
Jason: Listen, we know this about each other. We’re bougie. If anybody who paid attention to our travels last year, but it’s like, a certain level. It’s not like gold toilet bougie. That’s not it.
Caroline: Absolutely not.
Jason: It’s just like, I’m always bringing butt wipes with me everywhere bougie.
Caroline: Exactly. What is the term for, like, approachable?
Jason: A bougie? We’re a bougie.
Caroline: Yeah.
Jason: So it’s just like we’re not going to travel with one flip flop.
Caroline: I’m not going to sit here and pretend I don’t love a fancy dinner. I do.
Jason: We will go to a Michelin star restaurant.
Caroline: I like that.
Jason: But once in a grand while. Now, last year was different because…
Caroline: We were there for the experience, not the exclusivity.
Jason: Exactly.
Caroline: So it’s like, I want the experience of the food that I get at a Michelin star restaurant. But if you tell me that there’s, like, a dress code and it’s like a velvet rope situation, I’m immediately out.
Jason: You could tell me you have a GoodYear star and I’d be fine as long as the food has a story that it tells. I’ll take a Pirelli star. Now you got to stick with tire brands.
Caroline: I don’t know that.
Jason: I’ll take a Nitto. I’ll take a Toyo star.
Caroline: You’re not going to give me Jiffy Lube? That’s so in the arena.
Jason: No, it’s not. They’re tire brands, specifically.
Caroline: Tell me the tire brands?
Jason: Pirelli.
Caroline: Okay, I can picture that.
Jason: Nitto.
Caroline: I’m sorry. Nido?
Jason: Nitto. N-I-T-T-O. Toyo.
Caroline: Toyo?
Jason: Toyo. T-O-Y-O.
Caroline: Okay, now you’re making it up.
Jason: Yeah, I can’t really remember that anymore, but that just goes back to my car days 20 years ago. Remember when I showed you that video? Sorry, we’re just in a real random…
Caroline: Now we’re just talking to each other.
Jason: Hey, thanks for listening to our podcast. Remember when I showed you that video?
Caroline: We also have a very meaty episode to get to.
Jason: Yeah, there’s a lot to get to, but this is how we start this.
Caroline: Okay.
Jason: Also, we’ve gotten some comments from people recently that they really enjoyed the podcast and that they’ve been listening to it for years.
Caroline: They’re here for this?
Jason: Yeah, exactly. The video that my college roommate texted me.
Caroline: Sorry to interrupt you. It really sounded like you just made that up. You’re like, we’ve been getting some…
Jason: No. These are actually real.
Caroline: People really liked the podcast. It was very nondescript.
Jason: These are actual real. Yeah.
Caroline: Okay.
Jason: Really appreciate it. My college roommate texted me a VHS video that he transferred to DVD, and I showed you, and it was me at a car show. So picture for those of you who’ve watched any Fast and Furious movie when Vin Diesel…
Caroline: The original, before they became superheroes.
Jason: Every single one of these has a car show in it where there’s just a bunch of people. You’re always getting girls butts up close in camera angles.
Caroline: Why is it the butts always?
Jason: Always the butts. This was…
Caroline: The cars are, like, bouncing.
Jason: The cars are bouncing, but it’s like a big group of people hanging around. And then typically, someone wins an award for having the fanciest car.
Caroline: An award?
Jason: Oh, car shows. Are you kidding me?
Caroline: First of all.
Jason: I had many car trophies. There was a box of car trophies that we threw out when we moved out of Florida.
Caroline: I understand that, but…
Jason: That was hard earned money I put on a credit card that I couldn’t afford to spend.
Caroline: My only context is what you just said, which is the Fast and Furious movies. And it’s funny how they never show the awards ceremony. They never show the podium. They never play the national anthem.
Jason: The focus is not on the trophy. It’s on family.
Caroline: Family. Do it.
Jason: Anyway.
Caroline: Say it.
Jason: Family. Anyway. The video that I showed you from the VHS tape of my college roommate was me stepping out of my car, which went up and down, and I had…?
Caroline: A nissan Maxima.
Jason: That doesn’t matter. And I had what was the most thrilling part of that video that you got to see?
Caroline: The bleach.
Jason: The bleach blonde spiky hair. The bleach blonde spiky hair. For those of you who have seen a picture of me in the past, I don’t know, ten years, zero hair. Not a lot of hair. But this is like…
Caroline: You know why? Because you bleached it, babe.
Jason: Oh, possible. Also genes. Also…
Caroline: Genes.
Jason: Just hereditary.
Caroline: So it’s really combo. It was thanks, Eminem, and…?
Jason: Yeah, thanks, Eminem, and bleached my hair, and it burned a couple of times. All right, last week…
Caroline: Wait, let’s trace it back because I think there was a reason. Tire brands, Michelin Star, bougie, yachts, yacht rock. Where do we start? Okay.
Jason: Doesn’t really matter.
Caroline: Doesn’t matter.
Jason: Here we are. We out here. Okay. So we have two upcoming podcast episodes that we want to kind of, like, preface.
Caroline: You know how much…
Jason: We don’t normally do this, so we’re just like…
Caroline: I don’t like to leave people hanging. And I looked at our content calendar and realized that the last episode was all about simplifying your business. And we talked about if you haven’t listened to that episode, we talked about the various different flavors of chaos and complexity that you can have in your business. This is something we’re working through for the October coaching session, and I’m not yet ready to formulate my thoughts into a solution for everyone on the podcast, but I’m telling you, that will be coming in case you’re like, cool. I know which flavor of chaos, but what am I supposed to do about it?
Jason: This is how this goes, too. You got to ruminate.
Caroline: You got to ruminate. This is how the coaching sessions come together. You kind of dig in. I let it marinate. Usually, I’m furiously scribbling down mind maps on my iPad, et cetera. So I wanted to let everyone know who doesn’t like open loops in your brain that that episode will be coming in the future. Next couple of weeks, I’ll basically give you what we came up with of how to simplify your business. Number one. Number two, there will be an upcoming episode on the launch recap. If you’re someone who loves…
Jason: If you love a launch recap.
Caroline: A launch recap. You love, give me the numbers. How did it go? What were the things you tried this time that worked? What didn’t work? So we always do a very sort of transparent launch recap where we give you full numbers.
Jason: Also, if anybody listening to this has another business podcast that they listen to that often does launch recaps or interviews with people, please tell us about it. I’m always on the lookout for these because I love this content.
Caroline: We love this.
Jason: And also, I don’t need the like, I made $10 million. It’s not relatable, but I want the ones that are like, okay, you didn’t work yourself to the bone. You don’t have a team of 40 and you weren’t spending a bajillion dollars on Facebook ads.
Caroline: We love anything that is highly specific behind the scenes content. It’s our favorite thing because there’s something… This is a sidebar, but there’s something that you get from very broad content because you can apply it to your own business. These big sweeping statements of like, don’t burn yourself out. You’re like, great, love that. We do a lot of that. And I also get so much out of highly specific things.
Jason: Exactly.
Caroline: Because I know not everything’s going to apply to me, but I love seeing the full context of someone’s business and seeing what they decided to go after in that context.
Jason: So look forward to those two episodes upcoming, closing the loop on the simplification of your business framework and then also the full launch recap from this launch.
Caroline: And the reason that we’re not recording that today is because we are in the midst of…
Jason: Yeah, don’t give them the time paradoxes.
Caroline: Time. However. So we thought.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: As we are recording this, the Calm Business Encyclopedia is almost it’s basically done.
Jason: It’s fine. We don’t have to play with any time loops or any like, we don’t have to go into that. It’s done. We can just call it done.
