Blog - Paige Brunton

Passive Income Through Digital Products: Worth It?

Paige Brunton — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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Ever wondered how much money people REALLY make selling digital products?

Yes, there are some pretty impressive success stories online…but is it realistic to that you can achieve the same result? 🤔

Entrepreneurs tend to share their highlight reels instead of the whole story.

As someone who has been in the business for nearly a decade, I want to share some hidden truths of the industry.

Today, I'm sharing some eye-opening revenue numbers and hard-earned lessons from my 8 years in the digital product game.

Plus, I'll give you some honest advice on whether it's even worth your time and effort to get into this business.

And if you're undecided on which digital product idea is worth it, keep reading cause I've got tons of proven ideas for you. 📋

How Much Money Can You Make Selling Digital Products?

First, lets take a look at whether these products actually sell. Then we can decide if they are worth the effort of doing so.

After scouring the internet for the public numbers on a variety of different digital product types, here's what I found:

1. Online Courses

Amy Porterfield shared on the Cubicle to CEO podcast about her recent $7.5M course launch. 💵
Okay, Amy is obviously at the top of her game but courses making millions is not THAT unusual of an occurrence:
Tiago Forte, on the Billion Dollar Creator podcast, revealed he makes $2M - $3M annually from courses. 🧑‍🏫

2. Memberships

Melissa Wood Health has 92,000 members at $14.95/month, totaling $1.3M/month or $16.5M/year.
📈 Check out this Harvard Business School publication to read all the details!
Curous what her membership entails? Videos, audio, and written content related to health.

3. Wedding Signage & Invitation Templates

Blush Paperie Shop has an Etsy & E-commerce store that collectively have made over 134,067 sales, averaging $14.42 per sale (that’s an estimate), totaling $1.93M since 2017. 💌

4. Website Templates

BigCatCreative is a fabulous website template shop. They share on their site that they have sold over 7,000 templates at an average of $297, totaling just over $2M. 🖥️
Tonic Site Shop is another website template success story. They have served over 10,000 customers at an estimated average order price of $1,100, they are totaling at $11M.

5. Legal Templates

The Contract Shop has sold over 5,000 templates at $400 each (average estimated purchase price), totaling $2M.

By the way, if you’re looking for product ideas, there are 5 of them right there! 👆

Here’s my full list of digital product ideas:

Online courses
Memberships
Wedding signage & invitation templates
Website templates
Legal templates
Copy templates
Font licenses
Stock photos
Calculators & Spreadsheets
Branding templates
Party game printables
Lightroom presets
Notion templates

So, do these digital products make money?

Yes!

But are they worth doing?

Well, maybe. 🤔

These are the stories of HIGHLY successful digital product sellers. How realistic is it that you’ll actually build something like that yourself?

Let’s look a little bit closer….

What do all these digital shop success stories have in common?
What’s the one thing that they ALL have that took them years to build?
What is the ONE thing that is the foundation of their business & without which they would sell nothing?

The Secret to Success: Building an Audience 📣

That’s right - the common thread among all these success stories is an audience. Building an audience is honestly half the battle. Without an audience, your digital products simply won't sell so this is a non-negotiable for success in this field.

So, Is It Even Worth the Effort? 🧐

If you're not willing to put effort into audience building, then honestly, no.

Creating a product with no one to sell it to is a waste of time.

But don't throw in the towel just yet. Building an audience is not impossible, and we have a massive advantage, or “secret weapon” available to all of us, no matter our budget or connections.

Your Secret Weapon: Leverage 📚

I recently read an incredible book, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, which talks about leverage. According to the author Eric Jorgenson, these are the three broad categories of leverage:

Labor:
Other humans working for you. It's the oldest form of leverage but actually not a great one. Why? because managing other people can be complicated and requires tremendous leadership skills.
Money:
Take a look at the richest people: bankers, politicians in corrupt countries… essentially people who move large amounts of money around. If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more of it easier than managing more people. So this form of leverage is about managing large amounts of money, which scales very well.
Products with No Marginal Cost of Replication:
This is the most democratic of the three categories. We’re talking about things like books and media.
In the past, we were only able to reach certain groups of people but new forms of leverage (podcasts, tweets, youtube) are changing this.
Especially because they do not require anyone else’s permission. Even if you do not have money to manage OR people to work for you, you still have media aka content creation. THIS is actually the most effective and easy to access form of leverage that any of us has.

Content creation is the most effective and easiest-to-access form of leverage any of us have.

Join My Masterclass! 🎓

Next week, I'm hosting a 90-minute masterclass on How to Grow an Email List of Buyers (Without spending a second on social or a cent on ads).

We'll be covering:

The pros & cons of common marketing strategies
Shocking secret Instagram following to revenue numbers that will make your jawl hit the floor
The Backwards Content Strategy: What it is & why it's the secret weapon to online sales
So so much more! 🎉

I only host this specific training once a year, and it's happening live.

So, if you're lucky enough to be reading this before the event, register ASAP! I can't wait to see you there! 👇

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Selling Digital Products in 2024? Read This First.

Paige Brunton — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

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I totally understand: you desperately want to sell your digital products, but all the marketing & sales methods out there seem impossible or MASSIVELY time-consuming. ⏳

You've probably heard that you should build your email list in order to sell digital products.

But when you look at your list size, and how long you've been working at growing it, you just think…

“At the rate I'm going, I'll be 72 before I have a list big enough to sell to.” 👵🏻

And then you remember, you're an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneurs entire job is to see problems, and find a creative solution around them.

Thinking outside the box is basically half the entrepreneurial job description.

So if everyone says…

"Build an email list to sell your digital products"

And you think…

"That's never going to happen!"

You start thinking of clever, outside-the-box solutions, like any good entrepreneur does.

You consider the following.

Maybe social media is the answer…

It's a free tool which tons of people use to pitch products and make sales through. So it definitely has potential!

Or even better, affiliates!

If someone has already built the perfect audience who would want your product, they could just speak about it for you and do the promo & selling.

With affiliates you figure, you're cutting the work time of building the audience down to nothing, because you're just being savvy and instead of spending years building an audience, you're immediately getting in front of a perfectly aligned, existing audience.

Genius! 🙌

You could also consider running ads to get sales…

Of course, that comes with cost, but you need to spend money to make money right?

Not so fast.

Let's look at all these 3 sales solutions in depth and evaluate, just HOW good are they for selling digital products. What are the pros and cons of each, and which one is actually worth you investing time & effort into?

First, a little public service announcement 📢

I'm hosting a live masterclass in just about a week on "How to build an email list of buyers" and you're reading this, it's basically tailor made for you.

It's 90 minutes long, so we're going WAY more in depth than I can in a single blog post.

I only host this masterclass ONCE A YEAR, so if you're lucky enough to be reading this before the event, take this as your sign to register.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Let's talk about what social media is good for.

Discovery 👀
This is all about finding new audiences & new audiences finding you. If you're smart enough to focus on producing content with whatever the latest feature of a social platform is, that platform is going to reward you with a lot of new eyeballs.
Social platforms are all competing against each other. For example, Instagram released reels to compete with TikTok. So if you created reels right when Instagram released it & therefore were an early adopter of reels, you would greatly benefit from Instagram pushing your content out to new people, and be discovered and grow a lot as a result.
Social media is the very "top of the funnel" as we call it in the marketing world. It's where you get found by new people. It also is possibly the best tool for this next extremely valuable business asset….
Relationship Building 🤝
Nothing is better than social for bringing people into snippets of your life, sharing your personality, and building the know-like-trust factor with that new audience.

