Pep Talks For Side Hustlers

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Join me and Lauren Bellon of Essential Oils How To for Part 2 of our interview! My fave quote from this episode: “Growing your business is growing yourself. Your business is only going to be as successful as YOU believe it to be, and it’s only going to be as successful as you have the skills to make it, and it’s only going to be as successful as the network you have to grow it.” In this episode, we discuss: How Lauren manages her time as a busy mom of two, one of whom has special needs, when her schedule can change on a whim. The one thing that’s more important than “HOW TO” to grow your business. What to focus on if you only have one hour a day for your side hustle and what to prioritize first. What parts of her business she DIY-ed and what she outsourced, and w

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Join me and Lauren Bellon of Essential Oils How To as we talk about how she transitioned her essential oils business from side hustle to a full-time gig that supports her family, including her son with special needs. We talk about: What types of businesses are best for side hustlers. How she was able to take a two-year sabbatical from building her business and it her business, team and income still grew. What characteristics that the people that make a real income from their side hustle have vs. those people that struggle. Why it’s so important to surround yourself with successful entrepreneurs. Her secret to building your side hustle when you don’t have an email list or a huge social media following. The two most important things you can provide to your potentia

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! So what do you do if you find yourself with a roster full of the wrong clients? Clients that see you as an order-taker rather than an expert who can get them achieve their goals? First, ask yourself if you see yourself as an order-taker or an expert who can help them achieve their goals. Because it starts with you. You teach people how to treat you. When I first started freelancing, I felt like an imposter because I never formally learned to code. I didn’t feel like I know enough to call myself an expert. So why would my clients treat me like one? Once I worked on my mindset and began to believe that I had more value to offer than simply changing a font color on demand, I started to raise my prices. And it didn’t happen overnight, it’s been a slow progression from feelin

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! I stumbled upon how to find the right clients quite by accident. I was so frustrated and burnt out by working with the wrong clients that I stopped altogether and created the 5 Day Website Challenge, a free video tutorial series that teaches female business owners how to build the kind of website that helps them grow their email lists so that they can use email marketing and automation to sell their products and services. And I was totally caught off guard when people who had signed up for my free training started asking me to build websites for them. Why? I’d think. I’m showing you exactly how to do it yourself – for free?!?! That’s when I figured out that I was positioning myself as someone who can give people specific results rather than a commodity. When people were

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! If you’ve ever struggled to find clients, you’re going to love this blog post. In it, you’ll learn: Why you’re attracting the wrong clients (or no clients). How to attract the right clients. How to turn your existing wrong clients into dream clients. And I’ll give you some resources to help you grow your freelance web design business. Before we dive in, the reason I’m even writing this is because I was reviewing a survey I created on my website asking web designers what their number one biggest struggle is when it comes to building their business. I had to do a double-take when I saw that over 500 people responded to this survey that I had barely promoted! As I was reviewing these survey responses, I had a major a-ha moment which I’ll share with you a bit later. The ov

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Expenses Breakdown Tools: AccessAlly (Membership plugin for all of my courses) – $79.00 Acuity Scheduling (Done For You Consultations) – $10.00 Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, etc.) $64.48 Bluehost (Web Hosting) – $30.87 Dropbox (File Storage) – $19.99 FreeConferenceCall.com (Coaching & Client Calls) – $3.00 GoDaddy (Domain Names) – $5.17 GSuite (wp-bff.com Email) – $10.76 Infusionsoft (email marketing, automation, e-commerce & customer management) – $321.43 ManageWP (WordPress Site Management for Clients & WordPress Protection Package) – $88.09 Templates, Graphics, Fonts, Etc. – $54.81 Zapier – $15.00 Misc Plugin License Renewals (for clients to be passed on to them) – $257.90 Marketing: Facebook (Ads for Website Monetization Master Class) – $493.02 LinkTre

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my February Income Report! Each month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and show you exactly how much I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Important Things That Happened in February I opened enrollment for Websites That Make Money for the first time since the beta launch last fall. I purchased Amy Porterfield’s Webinars That Convert Course and spent a significant amount of time following it to the letter in order to create and promote the webinar. It also helped me to craft my presentation for my first live speaking event as well. I held a webinar to promote Serious Side Hustlers Membership Program again in February. I booked two new Done For You clients in February and began to test my new Do