Caroline: It’s completed. And so we thought those of you who have been following along on this behind the scenes of what it’s been like to basically do the biggest content project we’ve done in quite some time, we wanted to give you kind of our final thoughts. How did the project go? How did the experiment fare? What would we have done differently? What would we have not done differently? What were the great things we learned? What were the things we could have done better? Et cetera. So again, if you’re a behind the scenes type of person…
Jason: We’re giving you a little behind the scenes here. We’ve got stats, we’ve got emotional feelings, we have all kinds of things. But first, let’s start with we’ll get into some bubble caves. If you don’t know what that is, go a couple episodes back or just play Tears of the Kingdom on switch. It’s a great game. Also, I need to finish it, but I’ve been saving it. This is intentional.
Caroline: When are you going to do it?
Jason: Fall. I know we’re getting into fall, but truthfully…
Caroline: When do you think fall? Just when it gets cold?
Jason: I think after we get back from our US trip. That’s going to be the perfect time for me.
Caroline: Oh, that’s winter.
Jason: The winter then. I’m waiting for winter. Just when you’re like, hunkered down the days didn’t have a dark at 03:00 p.m., that type of thing.
Caroline: I think winter as well.
Jason: Yeah, it’s great. So anyway, a reminder of what the Calm Business Encyclopedia is. It’s our A to Z guide of building a profitable, predictable and peaceful business through 26 different videos or articles. A to Z on all different things. Audience building, email marketing, yada yada, yada.
Caroline: Content strategy, branding, everything.
Jason: You probably know what we’ve been doing up to this point, and if not, you can go find it all at wanderingaimfully.com/calm.
Caroline: It is kind of satisfying to look back over the topics of all 26 and be like, we basically covered just about everything I can think of in terms of the different aspects that we think about when it comes…
Jason: And again, this is not the perfect we’re going to cover every single thing because business is so nuanced that you have a digital planner business or you have a software business, it’s going to be very different. But we’re just trying to share all the things that we have really learned and taught and experienced in that. But what I wanted to also recap was we had a three pronged strategy to the Calm Business Encyclopedia.
Caroline: We did. So whenever we do a recap of a project, we like to go back to the beginning. What were our goals, what was the whole intention behind the project? And if you missed any of those episodes, we’ll give you the quick catch up, which was prong number one was our goal was just a short term goal to get people excited for fall enrollment. So this was pretty much people we expected to already be in our ecosystem. This is what we like to call pre marketing leading up to a sales window. You want to be top of mind for people. You want to create content that is adjacent. It’s iceberg content, we like to call it that, adjacent to what your offer is so that they can start to realize that your offer and program can be a solution to their problem. So that was prong number one. Jason also had a secondary.
Jason: I just threw a goal out there because that’s a very intangible thing, right? Like getting people excited. It’s very intangible. How do you measure that?
Caroline: Well, the measurement of that to me was, and we talked about this, was if I see more sales in this enrollment period versus spring enrollment, then to me the pre marketing and the getting people excited worked. However, that was before we realized that this would be the last opportunity. Let me finish my sentence so that people are like, what? The pricing. It’s our last chance to offer it at our lowest price ever. So that muddies the waters on the variables just a little bit. But anyway, if we’re talking about metrics of success, a lot of this is not going to be perfect. You just have to go with your gut. To me, it was like if we see a sales uptick, then it did its job in getting people excited and aware of the upcoming launch.
Jason: Yeah. So I just threw a secondary random goal out into the ether, which had no bearing on me gauging the success of this project or not, which was trying to get 500 new email subscribers by the end of this project.
Caroline: Which was the idea was getting people watching the videos every day and then converting them to our email newsletter using the lead magnet strategy that we had with the quiz, which we’ll talk about.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: That was prong number one, short term goal. Prong number two was a longer term goal, which was just a means of people discovering us through our videos, which obviously we can’t gauge yet because you’re probably going to see that in the next like six months to a year or so.
Jason: Well, that’s what I was going to say. For this one, what we want to do is a recap episode in six months and then a recap episode in twelve months of some of the data on how this is done.
Caroline: Exactly. Some things that we did dig into which we think is cool in terms of getting new people into our audience. We got 5000 new viewers to our videos.
Jason: On YouTube.
Caroline: On YouTube.
Jason: Specifically to our YouTube channel.
Caroline: So that means people, viewers, not just views. That means people coming to our channel and watching our videos that had not seen a previous video. That’s really cool. Versus 1000 which were returning. So that’s really cool. And then also 21% of total people who viewed the videos within the past month came through YouTube search and 10% came through suggested videos. Like when you’re watching a video and then you see on the right hand column, you see suggested. And to me that indicates that some of our thought that went into the keywords we were trying to target with the YouTube titles I think is helpful because it means YouTube is recognizing, hey, this is the keyword you’re going after. We’re going to share this on similar videos.
Jason: I think this is a huge immediate win and also a really great takeaway for those of you listening to this who don’t want to play the game of social media but are looking for another way to promote your business is that YouTube, besides just the initial viewership of a video, there is organic reach that can be had right away. So to me this is 21% of the, let’s call it 6000 total views on these videos.
Caroline: No, the 6000 was not views, that was viewers.
Jason: So 6000 total viewers?
Caroline: Sure.
Jason: So 21% of those viewers came through YouTube search. That’s incredible. Like you cannot get that on Google right now. So if you were to write 30 articles and just post them on your website, there’s no chance that you’re going to get a bunch of 21% of new traffic is going to come from Google search.
Caroline: It was views because now I’m looking at the total views and it was about the same. So anyway.
Jason: I think they probably relate very similarly. But my point there is just to reiterate, if you are looking for a new Discovery channel to get traffic somewhat quickly, also without having a very big audience. We don’t have a big audience on YouTube. It’s also a very disparate audience because we’ve talked about lots of different things. It was all travel content last year and not a ton of just I really like this metric and I think it’s a great thing to move forward with someone who’s thinking, I don’t want to be on Instagram, I don’t want to be on TikTok. I’m willing to try YouTube for a little while and see if I can get some organic search and see what that continues to look like for my business.
Caroline: Kind of interesting side note, I didn’t write down stats on this, but it’s just an observation. We didn’t gain a lot of new subscribers, which makes me wonder if what people are saying is true, which is just kind of like…
Jason: Subscriber metric is kind of dying.
Caroline: Subscriber metric is kind of dying.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: And then prong number three was just to have a place where we can send people that gives them a good overview on our website of all of the things that we believe in when it comes to running a calm business. And we don’t really have a metric of success there, but we’ll see in terms of do we get more email subscribers from the website? Do we see one year from now a bump in overall traffic? That’ll be interesting.
Jason: Yeah. All right, can I give the stats here? Because I love stats. Can I give the stats? When I said can I… Can I…?
Caroline: Set it up on the left, y’all?
Jason: Okay.
Caroline: We have video stats.
Jason: Yes.
Caroline: We have…
Jason: It’s called that. YouTube video.
Caroline: YouTube video stats. We have overall traffic to the Calm Business Encyclopedia landing page. This was the landing page that we housed all of the content to our website. And then we have the lead magnet strategy, which was we did a quiz, Calm Business Quiz. And so we have stats on that as well. So if you like…
Jason: Stats.
Caroline: Data.
Jason: Yeah. Going to kind of go through this somewhat quickly because we don’t need to dwell on it too much. But it’s just fun to hear these numbers because numbers are fun.
Caroline: I’ll be the one to pluck out the lessons. How about that?
Jason: Okay, wonderful. So total YouTube views across all of the Calm Business Encyclopedia videos themselves. This is not our channel. This is just those 26 videos as of right now, 5700 views ish. We rounded. Average views per Calm Business Encyclopedia video, 221 views.
Caroline: Lower or higher than you thought?
Jason: I would say a little bit lower.
Caroline: A little bit lower. If I had to guess at the beginning of this project what the average would be, I probably would have said
Jason: three to
Caroline: 400.