So if social is great for building a new audience and relationship, it must be fabulous for sales too, right?

Oddly, this is not the case. Here's what the data from Social Insider says:

So if you feel like your people are seeing less of your posts, you're not crazy, it is actually happening.

Campaign Monitor also found that “4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something compared to 0.59% from social media.”

Social is great for discovery & relationship building but not great for sales.

It obviously could be that during a sale or launch, you want a lot of people to go do one thing at one time: buy.

If your posts are only reaching 7% of your following, they're not going to see the multitude of marketing messages and have the number of touch points they need to make a buying decision.

The problem with social is: A fraction of your posts are making it to your people, you don't have a direct connection to them, and as such, social isn’t typically where sales happen.

Okay so if social isn't the answer for selling your digital products, what about affiliates?

Pros:

They already have an audience that you can basically just "borrow" during your sales period.
The model has already been proven by people who sell digital products. You can probably think of a few really successful affiliate programs selling courses and templates, and you may have even heard about how I used affiliates to raise my businesses revenue by $400k last year.

BUT there's one big drawback you need to understand. QUALITY MATTERS.

Kind of like when last year I bought a cheap vacuum which within 2 months failed to actually suck anything up, I then realized I had skimped on quality and finally ponyed up the money for a Dyson which works like a charm. 😅

Just like there's a difference in vacuum quality, there's a difference in affiliate quality too.

When people ask me to affiliate for products, I have a list of about 15 questions I ask them first. One of them is:

"What was your conversion rate on your last sale?"

My audience drives an incredible amount of sales for products I affiliate for. One time my audience literally drove 89% of an entire course launches sales.

And as an experienced affiliate I want to know, if I'm going to send a ton of traffic to something, is it going to convert?

So I don't affiliate for new products or untested items. Again, that's not my only criteria, I look at a LOT more than just that, but a stellar conversion rate is a minimum bar. Now of course, I'm not the only potential affiliate out there and not everyone thinks the way I do. But I hope what I look for does tell you something:

Experienced affiliates look to affiliate for proven products which sell well.

And if you're a beginner in selling digital products, you're unlikely to be able to get quality affiliates. You can probably get a few other entrepreneurs newer to business, but they tend to take…

A lot of time to manage because they're inexperienced and
Aren't all that great at actually driving traffic to you.

So while I do think an affiliate program is an incredibly effective marketing strategy, I would hold off on it until you have the track record which experienced affiliates are going to expect, as otherwise you're going to put a lot of time & energy into a strategy which, without the right affiliates, is likely to produce pretty mediocre results.

When you get your product converting well and have a ton of social proof & success stories and have a team to manage the affiliates, that's a good time to add affiliates.

Okay so now that I've just destroyed your social media and affiliate dreams…🙈

(sorry, but I want to share my honest opinions, which while maybe not massively fun to hear now, I want to stay in integrity and share the truth with you... )

What about ads?

Let's look at the math on that:

I covered this in my last blog, so I'll run through this very quickly here, but do feel free to read my blog from the other day if you want the longer explanation.

Ads cost on average $8 - $12 per quality lead right now.
So to build a 1,000 person list that costs $8,000 - $12,000.
Plus the cost of ads management for 3 months is easily $9,000,
So to run ads you're looking at a cost of $17,000 - $21,000 to get started with ads.

You obviously need to have a fairly high-priced digital product to make an ROI on that cost AND again, you're going to want to be darn sure your thing converts well before investing $20,000 to get eyeballs on it.

If you have $20,000 and a well converting product, ads are great. But I realize most beginners do not have that kind of budget, so ads tend to be a non-starter for most of my audience.

So... if ads, social & affiliates aren't great options, what the heck ARE you supposed to do?

Remember how we talked about an email list earlier?

And how building it is time-consuming & difficult, so an outside-the-box-thinking entrepreneur looks for other options?

The truth is this: the stats don't lie.

An email list is the most effective sales tool we have. 90%+ of my revenue comes from my email list, and that's the same for more successful digital product entrepreneurs.

Your creative solution to getting sales shouldn't be to pick a less effective strategy like ads, affiliates or social, you should put that creative energy into finding a better list building solution.

For 90 minutes I'm going to explain the complete strategy for list building to sell digital products. I'm hosting a live masterclasS:

How to build an email list of buyers (without spending a second on social or a cent on adS

This masterclass is happening live, so if you're lucky enough to be reading this before the event, take this as your sign to stop trying to cut corners and instead invest your time into learning how list building is done properly. 👇

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How to Grow Your Email List

Paige Brunton — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

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Have you noticed this too? It REALLY annoys me!

All the online experts say that to build your email list you should "share your freebie with your following."

Completely forgetting the fact that not everyone has an 100k Instagram following, and if your followers only consist of your 300 family & friends and not potential buyers, sharing your freebies with them isn't going to be the game changer you hoped for.

Next the experts give advice like...

🥸 (Expert) "Run ads to your freebies."

👩‍💻 (You) "That sounds expensive…"

🥸 "Post your freebie in a Facebook group."

👩‍💻 "That’s not allowed by the group rules."

🥸 "Just be active on Instagram daily."

👩‍💻 "Sorry, my mental well-being says that’s a hard no."

…So you’re left feeling…😤

Just know you're NOT crazy or alone. Experts online seem to love dishing out very impractical list-building advice, and I'm here to change that.

So if you're feeling like your list growth is going SO slow.

Read this blog till the end cause I'll spill the beans on my exact strategy which works, even if you're a complete beginner.

This is the exact strategy which has led to over 60,000 opt-ins to my list over the years.

Let me just note, not one of my social channels has anywhere near those follower numbers, so it obviously didn't come from Instagram or TikTok.

Let's get right into it!

Okay so we already know the problem: the advice to "share your freebie with your audience" doesn't produce that many email subscribers if you have no audience.

This is what I call the "traffic" problem.

A percentage of your traffic who sees your freebie will love it and convert to an email subscriber. But if you have next to no traffic, it'll result in next to no subscribers. That's why your email list currently likely consists of 2 people plus your darling supportive mother. 👵🏻

Now the one thing the list building experts do get right is the advice to create a freebie, because it is true that almost no one really cares about your call to action to "subscribe to my newsletter" and giving away some useful freebie will significantly up the conversion rate from people seeing the opt-in call to action to people actually getting on your email list.

Creating a freebie is just one ingredient, not the entire recipe.

If you just create a freebie and that's it and don't focus also on the traffic side of things, it's almost a complete waste of time because you're missing the traffic piece.

only with traffic will your list actually grow.

So many people think:

“oh my freebie must be terrible, I need to create a new one. No one is opt-ing in so obviously I created the wrong one."

99% of the time, that's not actually true and you're solving the wrong problem. That's why some business owners have 7 different freebies they spent months creating and their email list is still sitting at 32 people.

