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.
If you’re finding this information after February 21st, 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 21st, you are going to get a special Q&A with me and also a time sensitive bonus!
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!
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!
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!
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!
This is the first installment of my new feature, Entrepreneurial; a monthly journal entry chronicling my experience as an entrepreneur, my victories and failures each month, and the lessons learned along the way.
Hello my lovely readers! Welcome to my first installment of Entrepreneurial, my monthly business journal. When I first suggested the concept of this blog feature, many of you were incredibly supportive so I hope you enjoy these posts and that you learn a thing or two about the realities of being an online business owner. It’s not an easy job, but it is fun to be able to wake up and have complete control over what you will be doing. I like it. And most of all, I really want to remember it. I think I may have some sort of long term memory problem, because unless I write things down, I forget them, and I often can’t recall the things that happened the day before. Actually, one day last week, I completely forgot what I had done all day and what day it was. My husband was only moderately concerned. Now, I don’t think their is anything medical wrong with me, I just think I have too much information in storage already, so new items just get kicked back out of my system. I’m not very happy about this, and I wanted to do something to change it, find some way to chronicle my journey as a business owner, but most importantly, have a record of what I was doing so that I could keep my eye on the big picture. So, this year I started journaling. You may have seen my disc bound day per page planner/notebook/journal combo in a recent video, I’ve been faithfully writing in it almost everyday and if I do forget, I go back the next day and fill in what I was working on to the best of my recollection so I don’t forget about it. I’m the type of person who gets really excited about a project, starts it, gets it nearly done and then forgets about it. It’s funny because for all the content and products I create and launch, I probably have about twice as much nearly completed that just lost steam or I decided to change direction on. The journal has honestly been very helpful at forcing me to remember what I was doing and why I was spending time on a certain project. I actually started catching myself before I would start a random project that was off topic because I recognized I was about to distract myself from what I really needed to work on. So, I’d say that the journal is working, it’s like my accountability buddy and sometimes it’s like a therapist for me too. If I’ve had a bad day or made a mistake, I vent to my journal and make a plan for how I will course correct and learn from my mistake. I’ve been doing this with some new routines for the year which have actually started to take root. If you want me to do a video or another blog post where I go into the way I use my journal, let me know and I will!
So, let’s talk more about my results for the month. If I had to suggest an overarching theme for January, it would be Introspection. I spent a lot of quiet time this month alone thinking. Not planning, not strategizing, mostly thinking. I thought I had done all the necessary thinking about my business back in December, but apparently, there were more thoughts stuck inside of me that really wanted to break free. I finished a number of books this month, most of them were fiction reads I listened to during the day to keep myself entertained, but for the most part this month felt very quiet. It was a good quiet though, because I never ended up taking an official break from my business at the new year and I quickly realized that not taking a vacation was a grave mistake. By the end of the month before my Charmed Life Master Class launch, my sanity was hanging on by a thread! In fact, within an hour of completing all the work for the master class, my husband and I booked a vacation that we will be going to in just a few short weeks! It will be the first week off I have had since Aruba in June, and technically that was just five days off and I did a good amount of work while I was there, so not a true vacation really. So it was this stress of being worn out from 2015 added to the pressure of a major creative endeavor that left me wiped to the point that I was unable to focus on blog posts, and even creating my videos for the month was like pulling teeth. It was like I only had a certain amount of creative energy to use, and if I put it towards the master class, there was nothing left for other areas. Ultimately, I decided that it was fine, I just had to go with the flow and not get too wrapped up in what I wasn’t doing because I had something important on my plate. If you’ve ever wondered how it is that I get it all done, I think you now have your answer; I don’t always get it all done. If I can’t make it all happen, I have to identify what my priority is and focus on that, and then take it one day at a time!
So, now that we know what went wrong this month, let’s talk about some victories. Like I mentioned earlier, this month I launched my Charmed Life Master Class, a personal development course that teaches you my strategies for creating the life of your dreams. Other than the launch of the new master class which was a major victory for the month, and the success with my daily journaling, I also was able to slowly build up some positive routines. I had been very lax in November and December in terms of my daily schedule and so it was hard to get into a groove in January. I was extremely tired from being mentally tapped out and it took me a few weeks to get my regular schedule back. Thanks mostly to my journal, I was able to retrain myself to wake up early in the morning, and then I started to build up a morning routine that kept me awake all day without needing to take a nap in the afternoon. This was a major success, because I was really worried that I might never be able to wake up before 9am again! Now, I’m waking up between 6:30-7:30 with my husband and getting straight to my morning tasks. Another positive routine I have built this month is my meal planning. I have gotten back into the habit of cooking myself fresh meals instead of eating packaged food that’s filled with junk! I’m back to eating plenty of fruits and veggies, healthy snacks and I’ve been making the most drool worthy Pinterest dinners! Finally, I’ve also built up a self-care routine that involves a simple but consistent skin care regime and weekly lush baths. Overall, I am very happy with what I have accomplished this month. Although many of these items were not directly related to my business, trust me, building up these good habits and routines is going to make a world of difference in my business!
