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Business

How to Balance a #SIDEHUSTLE with Your 9 to 5

How to Balance a #SIDEHUSTLE with Your 9-5

I spent 6 years working on my business as a side hustle before I ever dreamed of taking my business full time! If you aren’t familiar with the term, a side hustle is when you have a 9-5 job (or equivalent) and then you have a project you are working on in your free time that is your own. Usually, when we talk side hustles, we mean a business we are running on the side as though it were a second job that may one day become our full time gig, but not always. It can also refer to a volunteer project or cause you are passionate about that you never intend to make any money from but just enjoy doing in your spare time. Whatever your side hustle may be, in order to give that project our full attention and really get the most out of it so that it can one day become more if we wish it to, I have a few tips to impart upon you as someone who has been there, done that and built a full time business from it! This is not the story of how I left my full time job for my side hustle, if you want to read that you can here. This post covers the important things you need to know and focus on to successfully balance your 9-5 job and your side hustle so that you can do both effectively!

Get Clear on Your Business Vision

The first thing you really need to understand when trying to balance a full time job with a side hustle is the vision for your side hustle. Is this something you want to make money doing? Is this something you want to become your full time job? What exactly are you trying to accomplish with your side hustle? What key activities do you need to accomplish to make your side hustle happen? You may not have a 5 or 10 year plan laid out for this yet, but having a well rounded sense of what you are doing and why is important!

Set goals

Once you understand your vision, you need to set some goals for your side hustle! Goals in terms of your output and the activities you will perform on a weekly basis, as well as goals for input in terms of results you are seeking. For example, when I started my side hustle, it was just a blog in the beginning that didn’t have much direction or any goals, but once I set the goal to blog three times a week, my blog really started to take off because I was putting in consistent effort. Simultaneously, I had set goals for my blog in terms of monthly page views, at first I set those goals low, 1,000 page views a month, and once I hit that goal, I raised it to 5,000, then 10,000 etc! Setting goals for output as well as input are important to help you keep an eye on your results to ensure you are moving your side hustle along!

Make a simple project plan

When you have a full time job and a side hustle time can get very tight, so I think it’s always best to keep your side projects as simple as possible. Don’t put too much on your plate at one time or else you will get overwhelmed and one or both of your jobs will be negatively affected. For example, if you want to start an Etsy shop, keep your products as simple as possible. Don’t bite off more than you can chew by adding dozens and dozens of different items to your shop. Focus on producing a few items perfectly and promoting them regularly on the social media platform of your choice instead of spending all your time creating new items and leaving yourself no time for promotion.

Block out time to work on your side hustle

Time management is an essential skill you must master if you want to successfully pull off a 9-5 and a side hustle, and I am often asked how I was able to balance my full time job with all my social media promotion, blogging and YouTube video production before I went full time. The answer is that I blocked out time in my schedule to complete my activities. I spent some time a few evenings a week and usually one weekend day to get done my essential activities. Again, because I kept my projects simple and set goals, I knew what needed to be done and set aside the time to do it. If you are setting aside time for your side hustle but find that you aren’t accomplishing much, you may need to simplify your projects so that you have less on your plate.

Track your results

Now, the final thing you need to do to ensure your side hustle is successful is to track the results of the goals you set. You first need to make sure you are doing all the output that you said you would do because action is the only way you will move your business forward. Once you have tracked that you are completing the necessary output activities, you need to check the effectiveness of those activities against your input goals or results. Are you moving the needle week by week and month by month? You can’t expect huge amounts of growth overnight, but as long as you see growth from your actions, you know you are on the right path! But, if you go week after week with little to no growth, you may need to reevaluate your project plan and your output goals to ensure you are actually performing the right activities that will get you the results you are looking for.

Remember, it’s not easy balancing a 9-5 with a side hustle, it takes a lot of determination and clear expectation to manage both and most importantly, to make progress with your side hustle! It took me over 6 years to turn my side hustle into a full time career, mostly because it took me that long to learn all the strategies of online business and marketing that would eventually help me to create the business I wanted to run! If you are still on the hunt for strategies that will help you master online marketing for yourself, I welcome you to sign up for my upcoming Free Webinar Training covering my 5 Pillar System for Building a Successful Online Business!

Sign up to get more details, access to the Live event, as well as to the event replay! Hope to see you there!

xoxo,

Online Business

“This is My Dream, NOT My Nightmare!” Two Recent Interviews to Check Out!

Hello my Strange & Charmed Ones!

I’m checking in mid-week with you all because I wanted to share a few recent interviews I did that I really wanted you to check out. I know you are used to hearing about my business in my content from my point of view, but I always think reading or listening to interviews are always a different experience because I’m not the one controlling the questions and the content so sometimes you get some unexpected tidbits of knowledge.

