How a side project made me a better marketer and the lessons I learned
First off, DMST is a medium publication that gives students knowledge and advice on marketing that they won’t get in a classroom. We help students, make sense of the marketing world, without the jargon.
On the 28th of October 2016, I published a blog post called “Teens rebel against junk food”, in what was to become the very first post I would write for the Dear marketing student medium publication.
It was initially written as a test article, back when dear marketing student was just a concept in my head. I’d been reading a lot of articles on career advice at that time and I had absorbed a bit of knowledge on the topic and started to develop my own opinions on careers. These opinions eventually become some of my early post published on medium.
Given that I’d had a little experience writing blog posts, I thought starting a content marketing project would be a relative breeze. Oh boy, could I have been more wrong!
I worked on the Dear marketing student publication for several months before winding down the project in early March to do other stuff. It turned out to be one of the most challenging and valuable learning experiences I’ve had in my journey as a marketer.
The biggest lessons I learned
Find and establish a process for getting stuff done
Do this as early as possible
A common theme that occurred during the time I spent working on my project was consistently missing deadlines I set for myself. This was due in small part to the fact that I worked on this all by myself and so I was accountable to no-one but myself. I didn’t have anyone to give me a kick in the butt whenever I was feeling lazy or unmotivated. Which, unfortunately, happened more than I would’ve liked.
However, this problem was mostly due to the fact that it was very hard to accurately predict just how long each task would take. Of course as time went on and with each new post I published I got better at this, but it was a nightmare early on in my project and now I know why — I didn’t spend time early establishing and documenting a process for how I would get the content from the idea stage to finished piece of work.
My process for creating a new post was elegantly simple. Whenever I wanted to start a new post, I would fire up a Google docs tab and just start writing. At first, I loved how simple the process was, it gave me the ability to turn my ideas into words deftly. Though as time went on, this would hinder my ability to work efficiently.
The final straw was when I missed the deadline for a post by a week. For context, I was scheduled to publish one post every 3 to 5 days. After this happened I finally sat down to draw up the process I would use to publish content on a consistent basis, which involved:
- Setting up a Trello board as an editorial calendar for easy management and scheduling of posts.
- Creating various templates for outlines and drafts
- creating neatly organised folders in my Google drive for easy document management.
Pace yourself
Don’t try to do too much too quickly
I had come up with the idea months before I wrote the first post for DMST, which I published back in October of last year. At the time I had published that post the DMST medium publication wasn’t even a thing yet. In fact, it would be another 9 weeks before I got the publication fully off the ground.
I spent those 9 weeks researching as much as I could. Reading publications and blogs similar to the idea I had in mind. I would read those blogs every day for inspiration and Ideas, paying attention to every detail of the content that they put out and studying how they formatted their content. In addition to this, I practised my writing skills and sought to formally validate the idea I had by interviewing people I knew.
I’ve found that it is a lot easier to go two steps forward than to go one step back when working on a project.
It would have been easy for me to start pushing out content right away once I had the initial idea, And though it may seem counterintuitive it was actually a good thing that I didn’t. I took things one step at a time and although my progress was extremely slow at first, and the work was tedious, I was patient and kept at it.
One thing that I realised early on is that with the excitement, joy and inspiration that having a great new idea brings, it can be tempting to skip a few steps and get into the thick of it. However, I’ve found that it is a lot easier to go two steps forward than to go one step back when working on a project.
That being said, there is one important caveat to this point; If you are doing a side project, your overall goal for your project should determine how fast you move on it and what tasks will focus on. One of my goals with DMST was to create high-quality relevant content but my primary goal was to learn to become good at creating content in the first place. I would probably have moved a lot quicker if I was a more experienced writer.
Always focus on the core tasks, no matter what
Don’t get distracted by quick wins
My main focus was always on the content, even if that meant the publication would be severely lacking in other areas. The homepage of the publication looked like a mess for a long time, I didn’t start working on the homepage design until much later in the project. For the feature images on the posts, I simply looked up relevant stock images and used the first nice one I found.
My point is that there were a lot of things that I could have done to make the publication look way cooler than it did. I probably would have got more views on my posts if I did, but I knew what my primary task was and focused on that above all else.
Triage, Triage, Triage
When working on a side project, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of chasing shiny objects and quick wins. The best way to avoid this distraction is to be ruthless at task prioritisation. I’ve seen many people use different methods of prioritising tasks. I am still getting better at this myself. I have a unique method of task prioritisation that I call ‘The Triage’.
This involves listing all the tasks I want to do, crossing out the least important thing on the list. I do this over and over again and by the process of elimination, only one will remain and that is the task I focus on.
As I write this, I am no longer actively working on the Dear Marketing student publication. After a couple months working on it, I decided to take a break from it and work on other things. My decision was made easy by the fact that, at that point, I felt like I had achieved my primary goal for the publication. Which was to become a really good writer and content marketer.
In the picture below you can see the traffic statistics for DMST for the time I worked on it. I’m happy with it given that I did little to promote the content outside of just Twitter.
Could it have grown more if stuck to it and promoted the hell out of it? Maybe.
Regardless, one thing I do know for sure is that the experience I gained and the lessons I learned from this project were invaluable.
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In case you didn’t know…I’m a writer, value-driven digital marketer, student and founder and managing editor of Dear marketing student. A Medium publication that delivers valuable insight to marketing students. You can catch me on twitter at @Ayo_af or see more of my work on AAFOLABI.COM.
