Two projects, One Month
As I grow in my knowledge of the business world, I find it increasingly important to read more. There is a wealth of knowledge and inspiration to be found in many types of books which I had not been capitalizing on previously. In an effort to absorb that knowledge and increase my ability to process written content. Those are just my personal goals, professionally, my aim was to build my knowledge or networking/communicating in a team, and how to influence people on the first level of a sales to funnel.
Outline:
Project One:
I set out to read and review three books about networking and wealth. Once I gathered 
useful information from these books I implemented in my businesses team to transfer the information from paper to real-world metrics. I started by reading, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, by Dale Carnegie. That was a great book with really helpful little tips about conflict resolution, bargaining, and drive. Coincidentally, it happened to be a great platform for the following books to build off of. I then read and reviewed, “Think and Grow Rich”, by Napolean Hill and, “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, by Robert Kiyosaki.
Project Two:
Along with reading these works, I wanted to further explore building my brand with Nest of Vipers Airsoft. So I took to Instagram, a popular outlet which we had been 
relatively inactive on, to boost up our reach and ratings. This project reinforced the theme of collaboration and communication I was trying to build inside of my team. Creating captivating images that pull in followers and convey a message that every member understands and backs up with their input from editing photos, to replying to messages sent to the page.
Project One: Learning from the masters
“How to Win Friends and Influence People”, taught me the value of communication and tactful resolve above all else. The book presents many examples of real-world situations that prove the ideas expressed throughout it. The title also stay’s true to the actual content in the fact that it demonstrates methods of conflict resolution and peaking interest on a smaller scale, analyzing initial issues or doubts and overcoming them with persuasive conversation. I found this useful for dealing with arguments inside of my team and delegating separate tasks by motivating them to create their own goals for those tasks.
See my highlights of “How to Win Friends, and influence people” here.
While I found, “Think and Grow Rich”, to be the least helpful, I still gleaned some useful advice from it. Which was the power of planning, setting goals, and making an attainable vision. This book outlines how to think oneself into productive trains of thought, how to turn your thought life and subconscious into productive forces for their user. This helps me to focus on my goals through the noise and fortify my mind when I hear “no” to one of my sales offers.
Here is my review of “Think and Grow Rich”.
Finally,”Rich Dad Poor Dad”, offered a really unique perspective. It is told as a story from Robert Kiyosaki’s lessons learned from his, “Rich Dad”, then it flashes forward to how a piece of advice carried him into successful work in his adult life. This book taught me about tenacity, to absorb, contain, and transmit advice from mentors into actionable tasks. Looking back, I feel as though this book really helped me ask better questions.
“No I don’t think I could afford it”, shuts down all potential opportunities before they can bloom, but “How could I afford it?” puts your brain to work.
Check out my review of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” here.
Project Two: Building my brand through social media
When using any platform to build our brand, my team and I are very careful to stay true to the initial themes that brought us together, which are the same themes that hold the community together. We wanted to reformat our Instagram as authentic, connected, and eye-catching.
Old posts looked like a ‘meh’ candid snapshot from a game with a boring caption and about four hashtags thrown in at random. These types of posts took little creativity, and it reflected poorly on us in the form of likes and followers. The frequency of posting was sporadic and disengage, which was the biggest problem.
Moving forward, we updated our rubric for an effective post, and have been yielding more engagement than ever before. We now see about 40 likes per post (at the time of writing this article), as opposed to the 14 or so likes per post in the past. Oh, and our follower count has increased from 80-111 with only seven new posts.
-We made captions interesting or engaging, instead of “Picture of Amp from Operation___”, we now ask a question or make a statement on a relevant topic in the airsoft community.
-We use ALL the hashtags we can, 30 tags are allowed per post. More on this here.
-We have a rough posting schedule (strict posting schedules will come when we do more events). We post at least two times a week.
-We have a set format for the photos and videos themselves: multiple pictures/videos, and the same type of filters/color grading.
We found that a lot of people from our the local airsoft scene are now coming to our page because of the hashtags and they stick around because of the cool content.