CHECK OUT MY PODCAST INTERVIEW ON BOSS GIRL CREATIVE

I connected with Taylor Bradford of BossGirlCreative.com after she interviewed our mutual friend, Anne Samoilov, last summer! In this podcast interview, we talk a lot about vision (or lack thereof), business planning and the joy of passive income streams! Check out the podcast here and I hope the Boss Girl Creative Podcast becomes one of your new fav’s as well!

CHECK OUT MY INTERVIEW IN CREATIVE BUSINESS MAVEN MAGAZINE!

Lindsay Maloney from Creative Business Maven Magazine recently reached out to me for an interview in their March 2016 issue where we talk about planners, printables, business and more starting on page 28!

I hope you guys get a lot of inspiration and a little more behind the scenes from these two interviews! Let me know what you think in the comments and if you want more behind the scenes from my business, follow me on SnapChat as MissTrenchcoat, because I am snapping up a storm!

xoxo,

Online Business

How I 4x’d My Social Following and 6x’d My Revenue! My 2015 Business Results!

Last week I told you about an upcoming Free Webinar Training I am hosting on the 20^th where I will be teaching you my 5 Pillar System for Building a Successful Business Online. I hope you had a chance to review that information and of course sign up to get access to both the Live event and the replay because this webinar is going to be packed with great information if you are someone who wants to start an online business or has already done so, but needs help getting it off the ground! I think it’s only fair, however, that if you are going to spend your precious time with me learning, that I explain to you how much this system has helped me to grow my own business. After all, I am asking you to trust me and to follow my example and I think it’s important that you know what I was able to accomplish with this method so you can understand what you too may be able to accomplish with the successful application of these strategies. So today, I am going to open up about my 2015 business results, and walk you through the growth I experienced in multiple aspects of my business.

Social Media Following

First, let’s talk about my social media following and how my presence online increased in 2015. As you may know if you have been following me for some time, I predominantly use Instagram, YouTube and Facebook as social platforms for my business and brand. Although I do have followings on other platforms, followings that have also grown over the year, these three are where I put my attention on a regular basis and therefore I can see a marked increase in growth based on my specific actions.

Instagram

Following January 2015: ~5,000

Following January 2016: 19,291

Strategy: Post high quality images that align with my brand daily. Learn more about my Instagram strategies here.

Results: My Instagram following quadrupled, adding nearly 15,000 followers in 2015!

YouTube

Following January 2015: 10,520

Following January 2016: 42,930

Strategy: Post 1-2 high quality videos a week focusing on productivity, business or personal development. Click here to learn more about my YouTube Filming Setup!

Results: 4x’d my following again in YouTube, gaining 32,000 new subscribers in 2015. This

Facebook Page

Following January 2015: 533

Following January 2016: 3,563

Strategy: Link up my Instagram to Facebook for those who do not use the platform, and share my blog posts and additional updates regularly, using Facebook as a hub for my content for those who are not as tech savvy and follow me on multiple channels online.

Results: This growth is less impressive when compared to the others, I picked up three thousand new likes to my Facebook page, however, that does represent a significant growth of 668% which is VERY impressive. Remember, numbers look good, but growth really shows your progress and for a platform that wasn’t getting any new original content and just acted as a placeholder for my brand, this growth is phenomenal to me!

Blog & Shop Traffic

The next major topic when understanding my business results for 2015 is my blog and shop traffic. Since my shop is my major source of income, it’s important that I practice great SEO techniques to ensure my blog and shop is being found in search and new eyes are coming to my content everyday. My blog and shop are both self hosted, and if you are looking for tips for creating your own professional website you can click here to learn more!

Blog Traffic

2014: 218,096 Sessions 434,011 page views

2015: 601,018 Sessions 1,500,263 page views

Strategy: Set up a visually appealing blog where I share content three times a week that relate to my business and areas of focus to establish myself as an “expert” in my field.

Results: 275% growth in the number of sessions on my blog and more than a million new page views in 2015.

Shop Traffic

2014: 44,146 Sessions (September-December)

2015: 521,779 Sessions

Strategy: Increase activity to the shop by mentioning and linking it in as much revenant content as possible through my blog, social media and YouTube. Search, Pinterest and YouTube are the top 3 referrers to the shop!

Results: 1,181% Growth in my shop from 2014 to 2015, however, 2014 is only a partial year because the shop opened in September. Since it’s growth, the shop has gone through a lot of growth and continues to grow even now in 2016 thanks to my continued marketing efforts! Mind you, my shop is a vast majority passive income, which means I make money even in my sleep!

Income & Revenue

Now to the crux of my 2015 business growth, my income and revenue! In 2015 I added a number of new products to my shop, which helped me to diversify my product line and secure greater sales for my items. However, it was not product diversity alone that helped me increase my revenue, but also my sustained marketing efforts through content creation on my social platforms. If you are looking for some more marketing strategies, you can learn about those here.