The problem isn't that your freebie idea is terrible, the problem is you don't have traffic going to the freebie.

Remember in summer camp when your counselors would create a sugary explosion by dropping a few Mentos into a Coke bottle and watching it explode?

Your list growth is like the mentos +coke experiment.

Your freebie is the coke. Your traffic is the mentos. And only when the two are mixed together do you get the explosion of growth on your email list.

If you have one without the other, you have... well, two individually tasty yet unhealthy items. Not an explosion.

Now for some wild reason, the two ingredients needed for our explosion seems to be conveniently forgotten by many who teach how to build a list.

When experts tell you to create a freebie and then promote it and you're thinking "Promote it to who?! I don't have an audience." just know, you're not crazy, they're just only explaining half of how list-building works.

So what can we do about this traffic problem?

If you have attempted to do what the experts say and "share your freebie with your following”, you've either already or are soon about to realize that all your friends & family probably aren't your ideal clients and the vast majority just aren't therefore interested in your freebie.

OR you post to your businesses social media account which maybe have a grand total of 300 followers and get a grand total of 1 opt-in.

the reason this happens is because of conversion rates.

Not every social media follower, even if they're interested in your topic will opt-in when you tell them to on social media. You're likely to get just a couple opt-ins from a 300 person social following. And that's when you realize you have a longggg way to go!

If you have a social following of 100,000 then yeah sure, just posting to social will get you the opt-ins you need, but if that's not the case, this is another big waste of time for most business owners.

So how do we get the mentos, AKA the traffic so that someone actually visits your opt-in page and therefore you get subscribers?

If you hear this next piece of terrible advice from an expert, I would honestly walk directly out the closest door and don't trust a word more that person says ever again.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about ads.

Ads are not a beginners game with a beginners budget.

At the moment, getting quality leads from ads is costing around $8 - $12 per lead on average.

Yes you can get leads for $1, but those are not what we call "quality" leads.

I spoke to a lady who had built a list of $1 leads and she had kind of indicated:

"well people must just be running ads wrong if they're getting $10 leads, I can get them so much cheaper."

To which I asked how many of her $1 leads have actually bought her product?

Her answer? None.

If you're a smart entrepreneur, you know that the goal isn't to get the cheapest leads possible, the goal is to get quality leads who will actually buy your offer. And when I chat with mastermind friends who do actually turn their quality leads into sales, their leads are costing about $8-$12 per lead.

Next we need to do a little math:

Say you want to build a 1,000 person email list, with ads at $8-$12/lead.
That'll cost you $8,000 - $12,000 (for the leads alone).
You will also have to pay an ads management fee. If you want someone decent, the minimum will be $3,000 per month. They always want you to sign up for a starting contract of 3 months.

If you choose to run ads to build your list, expect to spend around $17,000 - $21,000 to start.

See what I mean about ads not being a beginners game? 👀

If your business can support that start-up cost, incredible, go run ads. However, if that's feeling a little out of your budget, keep reading.

So if posting to your own social media doesn't work and running ads isn't right unless you can risk loosing $20k to start... what can you do?

On July 10th at 2 PM ET, I’m sharing everything you need to know in my masterclass:

In the masterclass, you’ll learn:

How to build a list that can be used to not only book out your current business (whatever that is - from coaching to calligraphy to web design & way beyond)
How to future-proof it too, so that your digital product dreams can become reality (and sooner than you’d think!)

If your entrepreneurial dreams have been on hold whilst you try, and fail to figure out list building, you need to be there.

LIVE attendees will walk away with an extra bonus - my Irresistible Digital Product Blueprint.

It'll be your secret weapon to understanding your audience on a deep level. You'll uncover exactly who your ideal buyers are, what they desperately need, and how you can meet those needs. And it's yours when you come to the masterclass live!

Now I know, I know, someone is going to hate me for putting the answer in a separate masterclass. But honestly, this is not a 5 second quick fix tip or an easy hack for someone who wants a shortcut to success.

There is no quick hack to list building and business success, so if that's what you're looking for, you're going to need to go somewhere else to find it.

The masterclass is 90 minutes long, so we're going IN DEPTH into how to fix this traffic problem. If you're serious about list building and you want the FULL answer that actually works and not just a 20 second tip in a YouTube video, I look forward to having you at the masterclass.

In the masterclass we'll sort through your traffic problem.

Because as you know, if you don't have traffic, no one will see your freebies and that means, you won't get opt-ins and your list is likely to stay a party of 3 for a long while.

It's why when I see someone has a list building course which consists only of "pick an email marketing software, make a freebie, send weekly emails" I'm so annoyed. Because if you simply do that, you're going to basically get nowhere with your list building.

So click below to register for the masterclass and I so look forward to seeing you there live! 🥳

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Investing for Beginners: 6 Steps to Success

Paige Brunton — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

*Yup - that’s an affiliate link! My margarita fund thanks you kindly!

Rather read all about it?

While this blog is personally a little uncomfortable for me to write AND probably won't be the most successful views-wise, it's important to me to genuinely serve my dear audience.

I think it’s of massive service to write about investing: how a normal person who has no interest in spending time managing investments, manages to make their money grow itself. 💸

Here are the 6 steps that took me from not having a clue how to invest, to being confident in what I'm doing and feeling secure in knowing I'm doing something exceptionally important and impactful for my future self.

Step 1: Educate yourself with books & podcasts.

Even at the very beginning, I knew enough to know that, it probably wasn't a great idea to just hear from a friend "I invested my money in X way" and do the same thing.

I didn't want to be the blind following the blind.

Financial health is one of those key areas of life where IF you get it right, it can be a MASSIVE blessing on your life. So it’s definitely worth spending some time learning about.

I did some Googling on the best finance books and honestly read about ten of them. I also started binge-listening to reputable podcasts on the topic too.

Here are my top book recommendations:

#1: The Index Card by Harold Pollack and Helaine Olen

This book is perfect if you're completely new to finance and want a beginner-friendly, quick guide on the key points you need to know about.

Author Harold Pollack was fed up with all the confusing, conflicting financial advice out there and said that what people REALLY need to know to manage their own personal finances and retire comfortably could fit on a single index card (hence the name of the book).

#2: The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins.

This book is another super easy read and gives a perfect introduction and explanation of investing.

Author JL Collins explains the stock market, its rises and falls, bull markets, bear markets, bonds, index funds, asset allocation, dollar cost averaging and more.

Basically all those confusing financial terms you've heard and nodded along pretending to know what they mean, this book explains them simply. 😅

By the end of the book you'll not only understand investing, how to do it properly and how to hold your nerve when the market goes wild, but also a bit of practical advice on picking investments too.

With other investment books I felt like I read them and understood the concepts, but I didn't know what to practically do next. This book is one of the few that covers this vital bit of information as well.

#3: The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle.

This book is where things get a bit more advanced and complex.

It was written by John C. Bogle - he created the index fund (a super popular financial tool and investment option).

He also is the founder of Vanguard, a company and platform that I actually chose to invest my money with.

This book goes in depth into understanding the market, and gives detailed examples on what would have happened with your money had you invested it different ways in the market over the years.

If you listen to any advice on finance these days you'll hear that index funds are all the rage…but you might not quite understand why.