Jason: Three to 400 too. I think we actually did say that because I think I said that I was thinking we would get like 15,000 or somewhere around there.
Caroline: So overall lower.
Jason: But again, doesn’t really matter. The goal, this was not views on videos. Yes, you need viewership on things, but that was not the goal. Total comments, 113 total comments across 26 videos. Average comments per video, four comments, which I love. To me that means…
Caroline: Comments are fun.
Jason: Yeah. That people are not just watching and being like, oh, that was fine, but they’re like, I have something I want to say to this video. Also shout out to Isabelle. I don’t know if Isabelle listens to our podcast, but she watches every one of our YouTube videos and is a frequent commenter and I just see her name constantly and it’s always a lovely comment. I just wanted to shout her out because she’s amazing.
Caroline: So one out of those four is Isabelle.
Jason: One out of those four is Isabelle for sure.
Caroline: In case you’re… The best one?
Jason: Yeah, sure.
Caroline: In case you’re curious what topics had the best viewership and I took out the first two videos because…
Jason: You’re always going to have the…
Caroline: Always going to have the most views. I think it doesn’t really count, but you can see clear jumps in these three videos. The content strategy video especially because I think the way we framed it, which was how do we have a content strategy without social media?
Jason: I think the thumbnail on that one’s probably one of our most enticing thumbnails too. Yeah.
Caroline: The second one is finances. So this one was the two decisions that changed our financial life. And then the third one is Productivity Strategies for Sensitive People, which was later in the… It’s the P, if you can imagine. So it was later on in the series and you kind of had a sense even when we were putting it together, that you thought maybe that would…
Jason: I think long term this is going to be the video that will get the most viewership of all the 26 videos. It’s the most niche with the biggest overall market interest. So productivity has so much interest on YouTube, but there’s not really like a productivity for sensitive people. A lot of those videos.
Caroline: Which I think as a lesson is kind of a framework that you could use to brainstorm, which is what are the search terms that do really well on YouTube? Content strategy, productivity, time management, YouTube specific platform things. And then how can you niche that down to kind of create a sub keyword that maybe is a little bit more of a blue ocean strategy in terms of less competition.
Jason: It’s almost like you’re creating a Venny here. So you’re like, you got a one circle of productivity, you got one circle of sensitive people, you mash them over top each other and you got a video you can make.
Caroline: Boom.
Jason: Create some Vennys. Also not a bad idea for like a video, not a channel, but like what topic should I create YouTube videos about? And it’s like enter one topic you like, enter one topic, you like. And then what’s the type of video that comes out of that. It’s kind of interesting. Okay, comments. The most commented video was on our Rest video and this is where I asked for a swirly eyed emoji in the comments.
Caroline: Second most commented was our Doritos framework where you asked which flavor of Dorito.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: So I think the lesson there, though, is and it’s such a simple lesson, but it bears repeating, which is if you want interaction on your videos, remember to ask for that. And if you really are trying to go for engagement, get people… and you could do it less like, I mean, it’s a little bit of a trade off because on the one hand, make it easy for them. Right. So Jason’s just asking an emoji or a thing. So if you really just want to go for engagement, or if you want more thoughtful engagement, ask a question. But I just think sometimes we forget that if we want people to comment, we just need to ask.
Jason: Yeah, for sure. And then one little note here is that we really didn’t promote these videos at all. So these videos got uploaded to our channel. Basically, this was going on through our launch, so there was no individual newsletter promotion for us, which is our main audience.
Caroline: This is one thing that if we’re talking about what I would have done differently now, having been at the end, there’s not a lot I would have done differently because we were very time constrained and so it’s fine. But this is one thing that I think would have been a very low time investment that would have paid off, which was setting up some sort of digest either like maybe on Friday… Off of our normal.
Jason: Normal, yeah.
Caroline: And just sending a Friday email or a Thursday email, which is more than we would normally do. But I don’t think you’re going to get tons of people being like, we unsubscribed. And just saying, hey, we’re doing this project. Here’s the latest five videos.
Jason: Yeah, I see this as an opportunity for us moving forward. And every email for the rest of the year is to highlight one of the videos or two of the videos or three of the videos and just give each a little bit of shine in every single newsletter. I think that’s an easy way to do this moving forward.
Caroline: Absolutely. And that was part of the idea with this content, is that it’s very evergreen content. Right. So it’s not like our travel videos where three months later you’re sort of like, we’ve moved on. It’s like no, these are always…
Jason: This is evergreen.
Caroline: Evergreen.
Jason: All right, moving over to the landing page, the Calm Business Encyclopedia page on our website. Again, you can find that at wanderingaimfully.com/calm. Total visitors, unique visitors to that page, 1500 rounded. 1500 people saw the Calm Business Encyclopedia. Unique people. So that doesn’t count like all the people who return and all that. Of those 1500 people, 1000 of them came through desktop. Did you notice that?
Caroline: No.
Jason: So normally it’s like a 50 50 split that we see in web traffic versus mobile traffic. This was, like, a little bit higher toward desktop traffic, which is interesting.
Caroline: That is interesting because I actually designed the page with our most prevalent screen resolutions in mind, which was basically extra large and then mobile.
Jason: Because we did some research on our screen sizes that people, when they come to our website, what screen sizes?
Caroline: That’s actually fascinating to me.
Jason: All right, let’s jump to the quiz. Ready to get to the quiz?
Caroline: I’m almost ready to get to the quiz.
Jason: What are you doing over there?
Caroline: I’m doing math.
Jason: We don’t do math live here. We learned that from other podcasts.
Caroline: Is that true? I think I’m doing it wrong.
Jason: What are you doing?
Caroline: I was trying to do the amount of email subscribers who did the quiz through the landing page.
Jason: Okay.
Caroline: Divided by the amount of total visitors to the landing page for a conversion percentage.
Jason: But this isn’t… Yeah, okay, sure.
Caroline: So 215 divided by 1500.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: So 14%. Is that right?
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: That’s high.
Jason: Yeah, that’s super high. That’s a high converting lead magnet.
Caroline: Okay.
Jason: Great. So the quiz, let’s get into that. Now that you just did some math and people kind of checked out and tuned out like I did.
Caroline: Sorry.
Jason: Total overall quiz takers of our Calm Business Score quiz?
Caroline: 249.
Jason: 249. And of those?
Caroline: 53 were new subscribers. So we had people who were already on our list took the quiz.
Jason: Which this makes a little bit of sense to me, but also it’s a little bit surprising.
Caroline: That makes more sense.
Jason: That I would have thought we would have had more new subscribers. But then when you think about it, again, we’re promoting this in a silo. So the only place… Can you move your mic down? Because you’re, like, slowly melting into the couch. And I’m just watching your mic… I’m watching your mic go to your forehead and so you’re just, like, talking under it.
Caroline: I want everyone to know that when we set up initially to record today, I was sitting straight up and down. Like, I had really good posture, and Jason was like, why don’t you get to where you think you’re going to end up?
Jason: And even from there, you’ve melted even further into the couch.
Caroline: Just… I want to be comfy when I get…
Jason: Also, this is such a funny difference between the two of us.
Caroline: What?
Jason: I will sit and record these podcast episodes and I will not move. I am a statue. You are like…
Caroline: Yeah. Do you know what that is?
Jason: You are like hot lava. You come down the mountain and you just flow right into…
Caroline: Do you know what that is? I’ll tell you exactly what it is. This is how the main difference in our personality affects every aspect of our life. You do not have the connection between your brain and body that tells you when you’re uncomfortable. You have like a blockade up, so your brain, it never gets to your brain that you’re uncomfortable. You could hold anything for a certain amount of time. My superhighway between my brain and my body is just flowing all the time. So many circuits all the time. So when I’m the least bit uncomfortable, my body is going to adjust to be more comfortable. Do you see that that is how that’s happening?