I’m often asked about how I spend my time as an online business owner. From day to day, my tasks and priorities vary since I am a one woman operation responsible for all the ins and outs of my business, but for the most part, the types of activities I preform can be broken down into one of five categories for how I spend my time. These categories are Developing New Products, Taking Care of Customers and Clients, Creating New Content and Forms of Advertising, Developing Business Systems, and Improving Current Products and Offerings. All of these categories are important priorities for my business, but on a daily basis, one may be prioritized ahead of another for a variety of reasons. For the sake of this blog post, however, I am not going to talk about them in terms of priority, instead I am going to rank them by the amount of time I spend on each overall. As you may expect, I cannot quantify exact measurements of time, nor can I break up these categories into any approximation of percentage of time spent because it can vary. So, here are the five ways I spend my time as an online entrepreneur ranked from greatest to smallest amount of time spent.
Developing New Products
An an online entrepreneur, my livelihood depends on me spending a large portion of my time developing new products because in the ever changing online market, you are only as good as your next idea! I am constantly working on brainstorming, concepting and designing new products and service offerings to help diversify my income. The way I look at it, each new project I undertake is a new venture and a new stream of income in and of itself. Since most of my products are digital, I am able to spend a dedicated amount of time developing one new product after another to add to my shop, creating variety to my offerings so that I am providing products that are interesting to a greater number of people in my community. I never expect that everyone wants all of my products, but as an online business owner I want to create more products so that everyone can find something of value in what I have to offer.
Taking Care of Customers + Clients
There is no doubt in my mind that my customers and clients are my top priority, and because of this they get a great portion of my time and energy. I spend time everyday responding to emails and comments from my customers and working on client products. It is very important to me that everyone who has purchased one of my products or receives my services get their money’s worth from me and I always want to leave my customers feeling positive about their experience working with me. This is probably one of the many reasons that I get so many repeat purchases in my shop. I cannot stress highly enough the importance of taking care of your customers. It makes such a difference to your businesses reputation and the advancement of your brand! I feel very lucky that at this moment in time, my business has not grown so large that I cannot personally handle all customer service inquiries that I receive, because it really gives me such satisfaction to be able to help my customers personally. Customer service tends to be the first thing that gets outsourced as a company grows, and I personally believe that this decision shouldn’t be taken lightly. I have seen many small and very personable businesses take a hit to their reputations once they grew because of poor management of customer service, and so I am very attuned to the needs and concerns of my customers for this very reason.
Creating New Content + Forms of Advertising
Content creation is probably the biggest task I undertake on a daily basis that yields me the least amount of direct income. Every week, I put out three blog posts, two YouTube videos, and a handful of images and tweets to social media, all for the express purpose of giving back to my community. I make very little income from these methods in proportion to the income I generate from direct means like my shop and consulting, yet, these tasks take up a significant part of my week. I cannot stress, however, how important these tasks are to my business overall. Blogging and YouTube are my direct means of communication with my community and the primary means I have for advertising my products. If I didn’t show my products in videos or explain them in blog posts, no one would know about them! And if I didn’t continuously put out high quality content to my blog that adds value to my readers or create fun and informative videos for my YouTube channel on a weekly basis, none of you would trust me enough to purchase what I was selling! You have probably heard the phrase “the proof is in the pudding” and in a lot of ways, that is how I think of my content. It’s my social proof that what I am doing and saying works and is worth your time and attention!
Developing Business Systems
I have done a whole video explaining my various business systems, so I won’t go into much detail here on them, but it has taken me months of working and organizing for me to get this far with my business administration, and this is definitely an area in my business that is frequently improving. To be honest, for me the business administration is the not so fun part of running a business, but thankfully, I spent years doing this sort of organizational work for my previous Fortune 50 employer so I happen to be very efficient at it! Because of this, I am able to get away with paying relatively little attention to this area of my business for the majority of the quarter, and then I may spend a whole day organizing and working out important knitty gritty business things like taxes and filing and fulfilling my obligations as a business owner.
Improving Current Products + Offerings
The ongoing improvement of my existing products is definitely a priority for my business and although my offerings are mostly digital, I still always like to make sure that I am fixing any issues or flaws in my designs as I become aware of them. For someone who may run a business with physical products, I would assume that this subject may be of greater importance as it also ties into quality control, sourcing materials and the ongoing struggle to keep costs low and quality high! For me, however, this is the area of my business where I spend the least amount of time overall, although time spent is certainly not a representation of priority. I take quality control with my products extremely seriously, and whenever I am made aware of any issue with my designs, even something as small as a typo, I immediately act to correct the issue. This ties into good customer service for me, but also an ongoing effort to retain a premium feel to my products.