2014 VS 2015 Revenue Growth

Q1 15 VS 14: 3,359% Growth

Q2 15 VS 14: 2,653% Growth

Q3 15 VS 14: 2,826% Growth

Q4 15 VS 14: 667% Growth

Strategy: Diversify income streams (Shop, YouTube, Affiliate, Private Consulting) so I have more avenues of money coming in, which protects me if one stream isn’t performing well in a given period of time. Then, market those streams effectively via my platforms!

Results: As you can see from the tremendous growth results above, 2015 was a big growth year for me! Because the shop was not opened until September 2014 I did not have that major revenue source in my business yet, which is why the growth is in the thousands for Q1-3 however, you can see that in Q4 14 once the shop opened and had effectively replaced my income, I still have substantial growth over top of that in 2015!

Overall 2015 Business Results!

As you can see from taking this deep dive into my analytics and revenue growth from 2014 to 2015, last year was a substantial period of growth for my business! I’m very proud of the growth my business has seen in the last year thanks to my sustained implementation of some key online business strategies! I have shared some of these strategies with you in this post and linked even more content for you to review to get a better picture of exactly what I did and why, however, I am looking forward to my upcoming webinar “The 5 Pillar System to Building a Successful Online Business!”

If reading about my business growth in 2015 interested you and you want to learn more about the specific methods and strategies I used to make this amazing growth happen, I would highly recommend signing up for the webinar, it’s FREE and I’ll be sharing both key strategies and a great tool to help you replicate my success!

xoxo,

Business

Are You Ready to Start Your Online Business?

Are You Ready to Start Your Online Business?

Over the last two years, I have coached, advised and cheered on dozens of women who were focused and ready to take on the challenge of creating their own online business. Some of these women were stay at home mothers who wanted to start a business to supplement their household income and help ease the burden on their significant other. Some of these women were employed in jobs that didn’t satisfy them but knew if they could work 9-5 for someone else, they could put those same skills to work for their own business. Some of these women were fresh out of school or unemployed and wanted to create their own opportunity instead of waiting to be selected from a list of candidates for a job! These women went on to start businesses hand making crafts, becoming coaches, virtual assistants, championing non-profits, and writing blogs and books of their own!

Each and every woman I have worked with has had a unique story and has taken a unique path to creating their own dream job, but they all had one thing in common. They knew that they were ready to act. They knew it was time to take control of their own destinies, and they knew that they couldn’t sit by and let things be for another day, another month or another year. The truth is, there is no right time to start a business. The process will shake up your life in ways you could never expect, so if you know it’s what you want to do, you can’t spend anymore time waiting. Time only makes it harder to succeed!

Remember

For some of you, their is no doubt in your mind that the time is NOW to act and get started. If that is you, I highly encourage you to stop reading this, and CLICK HERE right now to get yourself signed up for an informative Free Training I have that will help you get a quick and focused start to your progress!

But, if you aren’t sure, if you still have questions and don’t know if you are ready to start your own business, I have a few more insights to share with you!

How to know if you are ready to start your own business?

Since the truth of the matter is there is no right time to start your own business, similarly, their is no precise way to tell if you were meant to start one, however, after running my own business full time for the last two years and spending another six years working on my business as a side hustle before that, I have learned some important truths about running an online business that are key to understanding if the process is right for you.

1. You feel a passion inside.

This is a big one! The best indicator that you are ready to start your own business is that you feel a burning passion inside to do so. For different people, this passion can manifest in different ways. For example, if you find that you are unsatisfied with your work and spend your off time working on projects of your own, projects that you do for free but you know people would pay for, you have a passion inside of you! If you see other people starting businesses, selling products and offering services and you always say to yourself “I could do that,” you have a passion inside of you! If you spend your time reading other peoples blogs and following entrepreneurs online, secretly wishing that you could be like them, you have a passion inside of you. If you have been thinking about starting your own business, getting the urge every now and again and doing some research here and there still wondering if you should start, guess what? You have a passion inside of you! A passion for entrepreneurship does not mean you wake up everyday at 6am ready to start your day and conquer the world. I know sometimes entrepreneurs can make it seem like that, but it isn’t realistic for everyone. So, if you relate to any of those examples I gave, I think their is a good chance you have a passion that is untapped inside of you, ready to be acknowledged!

2. You are willing to put in the work with no guarantee of success.

Now, once you identify the passion you feel inside, the next thing you need to understand to ensure you are ready to start your own business is the fact that nothing is guaranteed. When you first get started creating your own business, you will need to do a lot of work, put in a lot of hours and do tons of research before their is ever a glimmer of even a penny! You know how they say “the only things guaranteed in life are death and taxes” well in entrepreneurship “the only things guaranteed in business are long hours and lots of obstacles.” You need to make peace with this fact upfront and feel comfortable with the fact that you may work long and hard for days, weeks, months and maybe even years, failing left and right until you find the path through to a business that is profitable.

