Win. Fail. Give. October 1, 2011

As a solopreneur, my business days are filled with successes and failures.  Some things I do work out well and some things I do flop.

The same is true for you, no one knocks the ball out of the park every time.

Failing is actually a good thing. I know that sounds strange doesn’t it?  It’s true though.

You can’t identify a failure in your business until you’ve put something into action that doesn’t succeed.  The ‘putting things into action’ part is worth celebrating today and the lessons you learn from the whole process makes you a wiser business owner for tomorrow.

Fail enough and you’ll be a successful solopreneur before you know it.

Knowing this, I want to invite you to join me in a quick weekly evaluation of your business activities.

I’m going to look back over my week and identify one Win and one Fail – then, just to make it all more interesting, I’m going to come up with a way to Give back to the solopreneur community.

So let me get started with my Win.Fail.Give. for this week:

This week’s Win:  I cleaned up my Twitter neighborhood, made some new lists and new friends.

I felt like my Twitter account was a little out of control.  I started by using UnTweeps to find and unfollow those who haven’t used their Twitter accounts in over two months.  Then I went to SocialOomph and signed up for a free account, then accepted a seven day preview of their paid service.  In several marathon sessions I reviewed everyone I was following on Twitter.  I un-followed a lot of people who had never followed me back, usually because I couldn’t remember why I’d followed them in the first place.  I created a few new lists and sorted a lot of users into them.  Such as… Interesting Bloggers, Admirable Marketers, & Solopreneurs

All in all I dropped about a thousand people and hopefully those I kept will be more enjoyable to engage with.

I’m going to keep the SocialOomph membership, I’ve got it set up to monitor and recommend new people to follow based on several keyword phrases I’m interested in.  If it works right, it will help me meet relevant new people.

This week’s Fail:  Just renewed the 5 domains I registered at this time last year, but haven’t done anything with yet.

Grrr.  This is annoying.  How said that I wasted $50 on domains that never got put into use.  A $50 fail is not a big deal in the grander scheme of things, but what bothers me is that the projects I bought them for are GOOD – and I can’ t believe I’ve let a whole year go by without taking action on them.

This week’s Give: Grab a free printable transcript of my interview with Tom Ewer.

I just added this transcript to the show notes for Episode #8.  The audio quality of this show was poor – something was wonky with my Skype that day.  The interview was great though, so I wanted to make sure everyone could enjoy it.  So do grab the free transcript.

If you’d like to join in and share your own Win. Fail. Give. for the week, I would love that!  You can tweet them (use the #solosmarts hashtag on your tweets), write about them on your blog (feel free to grab the Win.Fail.Give. graphic for your post) or just leave them here in a comment.