I hope this gives you some more insight into how I work as an online entrepreneur and perhaps some areas that you may want to be focusing on as well if you run an online business of any kind! I’d love to hear your thoughts and if there are specific areas of your business that you spend a great deal of time on, or perhaps not enough time on, I’d love to know what those are and how I could possibly help you by making those tasks easier or more streamlined! Don’t hesitate to leave me some comments below!
xoxo,
This article was first published on Strange & Charmed on April 27th, 2015 and being reposted as business inspiration for the New Year!
With 2016 right around the corner, it’s the perfect time to start giving some deep thought to your business planning for the new year. Yesterday I held a live business planning session over on my YouTube channel where I shared my strategy for wrapping up 2015 and starting 2016 strong. In order to help organize the information, I also put together a helpful study guide for the attendees to help them keep track of their thoughts and plans throughout the event. If you are a business owner or an aspiring business owner who is seriously contemplating starting a business in the new year, I highly encourage you to check out the video. It is about an hour and a half long, but packed with some excellent insight. Definitely time well spent in my opinion for anyone who wants to make sure they have covered all their bases for business planning.
Make sure to grab my free study guide to follow along with the video. You can download it from my Digital Resource Library. If you are already subscribed to the library, head on over to the library home page and download the file, or else sign yourself up here! And be sure to follow the video to the end to get a special limited time offer that expires on December 12th, 2015!
I hope you have had a successful 2015 in your life and business and together I want to ensure we have an even more productive year in 2016! Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have after you finish the video and I hope that you can I can work together in the future to make your business the best it can be!
Use this Periscope Script to gain more followers + My $5 Must Have Periscope TOOL
Since July I have been doing weekly broadcasts on the up and coming social broadcasting platform Periscope. I’ve even done a YouTube tutorial on how to use the app with suggestions and tips for growing your following. Today I have over 1,500 and being active and growing on this community building platform, I’ve seen a lot of scopes. Pretty early on I adopted a script for using the platform, which has served me well as I broadcast because sharing on Periscope is much different than any other platform and has specific challenges and barriers you need to make sure to navigate if you are trying to host an informative and engaging live cast!
1. Preplan + announce your Periscope broadcast to other channels of social media you use. First of all, it’s very important that you do a bit of prep work for your live cast before it begins. You will want to have an idea for the topic and content you will be sharing on and even make some notes to help you stay on topic for the duration of your scope. Next, you will want to share information on your topic and when you will be on Periscope chatting before your event. Use whatever communication channels you have like your blog, social media or email list and make sure to provide details for how people can find the event when it begins!
2. Create a clever headline for your periscope chat and use a custom hashtag as well as some popular topical hashtags to help your scope get discovered! Good headlines always help to capture the attention of your audience. Make sure your headline is descriptive yet engaging, and make sure to use relevant hashtags so that your headline is searchable. Remember, Periscope integrates with Twitter so you want to make sure that your headline and hashtags would make an interesting tweet to grab peoples attention!
3. Introduce yourself, what you do and where people can find you online. To help me with this, I have developed a set of cue cards that I even hold up at the start of the event and at various times with short links and info to help people find and follow me outside of periscope. It’s much easier than having to repeat or spell out my handles or important links I want them to be aware of!
4. Say hello + engage your audience with shoutouts and calls to action. You can ask your audience to tap to give you hearts, to share the broadcast or to subscribe to you if they aren’t already. This buys you some key time at the start of your event while people log on.
5. Introduce your topic + reintroduce yourself to new people who have jumped on. Remember that as you broadcast, new people are constantly jumping on and current viewers may also be leaving, so even if your viewer count remains much the same throughout your broadcast, you may have completely different people watching you at different points in time. Make sure to stop regularly during your broadcast to quickly reintroduce yourself, explain the topic of the chat and recap any important points you have made!
My $5 Must Have Periscope Tool
After my first Periscope broadcast I knew that I was going to need some sort of stand to help me hold my iPhone while I was chatting live. For my first event, I had created a makeshift stand from books, but it unfortunately wasn’t the easiest setup! Not long after this, I actually picked up a very inexpensive iPhone accessory called a gooseneck mount from a store I frequent called Five Below! This mount, which was actually meant to secure your smartphone to your car windshield or dashboard was the perfect stand for my Periscope broadcasts and it only cost me $5! I love it because it holds my iPhone in place while I talk, let’s me go hands free, and allows me to keep my phone plugged into the charger while I broadcast to prevent my phone from dying during a long scope! If you don’t have a local Five Below, here is a similar stand I found online for less than $10!