Jason: Bad way to live. Okay, let’s get back to these subscribers. So 249 total quiz takers. 53 were new people. As of right now, we can only say that five of those quiz takers came from YouTube.
Caroline: Directly from YouTube. New subscribers in the past 30 days.
Jason: I feel like that has to be incorrect.
Caroline: No, I think it’s true. And you know what? This is my…
Jason: Did you look at the actual Interact data, too?
Caroline: Yes.
Jason: Okay.
Caroline: Exactly.
Jason: Interact is the quiz software that we use.
Caroline: Yeah, we can look at it together. Here’s exactly what I think that tells me is, number one, we only included the call to action, which was go take our quiz at the end of every video.
Jason: That I understand, and the watch retention falls way off.
Caroline: So that tells me if you want to take anything away from this, if you’re going to do something similar, you have to either… Here’s two things I would have maybe done. Some type of interrupted in the middle. Hey, blah, blah, blah, quick to go here and download this. Okay. Or… and… probably and… I would include a little watermark.
Jason: I know we talked about this and we mentioned it multiple times, and our video editor forgot.
Caroline: Our video editor never did it.
Jason: And listen, when you’re editing a video every single day, I’m the video editor, by the way. There’s a lot of things you’re doing, and the last thing you can remember is, like, I wrote a note like three times to do it, and I was just like, no, I have to get to this.
Caroline: Well, this is why you listen to this podcast, so that you can learn from what we did. But a watermark, meaning just like a tiny little stamp in one of the corners of the video that says you take the free quiz at and it has the thing. You may not get… I don’t think that’s going to be that compelling, but it’s certainly going to be better, especially when you consider the fact that very few people have the chance to see it when you put it at the end versus every single person that watches a video you know has at least seen that watermark. Right. So that’s what I would go back and do differently there, which is fine. That’s why you experiment. You learn.
Jason: Totally. And again, some of these videos could pop, and it could lead to more people obviously viewing a video, reading the first line of the description where we have the link to the quiz. Clicking that link and we get a bunch more subscribers.
Caroline: Now, what I also think is interesting though, is we put in the first line of every single YouTube description a link to the quiz. And to me, I know that not that many people read descriptions of YouTube videos, but I would have thought at least a few more would have come from there. So that tells me I have a little bit of a suspicion of how we could make the quiz itself more compelling. However, this is the advice we give people inside of WAIM Unlimited, which is if you’re going to try a quiz and the numbers aren’t working out the way that you wanted to in terms of conversion, the first thing you should change is placement of your opt ins. Don’t go changing your entire quiz before you change the placement of the opt ins because that’s such a high variable. So change the placement of the opt ins and then if you’re still not getting enough, then we could evaluate whether we think the quiz because here’s my instinct. Number one. So this is aside from YouTube, but if I could go back, I would have been more aggressive is the wrong word, but I would have done different placements on the landing page. So as the encyclopedia days went on, the quiz was at the bottom of the landing page. So it gets pushed further and further down. We had the welcome mat on every…
Jason: Article.
Caroline: Article.
Jason: Which leads to the quiz.
Caroline: Which leads to the quiz. But what I would have done is an exit pop up on the landing page where it’s like, hey, before you go take the quiz and maybe an exit pop up on the blog articles as well. I would have tried that. I don’t like the first pop up when you get there because…
Jason: Yeah, we’re not a big fan.
Caroline: So I would have tried that. Then, as I was thinking about this and evaluating the quiz, I was also wondering, okay, is the quiz itself that compelling? I think people do want to know sort of score my business in terms of how calm it is. But now that we’ve done that podcast episode about what’s your flavor of chaos, I think that’s even more compelling because diagnosing for someone what’s causing your complexity in your business, what’s causing you to be not calm? Is it that you have too many offers?
Jason: Which is what I think goes back to our other quiz why…
Caroline: Exactly.
Jason: So well, to start was it identified the thing that you were missing in your business.
Caroline: Exactly. So, yeah, I think that’s fun thing to play around with. There’s opportunities there to go back and I don’t think it would be that hard to reconfigure the quiz in such a way where it’s more specific.
Jason: Yeah, and all of these things are they’re nice to haves, but at the end of the day, we made 26 videos, we made 26 articles. We have a great landing page that’s going to serve us for the rest of our business. And one of the most important stats that I think is the thing that we care the most about for a project like this is two people purchased waymolited through the landing page quiz…
Caroline: That are new subscribers.
Jason: That are new subscribers, and then one person also bought. So basically three purchases are because of the Calm Business Encyclopedia for this enrollment period.
Caroline: And that’s only the ones that we can directly tie to the quiz that are new. That’s not even to say because it would be very hard to measure people who are already on our list. And the Calm Business Encyclopedia project…
Jason: Reassured them.
Caroline: Reassured them, got them excited, put us in their awareness to then purchase. This is a total side note, but I told Jason, if there’s one thing that I could tell every single person to do who does online business and runs programs and offers it’s to put a post purchase survey on your confirmation page after someone buys, make it pretty simple. We have a couple of questions, but one of them is an open ended question that goes, what one thing directly led to you…?
Jason: Purchasing.
Caroline: Purchasing today? And it’s an open ended question. And reading through those responses is gold. It is absolute gold because people are saying, what was the thing that put them over the edge to buy? And the thing that’s the funniest for us is that there’s no one thing that wins, but it’s very helpful to know. Okay, this is what really resonated with people. Like one specifically, for example, this time on the sales page, we swapped out an older free coaching session. We have like an example coaching session on our sales page so that you can see how we teach, the value we provide. And we finally decided to switch that. We’ve used the same one for the past four launches, basically. We switched it to a different one. And I just scanned over the survey right before we hopped on and I saw at least two people who said, I couldn’t believe my jaw dropped when I saw the free coaching session, couldn’t believe how much value you provided. And so to me, that really validated our choice to switch that out.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Cool. All right, so I think that wraps up the stats portion of this Calm Business Encyclopedia project. Again, I think it’ll be fun to come back in six months and then in a year to recap the stats because I think it’ll be very interesting to go, well, we had when we first finished 6000 views of these videos. We’re now six months later and we have 60,000 views. Where did those come from? What happened? What does that look like? And can we attribute that to any actual metrics that matter for our business? And not just vanity metrics of views.
Caroline: Right.
Jason: All right. So a couple of other things that we wanted to talk about that we learned from this project. I think the number one takeaway for us specifically is that we found a video format that’s actually sustainable.
Caroline: Wow. Honestly, it was worth it just for that.
Jason: And I think this is the one part of it that it’s a very good thing that we found that format. I’m not sure it works as, like, a consistent YouTube video format that will bring us viewership that leads to new subscribers, that leads to sales of our offer.
Caroline: Tell me more. Why do you think that?
Jason: Because I just don’t think it’s enough people.
Caroline: What’s enough people?
Jason: Well, just having like a couple hundred views per video. And if you’re not getting many of those people to go over and take the free quiz from us, they’re not leading to any type of subscribership for us. Then those videos have to get more views to get that small amount of people to go over and subscribe.
Caroline: Totally. But this is where my brain goes. As an experiment, totally could be a format issue. Right. That’s one hypothesis. Another hypothesis is just you’re not getting the source of those views. So we’re relying very heavily on just organic search from YouTube, which we saw. That’s 21%. That is some of it. But my point is, like, is it a format or is it do you need to in this day and age of the YouTube algorithm, do you need to chop it up and create shorts in order to get into some type of Discoverability feed to get people over to view those videos?
Jason: Well, we’ll talk about shorts in a second.
Caroline: But that’s just my point. That’s kind of the ongoing step is I would want to try it for three to six months on a weekly basis before I decided that the format wasn’t…
Jason: Yeah, let’s talk about that in a second. So also, with just the specific creation process of the videos, I do think we found something that even after doing 26 of these, I know you’re a little bit burnt out on doing the keynotes right now and I’m a little bit burnt out on editing the videos and writing the articles.
