Every year I get my journal out and ask myself "5 Little Questions" and I write and write until I cannot write any more. In this week's vzine, I share those questions as well as some of my answers and I hope you'll play along too! The main thing to remember is to celebrate the good bits and avoid beating yourself up about ANY OF IT! You did your best and if you didn't, there's a good reason for that, I'm sure. Forward troops, forward into a better 2019!

Clicks And Leads is a "tongue in cheek" digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

On the blog

Zapping Tolerations (Revisited)

Kill Your Website?

Overcoming Obstacles

Is This The Next Big Thing?

Time Management

Stop Whining

The Need For Speed

Cheap Overseas VAs

Own It! 208 | Thoughts On Friendship

Own It! 207 | Buying A Business No Money Down

Vzine 80 | Zapping Tolerations (Revisited)

Vzine 79 | All Change Again!

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Hi, it's Nicola here and welcome back to the Vzine. It's a big week this week. I'm going to travel back to England. And I'm going to see Phoebe and Nelson and stay with them for two and a half weeks pretty much.

And that all kicks off with a very early start on Wednesday morning. 4:30 in the morning I'm being picked up. That is grim. There's got to a better way. I don't know what it is. I've talked about it in my newsletter this week.

So in the meantime, in the absence of a better practical solution to doing at least one early morning, horrible early morning start either going there or coming back in the winter. It's fine in the summer, because EasyJet run a lot more flights to our local airport. But in the winter, it's Athens, and that's three and a half hours away, if not slightly more.

So in the absence of a better practical solution, I'm going to change the way I think about it.

It's going to be great getting up at 4:30 in the morning! I'll have all that time on the coach to read and chat to my friend who I'm travelling with. And I'm going to really enjoy getting such an early start, because it means I get to England a lot earlier. And I'll have all of the rest of the afternoon and evening with Phoebe and Nelson. I'm really looking forward to it.

How's that for a reframe?

Today I want to talk to you about five little questions I ask myself at the end of each year.

And I'd like to share with you. So the first of the questions;

What worked in 2018?

Well what worked for me was continuing to press on with my membership site Clicks & Leads Academy. It had quite a good take-up last year, and this year has been even better by, well, astonishing amounts, extra actually.

And the main thing that really made the difference in what worked there was taking a bit of advice from my mentor. He said, "Try an annual membership."

Now I could not believe that anyone would be willing to sign up for a whole year. I was offering monthly memberships. I tried it though, there's nothing to lose. 80% of people over the last year have signed up for an annual membership.

Not only has it been wildly successful in that respect, but it's also been fantastic for attracting really great clients. The kind of clients who know they want to work on their business for the next year and who are committed to that and who know a bargain when they see one.

So to save 30%, if you decide that you're going to work with someone for a year, is a fantastic deal. And the other thing that's worked has kept me keep nudging the membership level up. I started at $49 a month, and I'm now at £147 a month. So again, you never know what price the market will bear.

What else worked this year?

Hmm, getting into a regular cycle of producing content and getting a process going. So basically, I just do the bits I'm good at, the bits only I can do, like talking to camera, because nobody else can do that for me, and then getting processes in place to make sure the content is t...