Looking for more information on how to use Periscope to support your online business?
On Wednesday October 21st at 8pm eastern, join me for a LIVE #CharmedBiz Chatover on my YouTube channel where I will be discussing how to use Periscope for your brand with two of my favorite Periscopers, Anne Samoilov and Mandy Jean! Anne, Mandy and myself each have different strategies that we use for Periscope and so if you have been questioning whether or not to get started scoping or if you have had some trouble gaining traction on the platform, this content is going to be very valuable to you! Make sure to join us live to get your specific questions answered and I will also have the replay up on my channel for future reference!
How to add passive income to your blog or business
As some of you may already know, the majority of my business income is passive, at least a good 75-80%. So I know a thing or two about passive income strategies! If you aren’t sure what passive income means, let me explain. Passive income means that a business is making money and sales without direct action, i.e., making money in your sleep! For example, a large part of my business comes from my shop which sells digital products, courses and programs. Once I have gone through the effort to create a product, because it is digital, I can list it on my shop and sell it indefinitely without having to do any work. The system is automatic, customers come to my shop, they look around, they check out and they have instant access to my downloads without me ever having to get involved with the process. Once the system is in place, I let it run with very little observation.
Having a business with a majority passive income is an amazing blessing, but one that took me a lot of time and effort to create. Nothing comes overnight with any business, and behind the scenes, I do ongoing work to promote my brand and put those key systems into place so that they can continue to generate income for me. Now, if this sounds like an awesome way to make money, I’ll tell you, it is! There is nothing more exciting then waking up in the morning to see that you’ve made sales and income while you were sleeping. Although my business took a good amount of time to get to this level, there are actually a few things you can do to get the ball rolling and add passive income to your overall business. If you are someone who runs a shop where you craft or resell products, you have an active, hands on business. Perhaps you are lucky enough to have some assistants so you are not the only person fulfilling orders and getting product created, but whether you have a team or you are a solopreneur, there are ways you can add passive income into your mostly active business to bring in some much needed additional revenue.
Two easy strategies for how any business can implement passive income!
Create an info or digital product: Many people that sell physical products miss some great passive income opportunities by not branching out and creating digital or info products that go along with their business. If you already have people coming to your site or shop, you are missing opportunities for easy sales of passive digital products. It’s all a matter of drawing on your strengths and knowledge base to craft a product or resource that makes sense for your brand. Here are some examples to get your brain thinking!
An Etsy shop owner who sells craft supplies can write an ebook with a few project ideas using their items.
A social media consultant could design a set of printable worksheets covering key action items and social media strategies that anyone starting out in social media could use.
A blogger could create a set of downloadable design templates for new bloggers to use to easily craft posts and lay out images.
Incorporate affiliate networks:Affiliate networks give online creators the ability to monetize links to specific products or services that the creator may be promoting. For example, when a beauty blogger writes a post outlining a makeup routine, if they are part of an affiliate network, they can include links to the specific products that they used in their tutorial. If someone reading that post wants to purchase the items, they can use the links and in doing so, the blogger makes a small commission (usually a few percent) of the purchase. Affiliate networks are great because they can give you access to a wide variety of products sold online and it’s easy enough to add a link into a blog post, video description or social media comment and once that link is in place, if anyone buys a product using the link, you earn income from it. Affiliate networks are a popular way for bloggers to earn income from their efforts, but even an online business owner can use affiliate networks to help boost revenue. If you watched my business photography webinar, you know that styled photographs are an important tool for helping to generate sales online. As a business owner, if you are executing those styled photographs and using peripheral items and accessories to set the scene, you can use affiliate links in your shop listings or on your social media posts to monetize the items you are using in your images as well! You’re doing the work to create those awesome images so you mine as well monetize every inch of them!
Additionally, as online business owners, we use a lot of tools and software to help us build and run our businesses. Again, sharing affiliate links to the camera you use or your office printer can also generate income for your business and help fellow small business owners or those getting started to understand the professional grade equipment used by your successful business. People always want to know where you got x accessory or which computer you use or even the name of your website host. You mine as well make a commission from recommending these products to your customers or audience!
Looking for more tips on how to add additional income to your business or blog?
If you are looking for more ideas on how to maximize your income from either a blog, business or social media presence, check out the Income Blueprint in my Empire Building Online Business Program. It’s packed with ideas on how to grow your business income and exactly what you need to know about online businesses if you want to get started!
I hope this post gave you some ideas for how you can easily implement passive income into your existing blog or business. If you thought that passive income wasn’t an option for your business, I challenge you to use the examples provided in this post and think of a way you can either use affiliate links or create a simple digital product to add to your product or services line up! It may take a bit of creativity but I do believe that any business can add in passive income and I know any business would be glad to have the extra income!