Caroline: That’s what 30 days is going to…
Jason: Exactly. It doesn’t matter what you do. I mean, it could just be eating skittles for 30 days. Like, by the end of the 30 days, I’m going to be tired of skittles. I know that’s blasphemy but also they’re very bad for you. The pace of the creation of these videos is extremely sustainable for us.
Caroline: It really is.
Jason: Which I think is a really good sign because if we wanted to, we could do one day a month. We finally have like a content marketing thing that we could do with Batching where it’s like, make the keynotes sit down and record. We could record four in a day. It was hard to do that now, but I think it’s because it was the repetition.
Caroline: And also imagine if we did two in the morning, two in the afternoon.
Jason: Yeah, but we could get a month’s worth of content done literally in like two to three days.
Caroline: Three days. It would take me two days to do the four keynotes and then it would take one day of filming and even less time, which we haven’t even talked about yet. If we brought in a team member to do the initial brainstorming, the loose outline of the video, we just basically tell them, here’s what we want to talk about, here are the points. So that would be even less time. So it’d be extremely sustainable, which I think is such a win. And I don’t know if you want to talk about it yet, but that’s why I’m saying if you find a format that works for you personally as a business owner, but you’re not sure if that format is going to resonate with your audience, I still think start with that. Because that’s your optimal, right? Something that you could do forever, that you enjoy. Start with that and give it a chance to actually resonate and try some different tactics before you decide that the format itself is not going to resonate.
Jason: Yeah, the tricky part here, and I think this is the really important thing for anybody who’s listening that’s doing content marketing and trying to figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze is to come back to the question of this podcast. What is it all for? So why would we continue to make YouTube videos in this format? Why would we even jump into creating shorts for it? And yes, YouTube wants people to make shorts. It’s just like Instagram changed from posts to stories and then stories to reels. This is what the platforms want you to do because it’s shrinking the attention span. They could squeeze more ads in like blah, blah, blah, blah. We all know all the things. And what I constantly come back to when we talk about this is like, okay, well, we could do shorts and we could see about this. But why? What is it all for? What would we be doing this for? Is it to grow our email list? Okay, sure, we could definitely try and do that. But again, what is that for? Is it to get more sales of Wandering Aimfully Unlimited, which is our program that opens twice per year, as you all know by this point. Okay, great, but does that actually lead to people who would buy that? Because I think that amount of time that we would invest in that could be spent better served, that’s maybe more directed at our audience by doing podcast interviews with people who have an audience like ours, that’s a better spend of our time.
Caroline: Totally.
Jason: Even just doing more free coaching content that’s out there that’s easier to be shared by our audience in some way. I don’t know what exactly that looks like.
Caroline: We’re investing in word of mouth marketing ideas. We did a whole one of our videos for the Calm Business Encyclopedia was 15 word of mouth marketing ideas. And honestly, it got me so excited, I thought we don’t spend enough time thinking about this type of marketing.
Jason: Exactly. So if you listen to that was last week’s episode about our Teachery plans, or is that two weeks ago? Two weeks ago we did our basically what we’re calling Project All In. We really want to focus on Teachery in 2024, which is our online course platform. And Wandering Aimfully is not going to take a back seat, it’s going to take a side seat. So it’s basically like we’re switching drivers. So we’re stopping. Teachery is running from the passenger side around to the driver’s side. We’re running from the driver’s side around to the passenger side, and Teachery is going to be the driver.
Caroline: And now Wandering Aimfully gets to put its feet up, roll down the window.
Jason: They’re picking the playlist, they’re eating the snacks from 7/11. But what they’re not doing is getting all the attention, which this is why we probably won’t keep doing these videos and won’t go into shorts for this because that’s not helping Teachery grow.
Caroline: Exactly. So that’s the kind of meta takeaway is after you do any project like this, you kind of diagnose, what would I do differently? What didn’t work out the way that I thought my hypothesis would have led me to believe, cool, I could do X, Y and Z in order to run this experiment again and try to get a different result. Now, before I do that, I need to question, is that worth it? What is my ultimate goal? And for us, new information has come about, which is we’ve decided that we want to steer the business and our attention towards Teachery next year. So these are all very good observations to keep in mind and still something that I’m not convinced. Like, here’s what I will tell you. I’m not totally convinced that it’s a no from me. And I think you and I will probably have this debate when it comes time to do our yearly planning for next year. I’m not totally convinced it’s a no for me because when I think about the time and energy investment is so low versus to just keep it consistent, the potential payoff of giving us one faucet to turn on for new people to discover Teachery or discover Wandering Aimfully when we’re not on social media, when we’re not…
Jason: Yeah, no, I for sure hear you and I think it is the smart move. It’s just there are always moves to be made in business, but there is a trade off in the time and energy it takes.
Caroline: The opportunity costs, and I hear you on that and that’s where it makes it a hard decision because I’m with you. Even if you think that the time away from focus on Teachery is like, let’s call it 10%. Right? It takes 10% of my energy a week to think about keeping up with this other consistent content schedule. It’s not actually 10%. It’s like somehow it makes the other 90% less effective.
Jason: Exactly.
Caroline: Because it’s a distraction.
Jason: Exactly.
Caroline: And I hear that.
Jason: Yeah, cool. All right. Is there anything else on the recap of this project and what we learned from it?
Caroline: Yeah, I think we didn’t do any bubble caves, so I’d love to just end on feelings.
Jason: Okay. Yeah, sorry. I don’t have, like, a bullet point here in our notes that says feelings. Let me… Here, let me write it real quick.
Caroline: Feelings.
Jason: Let me just write feelings. Okay. I wrote it. So feelings are there.
Caroline: Let’s talk about feelings. There is something that I get out of challenging myself. So we arrived at the end of this project, and I’ll be totally honest with you all. I was like, if I never see a keynote again, I will be okay. But now that I have a couple of days removed where I have given myself space to rest from it, I haven’t jumped back into our coaching sessions. I’ve really just given myself some time. If you go back and watch our Calm Business Encyclopedia R installment for Rest, I gave myself that space, and now I look back on it and I’m like, okay, yes, I was tired of doing it at the end, and I’m glad I gave myself that break, but it’s not like I hated it. There was no point during this project where I hated it. And as I reflect on it, I realize that we do have a habit of getting ourselves into projects that are… We bite off more than we can chew. We know this about ourselves, but I think I talked about this a few episodes ago where I’m reaching this place of acceptance, of going, yeah, but don’t I really love challenging myself. I love getting to that point in a project where you kind of see what you’re made of and you go, it’s not to the toxic place where you’re like, I have to push through at all costs. I’m going to shut down all my feelings. I’m going to close off those barricades between my head and my heart like Jason’s so good at doing. Not to that degree, but to the degree where you go, okay, things are getting tough. What are you going to do? How are you going to handle it? Are you going to take care of yourself physically, mentally, so that you can have the energy to continue forward? Are you going to stay mindful of your emotional state and regulate your emotions so that you can complete this to the best of your ability? Are you going to be kind to yourself even when your quality standards might have to slip a little bit in order to complete the project? All of these things, I find, are… I just love engaging with things that are challenging because I feel like that’s when I do the most growth.
Jason: Yeah. It will always go back to me of what our friend Greg Hardell told me so long ago, that’s, like, the number one determining factor of an entrepreneur is your ability to deal with stress. And I think a challenge project like this, where you have 26 days of posting content, I think it’s very different from the challenge of doing something for 30 days that you’re not having to post all the time, and you get to do a recap of it. That’s so much easier than posting every single day and doing something and creating because you’re just always in this loop, right? Like, you’re just, okay, you got to create a keynote. We have to record the thing. I have to edit it. We got to create an article. We got to post it.
