I’m going to be very honest, August 2015 was a bit of a mess for me projects wise.

I tried to juggle work and family holiday time and ‘failed’ (on the work front) but won on the spending time with the family front.

I’ve also decided to change these updates to not just be about Theme Valet but also roll in some of the other things I’m doing.

Finally, I’ve also decided I’m going to start setting monthly targets for Theme Valet (and anything else) based on the calendar month rather than the arbitrary date the business launched.

Without further ado, here’s my August 2015 update.

Theme Valet

Total orders: 2 (-50% on July, based on shift to calendar month reporting)

This is bad, but not really surprising as most of the orders for Theme Valet right now come from me talking to people directly on Facebook Groups / Slack communities or writing blog posts and I’ve been doing less of that.

So, what goal should I set for September? Well if I can get a 50% growth rate based on last month (July) that would give me a target of six orders by the end of September. Which seems reasonable despite the ‘bad month’ that was August.

In terms of activities for September:

• I think the increasingly obvious priority is to figure out how to best to turn existing customers of Theme Valet into ‘ambassadors’ for the service (other than trying to blow them away with great service which I’m already doing).
• I’ve also recently done one podcast and got another one scheduled in for early October. I’d like to do more of these.
• Speaking of podcasts I think doing any kind of media activities ‘off site’, whether it’s podcasts, guest blog posts or anything else is a priority at this stage with only a small audience for Theme Valet.
• I’m continuing to try to link up with theme developers who don’t offer their own theme setup service but progress has been slow.

Other activities

As I mentioned, I wanted to include these for the first time to give the whole picture of what I’m doing work wise.

Blogging

I stopped posting to GenesisWP.guide and NickDavis.co for about two weeks in August.

The original idea was that I was going to fold what I could from those blogs into one ‘mega blog’ for Theme Valet (and pause whatever didn’t make sense to move across).

Having thought about it in hindsight though I’ve been getting great support and feedback from doing both of those in their current format.

Selfishly I imagine they also indirectly draw attention to Theme Valet and whatever else I’m doing so I’ve decided to keep them going as they are (I also enjoy doing them).

It’s also probably not a coincidence that Theme Valet orders dropped off when I stopped doing them.

WP Owner

I thought a lot in August about launching WPOwner.com.

If you’re not familiar with the idea, it’s my plan to launch a membership site / community aimed at business owners with WordPress websites who want to do awesome things with their sites but don’t want to know how to code.

The idea is to charge a monthly / yearly fee for access to my collated (and regularly updated) list of strategies and ‘how tos’ for WordPress, access to a community of fellow members (in a Slack and/or Facebook Group) and a monthly Q&A with a WordPress expert.

The hope is that the cost would of course pale in comparison to hiring a WordPress consultant for an hour or two but the benefit would be massive.

My biggest concern has been spreading myself even thinner though (even though I believe it is a complementary idea) to Theme Valet so for now I’m not going to launch it for at least a few more weeks.

I do plan however to start talking to those who expressed an interested in WP Owner previously though and who are on the email list for it (if you’d like to join them you can subscribe).

Summary

Here’s a summary of my other activities:

• GenesisWP.guide (niche blog about a type of WordPress framework) – 141 email subscribers
• NickDavis.co (what you’re reading) – 52 email subscribers
• WP Owner (possible new project) – 13 ’email subscribers’ (I don’t believe I’ve ever sent them an email!)
• Client work (existing website / consulting commitments) – I have one ongoing commitment of a few hours a month till the end of 2015 and one project I expect to complete in the next few weeks (hopefully by end of September), apart from that I’ve been referring all enquiries to other consultants I know and trust
• eSanctuary (enterprise software sales) – I continue to support the main revenue driver of our business (eSanctuary) in any way I can.

I’ll write another update next month but if you want to chat to me in the meantime don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment.