It’s been a few months since I last sent out a monthly update, but here’s what’s been going on that you might find interesting.
– Earlier this year, I made a significant pivot to focus less on side projects and more on my core business (MarketBeat). I decided to stop publishing new books for the time being and stopped publishing my podcast so that I could work on growing my largest asset. I can now share that I have also negotiated a buyout of my ownership position in USGolfTV. I have mixed feelings about the sale of my ownership stake in this company, but the company needed more time and attention than I could justify giving it because of its relatively small sized compared to MarketBeat. I wish Todd, Tyler and the team the best of luck in growing the business in the future.
– I recently got back from California for Digital Marketer’s Content and Commerce Summit in Los Angeles. I picked up several great ideas that I can use to grow MarketBeat over the next few months, such as using Facebook Messenger ads and some landing page best practices. My next business trip will be for Rhodium Weekend in October. After that, I am planning on going to the Capitalism Conference in December and Traffic and Conversion in March.
– A great reminder that I picked up at Content and Commerce is to go through the process of becoming a customer in your business as if you were someone else that has never heard of your company and that was learning about it and buying from your company for the first time. For MarketBeat, that means signing up for our newsletter, receiving marketing emails, visiting the sales page for the product and going through the order and up sell process. If you’re an online business like MarketBeat, remember to go through this process on both desktop.
– Falls Angel Fund has officially made its 4th investment and have deployed $570,000 of our $1.35 million capitalization. We have invested in three Sioux Falls companies and one company out of Fargo. The newest company we invested in is called Learn Create Build, which teaches children about technology through computers. I’m very excited to see how the owners (Adam Learning and Shane Thomas) grow the business.
– MarketBeat is continuing to do well into the fourth quarter of the year. It appears that the company will grow by between 15% and 20% compared to last year and will top more than $3 million in total revenue. I credit a lot of this growth to web push notifications which have become a significant revenue stream in our company. We are also putting significantly more effort into paid advertising to acquire email signups in addition to the organic signups that we receive each month, which will allow the business to continue to grow over the next several years.
– GoGo Photo Contest continues to run like a well-oiled machine. I handle the day-to-day marketing of the business and the company’s financials and Jason and Stevie run the day-to-day operations of the business. It’s doing well into six figures and will grow by about 5% over last year. I think this business has a ton of potential, because we could simply offer additional fundraising programs to our current set of customers, but that would require Jason, Stevie and I to give the business more attention than we are currently able to give it.
– We just got over another round of childhood illness in our family. We’re in the age range where kids are bringing home colds from school and church every two to three weeks. Otherwise, our kids are doing well. Adylin recently started eating puffs, playing peekaboo and is in the very early stages of crawling. Micah is learning how to ride a bike and recently celebrated his fifth birthday.
That’s pretty much it for now.