Happy new year fellow solopreneurs and creative pros! I hope we all have an exciting, prosperous, and healthy year ahead.
To kick off the Kiss My Biz blog this year, I’m going to share my own 2023 resolutions for my business, 3 Beat Media.
If you don’t know, it’s a 3-prong business focusing on client services, web properties, and publishing. So that’s how I’ll break down the goals below.
I hope you’ll leave a comment to tell me about your own professional resolutions this year (or other form of goal-setting if new year’s resolutions aren’t your thing).
Client Services
This is mostly about the freelance side of my business. I take on freelance writing work, but also freelance consulting in digital PR, online marketing, social media strategy, content strategy, and thought leadership publication with associated research design and reporting.
Below you can see the direction I plan to take my freelance work in the coming year. I went into my 2023 freelance writing resolutions more in-depth over at All Freelance Writing if you want to learn more.
- Move closer to freelance “retirement” by limiting client project time to 10 hours per week.
- Cut any clients not hitting the updated $250/hr rate target (most already do).
- Stop taking on any new clients for small one-off projects such as single articles or press releases (focus on retainers, regulars, and larger projects).
- Update the focus and copy on my professional website to focus more on product sales and thought leadership / research-related work.
- Publish 3 white papers to my professional website.
- Release my first (in years) paid product targeting my prospective clients.
- Run 2 freelance writing experiments and report on them.
Freelancing isn’t the only aspect of my business. It hasn’t even been the most important part of my business in years. It was surpassed by my web properties quite some time ago, which not only allow me more freedom and control in my work, but they also bring in relatively passive income in many cases, which I love.
This is what I intend to be the primary focus of my business moving forward.
Web Properties
I’ve long owned and managed websites. I’ve designed them, coded them, built them on various platforms, handled some of their content solo, and have hired fellow freelancers to help write for, maintain, or run others.
I currently own dozens of sites, some associated with me publicly, others not. Some are blogs that require more attention. Others are “quiet sites” that are more of a one-and-done income stream.
Here are the main projects I’m hoping to tackle this year:
- Overhaul All Freelance Writing (optimize and simplify the backend; future-proof the frontend).
- Finish the site updates for Pro Business Writer (my service-oriented site mentioned above).
- Full overhaul of my genealogy blog, new monetization plan, and easing toward weekly updates after building the list to 1000 subscribers.
- Launch Remote Ranks (several years on-hold, and I’m aiming to make this one of my new “Big 3”).
- Finally complete the Kiss My Biz design and get to regular posting here now that the Bizammo issues are resolved (I shut it down late 2022). Design changes here will be minor, so this should be one of the earliest completions.
- Launch 3-5 new “quiet sites.” Either refresh or sell off any that have peaked.
- Launch premium e-books associated with All Freelance Writing and Freelance Writing Pros at a minimum.
- Launch my first premium online course.
- Relaunch NakedPR. (I’m not 100% sure I’ll have time to dedicate to this yet.)
Web publishing isn’t the only publishing aspect of my business. I’ve also been an indie author / publisher since around 2006.
While this has been the lowest priority area of my business, I’m hoping the continued scaling back of client work will allow more time to move these projects forward.
Publishing
In addition to the nonfiction writing that makes up the bulk of my writing career, I’ve also written quite a few novels, short stories, flash fiction stories, and poetry. I’m even an active member of the Horror Writers Association.
The thing is, I can fly through a novel’s first draft in 3-6 weeks, no problem. I can usually get through 1-2 rounds of revisions (books worth publishing often need more than that). But by the time I have to look at the project for a 4th run through, I feel burnt out. I just don’t want to look at it yet again.
So those projects get shelved. And that’s a good thing, don’t get me wrong. You won’t do your best revisions and edits without taking some time to develop fresh eyes.
But basically, this leaves me in a position where I have 6-8 full manuscripts waiting on various stages of revisions and edits. It might even be more because I keep finding things I’d forgotten about, including three short story completed drafts just today.
The good news is, that means several novels and a couple of nonfiction titles should be ready for rapid release around the same time (aiming for 2024 as beta readers and professional third party edits will take some time).
The bad news is, that means 2023 is going to be filled with revisions among a few new drafts. It’s my least favorite part of the process — give me writing and later edits any day. But let’s see how it goes!
- Finish revisions on The Query-Free Freelancer.
- Finish revisions on the first Murder Scripts series novel.
- Finish the second Murder Scripts novel draft through key revisions.
- Finish revisions on either 7 Gates or The Wailing Boy (both horror novel manuscripts shelved and waiting).
- Finish revisions on the first manuscript in a contemporary romance trilogy. (These are under a more experimental pen name.)
- First draft of the second novel in the romance trilogy.
- Professionally publish at least 1 short story (ideally horror).
- Professionally publish at least 1 piece of flash fiction.
- Professionally publish at least 1 poem.
- First draft of the planned QFF follow-up book.
- Finish my horror / dark fairy tale short story compilation.
- Write a screenplay (something I haven’t done since around 2008). This will likely be an adaptation of a short story I wrote which I originally intended to be a screenplay anyway.
- Overhaul author sites (includes changing some planned pen names prior to publication).
I know my yearly goal and resolutions lists always look like a lot. And it’s very true I won’t get through everything here. But the idea is to tackle as much of this as possible.
And I do that by breaking things down into “baby steps” on a quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis. When you pace yourself and keep taking small steps toward your goals, it’s amazing how much you can achieve.
What about you? Any 2023 resolutions for you as a solopreneur or creative pro?