I think it's super important for you to understand WHY you're making a decision instead of just following what everyone says to do.

By the end of the book you'll also be an index fund advocate and you'll truly understand why they're so incredible and such a fantastic tool for investing your money. This will be vital information to be equipped with when the markets take a downturn and uneducated investors pull out at just the wrong time.

#4: Millionnaire Teacher by Andrew Hallam

This one is a book which is for you if you're in a very specific situation like me.

It was written by a teacher who taught at international schools and whole moved countries every few years.

so it’s specific advice for anyone in a similar situation.

I'm not a teacher at an international school and I would imagine most of you aren't either.

But if you're digital nomading or moving countries a lot (like teamie Helen who recently blogged all about it) , basically just ignore the word teacher in the book, and it's perfect for you!

I MOVED ABROAD AFTER COLLEGE AND HONESTLY HAVE NO IDEA WHICH COUNTRY I'LL BE IN WHEN I RETIRE, WHICH MAKES INVESTING A BIT MORE COMPLICATED.

A lot of countries have investment vehicles or wrappers which are a tax efficient way to save for your future, things like 401ks in the US, RRSP's in Canada, and pensions in the UK.

If you're always moving or are not sure where you'll end up like me, you can't really take advantage of these and it makes investing a lot more tricky, but not impossible.

#5: Personal Finance for Dummies

I also recommend your country's version of Personal Finance for Dummies.

There are a few other things you should think about and do before you even get into investing, a few insurances that are advisable, some recommendations on debt if you have any.

These books give you a quick & simple explanation of the different tax efficiencies & quirks on investments in your own country that you should know.

I also listened to a few financial podcasts….

Dave Ramsey's The Ramsey Show and also when I was in the UK I was listening to The Meaningful MoneyPersonal Finance Podcast which had incredible UK-specific advice too.

These shows, specifically Dave's I find really motivating and keeps me excited about doing something positive for my future self, when of course our automatic default is to simply live in the moment and go after the immediate rewards.

Once I felt like I knew enough of what I was doing, noticed some consistent themes between these books and others, I next needed to take some action.

Step 2: Determine how much you can save each month.

Basically, decide how much you are able to invest.

The two factors I considered when determining this were AGE and BUDGET.

I looked at the age at which I was starting to invest, because that is a factor in what percentage of your income you need to save.

As for budget, it was about knowing what I could realistically put aside for investing while also putting money towards the other priorities in my life, like at the time putting money towards a wedding, a house down payment, and an emergency fund.

As different events have happened in my life, the percentage of my take home which I put towards investing has both gone up and down…and that's okay!

I have a final financial freedom number I'm working towards, and when I can put more towards it I'm excited to be able to reach that goal faster and when I can't, I remind myself it is what it is, and try my best to get back to a higher percentage as and when I can.

Psst…want more game-changing business and finance advice? Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss anything!

Step 3 Pick your investment type.

This step is all about finding the investment type or vehicle which works best for you.

I considered a few factors when picking mine and figuring out what I wanted. This included figuring out what I DID NOT want my investment type to be:

❌ Time-consuming

wanted this to take next to no time for me to manage. So real estate or I know some people open an AirBnB as an investment was out for me. That also meant picking individual stocks was out too. And having money in a zillion different asset classes also wasn't great, because then I'd need to keep up with the laws & changes which might affect my different investments.

❌ Conservative

I was starting young-ish in my 20's so I could invest in riskier items, so the very conservative stuff like bonds weren't of interest to me.

❌ High Risk

But also I'm not a massive risk taker either, so really new investments like Crypto weren't of much interest either. I will say, I have a very very small amount of Bitcoin, but I only bought an amount which if I fully lost it, I wouldn't mind.

❌ High Fees

I had seen enough graphs and charts in these books to know that expense ratios, that is the fees you pay to own and hold the investments, might look small at say 0.75% or 1%, but those teeny percentages often result in a hundred grand or a few hundred grand more or less in your portfolio in the end. So I wanted the lowest fees on my investments possible too.

That left me with the investment type that most of the books recommended anyways: low cost index funds (ETF's).

With ETFs I could easily be diversified across different countries, industries, and even other investment types. I could in a way be in the real estate market without the hassle of it by having real estate companies within my index funds.

All with it taking me 5 minutes or less a month to buy stocks and call it a day!

At the very beginning, I made my life super simple, I just bought the index fund with the lowest expense ratio I could find which tracked the S&P 500, or the 500 biggest companies in America.

Since then I have every so slightly changed what I buy to align with where I think the world is going and to spread my investments out over more countries, but to start, I legitimately just did that, and honest, that investment has done exceptionally well for me.

A word on individual stocks…

I will say the one other thing I do have in my portfolio, more out of fun and interest than anything else is a few individual stocks.

I currently have some Squarespace, Shopify & Lululemon stock.

They say don't invest in anything you don't understand, and specifically with Squarespace and Shopify, I know the industry. I get what they offer and how they stack up against their competitors.

Okay, Lululemon was honestly just for fun. 🤗

These individual stocks are a very small portion of my portfolio. I mostly bought them because when I buy my ETF's, if I have a few dollars sitting in my brokerage account uninvested, I can buy these cheaper stocks to use up the extra sitting in the account.

Psst..just realize you might need to put a little more love into your business in order to generate the revenue you need to reach that next step of investing? I’ve got you covered with a free guide!

Step 4: Get a brokerage account & figure out how to buy an ETF.

In order to buy ETF's, stocks or anything of the sort, you’ll need a brokerage account.

Every country is different as to which brokerage account is best, and when I say best, basically I mean has the lowest fees and allows you to buy the investments you want.

I'm in Switzerland at the moment and chose Interactive Brokers and when I was in the UK I chose Vanguard.

I encourage you to do some Googling to see which brokerage account in your country has the lowest fees. 🔎

The next thing which I found honestly rather difficult was how to even buy what I wanted to buy.

I knew I wanted for example an ETF that tracked the S&P 500, but no book really goes into how to actually do that. It honestly took a fair bit of Googling to know once I logged into a brokerage account, how to find the ETF I wanted, understand what's called an ISIN number, which is a giant long list of numbers & letters which defines each ETF and then buy one.

Again, a tutorial on your chosen brokerage account can help.

Step 5: Buy investments & set up an auto-recurring purchase.

This is where you actually buy your investment.

This is usually done AFTER you pay yourself.

Psst..still unsure how much you should be paying yourself and how best to organize your money each moth? steal my payment routine here! 👇

Buying investments involves transferring money into my investment account and purchasing my chosen ETF's.

Right now I'm buying VOO, VGT & VEA, those are all Vanguard funds with very low expense ratios.

And if I have a few dollars left in the account, I might add a Squarespace or Shopify stock too.

I'm pretty sure there's a way to automate this step, but honestly I haven't gotten around to setting that up yet, but it's on my to do list as I know, the less of me involved, the better.

Step 6: Do whatever it takes to stay the course.

I listened to a few podcast episodes on Meaningful Money about behavioral finance and one of the biggest hurdles to long-term wealth is ourselves. Specifically ourselves making not great decisions.

