Welcome to 2022 - What I'm doing here, what to expect and more.

A Little Philosophy

Better late than never.  That's what people say, right?

I guess I'm going to try to apply that philosophy here, since this is my first posting my new blog, in new year, and a new journey. If you have been following me online over the past almost 12 years, you've probably come to know me as Michael the English teacher or Michael the Happy English guy. And if you fall into that category, don't worry, because I'm still going to continue helping people speak English better. And you can check out my other website to see how I do that.

But here, in this blog, I'm going to be focusing entrepreneurship and growing your business. I'll share what I've learned over the past 12 years, what's worked and what's bombed, and I'll also let you take a ride with me over the course of this year as I implement new and different ways growing my business.

Life lesson number one - don't assume that you know what to do. This is a hard one to learn because it affects our ego, right? There's a lot of information out there on the Internet. As an entrepreneur, you may see some gurus talking about this or that and then you think, "Oh that's a great strategy I'm going to try that." And then you keep doing that without considering that there might be a different way or a better way. But there always is.

Change brings growth. A lot of people are reluctant to change it because it's not comfortable. Doing the same thing that I always do - that's comfortable. Change is painful. And one of the reasons that change is painful is because it makes you realize that what you been doing may not necessarily be the best thing to do. 

And we have to remember what Darwin told us in the nineteenth century - change is essential for survival. In the animal world, species need to adapt by growing or shedding tails, limbs, or wings. As business owners, we too need to adapt and at the very least, keep learning about our environment to prevent our own extinction. 

My 2022 Strategy

First of all, consistency is king. Look at all of the other online English teachers out there. Have you noticed that some of them, even those who were really popular with lots of social media followers have disappeared? It happens - and I'm going to lay out a couple of reasons why.

Social media success ≠ sales success

What? Yeah, I was surprised too. Just because you've got 100K followers on instagram doesn't mean those followers will buy a thing from you. Look at the people that you follow on Instagram or TikTok - have you ever bought anything from any of them? That's not to say that you can't earn money with tons of social followers - YouTube has monetization, Instagram has Badges, and so on. But that's revenue, and not sales of your online courses, coaching, or lessons.

Social media is the 21st century radio commercial. Social media is what attracts people to your website, which in turn gets them on your email list and THAT turns into sales.

Consistency is King 

Here in the suburbs of New York City, buying fruit is always hit or miss. Sometimes the grapes are sweet and juicy, and sometimes they have no flavor. Mellons are usually good in the middle of the summer, but at other times of the year they have the taste and texture more like a cucumber. There's no consistency and no consistency means unhappy consumers.

It's the same with social media. In the first five months of 2021, I posted 10 videos on Youtube  - that's about 2 per month, just in case your math sucks like mine does. Then between June 2nd and September 9th, zero videos. Between September 16th and November 16th, I posted 3 per week, then 8 more videos, 1 live per week and a bunch of shorts (some ESL related and some of my dogs and look at the change in unique views:

The numbers in the black boxes show the how many videos I uploaded in that particular time clearly, the more I posted and the more consistently I posted, the more views. I also went from 90 to 4,200 TikTok followers in the past 18 days - I'll be talking about TikToc in a separate post.

Here's the plan

Still with me? Good! So here's my social media plan for 2022 for Happy English

• YouTube: One LIVE lesson per week, plus 2 to 3 videos per week, plus shorts (ESL and the dogs, life, etc)
• Podcast: One new episode per week
• Instagram: One new REEL per day, plus 3 other posts per day.
• Tiktok: One new post per day, maybe more
• Snapchat: One new post per day (thanks to TikTok)
• Facebook & Twitter: 3 posts per day

Yeah, that's a lot. But in future posts here I'll get in to the technical details about how I create all of that. In the meantime, if you're stuck on something related to growing your business online (do we need to say online anymore?), growing your social media following or building online courses with Kajabi or other platforms, or anything else related to entrepreneurship, leave me a comment! If you like what I'm doing here, feel free to share it. 

Thanks for joining me on this journey.