My college classes ended two weeks ago, and after cleaning up some loose ends and taking a self-imposed one week break from all forms of work, today it’s time to begin my “summer sprint”!
I’ll have about two months and $1700 this summer to invest in the business, and I’ve been coming up with all kinds of different ways of using it. First the money. My first inclination was to pay off some personal debt and reduce my monthly debt payments quite significantly. I still haven’t totally ruled that out, but I’ve all but decided that the money should go into my marketing budget instead, as this could quite likely yield a higher rate of return than paying off the debt would. One of my first tasks is to come up with a marketing plan. I have the basic ideas established already, but I need to come up with some specifics for the budget that I have. That’s actually the first milestone I have scheduled.
Now for the time. After fleshing out my marketing plan, there are four specific things that I’d like to get done before July 1st: reskin the application using a professionally designed theme, add support for barcode scanners, add mass texting capabilities by integrating my app with Twilio, and finishing some miscellaneous bug fixes. Based on prior experience, I believe that these changes will double my conversion rate.
So I really have two main foci: develop and implement an advertising plan, and complete those four enhancements to my application.
Beyond that, I have a number of things I’d like to do this summer, but I’m not sure that I’ll have time to do them all. I have two ideas for technology projects that could vastly improve local food distribution. I’d like to start on these so that I can roll them out next spring. One of those ideas could possibly be viable already this year, but I’ve made the decision to focus my time on the attendance software instead.
I’d also like to dramatically improve the SEO for my business. This includes continuing to link build in the youth ministry market, although this has proven to be a slow and frustrating chore. It also includes testing some other markets.
I did a $200 test Facebook ad campaign for the boy scout software market, and am still running Google and Bing ads for that market, but have not received any sales so far. I’ll continue the Google and Bing ads, but I don’t think this market will be profitable enough for me to invest my time in too much.
I’d like to test out some other markets, too: first, yoga and martial arts studios. There is heavy competition here, but it is a big market and I had some success with it when selling my desktop application.
I need to spend about a half a day sometime to optimize my AdWords campaigns. I have some ideas which, based on some evidence, I think could double the CTR while keeping the cost the same.
So those are my main goals for the summer. June will be very work intensive. I’ll be teaching a three work course in July and will be moving at the beginning of August. I’m also building a model airplane which I hope to have finished and flying by July. So it will be busy but fun!