A few of the best things we can do are:

Don’t be overly active: Do not look at your investment account. Just delete the apps from your phone and don’t look at it. Having easy access apparently makes people more likely to trade which is proven isn't a good long-term decision.
Think like an expert: When something happens and the market takes a hit I do one of a few things. I remind myself of what I learned in all of those investment books from Step 1. I remember how the market works, whats really happening, and what successful investors do in the face of a market scare. I'll sometimes go reread Tony Robbin's book Unshakeable which speaks specifically about this.
Stock on sale = Good: I always remember that when the market takes a hit, what's really happening is stocks are on sale, and that's a GOOD thing.

Now all these steps are great…but if you're still struggling with your money because that mindset of yours is leading you to all kinds of bad decisions, I had an incredible conversation with money mindset expert Catherine Morgan.

She'll help you overcome your self-sabotage, challenges with money conversations with your partner and more. Enjoy! 👇

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Flying Business Class…Worth It?

Paige Brunton — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

I Launched, Then Escaped: My Riviera Recharge

Rather read all about it?

Today, we’re doing something different… I’m bringing you along with me for a business-class flight review!

I recently spent 8.5 hours on a British Airlines flight from London to Antigua.

Flying business class is ALWAYS very special…but this time it was EXTRA special because I was headed to Necker Island with a business group.

That also meant a significant portion of business class was taken over by our group.

So it was basically a fun slumber partY in the air. 🥂💃

For the purposes of this review, I'll be a very strict reviewer (but of course, i’m always thrilled & grateful to fly business class).

full disclosure: I love how Kara and Nate have devised a 100-point reviewing system for flights and will be using this same system for my review. Kara & Nate, if you’re reading this…I hope you don’t mind! 😇

But first, make sure youre subscribed so that you’re the first to know when my blog post about necker island goes online! 👀

Okay, let’s jump into the review!

Each category will receive a rating out of 10 points and then at the end we will add them up to see where the flight ranks our of 100.

THE CHECK-IN 6/10

The check-in was pretty standard. There was a separate line for business class and it was well organized. Nothing special here. 🤷‍♀️

LOUNGE 7/10

The airport lounge was lovely!

It wasn’t very busy when I was there (but maybe just becausethat was early in the morning).

There was plenty of seating available and in general it was very quiet.

There was a great selection of food and drinks.

The lounge bathrooms were also nice and clean.

⭐️ BONUS: there were a lot of outlets!

THE SEATS 6/10

Okay so for this one, the rating REALLY depends on whether you’re traveling with someone you know or not.

Overall, I loved the comfort and space of the seats!

Downsides:

There is not much storage space for personal items next to the seats. In general there was a lack of space to store things: there is only this small compartment near the feet which is tricky to get to if you have your feet up. So when I was seated, there was nowhere to really put my phone, water bottle, book etc.
The seat felt a tiny bit old - it was a little on the rickety side.
Potential for awkwardness if you don’t know your neighbor.

Okay let me explain this last one a little….so I was sitting in the middle row.

The middle seat set-up is ideal if you’re traveling with someone you know - you have a pretty cozy private space.

On the other hand, It might be a bit awkward if you were next to a stranger because the divider between the seats only pulls out a little bit.

Thankfully my seat neighbor was lovely (she was a friend of mine who was also headed to Necker Island) but if you happen to be unlucky with your neighbor, there is not much to separate yourself from them.

One positive thing is that they give your your bedding in a closed case, and so therefore, (because there's not that much storage) you can put it on the floor. If the bedding did not have a case, I wouldn’t want to put it directly on the floor because it might get dirty. So this is very practical.

THE BED 8/10

Okay, I have to say when the seat reclined into a bed, it was EXTREMELY comfortable.

It has this absolutely genius solution with the footstool that created plenty of leg room so that you can really stretch out.

If you’re flying with someone you know, you basically get a giant communal bed in the middle seats. If you do not know them… it might feel a little bit like you are sleeping with a stranger (up to you if you like that! 🤷‍♀️ )

Overall, I could not have asked for a more comfortable seat to sleep in so this category earns a well-deserved 8 out of 10!

Important note: In my seat i didn’t have to walk over anyone to get to the isle. But if you were sitting on the side row (window) or the middle seats in rows 1-3 (at the very front of the plane), then you would actually have to climb over someone’s legs in order to get out.

So basically, the back row or the middle seats are best for not disturbing neighbors when you have to get up to go to the bathroom, etc.

THE AMENITY KIT 6/10

The amenity gift was from the White Company which was a lovely British touch!

It had the following goodies inside:

Eye mask
Gentle moisturizer
Luxury lip balm
Lavender peppermint spray
Earplugs
White Company Advertisements
Toothpaste
Toothbrush
Pen
Socks

I really liked the bag everything came in. It’s quite cute so might actually use it again. 😍

THE DRINKS 9/10

The beverage selection was fabulous.

I loved that they also had some mocktails on the menu along with the standard alcoholic drinks.

The mocktails definitely helped me to get some of those tropical vacation vibes started 🏝️ while also making sense as something to drink at 10 a.m. 😅

THE FOOD 6/10

For the meal, I started with a caprese salad with a bun and butter (not wrapped in plastic which I very much appreciated). There was also a side of healthy-looking quinoa salad.

For the maincourse I had the baked herb-crusted stream trout with Moroccan couscous.

Then I finished up with a date and caramel cake for dessert.

Psst…to be honest, the lunch was just ok…but keep reading cause the afternoon tea was fabulous!

🫖 TEA TIME ⏱️

About 6 hours into the flight, a lovely teatime tablet was delivered. I Loved this. The British doing what they do best.

THE ENTERTAINMENT 9/10

They had an incredible selection of new movies plus tons of British films which I LOVE.

There were also some really good video podcasts like The Diary of a CEO.

THE STAFF 7/10

Very friendly and accommodating. No complaints here! 😊

THE BATHROOM 6/10

It was pretty much just a standard airplane bathroom. There were some white company lotions but nothing too special. Since only the business section was allowed to use it (aka just less people), it was definitely a bit cleaner than the average airplane bathroom.

The White Company bottles were a lovely British touch!

Okay, drum roll, please….

THAT GIVES US A TOTAL SCORE OF: 64/100

Now, if you want more business behind the scenes, I just published a vlog of what it's REALLY like launching a course. I also brought you with me for 24 hours of my vacation in the South of France. So do click here to watch that vlog next!

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From Side Hustle to Web Design Agency! Shayah’s Story

Paige Brunton — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Will Niching your web design business ACTUALLY lead to more clients?

Is it normal to see a dip in inquiries some months of the year, or does that mean your business is kind of “over”?

**What is it REALLY like to go from a one-woman-business to a team & agency? (and is it WORTH it?)**

It can be extremely challenging to know the answers to these questions if you haven’t actually had the experience.

Lucky for us, today's guest has experience with ALL of these questions.

I hope you enjoy this extremely honest and insightful interview with my incredible past Square Secrets™ and Square Secrets business™ student Shayah from Virtuwell Balance.

Let’s get into the interview!

Okay Shayah, I would love to know what you were doing before becoming a web designer.

(Shayah) So, my background is actually in health and wellness. My first business was being an online health and wellness coach, as a nutritionist and yoga teacher. I also worked full-time in a hospital in health care administration.