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! So, I don’t think this will come as a shock to anyone that knows me personally, but I’m absent-minded. I have a terrible memory. I can’t leave the house without having to come back inside at least once, often twice to find my keys or my phone or my laptop charger. I’m awful at simple math, not because I’m not smart, but because I’m impatient, not wanting to take the time to really think it through. And when it comes to anything tech, my attitude is “try it and see what happens.” And I accept that’s who I am. Sure, I’d like to improve, because I often create more work for myself, which on one hand is totally inefficient, but on the other hand, I often learn quite a bit when I have to fix something that I’ve broken. And that’s why I know so much about WordPress!! But about

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! If you’re anything like me, you’re building a website and an audience with the Free 5 Day Website Challenge because you want FREEDOM – financial freedom and a flexible schedule. About 4 years ago, I began the slow journey toward freedom, going from just a strong desire with no concrete plans to building a business that’s going to be my full-time job at the end of the year. This story isn’t “I had an email list of zero people and then I started marketing the Free 5 Day Website Challenge in Facebook groups, got my first subscriber and first affiliate commission and now I’m quitting my day job.” I’ve told you that story before, and it’s the truth, but it’s not the whole truth. It leaves out the slow, grinding start. The iterations. The doubt balanced out by the burning desi

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Hey, BFFs!!! So in my Free 5-Day Website Challenge, I kinda feel like I did a bait and switch on you… I lure you into the Free 5-Day Website Challenge with the promise of helping you to build a website. And I totally deliver on that promise… but… At about Day 3 of the Challenge, I hop up onto my soapbox and tell you that you have to build an email list. Like, I don’t care what your business is, you have to build an email list. The whole entire point of me even teaching you how to build your website is to give you a mechanism for building your email list. Pretty sneaky, right??? Building the actual WordPress site is the easy part. Getting the design, look, and feel the way you want, a little bit harder, but still totally doable. Writing your content and adding it to the s

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! If you’re brand new to side hustling and building your own website, you don’t know what you don’t know, right? That’s what this episode is all about – making sure that your website is optimized to help you grow your side hustle! Today I’m going to cover 5 common mistakes that I see on websites so that you know what to avoid or fix on your own site in the future! MISTAKE #1 – NOT HAVING ENOUGH MAILING LIST OPT-IN OPPORTUNITIES Have you ever said this? “I don’t want a pop-up because I think they are so annoying.”“I don’t want to ask people for anything, I just want them to read my content.” What’s the real reason that you want someone to come to your site? You want that person to join your mailing list or to buy something from you!! Even if you really are just blogging as

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Today we’re talking about what I think every only business owner should consider investing in during their second year of business. So as a side hustler, what I want for you to have the ability to be strategic about how you grow your business, and have the choice between investing time and investing money not coming from a place of fear like I had, but from a place of confidence and knowledge. So in my first 6 months, I invested as little money as I could and as much time as I could in my business. At the time, I told myself it was because I wasn’t sure if WP+BFF was going to be a success so I didn’t want to sink a lot of money into it, but I now see that was my fear of failure guiding my decisions, not a strategic decision based on reality. 1: Professional Photography M

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! So let me set the scene for you. Picture me and about 20 women in their 30s sitting in front of small easels around a long table in a beautiful historic home with a blank canvas, 3 brushes and a palette in front of us. Out of the 20 women, I know the bride-to-be and one other coworker. Everyone else seems to know each other… I tend to be shy and feel a little anxiety in situations like this, but I’m getting a TON better every time I do it, so I start some small-talk with the girl sitting next to me, “Hi, I’m Shannon. I work with Molly – how do you know her?” I know how totally weird it can be to bring all your friends from all your different compartments of your life together at once and just cross your fingers that they get along. This is going pretty well! So the art t

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! oday we’re talking about money, and how your mindset around it can affect the how fast – or slow – your side hustle grows! It’s a little bit nerve-wracking for me to spend big chunks of money my business. I’ve got this thing about money… I want to hold onto it and see those numbers sit steadily in my bank account. It makes me feel secure. We didn’t have financial stability growing up. My parents were teenagers when they had my older sister. We moved around quite a bit for my dad’s job and by the time we settled in Ohio when I was about 8 years old, both my parents worked to pay the mortgage and feed and clothe me and my sisters. There was rarely enough money to last the month, and I remember lots of stress over how we were going to pay all the bills. Money ultimately bro