Caroline: There’s no relief.
Jason: There is zero relief. Even on a regular challenge, when you’re just producing at the very end, kind of a recap, you get the relief every day of like, okay, great. I get the rest of the day to not have to think about this thing. So I think for me, in a project like this, it just shows me that I’m getting too damn old to do challenge projects. And while I do like them, I enjoyed the challenge of it as well. And even up until editing the last video, the editing of the videos, I found I could do that, and that’s not a problem. The writing of the articles, though, that got super mundane for me, and I just got really tired of doing it. And I think it’s just because I’ve written so much in the past ten years, like multiple books worth at this point, just in articles, not even including actual books. I’m just tired of writing articles like I just don’t necessarily want to do anymore. I could write an article. What’s funny is I was thinking about the product… Was it the productivity strategies or the time management ranked by effectiveness? That was my favorite article to write of the 26, and it’s because I made it like a game. There was a score. I could add more personality. It wasn’t just, like, business stuff. Yeah, I feel like I’ve said this so many times over that was like, let me tell you why the Pomodoro technique doesn’t work for me, and have some fun with it. That was enjoyable.
Caroline: Well, that’s a good takeaway, is just reminding yourself it’s what we always know that you have to bring that differentiator, or else you’re not going to be engaged.
Jason: Exactly. And I think this is why so many people listening to this hate content marketing because you’re creating content that you don’t like to create, and you’re doing it because, oh, well, so and so successful business coach told me that I need to create reels. And so my business is about helping people with productivity. So I need to make productivity reels. And I have to say the same thing that everyone’s all been saying. Like, I’ve got the James Clear quotes in my videos and it’s like that type of, to me, it’s just like regurgitated content over and over. I know there’s a lot of…
Caroline: I won’t call them out by name, but I did just stumble across a particular SaaS app this morning and I was curious what they were doing on social media because of course now I’m shifting gears to thinking about are we doing social next year? Are we not? I was writing notes for this and I was like, if if I’m going to do any content marketing whatsoever, it should be for Teachery.
Jason: Can we do like the masked singer but for Teachery?
Caroline: Yes.
Jason: The Masked SaaSer?
Caroline: Yes, and.
Jason: We’re the Masked SaaSers.
Caroline: Okay. And so I saw their Instagram page and I just immediately said to myself, I’m going to screenshot this and say anything but this. And this is literally, please do not take this as any shade to those people whatsoever. They’re doing what the playbook of SaaS social media marketing is. But every post is a perfectly designed photo of basically a feature. And I see it’s like four likes, three likes and I’m like, there’s somebody who’s putting time of their life. They only have one life and they’re putting time into creating this that nobody’s interested in because it’s just talking about their features and there’s nothing unique or interesting about it. And I had this moment of saying, not this, not anything but this because nobody’s getting value out of this. Nobody’s having fun with this.
Jason: I think, number one, as you get older, your time is less. Right. So you just have this reality of time. And I think as you get more years in business, all I come back to all the time is I just want it to be fun.
Caroline: I know.
Jason: Because we’ve spent years in the trenches of experimentation and analytics and content creation and doing all the things that way. Now we’re at the phase where the machine works in itself well enough. I just want to have fun. I want everything to be at the priority of fun. And I know we’re going to have to do boring things. We’re going to have to do some of the things.
Caroline: This is the part where I have to have a caveat and say, I understand that that perspective comes from an immense place of privilege in business.
Jason: Of course.
Caroline: Where you’ve done the slogging, you’ve done the not fun to get to a place where you have steady enough revenue that you can prioritize something different.
Jason: Absolutely.
Caroline: If you’re listening to this and you’re in the beginning trenches and you’re like, must be nice to have fun, I totally get it. And…
Jason: Five years ago, we couldn’t have said that.
Caroline: Exactly. But I will just add. It’s okay if you can’t prioritize fun to the degree that we can now that we’re in a place that we have regular revenue, that’s okay. But can you find moments of fun? Can you find ways to put a twist on it so that you can stay engaged and it is more sustainable? Because ultimately, the only way that you get to your business goals and you get to the place where the revenue is steady and you’re not stressed about money all the time is if you can stay in the game. And the only way to stay in the game is to not hate it. Right. So I just want to point that out. I get it sometimes. I do, not just from like, a revenue privilege standpoint of our business, but also I understand that when you’ve been doing it for ten plus years, you have different priorities.
Jason: There’s a decision making privilege as well.
Caroline: Yeah.
Jason: Because it’s like we’ve written all these things, we’ve done all these things, we produce all these things, made all these things. Like, the machine works. Now we can make other decisions that other people can’t make.
Caroline: Yeah, I wanted to… What was the other thing about challenge? Shoot, I lost my train of thought.
Jason: Oh, you didn’t have any more? You had more feelings you wanted to share? Oh, man. Maybe it’ll come back. All right, let’s go over a couple of future notes, and then I think we’re skipping Calm Business Confidential because you had a note for me that the episodes are getting a little bit long on the recording and tired. So do we want to save it for next week and then we’ll just wrap up with some Portugal stuff?
Caroline: Okay, that’s fair.
Jason: You want to do that? I know that our audience is going to be.
Caroline: Up and arms.
Jason: Because we did hear from you all that you love the Calm Business Confidential.
Caroline: Next week, we’ll have a shorter episode and we’ll emphasize Calm Business Confidential.
Jason: Yeah.
Caroline: Okay.
Jason: Is next week’s episode the launch recap, though? That’s usually… Maybe quick. Yeah. Okay, we’ll find out. You’ll find out next week. All right. So a couple of future things we would consider for a project like this, or even for this project that we wanted to share just as potential ideas for maybe you’re someone who has created a bunch of content and you’re not sure what to do with it. Maybe those will give you a couple of ideas as well.
Caroline: Yeah, and I think this is good too, when you come to the end of a project, sometimes we in the past have had this habit of just going on to the next.
Jason: Of course.
Caroline: And you go, Wait a second. You just put in all this work. Take your notes and your findings, and then ask yourself, I did all this work, how could I even optimize it more? So some notes I wrote down and these are things that I think we will probably discuss again in our yearly planning meeting. I would consider hiring an SEO consultant to go back over these articles and really try to optimize them for keywords. We did a basic job. We did a few keyword research exercises. We thought about what the keywords were we were optimizing for. We did basic SEO of trying to implement them throughout the article and in the headings, et cetera. However, someone who this is their full time job. They’re not just a generalist, they’re a specific skill set. I would be willing to consider paying someone to really beef those up.
Jason: My caveat to that one is I will not be logging into the WordPress article admin and clicking into any of the articles if we do this.
Caroline: Because you’re so over it?
Jason: As I’m so over it.
Caroline: Great. That’s a non negotiable for the person we hire.
Jason: That’s a non negotiable.
Caroline: Can you use WordPress? Get in there.
Jason: Get in there and not mess up any of the formatting, but add in this content yourself.
Caroline: Oh, I remembered my thought.
Jason: Your feeling?
Caroline: Yeah, we’ll come back to it. Okay, great. Keyword help.
Jason: Okay.
Caroline: So the next thing that I would consider doing is the same thing to hire a Pinterest consultant to really try to create Pinterest images and a Pinterest strategy to promote again, this goes back to the content is extremely good. I believe in it wholeheartedly. Where can we go to get it in front of more eyeballs, to get more discoverability? I think Pinterest is a clear winner there. But both of these caveats would be I’m not sure what my threshold would be for what I’d be willing to pay for those.
Jason: Right. What’s the budget? And again, what is it all for? Right? So it’s like…
Caroline: Exactly.