That full-time job was killing me. I really wanted to work online, travel, and do my health and wellness business.

So I asked my employer to give me one year leave of absence without pay. I know some people just quit their job, start an online business and travel the world but that just felt like way too much of a risk for me. So I told my employer that I need this time off for myself, my mental health and to figure out my life and they allowed it.

So I had a year off but I also had my backup plan. That way, I had a year to figure out my business but if it didn’t work, I could go back home to Canada and my job at the hospital.

Obviously, that's not what ended up happening. 😊

So my husband and I (fiancé at the time), moved down to Nicaragua because I realized that if I was starting up my own business, I couldn't afford to keep living in Canada.

So we sold a lot of our stuff, I had a little bit of money saved up, my husband also runs an online business, so we were like

Let's do this. Let's try to make it work.

So we moved to Nicaragua for about six months.

I was running my health and wellness business and was focusing on social media, email marketing, starting a blog, did my own branding, and building my website.

First I tried making my website on WordPress, then Wix, then Squarespace. So then I had all these different versions of my website, and was trying to figure out which worked best… and that was when I found your course.

So I took Square Secrets™ in order to learn how to design my own website but in the process noticed I actually loved web design.

Around that time, my health and wellness business was starting to do better and I had a lot of peers in the industry asking me

How did you build your website?

How did you build your branding, email marketing, and social media?

And since I really enjoyed these things, I was like

Well, I can help you, I can teach you, I can show you how to do this.

And so I started a little side business a VA business (which is my business now: Virtuwelll Balance) and that just took off so well.

So I eventually ended up switching full-time into the virtual assistant business and health and wellness became more like a hobby of mine.

that's how I got into website design. I slowly started offering all different types of services and realized that I enjoyed website design the most.

And I went back to your course so many times during the process of building different websites…so it was definitely super helpful in giving me the skills and confidence I needed to offer website design services.

It’s so common that people start out just building a website for themself, realize they really enjoy it, and then end up helping other people build their websites.

I feel like that’s also proof that the industry isn’t oversaturated. If everyone who learns how to build websites suddenly gets asked if they can do other people’s websites too then clearly there is enough work out there.

Oh, totaly! I was actually looking this up the other day and have a statistic to share…

In 2023, there's 5.4 million new businesses registered in the USA alone.

So in my opinion, like probably 95% of those businesses, if not more, are going to need websites.

That’s 5.4 million businesses in one year in the USA alone. So I do not think that website design is oversaturated cause like I can't serve that many people. So if you're a website designer wanting to get started, there's so many businesses out there who are going to need your help and support.

Plus think about the number of God awful websites out there. And the fact that so many people had their website design done like 3-5 years ago so now it’s looking a little dated. So it’s like a recurring service. So every few years you will have clients come back to you as well. People always need to update and redesign.

How did you get your first few clients? How did you turn this from an idea into people actually pay you to do it?

So at the beginning when I was doing VA work, I realized I really loved web design and that that was what I actually wanted to do. I wanted to offer website design services and packages.

Not only did I enjoy it but it was also a much better profit for my time than VA work was.

But I didn't have a portfolio or clients to use as a reference if people asked what work I’d done in the past. So I literally just made a few websites in my spare time.

I used stock photos and in the end, it looked as if it had been made for a client.

So I basically just made my own mock projects that then showed them to potential clients as an example of what I could do for them..and they loved them! It became my portfolio work for that beginning stage.

Then, I had my first few clients and way overdelivered for and undercharged... But, you know, I think that’s something that helps in the beginning. And then it just slowly took off from there.

In the very beginning, I was quite active on Instagram, so that's where most of my clients came from. Now, I’m hardly on Instagram…which I prefer.

Was the main reason you got off Instagram because you didn’t like being on it? or was it something else?

I felt like I had to show up a lot in a certain way and like portray my life behind the scenes. Those things sell but it felt a little weird to me. And people would say

But you're doing such cool things! you're traveling and have this fun life and business.

Why not share it?

But personally, I just feel like it takes away a bit from the experience. Like when I'm having a nice dinner with my husband or sitting on the beach and then i’m like

Oh, wait, let me get this on the gram!

It just takes you out of the moment.

This was something I struggled with for a while but have found a little more balance with: now I am intentionally sharing stuff on there.

Psst…curious about what other marketing strategies are out there besides social media? I’ve got just the thing to help find the perfect marketing tool for you! 👇

So you built and ran this business all while being a digital nomad. Where did you travel to? Do you have any tips for someone who wants to build a business that can move with them?

We started out in Latin America: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala. We drove so we also travelled through some other countries but those were the three that we actually lived in.

Then we also spent three months in Chiang Mai, Thailand which is one of my absolute favourite places. We spent three months in Bali, six months in Vietnam. I was also in India for my yoga teacher training.

Then we've also done some shorter trips through Europe: Switzerland, France, Germany.

At some point we thought we missed Canada. We were travelling for close to four years at that point. We were like

Let's go home, get married, settle down. Our businesses are doing well enough now we can afford to live in Canada.

So we went back home, last year for about eight months and realized it wasn’t actually what we thought it would be. So we made the decision to permanently, move down to Guatemala and that's where we are now in Antigua.

I guess as long as you're doing anything fully remote, you can take it with you as long as you have good systems and processes in place. And also a stable Wi-Fi connection.

When it comes to working as a digital nomad, do you have to think about time zones?

Oh that's a good point. When we were in Southeast Asia it was very difficult working with clients in North America. Most of my clients are Canadian and American, so that was hard. I was taking calls very early and very late…so that’s definitely something to keep in mind.

I’m super curious about this…how exactly did you end up finding my courses?

I think I found your course through Cassie & Shay from Bucketlist Bombshells. I was following them because they were talking about the digital nomad lifestyle. I was taking their Work Online & Travel the World course and they were doing something with you. I think it was a webinar workshop on Squarespace website design.

I was trying to learn Squarespace at the time.

When I found you, I actually was super nervous about the investment because at the time, I wasn’t making a lot of money from my business. But I knew it was something that I needed. I just knew that it was going to help me.

This was pretty much my mentality at the beginning when it came ot courses. I took so many courses at the beginning of starting my business. And I learned so much from so many different course creators.

I think courses are very beneficial in the beginning of your business when you can't afford, to work 1:1 with a business coach or a mastermind.

But anyway, your course was super helpful. I went through it so many times - it’s walked me through making so many websites.

So now you have switched to Wix. Tell me more about what made you make that decision. We've actually got many students now who do multiple platforms is also very common. What made you realize that this was something your clients needed?

So first of all, I’d like to say I was actually designing on Wix at the time when I bought your Squarespace course. And it also helped me with designing on Wix. Whatever I was learning from you about Squarespace, I’d usually find a very similar way to do on Wix.

So I actually implemented a lot of the stuff from your Square Secrets™course on Wix.

Now, over time, my company has used Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, and Show It. But basically at the beginning it was always between Wix and Squarespace.

Nowadays Squarespace has Fluid Engine. I actually haven't used it myself yet but basically you have alot more freedom and flexibility to place things where you want.

But back then, Squarespace was just allowing you to design in strips and blocks which felt limiting if you didn’t know code. I could still definitely design a beautiful website on Squarespace without having to code, and it does keep you on track when you use those blocks.

