Written by Jason Montoya. Posted in My Life.

September 2018 Looking Forward + 6 New Experiments

My mission this month involves sustaining my freelancing work at a high level, participating (more observing than anything) in the birth of our little girl, and working towards the next to last leg of blogging before hitting my goal of 400 published articles.

Early in the year, I added monthly goals to my annuals ones, but it’s been challenging to juggle it all so this month it’s staying simple. While this means my next book progress will be delayed, I’m okay with that result.

Availability For Working Together: Capacity Opening

Is now a good opportunity to grow your organization? Are you looking for a virtual chief growth officer (CGO) to help you leverage marketing, business development, technology, and operations to move your business forward? Do you need someone to operate as your customer’s advocate to ensure the business is uniquely positioned to serve them well?

If so, this month is a good time for us to work together with a new opening in my schedule, but let’s talk soon otherwise it’s likely to fill up fast, as it did last month.

You can explore my solutions page here for further details of what our engagement would look like.

Sandboxing My Life

As a growth hacker, I’m constantly testing out ideas, techniques, and tools to more effectively grow my self, others, and organizations. This section cracks open the door so you can get an insight into what these experiments are, and how they’re playing out. We'll start with new ones.

New Experiments

Store Page: I’ve launched a store page! It’s super basic, simply a bulleted list of items you can buy. Two products were created by me (freelance book & course) and the others are books and affiliate products you can buy elsewhere. Obviously, this is something that can be improved and grown but like any living thing, a skeleton framework is a powerful starting point.
Auto SSL: I’m a reseller & affiliate of the website hosting service, InMotion Hosting. They’ve recently rolled out a free Auto SSL option through CPanel, which costs nothing to use (unlike most SSL licenses). I’ve rolled out the security license for several clients, this website, and Path of the Freelancer. With Google Chrome now marking non-SSL sites as not secure, and with the SEO boost for doing it, this is a great step for improving every website.
Joomla 4: Working regularly with Joomla and WordPress websites, I find Joomla far superior as it gives more and better control over the website. I also find it much more intuitive. And, it’s about to get a whole lot better with the impending release of Joomla 4. Thanks to the free Joomla website launcher, I’ve been able to quickly launch a beta version of the CMS to explore the tool. I’m excited about what’s ahead and can’t wait for it to launch later this year.
Site Banners: As you’ve likely noticed, I’ve turned my sidebar image block and the section below each blog post into rotating banners that promote my services, freelance book, and several affiliate partners. This is a step for me to explore monetizing my blog.
Mastodon: This Twitter alternative is a decentralized open source social network. It operates like America, with a federal government and individual states. This means there are numerous instances of the site by different people and they all connect into a global timeline. It provides these subgroups and individuals more control over their experience. So far, it’s been challenging to get much interaction going, so I may be too early. If you’re exploring it, you can find me here.
Optimizing Past Blogs: I've been and plan to continue updating past blog posts, tweaking titles, headers, and read more text using researched keyword use. The goal here is to make several small tweaks to improve the amount of traffic the search engines send to different pages. Ultimately, what works will become part of my new blog post checklist.

Existing Experiment Updates

Quip: In last month's looking forward article, I shared about using the new Quip toothbrush, in exchange for sharing about my experience. The electric toothbrush runs for two minutes, with four 30 second segments to time the brushing to the four areas of my mouth. By using this toothbrush, it's helped me brush my teeth longer and more thoroughly than I ever have. I confidently now say, Quip has empowered me to take better care of my teeth! If you're still using a manual toothbrush or don't use your electric one, I suggest checking out this option.
Anchor: In a previous looking forward blog post, I talked about using Anchor to start podcasting, but was waiting for them to release the ability to trim audio files before I'd give it a serious consideration. Well, they've now released this function removing my last obstacle to starting a podcast. In the vein with my recent revelation that my focal point is around helping people and business grow, I've set up my podcast with the title Grow Your Life. My intent with this podcast series is to follow the model of Seth Godin (without the discussion piece), and simply share different concepts I've already blogged about. For now, I'll be reading past articles, essentially creating a way for people to listen to what I write, instead of reading. For now, this will play out sporadically as I continue to experiment. The first episode is me reading, "Doing This One Thing With Catfish Will Change Your Life For The Better".