Have You Heard About the Butterfly Effect?

How a Small Decision Can Have a Massive Impact

One year ago I had almost no knowledge about online business, copywriting, marketing strategies and video edition. 

I took action, moved out from my comfort zone and today I know about all these topics:

• Domain registration (Google Domains)
• Website creation (Google Sites and Blogger)
• Coding in Blogger (learned to embed Twitter feed and do some fine tuning)
• AdSense and Google Analytics
• Copywriting and Mail Marketing (Mailchimp)
• YouTube and video edition (Canva)
• Medium writing and publication management.

In this post I will share with you how I reached my current situation, with 1000+ followers on Twitter and 750+ readers on Medium.

At the end of this post, you'll have a list with the key learnings I got during the process.

I hope you'll enjoy, same way I did during this time!

The Trigger: Wondering About My Online Presence

The story starts about one year ago.

I started thinking about the fact of having presence on the Internet. How this visibility would affect to my professional growth? By presence on the Internet, at that time I had in mind uploading my CV there to be reachable from anywhere.

It’s important to say that until that point, my presence on the Internet was like the average: LinkedIn and Twitter accounts, with almost no usage.

So I decided taking action and checked about the oscarsoto domain availability. 

This was the beginning of a series of actions that would end up in todays situation.

Registering My Own Domain

To be honest, I had a lot of questions about it.

But after reading a lot, I decided to start moving and registered the best option I found: oscarsoto.net. I registered my domain on the 24th October 2021.

This was my first time registering a domain, so after assessing all possible options I did it with Google Domains. Really easy process and good integrations with other platforms like Blogger (we can start connecting the dots).

Creating My Webpage

At this point I had my own domain, but needed to create some content.

The natural process was to leverage on the web creator provided by Google because of the simplicity. This web creator is called Google Sites and, I have to say, it took me few days to create a very decent webpage. You can check the results on this link.

We could say I reached my goal then. 

I had my CV created on my own domain… but something clicked on my mind and I couldn’t stop thinking about going one step further.

My Blog Creation

It’s fair to say I like training and supporting my colleagues.

If you have worked with me in the past, you will support this statement. So, I came up with the idea of leveraging the platform I already created to provide some value. This value was going to be provided by creating a Blog. 

I had no idea about Blogging: platforms, prices, topics… so my next action was to consume a lot of online content about blogging. By November last year I launched my blog on Blogger and decided writing about what I master: Project Management, Management and Productivity. 

I decided calling it “Project Management Tips and Tricks”

Technically speaking, I was using a subdomain for my blog (blog.oscarsoto.net) and linking it from my personal website by creating a specific section. This URL is still valid, so you can check it.

The Blog Starts Growing

I committed to write 2 posts per month.

By January I had a total of 6 entries and the community was giving a warm welcome to my content. So, I decided giving its own entity to my Blog and registered a new domain called: pmtricks.net. This new domain was registered by mid January.

As I wanted to give it a great look and feel, I started learning a lot about Blogger:

• How to integrate a Twitter feed on it.
• How to change templates.
• How to edit and add custom code to a template. 
• How to integrate Mailchimp. 

Please, allow me to say I also did a decent job with my Blog (based on feedback I received during last months).

A New YouTube Channel Pops Up

I realized some posts needed video support.

After thinking about it, I also decided jumping to the pool and launched my own YouTube channel. The content of my channel is focused on supporting the Blog posts. 

Most of the people don't know the amount of work behind the scenes of a YouTube channel video. YES, this was my case too. 

For creating a proper video you have to follow several steps:

• Video preparation. What are you going to present? Is there a script?
• Video recording. 
• Editing the video.
• Publishing the video.

I had completely no idea about video edition, so again, I had to learn about it. I took Canva and I'm very happy with it. 

Expanding the Audience With Medium

Have you heard about Medium?

I wasn't until November, when I started looking for different ways to reach more audience with my posts. I came up with two ideas: Publishing on LinkedIn and creating an account on Medium.

After some investigations, I discovered that Medium writers can also earn some dollars just by writing, so I definitely decided going with it.

While I'm writing these lines I have a total of 778 readers on Medium and every single month I'm earning some dollars from there.

Final Thoughts

So, this is how a small decision had a huge impact in my life.

As promised, let me try to compile the key learnings I got during these last months:

• Move out from your comfort zone whenever you can. Don't hesitate about it.
• Stop being like the average. If you can do something to make the difference, just do it.
• Beginnings are tough and you will struggle to succeed. Better done than perfect.

Next time, I'll be sharing with you the opportunities I got during this period of time: Collaboration offer with a well known university and  opportunity to collaborate with a Startup company related to learning. 

See you there!