Our September Monthly Breakdown (AKA That Time We had a 6-Figure Month)
Episode 120: Show Notes
Six-figure September! Yep, last month was the biggest month in TTC history. So today we are going to be breaking down our successful launch by taking an in-depth look at our actual numbers, our growth and our stumbling blocks. We both celebrate our birthdays in September and so did TCC. TCC turned two in September! Reaching a six-figures this month is a very sweet gift from the universe. By that, we mean the cash came in and landed in our bank account. This blew our minds and is more money than we have ever made!
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Want to hear another cool thing? Not only did we reach six figures, but we reached it by September 19th. That’s a little less than three weeks. Want to hear another cool thing? We reached $110,000 – that’s an additional $10,000, just for fun! And this number happened without us even reaching the projected numbers during our September launch. If you want to hear more about that launch, definitely go back a couple of episodes and check that out. Because today, we are going to be reviewing the process step by step and finding out how the heck we got to a six-figure month? An exciting milestone for us. Take a listen, you know we’ve got tips to share!
Checking In On Our Goals
Our first goal was to 2.5 times our Rock Your Biz launch. We didn’t even come close! It just didn’t happen (and we talk about why in our previous Rock Your Biz episode). We were slightly confused by it, but not upset. Our second goal was to solidify a business manager. We’re still working on this one. Hiring a business manager is harder than we thought, so we’re taking our time with this to ensure we get a right fit. The third goal was to achieve a ConvertKit Ad. So... we had plans to do it but the timing was just awful. We just had way too much promotion happening that week, which was way too exhausting for us! And it made us realize we need to do a better job at segmenting our list even more.
Our fourth goal was to celebrate all the birthdays! Well, we celebrated 2/3. One celebration being a helicopter tour of Kansas City... coming soon. The last goal was promoting the Solopreneur Success Bundle. This we did partially achieve, but in retrospect, could have put a bit more out on social about it. We were just strapped for time and attention. So that was that. Moving on to what we did achieve and what we could improve on...
What We Accomplished Last Month
This was the launch we prepared, to the max, weeks in advance for. This allowed us to be there for the questions asked on social or email and gave us the time to set up a support chat weeks earlier. The month before launch is always insanity but now that we’ve done things a couple of times, we have established a more efficient framework. So the most prepared month, as well as our six figure launch, were two of our biggest accomplishments this month.
We discovered that we need a better system for how to handle Zendesk. This was the first time we tried to have our team support us in that and we realized we have not trained them appropriately. We also tried a new layout on the sales page, using a slider. This hardly got clicked on and resulted in tons of questions. This meant we had to copy the information from the slider and send this information personally to the people who had enquired. Extra work! We needed a code to make the slider mobile friendly and we didn’t have this before the launch. Improvement: ditch the slider on the sales page!
Looking At Our Numbers
One of our biggest improvements to be made is segmenting, tagging, and figuring out who is on our list. Who are the people who have left the program? This is something we need to have more precise information on. Looking at our Facebook numbers on the other hand, we have almost doubled since the beginning of the year to almost 8,500 likes and followers. We have never explicitly told people to go over and like our page. The page like increase has just been a byproduct of our valuable content strategy and our sales ads.
The Facebook group is at 14,047 members and we also surpassed our goal, which was 13,500. Our email list is sitting on 14,844 sign ups. Our goal was 16,500, which means we didn’t make it. And this launch was just a freak of nature of people wanting to bail! Our iTunes is sitting at 3,174. Our goal was 3,800. Not good. It’s lower than it was in June, July, and August. Was this because we weren’t pinning the podcast graphic to our Facebook group? We’ll be checking up on that...
Our Pinterest following is at 6,840. Our clicks are at 9,090. The deal with that is that we are blogging less and our re-pinning game could probably use an actual strategy. Despite the decrease in our pins, our income has gone up and our subscribers have gone up. Although this is not a huge biggie for us at this time, we do want to address it before our pins become non-existent!
Moving on to website analytics. We went up this September to 29,913 in traffic. Page views: 46,841 and audience is at 28,328. 30% of the traffic was direct, meaning someone typed it in. Pinterest was 29%. Google was 28%. Which means, we’re up 5k, 10k and 8k. Did something go viral and we weren’t paying attention? We were kind of confused by the increase in views to our website and we’re going to be following up on the spike in traffic. But hey, we’re not complaining!
Quarterly Goal Check-In
We had a Q3 goal of having a shit-ton of people on our email list. We’re talking like 37,000 people, with a conversion of 8.5% of those to students. All students currently is at 5,736, which means we surpassed our goal. And our paid ones are at 2,335. We ended last month (August) at 1,928 paid students so that’s a big increase for us. We ended August at 5,063 all students. So we are very pleased with both of those increases. Our conversion rate used to be 8.5%, it’s 15.7% for September. That’s literally astronomical! That means 15.7% of our list has paid us. The industry standard is 2%. Of the 2,335 paid students, we have 2,018 paid students in Trello... We’ve said it once but we’ll say it a trillion times more: Trello is the gateway drug to everything we offer. If you get inside Trello, you are going to buy something else we offer. That is just the math.
This tells us our plan to evergreen promotion on Trello is brilliant. Of the people who purchased on our last launch, 91% had purchased with Trello before they purchased the course. So ultimately, we need to increase the amount of people who bought Trello and pitch to people who have already bought Trello. The other things that have helped us increase our email list were: converting podcast listeners to email by getting them to sign up to our free course, Your Biz On Auto Pilot. Our other goal was to build business relationships. Which we sure have done twice, with Courtney and ConvertKit. Evergreen and webinars are in Q3 and we decided to make that Q1 of next year. Our Pinterest strategy, er… we didn’t quite get to!
Business Questions And October Affirmations
How many people bought Your Biz On Auto Pilot first, before Trello? Is the podcast the gateway to the free course, which is the gateway to Trello? And then if you bought Trello, are you more likely to convert? So, ultimately, is everyone listening to the podcast way more likely to buy from us? These types of questions really help us to access our opt ins and understand our business better. And we want to figure this out! There is a way and it is so exciting when you see these numbers. When you can see the funnel and say “Ok, I just need to increase X” you’ll be able to increase Y. If the podcast is the number one, root reason why people sign up for our courses – then we need to be flying people to the podcast.
The last day of October is the first day of promotion for us, so pretty much all of October is not launching. We talked about doing Sunday emails, prepping for what is hopefully the biggest launch of the year, the successful onboarding of two new team members, funnel guide and stay on schedule for the podcast! We’ll be recording everything in October, for October, November and December. We want October’s affirmation to be “Do the sh*t.” So now, what we typically do is go and check these goals, go look at Trello and just keep moving the train along! Time to do the sh*t!
Quote This
We’ve said it once but we’ll say it a trillion times more: Trello is the gateway drug to everything we offer.
Highlights
Checking our goals: the goals we did and didn’t meet last month. [0:08:30.1]
What we accomplished last month and the improvements we could make. [0:18:00.1]
Looking at our numbers: likes, views, traffic, pins and posts. [0:24:00.1]
Quarterly goal check-in and finding out how much our email list has grown. [0:45:50.1]
Business questions and October affirmations: what can we investigate going into next month? [01:01:40.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Six figure month, Goal setting, Accomplishments, Improvements, Web stats, Google Analytics, Email list strategies, Quarterly goals