From a designer’s perspective, I wanted a little bit more creativity, I sometimes wanted to move outside of those blocks.

That's what I found on Wix. It didn’t constrain me in designing in certain ways. But the thing to keep in mind about this: if you’re a designer, you can have more freedom and flexibility to create what you want without coding on Wix. But only if you know design best practices and have the skills for it. What I found is that clients who use Wix without having the design know how, could really screw up a website because it doesn't keep you in the box.

So for doing a DIY website without any design background, Squarespace was probably better because it didn’t let you screw it up. But for me, I loved using Wix because I had that extra freedom and I knew design best practices.

But like I mentioned, now with Squarespace you can have that extra freedom too.

I think it's interesting that I created a course centered on Squarespace but now I always hear about people from all these different platforms who ended up taking it.

I think it's just the best website design course out there, like, regardless of platform. Seriously, I've looked for other courses after taking your course because I was like obsessed with courses in the beginning of my business. And I couldn't find one that I felt would be more comprehensive than yours.

That makes me so happy! Mission accomplished!

I also want to talk about revenue numbers over time, because I think this is very interesting for people to realize that not everyone is an overnight success in 2.5 seconds.

Can you tell me about what you made in your first year of business, and what you’re sort of on track to make this year?

Yes, I'm happy to share these details with you guys. I've actually never shared this before. I normally don't want to talk about my numbers because I'm always concerned or like conscientious about how this might make other people feel. Especially because they don't always know the background story of these numbers.

When I was first starting my business, I would see people on social media talking about

“50 K months” or “100K launch”

and I’d be like

What!? That's amazing! I want to do that in my business too!

But you don't actually know like what it took them to get there, what their expenses are, and how much of that is actually profit. So keep that in mind next time you see these numbers online.

But anyway, so my first year in business with Virtuwell Balance was 2019. That was when I started working as a VA for health and wellness businesses. That first year I made approximately $10,000. And then I spent most of that money on, like reinvesting in the form of buying courses.

To be honest, I lived off of my savings the first year while we were travelling and I was still getting my business started. Any money I made, I pretty much just, like, reinvested. I was maybe around, ten months in or close to the year when I started structuring my services better and charging a little bit more, that I started to have better revenue.

Was that actually the time where you started to switch from VA work to more web design projects?

Yes that was exactly that time. But at first, I wasn't offering whole website design packages. I was more just like doing a page for someone or edits or updates. I was kind of nervous to do a whole website on my own and didn’t feel confident enough to offer that yet… but that’s just something that comes with time and practice.

So first year I made around 10K, then in my second year, I made about $50K. At this point it was still just me, like solopreneur doing website design, mostly still figuring things out as I went along.

Then in 2021, I started hiring. So that was when I brought on my copywriter, and then later my brand designer. I was basically hiring for things that I didn't do or I wasn't good at.

In 2023, I also brought on an SEO specialist, a virtual assistant and a website designer. That year the business made around $150,000.

I think this year, we will make around $200,000 as an agency with the team.

But something to remember here is that now my role in the business is no longer a website designer - I’m more like a director. I basically manage the team, do the sales and marketing, the finances and the PR. And those are the things that I like and enjoy doing as well.

There are some people who would never want to grow a team because they don't like to manage people - they love the client work.

Maybe you are like a multifaceted creative, and you can do copywriting and branding and website design, and you just want to be a solopreneur - that's fine too! You can actually have a lot more profit that way.

So now, even though my business makes $150 to $200,000 a year, my profit is still probably about $50-60,000 a year. I have a lot of expenses with my team, but that’s fine because I'm still doing the work that I enjoy. Plus I'm working less hours.

In 2020, my second year of business as a website designer solopreneur, I was making around $50,000. Now I have a way bigger business, team and more revenue. I'm still making the same amount of money, the difference is that i’m working less hours.
So those are just things people don’t really think about.

If you want to grow a team, are you also up for managing that team?

If you want to have a big business or agency, do you still want to be the website designer in your business?

Those are things I think you need to think about when you grow.

I think it's also so true that what’s right for one person might not be right for another. For example, for me, running an agency is just not my thing but I have so much respect for people who do it and think that if you have the skills and it brings you joy, then that's amazing.

And it’s definitely nice that you can then work significantly less hours because you have other people who are actually doing the implementation.

Totally! And the nice thing about having a team -although I'm sure there's ways around this too if you're still a solopreneur-is family planning. We want to start a family soon so it’s ideal that the business can still be run without me.

We can still have clients coming in and out, have client work done, and be profiting without me having to do the client work because I have a team in place for that. So, this is something I'm trying to work on this year: getting the business to a stable and consistent enough place that it’s able to run a little bit more with without me.

When it comes to business, I like to picture a Venn diagram that includes the offering, the ideal client and the marketing strategy.

Who is your ideal client, what is your niche and how do you make sure you get in front of those exact people?

So I had a little bit of a journey with Niching…I basically started my business because of my niche- health and wellness. Then, as I grew, I had some people reaching out tome being like

I know you design for health wellness, but I have a vacuum cleaning company…can you design my website?

And I was like

Yeah, I can make you a beautiful website!

So I had random people reaching out who were in totally different fields. And it made me think

Oh geez, there's probably a lot of people who are inclined to work with me because of like, my needs, health, wellness.

So then in 2022, I un-niched. I changed around all of my content, my entire website, social media and copy. Everything was changed to like general website design, branding and marketing for service based businesses.

But then it was so hard to create content because I had no idea who I was talking to and who I was targeting. I felt so messy and sloppy. It was just so much harder to sell my services and talk about my services. We also had a big drop in revenue that year.

We do usually have a kind of roller coaster of ups and downs in revenue in my business. But during a time of year where we are typically busy, it was very slow that year. And that was right after I did the un-niche.

So basically I ended up re-niching. I went back into health and wellness. And we even got more specific with the niche. So now we do clinics like therapy clinics, chiropractic clinics, things like that.

We reworded some of our marketing and went through a whole rebrand. We're currently working on updating our website copy and coming up with a new content marketing strategy to target these people.

👈 We also have a newsletter now called The Mindful Marketer because people in the health and wellness space love the word mindful plus they want to learn to market their business better.

And we’re spending more time on LinkedIn as opposed to Instagram because that's where they're hanging out.

After we did this, I had three of my biggest revenue months in business ever.

So I definitely think that niching is important and it's going to make your life a whole lot easier just in terms of talking about your services and creating and selling content.

Also people will still come to you. Don't be nervous that people outside of your niche won't work with you. They'll work with somebody else and you're going to have the people who want to work with you pay more to work with you because you're a specialist in that industry or niche that they want to work with.

Wow… I love that that. That is such a good lesson for so many people.

Yes, I wish that it didn't have to happen to me and that I could have just learned it from somebody else. But now I’m the example. 😅

Lets talk about fluctuations in inquiries. Earlier you mentioned that the the first time this happened to you, you basically had a heart attack. But now you’ve realized that there are just seasons and it’s normal. What are the seasons where you tend to see a lot of inquiries and what times of year do you see less?

Yeah so especially for web designs, I think the summer months really slow down. For us it starts in May and stays slow through July and even August. Sometimes in August it starts to pick up because people begin planning for the fall.

