How I Planned My First Year of Afroneurs with Accountability

When you have a session with a consultant, one of the main instruments they leave you with is accountability.

They will tell you to aim for a maximum of 3 to 4 main goals that are meant to move your business forward, and then break them down into smaller milestones with deadlines.

No excuses, it’s always the leader’s fault for missing the goals.

The goals should be attainable.

Now, I like to practice what I preach, so in this email I will share my first-year strategy plan with you.

Yearly goal

I decided to consult myself and apply the same approach I use with my clients, starting with the end result I want to achieve at the end of my first year.

I wrote down the 4 main goals I need to accomplish. As I mentioned earlier, the goals should be attainable.

1. Newsletter: Run a newsletter with around 300 subscribers.
2. Website: Create a website that hosts the newsletter archive as blog posts and includes a landing page that I can link to when I start running paid ads later on.
3. Social Media: Grow my LinkedIn to 3k to 5k followers and my Twitter to 1.3k to 1.5k followers.
4. Networking: Connect with other creators who are on a similar journey.

Now I set them to based on priority
Then I divide the tasks in 4 quarter, Every 3 months I need to achieve 1 main goal dividing into 3 milestones.

Focusing the first month the most important one and to the least important one.

I will show you what I did in the first 2 quarter, and what I will do to the next 2 quarters

Quarter One: Building the Habit of Writing

September 2024 is when my journey began in building the Afroneurs newsletter.

One of the things I encourage is building a Minimum Viable Audience (MVA).

The audience is your distribution, and you need to own your distribution, otherwise, you’ll end up paying for ads.

In order to grow my LinkedIn, I had to plan on writing posts and connecting with people.I’d to be consistent and showup everyday.

• I wrote 3 posts a day for 3 months. Obviously, there were days I missed, but consistency is about continuing to show up even if you miss a day or two.
• I also sent 10 connection requests a day to my target audience. The great thing about LinkedIn is that you can actively contribute to the growth of your followers.
• To grow my mailing list, I made it a habit to ask for newsletter subscriptions in the first comment of my posts.

After 3 months, I grew my mailing list to 100 subscribers, my LinkedIn account to 1,000 followers, and reached almost 20k impressions.

I hit all three of my targets, which was a huge milestone for me.

Quarter 2: Launching The Newsletter

In this quarter is where the real work started, its mostly to build the foundamentals.

• I launched the newsletter with 100 subscribers and I send every Saturday.
• I build the website where I post the newsletter’s articles like blog posts
• I started writing content on twitter which by the way is giving me better feedback than LinkedIn.

Obviously launching the newsletter was the most important goal, then building the website.

Ultimately twitter content, which is giving me 50k impression monthly which is leading a bunch.

Quarter 3: Building Trust

This is the quarter where I’ll take a step forward to build trust.

Writing online is great, but adding something extra that allows people to get to know you, like the visual aspect build trust.

Once I start building trust, I need a place where people can find me for consultations.

That’s what determines my goals for this quarter:

• Build my personal website with a single call to action: 1:1 consulting calls.
• Networking for potential collaborations.
• Start creating short videos to enhance the visual aspect and build trust.

The main purpose of these three goals is to build trust and start monetizing through 1:1 consulting calls.

I will continue building trust and monetize one dollar at a time.

Quarter 4: Growth

This quarter is all about growth. I have to push both my social media and newsletter to reach at least the numbers I planned to achieve.

Expecting my newsletter to grow 3x might seem daring, but it’s possible considering the strategy I’m about to implement in the next few months.

I’ll share the strategy with you if it works.

So, in this quarter, I will focus on reaching the numbers I set:

• Grow the newsletter to 300 subscribers. It’s 3x what I currently have, but with my strategy, I believe it’s attainable.
• Grow LinkedIn to 3k to 5k followers. These numbers are realistic, especially since I’ve already grown to 1.7k in 6 months.
• Grow Twitter to 1.5k to 2k followers. It’s more challenging due to Twitter’s chaotic nature, but it’s still within reach.

The first year is what I call building the fundamentals of the business.

Once I’ve built the base, growth will follow naturally in the year after.

Paid ads, Podcast invitations, Participating in online events and Speaking at events will likely come into play somewhere next year.