3. You are willing to commit and make the necessary sacrifices.

The final way to know you are ready to start your own business is that you are comfortable committing to the process and making the necessary sacrifices to see your vision through to reality. One of the major mistakes I see entrepreneurs make when they decide they want to start a business is that they fail to fully commit to their idea. They get started, do some hard work up front and then when they don’t see the return on their time investment immediately or they encounter an unexpected obstacle, they doubt the process and slow down. They start to question the process, they panic and they change the plan which ultimately causes them to fall completely off course. In business, you hear people talk a lot about having a plan and creating a roadmap to success. Once you have a solid plan, the worst thing you can do is fail to commit to it, so its important to understand before you start a business that you need to commit to the process, even if that means you need to make sacrifices to stay on course once you have begun.

So, if you have made it this far and you haven’t been scared away from what I’ve shared already, you may really have what it takes to start your own business! If you are curious to learn more about getting started, I want to invite you to sign up for a FreeTraining webinar I am hosting where I share my 5 Pillar System to Building a Successful Online Business! Click here to get details on the upcoming event. I do hope to see you there and help you get a jump start on creating your own business online! After a combined 8 years working on my own business, I have a lot of advice to share and actionable content that you will want to get started on to save you precious time and energy on your own entrepreneurship journey! See you soon!

xoxo,

Business

Entrepreneurial: More Intention, Less Stress!

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.

Hello dear readers and fellow #BossBabes! As this post goes live, my husband and I are already on our Disney World vacation that I told you I had booked last month! I hope you will follow along with our adventures in Disney World by following me on Snapchat as MissTrenchcoat because I am probably snapping up a storm and this is the method by which I plan to “vlog” our trip. But you aren’t here to listen to me describe my vacation, instead, today we are recapping the month of February in terms of how it affected my life and business.

February was a great month and felt like a vacation itself in comparison to January. Last month I told you about how tired I felt because I didn’t take an official break after the holidays and jumped right into 2016 guns blazing! Well, after the successful launch of my Charmed Life Master Class at the end of January, I promised that I was never going to put myself in a situation like that again, so I immediately made some changes in my routine and work schedule. First off, I took a few days off after the Master Class went live and relaxed. I listened to some books on tape, I watched TV and movies and just let myself turn off for a while. I actually spend the first week of February in calls with clients and getting feedback from my audience on different products which was a productive, yet, leisurely use of my time. Talking to my clients reenergized me and it was a very low pressure project to work on that was still very crucial to my business. I also spent the first week of the month working on getting ahead on my blog posts and writing work. Again, pretty low pressure items that were important but didn’t have an immediate decline that caused me stress. By the time the second week of the month rolled around, I was feeling much more under control of my schedule and could devote my time and attention to the major project of the month, which was my Free Photography Webinar “The 5 Photographic Marketing Assets You NEED to Build a Cohesive Brand Online.” I took my time with this webinar, outlining it and pulling together many of my frequently asked questions from my community, applying my best strategies to make sure the webinar was jam packed with information. I spent two weeks working on the webinar before the live event on the 21^st which was a tremendous success, and if you missed that webinar, click here to get yourself access to it. During the middle of the month, I also spent a good amount of time working on personal and home related projects. I know it may sound silly but I really needed to shop for new clothes which I had put off for far too long, so I did some online shopping, and also ran some important errands for just day to day items I had run out of weeks ago but had been too busy to take care of. Just spent some time organizing my personal life and making progress on my ongoing goal of keeping my home and life in order! Finally, at the end of the month, during the last week, I had a lot of loose ends I needed to take care of. Small projects that needed to be completed before I left on vacation like cleaning the house, mending clothes, putting together my March #CharmedGTD Photo Challenge and my monthly freebies, planning out my #CharmedBiz Chat (on the topic of taking great photos for your blog and social media… click here to check it out if you missed it) and recording an audio interview for an upcoming episode of the Boss Girl Creative Podcast! So like I said, loose ends, little projects that needed to get done before I could fully relax and take off on vacation!

Okay, so now lets talk about some victories and failures for the month because there were certainly a few of those along the way! First, let’s talk failures! Although I had developed a really good practice of journaling during January, I found that as I was feeling less stressed and more organized thanks to my new routines, I stopped journaling consistently everyday. Journaling ended up being an every other day or every three days event, which made it harder for me to journal because I kept forgetting what had gone on in a day and made the whole life documentation aspect of the journal difficult. I am someone who does what they commit to, and I did make sure to go and fill in the days when I missed, but the failure here was that I broke the habit. Part of this, like I said, was because I wasn’t feeling stressed so I didn’t feel like I had a need to go to my journal and vent, and part of this was that I was spending some “me” time alone in the evenings and getting into bed early, but I would end up falling asleep before I got to the journaling part of my night time routine. Going forward, my solution for this is going to be to try to journal earlier in the day because generally, I don’t have news for my journal after dinner! Another failure for the month was that I fell off my healthy eating kick. I had been doing really well cooking healthy dinners for me and my husband, but again, laziness set in and we ended up ordering out or going out more than we should have, especially since we knew we were going on vacation at the end of the month! My solution for this is going to be instituting meal planning again once I get back from vacation and even an light exercise plan. I find that I’m more likely to eat healthy if I am also doing physical activity so I will be working on that when I get home.