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Yesterday, I shared with you that any time I focused on making money rather than serving people, my growth totally slowed. And that’s because I didn’t fully understand the nuances of online marketing, and I didn’t understand them because of MISTAKE #7 – NOT PAYING FOR SHORTCUTS. I have a tendency to want to learn everything about everything and do it all myself and spend tons of time on trial and error. Don’t get me wrong, I REALLY think it’s important to learn the tech that runs your business (#duh, that’s what I teach!), but once you learn it and understand it, it doesn’t always make sense for you to keep doing it. But if you don’t know what you don’t know, then you risk continuing to make the same mistakes over and over again. That’s why it’s so important to invest in

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Yesterday I shared with you that I put my side hustle before my family all the time and how hard it was to change directions on that. Today, I’m sharing number six: FOCUSING ON MONEY AND NOT ON PEOPLE. This totally has to do with boundaries and a lack of confidence and a lack of clarity about my offer. I have people tell me all the time that they wish there was a way to pay me for the 5-Day Challenge. Or for the support they got from me in my Facebook group. And I would think, man, if I had even charged $10 for the 5-Day Challenge I’d have made $10,000 dollars. Or if I create a course and sell it for $297 and I have to sell x courses to make x dollars – then I spend all my time creating that course and zero time nurturing and interacting with my group – and it all goes t

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Yesterday, I shared with you that I didn’t try to get enough quality sleep because I put my side hustle first, which left me exhausted and stressed. But the fifth biggest mistake I made on the way to side hustle success is SPENDING TOO LITTLE TIME WITH MY FAMILY. I might have been in the same room or car with my husband, but I was certainly paying zero attention to what he was saying when my nose is in my Macbook or glued to my iPhone. Countless times he’s been talking to me and I listen to the first 5 words, then start typing again, then realize he’s waiting for a response and then say “Wait, what was that again?” I try to feign misunderstanding, but he knows the truth – I just stopped listening. Or I’d ask him a question, immediately stop paying attention for his answe

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Yesterday, I shared with you that I didn’t validate my first paid product idea, which resulted in me spending over 100 hours creating a product that just 2 people bought. Ouch. But the fourth biggest mistake I made on the way to side hustle success is NOT SLEEPING ENOUGH. I’d stared at a computer screen ALL DAY at my day job, and then all night at home working on my side hustle. My eyeballs literally hurt. I Googled exercises for eye strain and practiced those just to get some relief. I started to see WAY more lines around my eyes which I’ve decided to blame on working too much. I swear it has nothing to do with me turning 39 this year because I wouldn’t be aging at all if I had gotten enough sleep while I was side hustling (that’s what I like to tell myself anyway). The

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Yesterday, I shared with you that the second biggest mistake I made was going it alone for too long and not joining a mastermind group to support my business journey. You can listen to that episode here. Today, I’m sharing the third biggest mistake I made, which is not validating my idea and creating a product that my audience wasn’t ready for. I started with a free 5-Day Website Challenge that teaches how to build a WordPress site from scratch to grow an email list. Then I built a course called WP*OMG – Operation Marketing Genius which teaches how to build an online course or membership site and how to create all the marketing sequences to automate getting people into the course. Sounds like a logical next step, right? WRONG. I miscalculated. It launched to crickets. Pe

Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Yesterday we talked about the number one mistake I made in my business that really caused me a lot of stress in the early years of my business – you can go back and listen to that episode at www.peptalksforsidehustlers.com/36. The second biggest mistake I made was WAITING TOO LONG TO JOIN A MASTERMIND GROUP. Just because I’m a one woman shop doesn’t mean I have to carry the weight of this business on my shoulders. I had come across One Woman Shop while researching ways to grow my business, perused their membership, and didn’t do anything. A few months later I was nominated for their 100 Best Sites for Solopreneurs list. I perused their membership again and did nothing. Then I saw how much money I was blowing on Facebook ads vs. how much traffic I was getting from that on