Jared Dees's Blog: The Latest from Jared Dees, page 43

How I Plan to Read 50+ Books This Year

The most common advice from authors for other authors about being successful is:

“Read a lot, write a lot.”

I’ve always believed this but I didn’t put it into practice until recently.

Last year I read more books in one year than the previous three years combined.

This year I set my 2018 Reading Challenge in Goodreads to 50 books.

Here is how I plan to do it:

First, continue to follow everything I did in 2017 to set a new reading record.

Specifically I will continue to:

Track progress Read tw...

Maker’s Schedule, Marketer’s Schedule, and Manager’s Schedule

One of Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham’s most popular essays for startup founders is “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” The basic premise is that tech startup founders, who have typically come from programming backgrounds, have to make a mental shift from a maker’s schedule to a manager’s schedule where more time is spent in meetings.

At some point, for example, Mark Zuckerberg had to transition away from spending most of his time making Facebook to managing Facebook. He had to spend mo...

For the Love of the Game

We watched a lot of football this weekend. Even when we weren’t watching football, we were watching football when We Are Marshall came on TV on Sunday morning after church.

One consistent theme seemed to continue to pop up in the stories we heard and the successful teams we watched.

It was articulated best by a commentator quoting Golden Tate. Someone asked him about his motivation and his response was just perfect. He said he loved the game. He had been playing it since he was five years old...

My 2018 Business Plan

A few years ago I created a Word document with a business plan for my website, The Religion Teacher. I spent hours on it. It had a long list of statistics and strategies that I was going to work on for the year. I quickly forgot about it, of course, and just got back to work.

Needless to say I am wary of business plans and documents that get ignored. Still, I have spent some time this month looking ahead to 2018 and trying to decide what NOT to do. In the past, I made plans of what I should d...

Planning vs. Playing

When someone introduces you to a new board game for the first time, it can sometimes take ten or twenty excruciating minutes of explanation before actually start playing the game.

Finally, after what seems like forever, someone says, “Let’s just start playing. You’ll get the hang of it.”

I suppose planning for a new year is a lot like this.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks mapping out how I want to be more productive in 2018. I’ve been looking back at 2017 and trying to see how I can be mo...

A Brief Blog Review for 2017

I have seen a bunch of articles with tips on reviewing your blog and website’s performance for the year. They all seem very complicated to me.

I’m going to do something much more simple this year. I want to answer these questions:

What worked? (What will I do more?) What didn’t work? (What will I do less?)

The numbers don’t lie.

Here is my analysis for my main website, The Religion Teacher, in 2017. I’m only looking at traffic sources and top pages.

Website Traffic Sources in 2017

According...

How much to charge as a speaker?

There are basically two ways to figure out how much to charge as a speaker:

Find out what other, similar speakers are charging. The “Guess and Yes” Approach What are other, similar speakers charging?

Reach out to other influencers and speakers in your space. Don’t be afraid to ask them what they charged when they first started out. When my first book came out and I was starting to book speaking gigs, I had no idea what to ask for a stipend. I reached out to the foreword writer for my book a...

My 2017 Project Report

Elon Musk keeps track of every minute he spends at work. He runs multiple billion-dollar companies in highly competitive markets. In addition to SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City, Musk started yet another business in late 2016 called The Boring Company.

He was asked in March 2017 how much time he spends on this new fourth company.He said he spent 2% of his time on it. Now, some people might hear that and think he is making an estimate. In reality, though, Musk could tell you to the minute how muc...

Situation-specific SEO

SEO is “search engine optimization.” The idea is to create content that can be found on search engines.

There is a problem with the way most people approach SEO.

Too many people focus on keywords rather than context when it comes to SEO.

It would seem as though SEO is all about ranking for keywords, but it is more than that. It isn’t just the rankings for a bunch of random keywords that is important; What matters most is the intent of the people who sit down to search.

Your content may rank h...

Instruction Manuals

The best instruction manuals include only three simple steps.

Three is a magic number. The best instruction manuals that come with toys, games, and devices include only three steps.

A long list of steps, on the other, hand increases our level of frustration and confusion.

I got a couple new devices for Christmas yesterday. Each instruction manual included just three steps to set up and the devices did the rest (nice job Apple and Amazon).

Some of the kids’ toys, on the other hand, had a long...