Life has been so exciting the last couple of weeks working on this project, and I am so excited to be able to share with you all the things that I’ve been working on!

Just as a reminder, or if you haven’t read anything previous on my blog, I am working on a project, and at the beginning of the month I posted a project outline, complete with weekly goals. Here are the goals I set out to attain during week two, and then the actual results of what I accomplished.

Week Two Goals:

Goal one:
  • Record the second episode [for my podcast] (and record the first if unable in week one).

How I did: I not only did this, but I recorded the next three episodes as well.

What I did: When I sent out cold-emails to my prospects for the podcast, I sought to schedule the earliest possible date to record a call. I figured that then, even if it fell through or they couldn’t make it, we still had plenty of time in the month to get it done. One of the days, this resulted in cold-emailing someone and recording less than 20 hours later. I sent out Google Calendar invites to my guests, made sure to not let more than 30 minutes pass before responding to emails, and I made confirmations a couple hours before each meeting.

This leaves me with just one more interview to record and it is scheduled for Wednesday.

Goal two:
  • Write at least one blog post about what I have learned that week. Whether I learned it through podcast interviewing or articles I read. Can be related to sales or podcasting.

How I did: I once again wrote a blog post every day about things that I am learning, and I would honestly say that all of them had some relevance to what I am learning in sales or podcasting. However, if one were being extremely picky, I would say that three of them directly applied to sales or podcasting.

What I did: I put in some late nights is what I did. I had a lot of things going on this week. Project related, work related, family related, and church-related. I was tempted many times to put off my blogging for a day. Honestly, though, I can’t say that I actually ever seriously considered it. I am simply too competitive to give up on a goal that I set. I also just made sure to have a steady in-flow of information coming into my mind each day.

I heard an analogy this week and I loved it! It compared our mind to a lake. If this lake has a ton of sources feeding into it, but no outlets, it becomes stagnant, swampy, and gross. Conversely, if there was nothing feeding into the lake, and many outlets going from it, it would dry up. It’s an important balance for us to constantly be gaining new information, but we then must make sure to have an outlet to use this information.

This worked perfectly for me this week as I was consuming content and then able to write about it each day.

Goal three:
  • Research various outlets for podcasts (iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, etc) and put the first episode online.

How I did: Through Libsyn, I was able to send in my first podcast episode to iTunes and Spotify for approval, and I was able to post it on my Libsyn site and on Soundcloud.

What I did: This actually ended up being a bit of a challenge for me. I got my Libsyn account this week, so I was completely new to the program. I didn’t know how to do anything on it, so I ended up probably watching about 4 hours of tutorials, reading a couple hours’ worth of content, and Googling what seemed like a thousand questions.

In hindsight, I wish I had gotten my account earlier and had edited my first episode earlier. I wanted to wait to get the account until I needed it so that I wasn’t paying for an account I wasn’t using, but I didn’t take into account (no pun intended) that to put something on iTunes or Spotify, you can have up to a two week waiting period. I am now in an awkward stage where the podcast is technically out, but I don’t want to tell my email subscribers until it is out on Spotify or iTunes.

In general, I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the “posting content” world, but I am sure that I will learn quickly as I go through this project.

I also added yet another aspect to my sales project this week.

So, I already added the email campaign last week, but this week, I upped the ante a little bit on what I wanted to accomplish with it. About halfway through the week, after hearing an idea from someone, I decided to go down the contacts in my phone and just start cold-calling people to see if they would be interested in subscribing to the email list for my podcast. I set my goal at cold-calling 100 people by the end of the month and attaining at least 100 subscribers.

In a 4-hour period of time spread over two days, I cold-called 49 people. From the people who picked up the phone, I received subscriptions from all but one, and I left messages for the rest. I plan to follow up this week.

I received 34 subscriptions from this, and my total number of subscribers is now at 65 people. Over doubling where I was at last week, and this was all before I even had the first episode out.

I am learning SO much in my journey in sales, and wow! I’m getting excited to be able to use these skills in a company I am passionate about!

Week three sneak peek: Even more blog posts, my last podcast interview and a recap on what I learned interviewing, another podcast episode online, and maybe (fingers crossed) 100 subscribers to my mailing list.

Bring it on week three!

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