Every year I get my journal out and ask myself “5 Little Questions” and I write and write until I cannot write any more. In this week’s vzine, I share those questions as well as some of my answers and I hope you’ll play along too! The main thing to remember is to celebrate the good bits and avoid beating yourself up about ANY OF IT! You did your best and if you didn’t, there’s a good reason for that, I’m sure. Forward troops, forward into a better 2019!

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

On the blog

• Zapping Tolerations (Revisited)
• Kill Your Website?
• Overcoming Obstacles
• Is This The Next Big Thing?
• Time Management
• Stop Whining
• The Need For Speed
• Cheap Overseas VAs
• Own It! 208 | Thoughts On Friendship
• Own It! 207 | Buying A Business No Money Down
• Vzine 80 | Zapping Tolerations (Revisited)
• Vzine 79 | All Change Again!

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Hi, it’s Nicola here and welcome back to the Vzine. It’s a big week this week. I’m going to travel back to England. And I’m going to see Phoebe and Nelson and stay with them for two and a half weeks pretty much.

And that all kicks off with a very early start on Wednesday morning. 4:30 in the morning I’m being picked up. That is grim. There’s got to a better way. I don’t know what it is. I’ve talked about it in my newsletter this week.

So in the meantime, in the absence of a better practical solution to doing at least one early morning, horrible early morning start either going there or coming back in the winter. It’s fine in the summer, because EasyJet run a lot more flights to our local airport. But in the winter, it’s Athens, and that’s three and a half hours away, if not slightly more.

So in the absence of a better practical solution, I’m going to change the way I think about it.

It’s going to be great getting up at 4:30 in the morning! I’ll have all that time on the coach to read and chat to my friend who I’m travelling with. And I’m going to really enjoy getting such an early start, because it means I get to England a lot earlier. And I’ll have all of the rest of the afternoon and evening with Phoebe and Nelson. I’m really looking forward to it.

How’s that for a reframe?

Today I want to talk to you about five little questions I ask myself at the end of each year.

And I’d like to share with you. So the first of the questions;

What worked in 2018?

Well what worked for me was continuing to press on with my membership site Clicks & Leads Academy. It had quite a good take-up last year, and this year has been even better by, well, astonishing amounts, extra actually.

And the main thing that really made the difference in what worked there was taking a bit of advice from my mentor. He said, “Try an annual membership.”

Now I could not believe that anyone would be willing to sign up for a whole year. I was offering monthly memberships. I tried it though, there’s nothing to lose. 80% of people over the last year have signed up for an annual membership.

Not only has it been wildly successful in that respect, but it’s also been fantastic for attracting really great clients. The kind of clients who know they want to work on their business for the next year and who are committed to that and who know a bargain when they see one.

So to save 30%, if you decide that you’re going to work with someone for a year, is a fantastic deal. And the other thing that’s worked has kept me keep nudging the membership level up. I started at $49 a month, and I’m now at £147 a month. So again, you never know what price the market will bear.

What else worked this year?

Hmm, getting into a regular cycle of producing content and getting a process going. So basically, I just do the bits I’m good at, the bits only I can do, like talking to camera, because nobody else can do that for me, and then getting processes in place to make sure the content is taken off me and it appears regularly.

It’s really enhanced, not only my traffic to my website, but it’s enhanced my traffic to my sales pages, which is more important. And I think it gives a lot of value. I get a lot of good comments. I get a lot of good engagements. I get a lot of shares, which can only be storing up good karma for the future.

What didn’t work this year?

Well what didn’t work was very clear. It was taking a holiday in August. Basically, my podcast partner, Judith, takes a month off every August and December. I tried it and what I found was I fell right off the wagon.

So in August I didn’t produce any content. And then September went on because I’d some unexpected visitors out here. And I just never really got the focus of mind back to get it going again until early November.

Because when I looked at my analytics, I realised that while the traffic to my website overall hadn’t gone down, the traffic to my sales pages had halved. Content I was creating for social media was sending people straight through to the sales pages.

It was a real big learning curve, and it also showed me that I need to be in a regular routine of creating content. And I do that on a Monday now. I do the Vzine, and I do my seven daily videos. And I find that much, much easier.

So what did you learn this year?

That’s question number three. What I learned is that I need to stop paying attention to what other people do, and I need to just trust my gut instinct and trust myself.

I’ve got a mentor who I can ask any tricky questions of. In fact, I’ve just thrown a couple of curve balls at him now. And I also have a very good peer group, through my mentor’s community. So I don’t feel the entrepreneurial loneliness I’ve talked about in some of my videos before.

