Question Week: Question #5

Our final question comes to us via Sherrie:  "Hi Kevin, what are the metrics you look at that tell you that your marketing is successful?"

A pretty good question to wrap up the week.

I have about 8,100 Twitter followers. Twitter does not generate business. Twitter is where you test ideas, concepts, comments, and see what the angry masses have to say. Nobody waiting to hire you is sitting there on Twitter waiting for you to say something brilliant.

I have about 1,380 blog email subscribers, with another 3,000 blog visitors per month. If I de-dupe some of overlap (not much), I likely have 29,000 "views" possible in any given month (website visits and 20 posts per month viewed potentially viewed by the audience of blog subscribers), yielding about 80 visits to the "Hire Kevin" page per month. Convert just 2-3 of those per month into a project and life is good! Visits to "Hire Kevin" are what I consider "success". Monthly blog subscribers (1,380) are a secondary measure of success.

I used to have a podcast with 3,000 subscribers. I recall one (1) paying project coming out of that endeavor ... a lot of work, not much return on that investment.

Books used to be a huge source of projects ... about 20% of my work used to come from people who read books/booklets and hired me. COVID changed that dynamic. Now, people substitute a book purchase for what used to be a paid project. Times change, we move on.

Undoubtedly, there are things I could do better. Much better! But the math outlined above yields a work-from-home model that persists ... for fifteen years now.