Leverage Asia’s 1 Month Anniversary!
I'm sharing these monthly updates to track my journey in launching Leverage Asia — a platform focused on not only improving business practices and investment activities between Asia and America, but also fostering bold leadership.
This is my September 1st update. You can catch my August update here.
August Results
For August 2024, here are the goals I set at the beginning of the month compared to what actually transpired:
Overall, I'm happy with the results. However, I wish I had been more familiar with beehiiv and knew more about the intricacies of email delivery — turns out, it's not just about writing and clicking send!
I released a total of six episodes in August.
Not all episodes received the same level of attention. There were two sharp spikes (see above).
Spike #1
The initial spike on August 2nd resulted from the buzz I created around the launch, which I announced exclusively on LinkedIn. While I could have used other platforms, I focused on LinkedIn because:
It’s a professional platform;
My LinkedIn engagement is strong and growing; and
Understanding both the activities and quirks of LinkedIn users was important for future iterations
Spike #2
The second spike on August 21st resulted from the release of my interview with Chang Kim (CK). Once again, I announced it solely on LinkedIn, where CK’s engagement is also strong and growing. However, several other factors might have contributed to this spike:
It was the first long-form content (1 hour) released on Leverage Asia (all previous content was approximately 20 minutes);
The LinkedIn title and post were carefully crafted to maximize attention, unlike previous episodes, which were shared more organically and off the cuff.
CK is somewhat of a celebrity in the startup world.
More experimenting is necessary to identify consistent patterns for achieving strong, recurring spikes in performance!
Subscribers: 59 (but 40 active)
Although a total of 59 people subscribed to Leverage Asia’s mailing list in August, only 40 are officially considered active members.
I didn’t realize that factors like sender reputation and double-opt-in are crucial for ensuring emails are safely delivered to subscribers’ inboxes. So, what does it mean when only 40 out of 59 subscribers are active members? And what about the remaining 19? It likely means that my emails are ending up in their spam folders. That’s disappointing.☹️
Although I didn’t hit my goal, I’m not too bent out of shape about the results. I’m actually happy because I did get 59 people to subscribe, which was essentially my goal of 60.
For September, I’ll need to tweak my goals to measure not just how many people subscribe, but more importantly, how many remain active members!
Interviews: 12
I exceeded my goal of 10! I’m realizing that meeting and interviewing people isn’t that difficult for me — in fact, I really enjoy it. What slows me down, however, is the video editing process.
In September, I plan to outsource my editing and explore the use of video editing AI. If I can figure this out, I believe I can publish my content MUCHOS faster.
Instagram and Facebook
For September, I’ll start experimenting with other platforms while continuing to focus on LinkedIn. I suspect that Instagram and Facebook, in particular, will help me gain better traction, especially if I can break my long form content down to short 20- to 60-second clips.
Podcasting is no longer just about audio; it’s also about video.
September Goals
Here are my goals for September:
12 new interviews for the podcast
60 new mailing list subscribers (ALL active members!)
4 total interviews for the case studies
In addition to continuing with podcasts, I’ll be debuting case studies in September.
Case studies (written content) provide in-depth, actionable insights, while podcasts (audio and video content) offer engaging, narrative-driven inspiration and motivation for doing business and investing between Asia and America.
If the goal of Leverage Asia’s podcast is to entertain you and engage you in high-level learning, the goal of the case studies is to go deeper, providing you with additional insights and practical tools to enhance business practices and investment decisions between Asia and America.
Wish me luck!
I 🫶 you mucho.