Now for some wins for the month! Obviously, the whole living with less stress was a major win! Being intentional with the amount of work I put on my plate and only doing the activities I see as essential gave me more space in my day to just relax and do the things that make me feel peaceful. Being stingy with my time also meant that I had to be very selective about how I spent my time, which really makes you focus on your priorities. A second win I had for the month was that I started using Snapchat again and have been really enjoying it! I think I may have found my solution for daily vlogging because there is segment of my following that likes seeing what I am up to, but the idea of vlogging myself day over day for a produced YouTube video is daunting and not the way I want to spend my time. It’s a lot of fun and I hope you will follow me on Snapchat — MissTrenchcoat — if you want to see my daily life and adventures!

Overall, February was a great month, I have no complaints and I feel like even my failures for the month are teaching me how I need to be more intentional with my time so that I can build a sustainable life and business that works for me! I’d love to know how your month went, so please make sure to comment below and let me know your wins and “opportunities” for improvement- I think we can all learn from hearing each others experiences so please share!

xoxo,

Online Business

The Marketing Assets Your Business NEEDs! Sign Up for My FREE TRAINING!

The Marketing Assets Your Business NEEDs! Sign Up for My FREE TRAINING!

Truth: Your visual marketing assets are most of the reason people follow you online and purchase your products. Even if you don’t have a product based business, the images you use and share to represent your brand online are crucial to the success of your service based business and even your brick and mortar locations. For me, putting together a strong photography based marketing strategy was much of the reason my business skyrocketed over a year ago, and it remains one of the main reasons why I am still growing at a quick and steady pace.

In terms of my own business specifically, Pinterest is the number one traffic driver to my website and shop. Hands down! The images I share on Pinterest linked to great blog content and new products are my number one asset. Without those great images, people wouldn’t be interested in the content and products they are linked to.

Traffic driver number two for my business is Google search, number three is Google Image Search and number four is Facebook! Okay, so do you see the pattern? Three out of the four top drivers of traffic to my site are image related. My images are seriously driving my success online!

So, what does this information mean for you? Well, over the past year, I’ve been tracking this success and analyzing it, and what I have come up with this that their are 5 Photographic Marketing Assets that are the major needle movers. So much so that I believe that if you focus on these 5 assets, and create your own, you will also experience growth in terms of traffic and sales for your business.

Look, this is the internet, right? The only way you are going to know if this strategy works for you is to try it yourself, which is why I am hosting a FREE TRAINING WEBINAR sharing these 5 assets and examples of them so you can implement my strategy yourself.

The training is scheduled for Sunday, February 21^st at 3pm Eastern. It’s going to be an online training webinar, that you can sign up for by adding your name to the info list here. You can access the training via computer, tablet or internet enabled smartphone!

If you’re finding this information after February 21^st, don’t worry, I will have a replay of the event for you to watch, but if you can make it to the live event on the 21^st, you are going to get a special Q&A with me and also a time sensitive bonus!

Hope to see you on the 21^st, so sign up today to stay in the know!

xoxo,

Online Business

How to Start a Service Based Business

How to Start a Service Based Business

I’ve been speaking to a lot of people lately, students and followers within my community, about getting started with a service based business. Service businesses are a little different than product businesses because it’s not all about creating something and putting it out there, you have to develop your own personal skills first, organize your offer and then seek out clients that need the skills you have. If you want to start a business as a life coach, stylist, personal shopper, professional speaker, designer, photographer or any of the other thousands of possible service based businesses, this article is going to teach you how to get one up and running and how to get started promoting it!

Step #1: Get the Experience

I’m often asked how one goes about getting the necessary experience to start a service based business. Depending on the service, you may have to go to school or get a specific certification for it, like being a lawyer or a health coach. But if your service doesn’t require schooling or any specific certification in order for you to practice it (which you find out by researching the field and the norms associated with it) then you need to get yourself some real world experience. A web developer or designer could gain experience by getting a job in the field and practicing their skills, or a life coach or public speaker would want to find some clients (perhaps friends or family) to test their skills on. In this period of time, you are either working for someone else, working for low cost or no cost at all. Think of this as your intern stage where you are gaining the skills you need to eventually earn an income from your service.