I’m in a great community of people who are all much more successful than I am, and that really, really helps. I think being mentored by someone who’s done exactly what you want to do, being surrounded by people in that community who’ve also done exactly what you want to do, but are further ahead down the road, that really helps.

I’m going off to his conference and I’m really looking forward to that. So I’ll be surrounded by all the people that I interact with on a daily basis online.

Question number four;

What will you do differently this year?

I want to travel more, and I want to go to more conferences. And I want to go and hang out with my peers in various places around the world.

Now obviously, there’s a financial impact on that. But the good news is, it’s all tax deductible. So I’ve got a trip to Australia planned in March. And the funny thing was as soon as I booked that, to go to my mentor’s conference, I got a speaking engagement in Australia in the same city within the same month.

So I’m going to stay with my brother in between. That’s just fantastic. It means I’ll be away from home for nearly a month, but I’m really looking forward to it. Sydney’s a fantastic city. I’ll really be able to get to see it this time as opposed to going in and out within a week, which is what I did last time.

And then, of course, I’m off to Las Vegas in May. I’m really looking forward to that. That’s another one of my very good friends who has one of the biggest masterminds in the world in Las Vegas every May.

Final question I ask myself every year, is…

What do I really, really want?

What I really, really want is I want to travel more. And I also want to finish my book. I’ve got 15,000 words of a sci-fi novel written. I’ve got a trilogy planned out. It will be a massive achievement if I can write a novel.

I never thought I’d be able to do creative writing in spite of having written four or five business books. I never thought that you could learn to write a novel, but there are structures to it. There are things you can learn to make you a better writer. And I’ve really enjoyed the whole process. So I’m really looking forward to getting that done.

What do I really want? I want more of the same. This year has been fantastic. I’ve been getting much happier.

Business has gone from strength to strength. And the only thing that I would like to do is travel more so that I can see Phoebe and Nelson more often as I pass through. That’s always a good move.

So are you going to ask yourself these five questions this year? What worked. What didn’t? What did you learn? What will you do differently? And what do you really, really want?

Notice, none of them make you at fault. None of them make you wrong. It’s all just a learning curve, and you can do it too.

I hope that helps and happy Christmas.

What’s on the blog and the podcast this week?

Well obviously there’s the daily videos. They go up on the blog every day. And this week’s topics include mental models, how to think better, entrepreneurial loneliness, how to deal with it. Are you getting paid well enough? Are you getting paid in time? Are you getting paid on time?

On Own It! Episode 207 we cover how to buy a business no money down. I’ve been thinking about buying a business back in the UK and I’ve found a couple of potential candidates, but then I decided, again, that I didn’t want to have anything to do with real life staff and anything to do with real life premises or anything that might tie me down to not being able to travel as much as I want to.

So the businesses involved were not aligned with my values for 2019.

And we talk about that in quite some detail on that. But we do talk about how to buy a business, no money down using its own money. And there are plenty of virtual businesses for sale. So you can actually go along and buy a functioning website with lots of traffic and even producing a profit. And you can do that. And you can do that online quite easily.

So if you want to hear some more about that, come and listen to Episode 207 of OwnItThePodcast.com on the blog, as always, NicolaCairncross.com/blog. I also cover list segmentation, what it is, how you might want to do it, and why you might want to do it.

I cover the three different business models you can offer if you’re a service industry, the done for you, done with you, or done for you models and talk about that a little bit more. I talk about how to identify your ideal clients.

And in Episode 79 of the Vzine it’s all change again. So last week’s episode of the Vzine is up there for you to enjoy now. Just go to NicolaCairncross.com/blog, and I really hope you enjoy all this content. I know that a lot of new people are, because my figures are going through the roof. So if you’re a longtime listener, I really hope you’re enjoying it too.

And I’d love to hear from you. Just pop a comment underneath wherever you’re looking at this right now, whether it’s on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or indeed, NicolaCairncross.com/blog, and I’ll see you over there.

Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun

Intro Music
Pool Cosby

Incidental Music
[No Copyright Music] Chill Lofi Hip Hop Instrumental (Copyright Free) Music – Days Like These
[No Copyright Music] Chill Lofi Hip Hop Instrumental (Copyright Free) Music – Holding On
[No Copyright Music] Chill Lofi Hip Hop Instrumental (Copyright Free) Music – Watching The Clouds

Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas

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