Happy New Year everyone. It’s that time of year. The gyms are packed.
2016 was a good year for Excel TV. We laughed, we cried… you get the idea.
But now it’s 2017, and there is a lot to look forward to this year. At Excel TV, we view this business as a labor of love. Where we have poured our time and effort into this community with little financial return. We do it on the nights and weekends and all expenses have come out of our pockets. Basically, we do it for the LOLZ (my kids taught me that).
But we want to move beyond that. Make this a full time gig at some point. Live and breathe this community on a full-time basis.
I was once told that the best way to riches is to focus on creating value. Don’t focus on money. Focus on the value you can create. Finances naturally follow as a by-product. So that is our focus. determining the best way that we can provide the greatest value to the community in a way that enables the analyst community to be the best they can be. So with that, I give you our direction for 2017.
Goal: Release 4 Excel TV Courses
As many reader’s may know, we are releasing our first online course, Excel Dashboard Pro in the next few weeks. A second course starts recording in January and a third course starts recording in February. It is likely that we will release a training product at least once a quarter on Excel TV. These are not generic courses by no one you have ever heard of. Just like our Excel TV episodes are a who’s who of the Excel community, we are partnering with Excel experts who are at the top of their game to deliver training to the Excel TV community.
Training Platform – We are not the first ones to journey into this space. We looked what many others in the market have been doing before plotting our course (pun intended). Many online Excel trainers will use a service like Thinkific or Teachable to deliver online content. The problem for Excel TV is that we don’t want our content (including user comments, text, etc) to be hosted on a URL that we don’t own.
We are control freaks like that.
Since we are looking to build a sense of community, we want someone who buys a product from us, to also be able to access our forums if we should ever build them. So we have opted to build this on the Excel TV platform. This takes time. But we have the future in mind, so we are planning to do this right the first time. There will be a post next week that gives you a behind the scenes view of the new training area and membership platform.
Goal: Release The Excel TV Affiliate Program
Another step in growing the community is growing our reach and enabling the entire Excel ecosystem of bloggers to profit from our products. In 2017 Excel TV will release our affiliate program. This will coincide with the launch of our first course. So the initial launch of the program will be in the next 2 weeks. Keep your eye out on the Excel TV Blog for this development.
Goal: Increase our Excel TV Newsletter Reach to 15,000 Unique Inboxes
When we send out an email update today, it reaches a little over 2,300 unique inboxes. That’s a lot of analysts. This time last year we reached about 1,000 analysts by email. So that is solid year over year growth, but was far short of our goal of 6,000. This year, we will go from 2,300 unique inboxes to 15,000.
This will happen in large part because we intend to have one of the most compelling affiliate programs in the Excel market. Our affiliates will send people to our website to share our products (and receive a royalty). When they like our products or free video training we offer them, they sign up to receive updates from us. I expect the growth will be dramatic and will start in about 2 weeks once we begin the program.
This is not growth for the sake of growth. We intend to keep people updated by email of things they are most interested in. Dashboards, or Data Cleansing, or Automation, or Excel Power Tools. In short, we will segment our list in a way that updates our readers on things that they are most interested in. I expect this will increase our customer satisfaction.
Goal: Double our Social Media Reach
Again… not growth for the sake of growth. But growth with a purpose. In previous years, we would make a blanket statement that we wanted x# of Youtube subscribers, X# of G+ subscribers, etc. Basically having a goal for every single social channel where we have a presence. Now that we’ve been at this for a bit, we see where our readers tend to interact with us and where they don’t. We have a better idea of where we can best focus our efforts to get the most community interaction. For Excel TV, that is Facebook. We will look to double our reach on Facebook this year.
- Facebook – We ended the year with 3,493 likes. By our records, that makes us the 20th largest Excel-related english Facebook page. Not bad since we haven’t been around that long. The page started about 3 years ago. At this point 3 years ago… Chandoo (a leading Excel blog) had about the same Facebook reach that we have now. So we are about 3 years behind some leading bloggers that we respect. That’s a decent place to be. We will end 2017 with 7,000 likes. Expanding our reach into the Excel community.
Goal: 17 Perfect Water Bottle Flips in 2017
If you have a kid… then you are probably frustrated that they keep taking these half empty water bottles and flipping them Trying to make them land perfectly upright on the ground. Yes… it’s a nuisance. But at Excel TV, we will not be outdone. We will reach out to the young aspiring analysts and impress them with our ability to land 17 perfect water bottle flips.
I know what you are thinking…
“Wow Rick. That’s sounds impossible. You guys at Excel TV can do everything”
You may be right on that. 🙂
But take a lesson from my two kids… this will not be “FAKE” water bottle flips.
OK… so maybe I had a little fun with that last one.
Anything Else We should Focus On?
What do you think about our direction? Would you like to see us explore other ways to serve this community? Hit me up in the comments section and let me know.
Happy 2017 everybody. Excel TV wishes you a prosperous year.
Until Next Time… Keep in Excell’n
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Rick,
What is the future release schedule for your Excel TV episodes on YouTube? I am hoping that you will continue releasing new episodes. There are lots of excel training sites out on there and I think what makes your site unique from the other sites are the TV episode content. Also, I think that you it would be good to get Oz back on the show or possibly reach out to Mike Alexander as a possible cohost to mix things up for the new season (just as thought).
Thanks for the comment Dave.
After I wrote the post, I was like… “shit… I forgot to mention the show”
Here is the plan… We need to make a few dollars to continue operations. It may seem counter to the blogging culture, but we aren’t allergic to money, and we need to pay the bills. I plan to relaunch the show, possibly along with a few surprises.
Here’s the thing… Google Hangouts on Air (our delivery platform) doesn’t exist anymore. They replaced it with Youtube Live. The show came to a halt when our delivery platform disappeared. https://support.google.com/plus/answer/7126353?hl=en
We have to decide if that’s what we want or not. If not… there is a chance to do something bigger and better than anything we have done before. Whatever that new thing is, it will happen in 2017. It may or may not take significant investment to take it to the next level. We have to figure it out. To figure out what the format will be, who the hosts will be, and what we can do to make it better than it was in the past.
I agree with you though. What puts the “TV” in Excel TV is the show. In one manner or another, it must continue. There will be a season 4 in 2017.