Jason: What are we trying to do with that traffic that leads to getting more customers, building an audience, doing those types of things? If that isn’t the goal, let’s just throw around numbers. Just for sake of throwing around numbers. Let’s say the SEO consultant costs $5,000. Pinterest consultant costs $5,000. Right? It’s $10,000. Is that investment worth it to invest, to grow, Wandering Aimfully’s email list plus a couple of WAIM Unlimited buyers? Or is that $10,000 worth it to hire someone for Teachery to do some type of content creation that we don’t want to be doing?
Caroline: That’s where you have to be thinking. And also, if you’re someone who is not trying to choose between two businesses, but you have a project like this and you’re like, oh, is it worth getting more eyeballs on it? This is one of those things where I would go back to my findings about the quiz and I would fix that marketing bridge first.
Jason: Or even better, it would just be to know that, okay, I’m seeing the people who are on the website are converting to the quiz, and those people are becoming customers. So I need more traffic direct to the website, not directly to the videos. Does that make sense?
Caroline: Right, but the SEO consultant and the Pinterest are both…
Jason: Right, but I think the… Like, for me in that strategy, I would go Pinterest first because Pinterest, I could see actually, like direct traffic change quicker than SEO, which is like Google, it takes forever. Unless you’re doing paid AdWords.
Caroline: Sure, if I was going to rank those, I would be more interested in…
Jason: Interested? Pinterested?
Pinterested.
Caroline: Okay.
Jason: All right.
Caroline: But my point was I would go upstream to the conversion. So if you think about a marketing bridge, you have traffic, you have people converting to your email list, you’re selling to your email list to get the sale. I would go like, if the conversion piece of the puzzle is broken and not converting high enough, it doesn’t matter how much traffic from Pinterest you pour onto that. If they’re never getting onto and they’re never taking the quiz, that was a waste of money. So what I would do first is toy around with some of the opt in changes we mentioned, maybe even go as far as to change up the quiz to the direct diagnosis, see if that had a positive impact. Then from there, I would go upstream and I would pay the $5,000 for the Pinterest.
Jason: Great. Okay, final bullet point here on things we would do in the future with this Calm Business Encyclopedia project.
Caroline: This last bullet?
Jason: Yeah, I teed it up for you. Are you okay? I threw a softball up in the air. You have a bat in your hand.
Caroline: No, I don’t know which bullet you’re referring to.
Jason: After the launch is over and the project is officially over, how do we want to take time? So it’s like, do we want to change anything with how this is positioned on our site, I think is the point here.
Caroline: Great. So that’s a question. It’s not really tee up.
Jason: Well, it’s a tee up for you to bring it up and then we talk about it. That’s how a podcast works.
Caroline: Cool. Let’s try it again.
Jason: Okay, great. Here we go. And up in the air.
Caroline: Just to finish things off here. How do we want this to live on our site?
Jason: Yeah. Well, I think it could become the landing… Like the home page of our site is one option.
Caroline: I think we would also really have to think about the navigation of it because I added that little…
Jason: Book covers.
Caroline: The book covers, which I think it’s fine, but I wonder if a more condensed version of it where you could just scroll through. I don’t know.
Jason: It is interesting because it’s like the version of our homepage that we created earlier this year, which was for people transitioning from client businesses to digital products. I think that very much speaks to our most core customer, which is good. The Calm Business Encyclopedia doesn’t. That’s more of a more broad thing again. I think I would lean to leaving the homepage as a…
Caroline: More specific.
Jason: Client specific, trying to go to digital products because that’s our core customer. And then this just becomes the start here page of our website. It’s just the first place we want to direct people and maybe our articles page changes in the design of that to feature the calm business articles first and then all of our previous articles can kind of just live in the ether of those because no one’s finding them in our site anyway. They’re just finding them haphazardly through Google.
Caroline: That also just gave me an idea of it kind of ruins the encyclopedia concept. But is there a world where you kind of separate the topics by profitable, predictable and peaceful? Because to me, predictable is the client off ramp kind of ecosystem. It’s like, okay, your client income is maybe stressful and not predictable. Create scalable digital Products, right? Profitable, anything related to marketing, sales, et cetera, and then peaceful, anything related to mindset, rest, et cetera, productivity, et cetera. I’m just wondering, could that be a way? I don’t know.
Jason: We’ll talk about it. We’ll think about it. But again, I think the point here is in all of these future things is trying to leverage all of the effort that we put in the past eight weeks into this project or ten weeks into this project and not just have it be done and move on to the next.
Caroline: Exactly.
Jason: This is not content that now isn’t valuable now that it’s up and it was just like, oh, watch us day to day do this thing and then it’s not really worth watching. It’s like this is valuable for a long time, so let’s make sure that we give it just too yeah.
Caroline: And I will be looking forward to recording an episode at the end of this year to look back on the year and see all the experiments we did because this was very much like an experimental year for us. When we were traveling last year, we very much had let kind of the business ride and we just let ourselves kind of be in more of a coasting, sustainable place. And this year we were excited to get reinvigorated with Wandering Aimfully and try some different things. So I’m excited to go look back and see here’s where we put our time this year. Here’s where that led us in terms of where we want to steer the business. And then the hope is that that’s what next year is for Teachery.
Jason: Yeah, for sure. All right, let’s get into the Postugal here, our chat about living in Portugal. We have a couple of little updates for you. Again, the Calm Business Confidential, we’ll save that for next week because we’re already running a little bit longer.
Caroline: For those of you who love it.
Jason: But there’s just a lot to, a lot of things to talk about, a lot of feelings to share, a lot of stuff. Our first big update is that we went to the dentist. Your boy’s least favorite thing to do. For those of you who are around in 2021, you remember my dental saga of getting, like, nine of my teeth replaced. It’s not true. It was three. But that’s still a lot of your teeth to get replaced. I had to get a bunch of crowns is essentially what it was if you didn’t listen to that. And it’s not fun. I’ve had a lot of teeth work done over the years. It was funny. When she looked in your mouth, she was like, wow, have you ever had orthodontics? And you’re like, no. She’s like, your teeth are perfect.
Caroline: She said, they’re so straight.
Jason: You’ve never had a cavity? I mean, maybe when you were like a baby.
Caroline: Little baby cavities.
Jason: Tiny.
Caroline: But I’ve never had any.
Jason: You’ve never had a cavity like I’ve had?
Caroline: I definitely haven’t.
Jason: But then she looks at my mouth. She’s like, wow, your mouth is shaped wrong for the size of your teeth.
Caroline: You have really big teeth.
Jason: I was like, yeah, I’ve had eight teeth removed. And I had orthodontics. And my teeth are now crooked, and I have teeth that just fall apart. So anyway, the point that we wanted to share here is the dental experience itself.
Caroline: Fantastic.
Jason: Probably one of the best dental experiences we’ve ever had.
Caroline: Best I’ve ever had. Best I have ever had.
Jason: I think I can’t say it’s the best I’ve ever had because all of them suck horribly, and I absolutely hate it.
Caroline: You just refuse to say it was the best of anything.
Jason: Because every single time I go to the dentist, they’re cleaning my teeth, it hurts.
Caroline: It’s painful.
Jason: It’s an 8.5 out of ten in my pain scale, which is extremely high for my life.
Caroline: You were really brave.
Jason: I end up in a flop sweat halfway through because…
Caroline: I was rubbing your calf because I was sitting in the chair. First of all, cute that we got to go back together.
Jason: We did. The first time we’ve ever done that.
Caroline: Yeah, we didn’t get to do that at our dentist previously in California. But we met the dentist, and she spoke English. And she’s Portuguese, but she speaks English. And she was like, do you want to come back together? And we were like, sure. And so we got to be in there together, which was just fun. And we also… Can I just say, when we get to go to doctor’s appointments together, I feel like we do some of our best work.
Jason: Yeah, we really do.
