Welcome to my very first Build in Public report, where I discuss the activities that contribute to me building a $20K/month one-person business (starting from zero) and what I have learned each week. 

I’m testing out this format and I’m sure it will evolve over time and with feedback from Authentic Marketer Plus subscribers. 

Free Authentic Marketer newsletter subscribers will be able to get a sneak peek of what this newsletter looks like for now. 

Goals & targets

I’m using a neat little tool that I discovered (Weekdone) to define and track my OKRs for each quarter. I’ve just started using the tool this week so have yet to define weekly tasks (action for next week). 

For now, here’s what my marketing objectives look like for what’s left of Q3:

Important Goings-On this past week

1/ Published Authentic Marketer free newsletter #1!

Until yesterday I had invested 19+ hours of work in:

Getting my newsletter up and running in Beehiiv (switching over from Convertkit)Researching, writing, editing, and publishing the newsletter titled The hidden cost of fast growth – do you know it?

This resulted in a few wins:

a) 38.3% of subscribers opened the email. (that’s 18 of 47 subscribers) 

(note: wondering what happened to my 800+ subscribers? Details will be shared below with Plus subscribers) 

b) I got positive feedback from one subscriber, an entrepreneur that I respect. So that gives me assurance that the format and topic of the newsletter are resonating. 

They also gave me some feedback about deliverability which I contacted Beehiiv to discuss and they gave me some suggestions. I also enabled double opt in for all new subscribers as that will help with deliverability. 

c) Getting on the radar of an influencer

Rach Murphy is the founder of Rachel’s List, a site and community of “over 7000 journos, copywriters, editors, subs, content writers, designers, PRs and other creatives from around Australia”.

For $99 AUD you can sign up as a Gold member and get access to their job board and their private FB group. The group is where I saw Rach make a callout to members to share what they’re working on. I responded to the callout, and that led to:

Rach reading my newsletter and sharing some feedback that she “really enjoyed” it and that the piece “made so much sense to me.” Rach linking to my newsletter in her weekly newsletter for her gold subscribers.

2/ Made progress with finding and applying for writing gigs

Found and applied for 2x freelance writing gigs this week. The sites I look at are weworkremotely.com, Dynamite Jobs, Rachel’s List, and Linkedin (via my wife’s account because my Linkedin account is still suspended). Responded to a callout on Twitter – no further update, but glad I did it. Who knows, someone might see that tweet one day and contact me. 

Whilst none of these have resulted in a booked writing gig yet I’m most proud of the fact that I’m taking daily actions to reach my goal of generating $20k monthly income. It’s all about building momentum, and not sitting and waiting for opportunities to manifest. 

3/ Completed a case study for a client and received an order for 4 more from another client!

I wrapped a customer success story for Bean Ninjas. I had fun interviewing Andrew, co-founder of Australian e-commerce business Crockd. They’re on a mission to “get the world out of its head and into its hands,” and they’re doing some really cool things with DIY pottery/craft kits and corporate workshops using their kits. 

It’s hearing inspiring stories like Andrew’s that make it such a pleasure to conduct case study interviews and turn them into articles for my clients.

Then two days ago, an awesome client whom I haven’t worked with for a while sent through an order for four done-for-you case studies. When I saw the stripe email in my inbox that morning I nearly fell out of my seat!

This is just a solid reminder that when you do good work for someone and maintain an active relationship with them, they might just want to hire you for more jobs later on. So always keep in touch.