Step #2: Put Together Your Offer

Once you have some good experience under your belt and feel like your trial clients are happy with their results with you, you can develop your offer. Your offer is whatever your specific service will be, in some form of packaged form. For example, a public speaker would put together some speeches on topics they have experience on and develop a price that they can offer to businesses and events looking for such speakers. If you’re a wedding planner, you will want to work up all the services you will perform for a customer and price them out individually and as a packaged deal so when you meet with engaged couples, you have a clear outline of what you can do for them and how much it will cost. A photographer may work up an offer that’s based on an hourly rate with examples of how many usable photos will result during the time frame. Whatever your service is, work up the offer, do some market research for other similar services in your area and use your trial clients to help you determine a reasonable price for your offer.

Step #3: Brainstorm Opportunities

Once you have experience and an offer worked up, you then need to start thinking about who needs your service and where you can find them. Depending on your business you will want to understand your ideal client and research where you can make contact with them, either in person or online depending on your offer. Once you have a list of people, other companies or places where you can find opportunity, you then need to start making cold calls. Cold calls are when you approach someone about an offer that did not seek out you or your services. Cold calling can be tough, it really can be, there is no way around that. But, it is necessary for you to build up your network of contacts. You can always work with your trial clients to see if they have contacts for you and work on a referral basis, but you also need to put yourself out there and find opportunities for yourself. Your goal for each cold call should be to present your offer to a decision maker with the ability to hire you, hopefully closing a deal with them, or getting the contact information for someone who may be interested in your services. If you have done your research, the person you pitch your offer to should have a need for your service so if they don’t hire you for one reason or another, they should at least be able to direct you to a new contact. From there, you will continue to make cold calls and develop a network of contacts, closing some deals and growing your list at the same time. This is one of the reasons why having an active social media presence can be a lifesaver, especially if you run a service based business. It makes finding opportunity much easier. If you are in this boat, with a service based business you want to get off the ground and you want to make the road a little easier for yourself by developing your presence online, I would highly suggest checking out my online business program, Empire Building. In Empire Building, I teach you the 5 pillars to successful online communication using the exact strategies I used to build my website page views to over 200,000 a month, and gain a social media presence of over 50,000 followers! Most of this growth happened within a six month period of time, that helped me to replace my income after I left my day job, so no matter where you are starting, Empire Building can help you grow if you apply the information to your business and execute! Thankfully, Empire Building is packed with worksheets that help you take the lessons and apply them to your scenario, so you don’t have to build your own success blueprint from scratch, I give you the tools that streamline everything for you!

I hope this information helps you get your service based business off the ground and if you have any other questions for me, I’d love to help you work through them, so leave me a comment or send me an email!

xoxo,

Online Business

The Essential Skills of a #GIRLBOSS

The Essential Skills of a #GIRLBOSS

So, you really want to start your own business and claim the title of #GIRLBOSS for yourself, but you aren’t sure you have the required skill set. While starting your own online business doesn’t require a specific resume, I’ve found that their are a few essential skills that tend to separate the successful from the average. Here are the skills I have found to be the most crucial as I run my own business.

Communication

Great communication skills are a very valuable asset for any #GIRLBOSS, but especially for one that deals with online business. In the real world, having strong speaking and writing skills are a necessity but online, they can mean life or death for your business. It’s so hard to communication online. Yes, it’s easy to send a tweet or leave a comment, but it’s hard to get your messaging across on noisy social platforms and through the hustle and bustle of ads and other constant interruptions on websites. You either need to have great public speaking skills so you can kill it on video platforms OR you need to have impeccable writing skills if you want to carve a name for yourself via a blog. If you have the complete package, you are golden, but if not, don’t fret because you can always improve either!

How to Improve Your Communication Skills: If you need to work on either of these critical communication skills, I have some recommendations for you. To improve your writing, I love the book On Writing Well. It’s a simple guide that can help anyone at any writing level clean up their written communication and start crafting better messages. If you need to improve your oral communication skills, I would suggest joining Toastmasters, which is an international organization that helps people improve their public speaking.

Graphic Design

Design skills are another complete must for a #GIRLBOSS with an online hustle because everything online is driven by design. Your website, your content, and even your products need to have a great design to them in order to turn heads online. Yes, you can always hire out a designer to do this sort of work for you, but if you don’t have the basics down, you are leaving the design, and really the direction of your business, in the hands of a stranger.

How to Improve Graphic Design Skills: When it comes to improving your design skills there are a few things you can do. First, you can get a sense of what your ascetic is by searching through other websites, magazines, and through sites like Pinterest to understand what you like and what you don’t like. Next, I would put together collages via Pinterest to see how different images and design elements work together to create on cohesive vision. If you have a specific project you are working on, like a website redesign or you’re trying to research design for an upcoming project, you can make a board on Pinterest for the project and drop all your inspiration there. Be careful of what you curate because much of understanding good design is knowing that less is more and that a good designer knows how to build a great design with the fewest possible pieces.