Caroline: Our best crowd work. We went to a dermatologist appointment for Jason one time, and it was actually quite bad because it was, like, during a procedure, and we were making him laugh so hard that he forgot something. He was like, oh, shoot. Can you come grab, like, a thing out of the cabinet over here?
Jason: He needed you to help because he had forgotten something.
Caroline: I get that we’re pretty funny, but you need to just tighten it up a little bit.
Jason: Thankfully, in the dental office, the laughs kept everything going through.
Caroline: But it was very just comfortable. They explained everything that they were doing. They were very gentle. She was just walking me through the whole thing. She said, Are you comfortable? She said, Anytime your jaw gets tired, we can stop.
Jason: I didn’t get that same treatment. They just dug into my teeth.
Caroline: She was like, I got to get in and out. They had the little TV above where you could watch it. And so I was practicing my Portuguese. They were watching, in case you’re wondering what they were playing the movie Spy with Melissa McCarthy, but with Portuguese subtitles. So I got to practice, which was great. They were very complimentary of our Portuguese.
Jason: They were complimentary of our Portuguese and of our oral hygiene, which I was very appreciative of.
Caroline: Yes, because…
Jason: As someone who has started taking their teeth a lot more seriously after all this stupid dental work.
Caroline: Yes, after the whole dental saga, you were like, I’m going to…
Jason: I need to start investing in what I have left, the four teeth.
Caroline: And so we have really upped our dental hygiene game the past year, and it has paid off.
Jason: I will… Just one funny kind of little anecdote to share is that the office is so small, but this is just what you find, especially here in Portugal, but also just in Europe, is like space is at a premium, and they just don’t… Like you walk into a dental office in the US, in so many places, they’re just enormous. The rooms are huge. The waiting area is huge. I get there’s more people, but this was like a tiny little office. Like all the doors are closed. Like, if someone opened a door, you’re hitting another door. But it’s totally fine.
Caroline: And it’s funny because I used to care so much about that. I was definitely like a person who needed space to feel like, I don’t want feeling claustrophobic. And something I think has happened. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it, but yeah, it doesn’t bother me anymore. And I think their facilities were nice. It’s not like everything is the most state of the art thing.
Jason: Totally.
Caroline: But it’s very clean, it’s very bright. The people are very nice. I mean, my biggest thing was just the friendliness.
Jason: Yeah, there was a dental office that was right in our town where we live, but we use a company we’ve talked about many times that helps us find appointments and get things up. They’re like, not sure if they speak English. And we were like, if someone’s going to be digging around in my mouth, that’s different than when I went to the knee doctor. And it’s okay, we can figure it out. But anyway.
Caroline: Which also, by the way, I’m happy if a lot of times the receptionist won’t speak English.
Jason: Right.
Caroline: But the doctor will, and that’s fine. You end up working it out just fine. But I will say, and I know I’ve said it many times, is if you move to a different country, there isn’t a better time investment you can make than learning the language.
Jason: We’re toddlers.
Caroline: We’re toddlers with our Portuguese. We’re not very great. Now, falu muito bem. But when you know certain words and you show them that you’re making an effort, I can’t even express to you how it changes someone’s demeanor. First of all, it’s like you would treat a toddler. You’re so proud of… Like when we would say words, she gave me a quiz on fruits on the way out. She was like, what fruits do you know?
Jason: Just out of nowhere.
Caroline: Okay. Malau, le mao. So we had a great time with that. And, yeah, she was just very lovely. And we will definitely be going back to that dentist office.
Jason: And also love a dental appointment when there’s no bad news. I have not been to a dental appointment and not gotten cavity news in a long time. That’s also because my dental appointments were an average of six years apart or more, which is not a good thing. So take care of your teeth. Get in there, get them cleaned.
Caroline: The healthcare and getting healthcare, which I consider dental care, health care. Getting health care in a country that is not the one that I grew up in, had me so scared to move to not just Portugal, but anywhere, because there’s so many unknowns and anything with medical stuff feels so…
Jason: Do you guys know what arms are? Like are you going to know how my arms work?
Caroline: But every interaction I’ve had with the medical system has been positive. I know that’s not going to be the case forever. I mean, I think anywhere has problems, but I think the point I’m trying to make is less about Portugal and healthcare, and it’s more about taking a risk and taking a leap. And some of the worries that you put in your head, if you allow yourself to be courageous enough to take the leap, you come to find out that it’s completely different.
Jason: And also, everybody has teeth in every country, and they’re all getting taken care of. You know what I mean? If that’s the thing you’re worried about, they’re just going to be a good dentist, it’s fine. Another good piece of good news, if you had not tuned into a couple of weeks ago, we gave the good news, the really big news, which is we got our residency cards, which is such a huge thing that finally got accomplished. We got those, which is great. And that led us to the next step, which was to get approved for the NHR, which is the non habitual resident tax scheme. They call it a scheme, which sounds weird in the US. But it’s like a strategy is the way that it’s described here, and essentially it gives us ten years of tax freedom in Portugal. So we don’t pay any tax to the country of Portugal. This is like an agreement that they have between the US and Portugal. So who knows how that actually works out because I’m sure…
Caroline: And we do continue to pay taxes in the United States, in case you were curious.
Jason: Exactly. So it’s like, I’m sure that there is some agreement between the countries where the taxes that we pay in the US, because we’re spending all of our time and our economic money here, then they pay based on a portion of that back over here.
Caroline: This is not something that I even knew coming here.
Jason: We did not know this was a thing until we moved here.
Caroline: Exactly. I know people come here for that. This is not why we chose Portugal. But there is paperwork involved, and it feels good to have that crossed off our list.
Jason: It also got to a breaking point with me because I was emailing back and forth to the CPA, and there was, like, forms and things and stuff. You had to go online. You had to do this. I thought something was coming in the mail, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere was like, hey, you got approved, and here’s your pieces of paper. You’re done. Like, you’re good until 2032. You’re all set.
Caroline: Okay.
Jason: I’m, like, very stressful, but I’m glad that it’s finally done, which is just really paperwork in general.
Caroline: I know.
Jason: And then we had a note here to talk about our continuing saga of trying to buy a car. Still has not happened. Have not gotten approved for an auto loan yet. I mentioned a tip last week, had we been just putting some money into our Portuguese bank account on a consistent monthly basis, we would have been approved by now, because we just did a lump sum when we first moved here. It doesn’t help us show that we have consistent money coming in.
Caroline: Yeah. And my big thing there was also I wanted to point out that there are hidden costs to moving countries where even if you think that, for example, real estate is less than where you are in the States or whatever, but there’s hidden costs, which are you’re going to have to pay more down for things like here, you basically have to pay 30% for any type of financing that you want to do. 30% down. So anyway, just do some research into that. If you’re moving countries, think about what is the credit system there, what are the big purchases you want to make, how does that affect that? All things that are fine and we’re working through, but get a heads up since we’ve done it.
Jason: Yeah. All right. Well, if you made it all the way to the end of this episode, we hope you had a great time listening to all of our takeaways from the Calm Business Encyclopedia. Hope you’ve checked out some of the videos and articles that we put together. We poured a lot of time and love into those, and we hope they’re helpful for you.
Caroline: Definitely. Overall, I just think I’m still really glad we did the project. It feels great to challenge ourselves. We learned, I think, a lot. I mean, as evidenced by the hour long kind of podcast episode about the things we learned. And I now am excited to take a step back after being so in the weeds on a project and really think more strategically about where we want to finish the year, where we want to steer things in 2024. I can’t believe we’ve already been here basically a year in Portugal.
Jason: We’ll do an episode, recapping our first year, and some of the best moments and things, I think. Yeah. All right, that’s it for us. Good to have you here, and we’ll chat in your ears very soon.
Caroline: Felt like saying, I love you so much.
Jason: You love doing that.
Caroline: I love you so much.
Jason: Okay, bye.
