What Mike is Up to Now – Aug 9, 2020
for the here and “now”
* Yes, still here in Shenyang, China. No travel plans, but do any of have those these days?
* Online content creation – trying to scale it up even more across more websites with more of our team.
* Delegating more of the SEO tasks I do to our amazing new SEO manager. I need to try to let go.
* Thinking more on monetization,. I know I love to create, but need to work on getting some of the sites to monetize with even just ads.
Opportunities for people reading:
Looking for someone to help manage our job site on expat teachers. Getting tons of inquiries and have a basic site workflow and schools wanting the applications but need a project manager for this website.
If you are interested in this or have someone in mind fill out this form
now for the company week letter I write, modified for public:
Week Plan Aug 9 – 15, 2020 Shadstone Limited
More biking this weekend w/ the wife and kids. Using those per hour Chinese Didi bikes and they are pretty convenient for sure!
Last week was more management and smoothing out of the systems of our content creation system. Still a lot of moving parts and with more and more sites it gets more and more complex. As they say – the devil is in the details, and the details is where I am unfortunately a bit weak. But we have a great team and we are working tirelessly on smoothing out the system more each day.
We had a couple calls last week for departments:
SEO team call on Monday at 7pm. May do these more, discussing how to handle all these sites, and especially the content creation of these sites.
Monthly GFA marketing call was the first Wednesday of each month at 1pm. Really figuring out our flow for GFAVIP membership marketing and servicing as well as sponsorship packages for the company side.
Team highlights:
Website optimization team is really taking charge like a boss on the site cleanup (SCU) process. I am a bit behind on the QC
We are speeding up and adding more hours to our SEO manager so she can help QC and SEO review the sites the team is making.
Our designer team helped us start to better organize the job application on Expat Teaching site, as we get inquiries but we didn’t have a database – hope to get people onboard for those now.
Our PM is helping smooth out the portal, working out adding SOPs to checklist tasks and also the timer workflow.
Sorry if I didn’t name everyone here – I am really happy with our team more and more.
Also we are investing in more tools and systems to manage things better. Of course key blogging is one, we have a new analytics tool, also click tracking, and others so that we can better organize all the work we do and have a dedicated tool we use across all our investments.
One of our upcoming podcasts will be on team management, and the guest Thomas Pun recommended I read a book “radical candor” (book review coming soon) based on some of the points in my interview. Reading it now, and yes, it is a great one which I am planning to make new “SOPs” and adjustments. The main point I am getting from it already is to guide each person on the team, if they are doing good work or bad work – and be direct and keep everyone on track.
Basically – we are really working hard to smooth out or website building and content creation systems- that is what we are – that is the core skill and ability of our team for so many years – and finally I “woke up” and said this is our core competence and this is what we need to focus on.