Photography

Photography is another skill that is invaluable for a #GIRLBOSS to have in order to run a successful online business. Images are so much of what compels us to connect and purchase products and services online and so any serious #GIRLBOSS should be comfortable behind the camera. Styled photography is a key element of branding that is necessary for a variety of platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, not to mention how crucial it is for your website or online shop!

How to Improve Photography Skills: If you need to up your photography game, I would highly recommend my Digital Styling Lightroom Course. It’s a video based course with 5 modules designed to teach you how to shoot, style and edit great photography for your brand. It’s currently on sale for a special price, so click here to take advantage of it!

Sales

I know the average #GIRLBOSS hates thinking of herself as a salesperson, but you do need to have a basic understand of how “sales” works, in order to close the deal with your customers. The thing you need to know as a salesperson, however, is that sales isn’t really about selling your product. Rather, it’s about selling yourself. A good sales person can sell any product to anyone, they don’t really need to know much about a product, they just need to have confidence in themselves and a charismatic personality.

How to Improve Sales Skills: I know it’s probably not the first book that would pop up if you did a search for tools to help you become a better salesperson, but I’d recommend the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The book is super old, but stands the test of time, even in the modern online marketplace because it isn’t about the products you are selling, its about the basic principles of selling yourself to another human being.

I’m sure their are other skills here and there that would benefit and savvy #GIRLBOSS, but these four are the crucial ones you need to have under your belt in order to really have what it takes to stand out in business, especially online business. If you’re lacking in a skill, definitely prioritize honing it because all of these skills are learnable!

xoxo,

Business

How I Made $1,000 from 1 Instagram Photo and the Strategies You can use to Repeat My Success

How I Made $1,000 from 1 Instagram Photo and the Strategies You can use to Repeat My Success

I get asked all the time, “Alexis, is it possible to make money from Instagram?” The answer is YES! Today I want to share with you a few strategies for how to monetize your Instagram account and tell you about a strategy that I use to regularly earn hundreds of dollars for each promotional image I place. Now, before I begin, I do want to be clear, that these strategies are not about earning hard money from each and every photo you post on Instagram, in fact, these strategies rely on the fact that you will be posting more than just promotional images onto your Instagram feed in order to build your following. These strategies are also not a one and done deal, meaning they are most effective when you execute them regularly as part of a defined marketing plan for your Instagram account. As always with me and my strategies, it’s about finding a strategy that works for your brand and business and then consistently executing it and growing your results over time. Let’s get started!

First things first, growing your following!

Before I talk about the strategies for earning income from Instagram, we need to talk about the fact that you first need to have a following on Instagram for any of these to work. How big the following needs to be honestly depends on your brand and the market you are selling to, but I do believe that even a small following of 300, as long as it contains a few dozen active followers, will yield results. Obviously, the more followers you have, the more income you can earn, so tomorrow I will be explaining how to grow your Instagram following if that is something you need to focus on! In the meantime, just understand that more followers usually mean more sales (usually because you can’t try to sell something that doesn’t relate to your audience and expect sales) so your personal results will vary, but I have used one of these strategies in particular to earn over $1,000 in 24 hours! Yes, it happens people. It’s not a daily occurrence but when you start integrating these strategies consistently, it is possible to have days where you make big bucks from one single image!

Strategy #1: Affiliate Links & Income

The first strategy for earning an income from your Instagram account is to feature affiliate products and use affiliate links to help people purchase items in your image. If you aren’t familiar with the term affiliate, what this means is that you are promoting the products or services of others and earning a commission from your referral. There are many affiliate programs you can join to help promote the products of other businesses, and the way you use this strategy is to take a nice styled photo of the product in question and then share a link to where people can purchase it in the description. To help with this, I tend to create short links via bit.ly which makes it easier to direct people to the product. Take a look at the image and description for Strategy #1 and see how I have used this strategy in the past!

Strategy #2: Sponsored Posts

The second strategy for earning an income from your Instagram account is to make sponsored posts, which means that a company or business is paying you to share an image of their product in your Instagram feed. More and more this has become a common practice, however, this route does tend to have two drawbacks. First is that when you get paid to sponsor an IG post, usually the amount isn’t a large sum of money. Maybe $20-$100, so you would have to find numerous sponsors or alternate income streams for your IG account in order to make serious money from this strategy. Second, finding sponsors for Instagram is very much dependent on you having a large following in the thousands at the very least. So you do need to have a larger following for this strategy to apply to you, but I have seen some instances of smaller businesses working with niche IG accounts. For me personally, I haven’t engaged in sponsored Instagram posts for a long time, because since starting my own business, I don’t need to get sponsors elsewhere, but check out the image and description for Strategy #2 for an example of how I have executed a sponsored Instagram post in the past.

