Welcome back for another installment of Entrepreneurial, my monthly journal entry chronicling my experience as an entrepreneur, my victories and failures each month, and the lessons learned along the way.
How my online business survived my month-long hiatus!
As some of you may already know, July was a big month for me and my husband because we bought our first home and then moved into it. Thanks to all of you who sent your congratulations and words of encouragement and support on this major life milestone of ours, we truly appreciate it! I know that I am incredibly blessed to run my own business and therefore, I alone am the sole manager of my time, so when my husband and I were preparing for the purchase of our home and the major project which was preparing it for our arrival and then moving into it, we decided that I was going to pull back from my business for a few weeks. Initially, this meant that I was still going to be working but that I would stop doing certain time consuming tasks (like filming for YouTube) in order to spend time on this event which was our #1 priority.
Quickly, however, that plan went out the window when, despite our best attempts to plan and manage the new home situation, unexpected issues and stress took my mind off of my business and kept me preoccupied with a litany of house related obligations. So, as it turns out, I ended up doing little to no work for my business in July, a very scary, but also incredibly necessary choice I had to make. I was of course worried that this would damage my business and my brand. Although I built my business to be a passive income producer in theory, I had never really left it alone to its own devices. So this was a big test for me and how well I had built my business to run without me.
The results of a month away from my work were pretty unexpected. My business still brought in a steady income, not the amount I usually earn each month, but about 1/3rd of it. Still enough for me to pay my bills and keep my head above water without having to dip into savings, and although with the major expense of the move, having my usual full income would have been great, I was pleased that things were running sustainably without me and that the time away didn’t cause a financial burden. In terms of my following, I was very pleased to see that after a hiatus of 6 weeks on YouTube, my channel was still growing at the same rate it had been and that my views were comparable to the same time frame last year. Even my blog traffic stayed consistent during this time which was great, and my Instagram, Twitter and Facebook following all grew at about the usually rate as well.
So, other than a dip in my income, it doesn’t appear that the month away did any damage to my brand, and I think I have some good solid reasons why!
#1. Having a backlog of high quality content kept my SEO and discoverability consistent so that new followers and customers were still flowing in. If you are a new business that doesn’t have much content built up on their platforms, I wouldn’t recommend taking an extended period of time off, but with hundreds of blog posts and hundreds more YouTube videos in my history means that there is lead generating content available at all times.
#2. Being transparent with my existing audience meant that everyone understood why I was gone and that I would be back! I really think this was a big reason my followers didn’t drop me during my time off and were actually excited for me to get back, because I let them know what was going on, why I was taking time off and when I would be back in business. I received many messages and emails during my time off expressing support and excitement for me and my husband, and sharing anticipation for me to come back with new content.
#3. Using social scheduling tools helped me to push out and promote existing content and products consistently, so that my accounts didn’t go completely dark. Although my Blog and YouTube weren’t being regularly updated, some of my other social feeds were, so my closest followers were still connecting with me and my content while I was gone and new followers were still able to find me, my content and my products!
#4. I regularly checked my email to remain connected and responsive to those who reached out. I’m a true believer that it’s very important to reply to your emails because for me, its a sign of respect that if someone spent the time to message me, I am going to spend the time to reply back, even if its just a short response. Although my email response rate was slower than normal, I did regularly check my email and reply as quickly as I could to customer service inquiries, questions and the outpouring of love I was receiving from my community!
So, that is my recap of July aka that time I took a month off and my business was still okay when I got back! I definitely learned a lot about life and business from the process of buying a home, moving and trying to manage my business in the process, which I will be sharing with you more in future posts and emails, so if you are not already subscribed to my newsletter, sign up here! Don’t forget to let me know how your July went, I can’t wait to catch up with you all over the next few days and weeks as I settle back into my work routines and start defining some new ones!
xoxo,
