2022 in review: What worked, what didn’t work, and 3 things you can learn from my mistakes

As we approach the holiday season, now is a great time to look back on the year that was. In today's episode, I share with you my reflections on what worked, what didn't work, and 3 lightbulb moments that came out of my mistakes.

In this episode I chat about:
– The powerful impact of taking action to reflect upon and tweak what is no longer working
– Getting intentional about repurposing content for maximum potential
– Creating structure that allows for freedom to focus on the ‘wants' and not the ‘needs' of the business
– We can't always do all the things…recognising and responding to the overload
– Just because it's out there, doesn't mean it will sell – the reality of not having sales processes in place
– Mapping out the next step – how can I continue to service my existing audience?

 

Today I'm looking back on 2022. At what worked, what didn't work, and what you can learn from the mistakes I made during the course of the year. I think it's one thing to learn from our own mistakes, but sometimes it's quite nice when somebody else has made those mistakes, and we can learn from them. 

 

What worked:

 

• Rebranding the podcast

I outgrew the name Socialette and I knew it wasn't attracting the people who were the ideal listeners. This next phase of my business, the next phase of the show and rebranding, was such a great decision because now ever since that rebrand, monthly downloads are up 15 to 20% over the last two months, both of those months have been an increase of 15 to 20% over and above what those downloads were pre rebrand. 

Now that doesn't mean that you should go and rebrand your show if you have one just for the sake of it but it is something that I knew in the back of my mind needed to be done and I'm really glad that I did it. I don't think it was because of the rebrand – I don't think was the excitement around the rebrand that was that spike in downloads. I think it's just the new format and the new name and the design. I think all of that is just so much more aligned than it was previously. 

The other thing that worked really well with the podcast was starting to get intentional with content and repurposing. So, as part of that podcast rebrand, I decided to start being a bit more of a grown-up about all of the content that I'm creating. The main job in my business is content creation and I create quite a lot of it – I'm producing three episodes a week on this show. 

But before we got intentional about it, my team and I got intentional about it. They weren't really being repurposed or promoted. So I made sure that now I was emailing my list. Every time there's a new episode now, my list and the community gets a message, creating that structure and systems as well around how everyone has each piece of content and how I repurpose each episode into Instagram reels, YouTube videos, and carousels. 

This is all still a work in progress because there are so many moving parts here but we're figuring it out and trying to figure out how we can get it as simple as possible. And the end goal really was like me showing how to do those episodes three times a week. 

 

• I went fully offline

It was such a great feeling. I have done a lot of prep work on everything. Put the right foundations in place. I didn't even have to think about my business while I was away. And I think back to when I first took a decent chunk of time – seven days off because I was going on a yacht around Greek islands. And I remember standing there on the boat, holding my phone up trying to get a little bit of reception because I was so worried that things might be falling apart. And this time, I didn't even think about my business much. 

So at the end of 2021, I made a very bold move, which felt so scary at the time that I didn't think I was really ready. But it was such a great decision and that was hiring my ops manager. And over the last couple of months of working together, it's been quite a continual process of getting things off my plate, creating new processes, handing things over, and slowly building the business to the point where I am working on the things that I want to work on, and only those things and this isn’t something that happens overnight. And I've definitely seen a lot of people hire somebody into that kind of operations role and they expect them from week one, that person is going to be on top of everything.

But what I've noticed is that it's actually quite a universal process of slowly letting go of things, slowly teaching that person how to do those things slowly with less and less of that work. And yeah, it doesn't happen overnight but the move was definitely worth it!

 

What didn’t work:

• Trying to do too much

So the first quarter of 2022 was jam-packed because I thought it would be a really great idea to create a new course, launch for the first time, and run our first live virtual event all in the space of like two months. And I also travelled to the US conference all in that first quarter. By the time April rolled around, I was exhausted, and I'd been running 100 miles an hour for way too long. I felt uninspired. My creativity was gone. And of course, my natural instinct was to just push harder. 

 

• No sales page

I also didn't have a sales page. All I had was a link where you could go straight into my calendar and there was no sales page and a lot of people asked me, What am I getting out of this? And considering it was a $3,500 investment. I should have known that this wouldn't have been as effective because people wanted to know what they were getting for that investment and some people did, but it's waiting but not that many. So my launch strategy intensives are really the only client work that I do these days. And it’s a container where somebody gets six hours of my time.

 

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