Strategy #3: (THIS IS THE BIG ONE!) Product Promotion

The third and final strategy for earning an income from your Instagram account is to promote your own products or services via your account! This is the strategy that I have used time and time again to earn hundreds of dollars per post. In this strategy all you need to do is share nice styled photographs of your products and, ideally, run some sort of short term sale or promotion to encourage people to purchase your product as soon as possible! That’s it! I know that sounds pretty simple, and it’s because it is. The hard part is growing your following to the level where you can share one picture and a sale here and there and it yields you incredible results. So, let’s go ahead and take a look at the example for this strategy, that $1,000 photo and description I used to get quick sales in one single day!

Now that you know the strategies for earning income from Instagram, go forth and execute! Like I said, check back for tomorrow’s blog post which is all about growing your Instagram following. OH, AND THERE’S ONE MORE THING! A few times in this post I mentioned the key role nice, styled photographs play in the successful execution of these strategies. If you are curious about Styled Photography and want to learn how to create great photos for your Instagram and the rest of your business, including how to edit them and create beautiful ads for your brand, I have a LIMITED TIME OFFER on my Photography Styling Course called The Digital Styling Lightroom! Click here to check out the offer and the course and get started earning income from your Instagram account TODAY!

xoxo,

Online Business

How to Prep Your Business for a Vacation

How to Prep Your Business for a Vacation

As a solo entrepreneur, everything rests squarely on your shoulders. It’s a lot of pressure to manage on a day to day basis, but that pressure exacerbates whenever we take time out from work. I know how important it is to take a vacation every now and then as a business owner- mostly from my own lack of vacation time. Self-care is ridiculously important to help you keep in tip-top shape to face the challenges that each day brings, and vacation time, too, is a requirement to help you relax and recharge your batteries. But, how do you prepare for taking the necessary time away from your business when you are the business? This is a question I’ve been forced to ponder since I have booked my first week long vacation since my business began to take off, and this is what I’ve come up with after taking a look around to see how the best solo entrepreneurs and small businesses manage prepare.

1. Communicate your absence: If you work for yourself, by yourself, the first step to preparing for your much needed vacation is to communicate your time off to your customers. If you have clients, you will want to give them notice of your time off and make sure that you are able to properly schedule your work for them around this time period. If you run a shop, you will want to consider letting your customers know via a newsletter and then post a site-wide notice that let’s people know when you will be away and how that will affect order fulfillment. Whatever you do, just don’t say nothing! Customers are incredibly understanding when they have notice that there is going to be a change in routine, so let them know as soon as you can!

2. Create your vacation protocol: Depending on the type of business you run, you may be able to manage some items of your business while you are away. For example, perhaps you run a digital shop like I do, then your shop doesn’t need to close while you are on vacation, you just won’t be able to respond as quickly to customer service emails. Set the protocol for what is going to happen while you’re away. Will you respond to emails while you are away or will you be some place where you don’t have reliable internet? This will need to be communicated to your customers. Do you have stock that can be sold while you are away, but you just won’t be able to fulfill orders until you return? That should also be decided and communicated. It’s very hard as a solopreneur to step fully away from your business and if you feel like you would still like to be tethered in some way, make that decision and set your protocol. Perhaps you will respond to emails while you are away but not be able to troubleshoot issues or play tech support. Whatever you decide is fine as long as you define it and communicate it before you leave!

3. Pack only what you need to take: Once you have defined your protocol and communicated your absence and plan for managing the business while away, you will want to make sure you pack the specific items you will need, no more, no less. For example, if you know you will have internet access and might want to send emails, bring your smartphone to limit the amounts of emails you will send. If you know you will need to play tech support while you are gone, bring your laptop. Don’t bring more than what you need, “just in case” because you will most likely put yourself in a situation where you end up working more than you need to.

4. Pre-schedule content as needed: If your business revolves around content, you may want to take some time before you leave to pre-schedule some content for the time you will be away. Write your blog posts (or find a guest poster- even better!), take your Instagram pics, and schedule your tweets or Facebook updates as needed. Apps like Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to schedule your content out across multiple platforms so you can ensure promotions are running smoothly while you are away.

5. Close up the office: The final way you can prepare yourself for vacation mode, is to close of your office before you leave! What I mean by this is to make sure your office space, whether its a desk in your bedroom, a home office or even a rented office space, is cleaned up, everything is put away and your equipment is shut down. A simple act like this can go a long way to help your mind turn off from work and turn onto vacation mode!

I hope these tips help you prepare your business for your next vacation! There is one more thing I wanted to mention to you all since I have received some questions about it. I am going on vacation in a few weeks to Disney World in Orlando Florida, and it has been brought to my attention that some of you are in the area and may want to do a meet up with me. If you are in the Orlando area and would like to see if we can make this happen, send me an email and let me know! Can’t wait to hear from you!