“Alternative” as it is not a 9 to 5 office routine that I am following. Here’s my year end review giving you a gist of how my alternative work life is shaping up. New Year as per the traditional Indian calendars. Know more about these calendars here.

I love spending this holiday time for my year end reviews. The travel review was done first. The life and spiritual one is almost done. Now, here is the review of my work life in the past year.

I think these year end reviews are turning into a cool sort of log. Other people who may be considering an alternative work life or digital nomad-ing can refer.

Since last year,

Growth marketing: my “mainstream” work

The website www.priyankadalal.com is supposed to develop into a project pool for me, and so far it has grown (a little). My free email course has over 150 subscribers from around the world. These were mostly organic signups through word of mouth. And I have received some really good testimonials for the course from people who have genuinely gone and shared it with their other entrepreneur friends.

The overall open rates, engagement and testimonials received are really good in terms of percentage. So I am excited on this front. What was lacking was monetizing the same. So that has been worked on with a couple of paid service packages now, Growth Marketing Audit & Web Analytics Report. More monetization ideas are in pipeline.

Slowly but surely this site is shaping up.

It has, however, been moving quite slowly. I am aware of this.

I think last year and this year, my life focus has not been on work.

Flux

Mid-september I shifted to Coimbatore. This is now my home base (earlier it was Mumbai). Since I wasn’t at all keen on any offline meetings in Mumbai, I am happy with the move even though it will impact some of my work prospects.

Once here, I am hoping to be able to strike a better balance with work stuff. Thus, grow this community much quicker. And also basically work on some really good growth marketing projects.

As I mentioned in my previous year review also, the whole idea behind going digital nomad is so that I can shape a life that holds much meaning and value for me. And in the short term, I am Ok taking a flack on my revenue. And this year too is a taking-flack year.

Note: this is not because I have gone ‘digital nomad’ or because of my travel bug. Both those were methods to choose a certain kind of life. Will talk more on that later. But basically, I am taking a flack currently because I have been focusing on other things. There is a flux taking place in my life where priorities and direction is re-aligning itself. I find myself not able to really dedicate enough time for work. Hence, the community is growing slowly. And I have not been able to focus on monetizing it or do outreach for new projects as much as required.

Earlier in the year I went solo-cycling in Thailand for 2 months. After that I wanted to start working asap, but multiple reasons made it very difficult. One was the constant metro construction related noise outside my house and additional construction activities in my house. Second was that my heart was at Isha yoga center near Coimbatore. This actually expedited my move to Coimbatore. And here, I find the situation a lot more conducive to work in quiet and peace.

5th Year of Teaching Social  Media to post-graduate students

This was my 5th year of teaching social media to the XIC journalism students. And I have found some ways to significantly improve my course – always happy about this. However, my grouse about connecting with the students remain. In my relationship with them, it feels like there is a gap. Like in the first few years of my teaching, the students didn’t seem to understand why a marketing professional should teach them anything. Over the years, the newer batches are more cued in to the need for social media for Journalism. But still there seems to be a gap in what they expect to learn under social media. And I am coming from the industry and am aware of how crucial digital marketing has become for them and so I feel their course needs to become even more centered around hard core marketing.

The problem : Post graduation is TOO LATE a time to be learning about social media. A lot of students are creating their Twitter accounts for the first time when they come to my class. This is not good. I feel that the later school years of 7-8th standard is when they need to be given social media lectures. Some sessions on personal branding, privacy, safety and productive outreach. This will then hone them for their future usage. And the ones who choose any media related field later on, will be competent with prior social media understanding.

I am pondering on my way ahead with these lectures.

Media Writing

I started working on this last year. There is some progress to report here (yay!).

Featured in Open Magazine, Swarajya, Sunday Express, Inc42 and maybe a couple more that I don’t remember.

But this field of writing is murky. Getting an article published can take months. Editors can edit random things. They add their own titles and own captions to your images. Sometimes I may not like these changes.

The other challenge would be to figure out the better paying publications that contribute in some measure to my income. Some newspapers which would look respectable on my writing portfolio, actually pay peanuts. Like not even enough to cover the time spent on writing the piece. But still I would like to pursue this for a while and get some blog back links and all such.

That’s all I got for now.

If you have any Qs about digital nomading or alternate work lifestyle, feel free to comment.

 

Mailchimp Rebrand and Plan ChangesMailchimp has been rolling out a rebrand for a while now. And I have been watching curiously as it is easily one of my favourite brands so far. And yesterday, when I logged into a smaller and less used Mailchimp account, I got a notification telling me I couldn’t create any more audiences. To create more, I have to upgrade my plan to a paid one. And I saw that from now onwards free plans only get 1 measly Audience allowance.

What is this “Audience” anyway, I thought. It is the same as ‘subscriber lists’ and allowing only one such list is so measly.

Continue reading »

 

As I was writing in my previous post, breakthroughs can happen anywhere. On the canvas, in our business, yoga practices.

And after we get that break, there is growth.

Something we always wanted and aspired for.

But this growth can bring with it many problems. And for a bit it seems that the lush green gardens of heaven that we imagined on the other side of the breakthrough turned out to be a BOG!!

Continue reading »

 

I haven’t painted in ages. Has it been months or years? I cannot recall. But I did paint quite a bit at one point, and made what I consider some amazing murals and art works.

Last few years I have been immersed in many business growth projects. And I am looking at cracking acquisition channels and getting breakthroughs a lot.

Today in the middle of some work, I remembered a breakthrough I had on the canvas.

Earlier, I painted pictures from paint books. Mostly European paint books with their trees, their house styles and their people. One such scene was of a village – very colourful and happy – a few farms, pumpkin fields, houses and the village road passing through them. The highlight for me was an old water mill over a lake.

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digital nomad - year in review

It’s that time of the year to write year-end review posts. And yes, if you are wondering why I am writing this in early November, it is because I am now following the traditional Indian New Year calendar. (you can know more about the Indian calendars here).

So how was this work year?

It’s been a mixed pot. Very enjoyable but since the work-year review should take into consideration incoming revenue also, I guess this year was a mixed pot. In the earlier year, I was working full-time for many months with a European company and so it was very lucrative. However, I also realized that digital nomad-ing and a full-time job doesn’t work for me.

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The traditional business growth model focusses on the customer journey aka “funnel” in digital terminology. We determine the major engagement points of a potential customer with the business before becoming a paid customer. And we measure these points as best as we can.

On basis of this funnel data, we keep strategizing and implementing new ideas.

The aim is to improve the conversion at each step i.e. from step A we want more people to move to step B and so on. This includes two activities,

  • improving product/service features. For example, a better customer service would lead to more people moving from free plan to premium plan.
  • better visitor traffic. For example, 30% of the visitors from Facebook convert to paid customers while only 10% traffic from Twitter converts – making Facebook a preferred traffic channel.

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Small company or Startup CEO

Recently, I was working with a company on a hands-on project and I came across a very different work culture. It was a flat organization and one of the most unusual aspects I found was the CEO’s task list. It typically included Marketing & Product team tasks. There was no official Product team – the CEO filled this role. And there was a Marketing team but it was fairly new. So the typical role of the CEO was running product A/B tests and he would pick up some small marketing tasks he found interesting. This was apart from the usual query solving of the team and logistical stuff like invoice clearance and all that.

I found it pretty odd because in all my years I have never come across a CEO with such a task list. Except if it is a family run business and the director has a lot of money to spend. Or if it is a bootstrapping startup and they don’t have the funds to hire more people (which was not the case here).

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