I’m doing an 8-day sprint where I’m launching an email course on how to Build a Ruby Gem.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Weekend Update

Back at it

I hit the 5:00am goal this morning! It’s 6:15am and I’ve wrapped up the 2nd day of the Build a Ruby Gem Email Course.

Yesterday, I had some anxiety about the amount of writing involved in putting this course together. I’ve read a number of blog posts about building a Ruby gem, but most seem to assume you have a pretty in depth knowledge of creating gems, while others skip important details of the process. So I knew going in to it that I wanted to write about it a little differently. I wanted to talk more about theory of why things are being done vs. how the Ruby language works.

Thinking back to my first Ruby gem, I remember my frustration trying to understand the conventions of naming and file structure. So I’m writing the course I wish I had when I started.

Flow

It’s been 3 days since I started documenting this process and the writing process has gotten significantly easier. Since I started my blog, I’ve read a number of posts recommending the value of writing every day, regardless of the subject. I’m beginning to see the benefit of this consistency. I’ll report back on this by the end of the week as it should be even more apparent by then.

What I Accomplished today

I wrote Day 2 of the Build a Ruby Gem Email Course. The content organization that I did on the first day has proved to be valuable. Outside of moving a few topics around, it’s stayed largely in tact. So here’s to organization!!!

I think I also solved my email list problems. Actually, it was less “problems”, and more, I need to learn how to use Mailchimp. I was in touch with their support over an issue around signing up for multiple lists. I originally had the subscriptions to the Week of Hustle updates going to my personal newsletter list. This caused a semi-alarming error message if you were already on the list.

The solution was to create a separate list and manage it outside of the realm of my newsletter. Despite seeming over-complicated at first, I now feel comfortable with this solution and I think it actually fits my goals better. I’ve already started to think of the best way to manage the email course once it’s live.

What I’m working on today

A few people have pointed out some oddities with the formatting of my email updates and there are a few design changes I’d like to make on the sign up forms. However, because the email updates are going out daily, it’s my first priority.

There have been no changes to the timeline I posted yesterday, and still feel like I’m on schedule to finish by the end of the weekend!

Marketing

I was originally worried that the buzz surrounding the course and my updates about the process would die off and I’d get another couple people throughout the week. This appears to not be the case. However, I’m not convinced it’ll continue this way throughout the week.

As you can see, traffic to the blog was almost exactly the same as the previous day (Sunday).

I screwed up the Google Analytics tracking code on the layouts, so I wasn’t tracking email list conversions until late last night. But the good news is that according to Mailchimp, I signed up another 25 subscribers to the updates list.

This is down from the previous day, but overall, I couldn’t be happier. I did get a little boost because I sent a campaign about the course and my updates to my newsletter email list, which seemed to account for maybe 8-10 subscriptions.

See you tomorrow!