December is super busy which I find kind of weird because it's holidays season so you’d think people would be taking time off. Maybe because it's the end of the year, companies have leftover budget that they want to spend. Or maybe they had it as a goal for the year to rebrand the website but left it till the last minute.

Anyay, in December it picks up and then January through march is always very busy because it's the new year which means new goals, new budget. People want to rebrand their websites and in general it’s just the time of year when businesses are thinking about these thing and setting goals for the year.

So overall I’d say the busy season is November through March. And then April might still be okay and then in May it starts to slow down for the summer.

But honestly, you don't know that until you're in business for a few years and can look back and see the pattern year over year. So don't freak out like I did. Just know it's probably a trend

It’s always good to ask around and hear experiences from other website designers. I feel like we need some kind of a community where we can talk openly about this stuff and people won't be embarrassed to say things like

My business is slow right now…anyone else too?

Cause then we can relax and know it’s just a trend in the industry. Some people don't like to say when their business is slow, but I think those are important conversations to have with fellow entrepreneurs.

It’s especially true if your ideal clients are women who have children. They are so busy looking after their kids in the summer since they might not have consistent childcare during that time. Or if you're serving photographers, it’s definitely slow in summer because they are shooting weddings.

So the degree to which you’re impacted by these trends definitely depends on your industry. The good thing is that once you know this, you don't need to have a heart attack about it and can plan your business in a way that makes sense. You can plan your vacations for the time that your business is going to be slow.

Just make sure that you're pricing accordingly so that you can take that time off. That means you set my prices high enough so that you know you can hit the numbers you need during the busier phases.

Exactly! Or you can use that time to put back into your business. During our slow times, I like to take a look at all of our systems and processes and check in with the team. We work on our content or updating our website…it's easy for us to do those things when it’s slow. Where as when we’re busy, we don't have time to touch that.

If someone wants to do what you've done, what are your top tips for them? if you could go back to your beginner self in that first year and just give yourself some advice, what exactly would it be?

First of all, be patient cause it’s not a sprint.

Pick your niche. Pick one marketing funnel and stick to it. Whether it's Instagram, LinkedIn, blogging, YouTube.. I think it's better to just pick one thing and get really good at it. Plus you can always repurpose pieces of content to share elsewhere if you want to, but focus on one place.

Last, take Paige’s courses. Really! I invested in so many courses (I could give a list of other courses that I've taken) but when it comes to web design, Paige’s courses are like the most comprehensive out there. So that was super helpful in the beginning stages of my business.

And again, be patient. These things take time. Don't beat yourself up if it hasn't been an overnight success in five seconds. Especially if you're busy traveling the world. If I could build a successful business traveling the world during Covid then I think anybody could do it. You just have to be motivated. You have to have some goals and stick to your values. You'll eventually get there.

So what should you do if you also want to run a successful website or business? Let's start with getting you a client or three.

I have a training called Finding Clients as a New website Designer:The Seven Costly Mistakes to avoid.

If you are totally confused right now as to what exactly you should be doing on a daily basis, this training is for you. I’ll be thrilled to hear from you very shortly when you land that next fabulous client!

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Successful Entrepreneurs Know These 4 Secrets

Paige Brunton — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Marie Forleo and Jenna Kutcher both create content about: How to grow a successful business.

but the secret to their success is not always in what they share. instead, you’ll find it if you look closely at the right stuff.

Success leaves clues or crumbs…just like your darling children do throughout your entire house. 😉

Today we'll follow that path of success breadcrumbs straight to their business secrets vault. 🤫

I've observed these ladies’ businesses over the years and have discovered four secret strategies they're both using to explode their growth.

When it comes to running a business, these four tips are an ABSOLUTE MUST for figuring out where to focus your energy and what’s just a waste of time.

Secret #1: Sell the same thing for YEARS & become known for it.

If you look at Jenna and Marie’s content, you’ll notice they have something in common: their courses are their main offerings.

These ladies have sold the same courses for years.

Maria has been in business the longest. Her B-School course has been around for 14 years! 🤯
Jenna’s courses are also all about marketing. She has increased the number of courses over time but she still sells her original courses from 2016. She's been selling the same courses about Instagram, Pinterest, and list-building for years.*
*Of course Jenna updates the courses when needed, but the meat of the courses and the courses themselves have mostly stayed the same.

The moral of the story?

You don't need to launch new products every single year.

Many entrepreneurs assume that if their original offer was a success, this automatically means the best way to raise revenue is to create more offerings to sell to their current customers.

I get it. It feels like we should be working hard, thinking up big ideas, and launching sexy new things.

Plus, we think that…

Doing the same thing year after year will get stale.
Our audiences will get bored.
Our audiences will grow so we should be there with the next product to help them at the next stage.

☝️ This isn’t always the case.

As these ladies show, you can sell the same thing again and again and again for literally well over a decade.

Marie and Jenna were only able to scale their products to the household names that they are today because they invested their time and energy in marketing. That wouldn’t have been the case if they’d filled up every waking moment with creating new offerings.

Imagine if your favorite chef only ever cooked one signature dish. But over the years, that dish became so legendary that everyone had to try it. 🍜

Jenna and Marie perfected their signature dish: Their courses.

Rather than filling the menu with a bunch of options that nobody actually orders, they stick to what they know and make it the best thing on the menu.

Secret #2: Master 1 marketing strategy before adding another.

Jenna is mostly known for her massively successful The Goal Digger Podcast. 👇

AndMarie for her award-winning show MarieTV (YouTube channel). 👇

but you might be surprised to learn….

While both ladies are now active daily on Instagram, this was not always the case. On top of that, there are many examples of social media platforms where these ladies were (or still are) less active than one might expect…like Jenna’s highly inactive Tik Tok account with 700 followers.

What can we learn from this?

Jenna's YouTube channel holds the answer.

Jenna started The Goal Digger Podcast in 2016. In 2020, after creating 341 episodes, she THEN decided to expand to YouTube.
(Oh, and when I say “expand to YouTube”, I just mean she started to upload the podcasts there as well. No video - just audio.)
Finally in 2024, Jenna started adding podcast videos and custom thumbnails for her YouTube content.

Yup…she pretty much ignored YouTube for eight years!

Now, I know what you’re thinking:

How is failing to make use of one of the best marketing platforms online a secret to success?! 🙄

Each marketing platform has its own intricacies, strategy, and algorithm. Jenna knew if she tried doing all of them at once, she wouldn’t get anywhere.

focusing on fewer marketing strategies until you see massive success is both counterintuitive and an incredible business decision.

Note: even today with their mega teams and mega budgets, neither of these ladies is “perfect” on every platform ( Heck they aren't even ON every platform).

Jenna and Marie intentionally didn’t diversify their marketing from the start. They were consistent with one thing for a long time. It doesn't sound sexy, but this strategy works.

It doesn't matter if you pick podcasts, YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. What matters is that you stick with your choice until you become exceptional at it. Only then should you think of adding in other strategies.

Starting with one marketing strategy is like laying the foundation for a skyscraper.

You wouldn’t start by spreading your resources thin over a wide area (like you do when building multiple houses at once). Instead, you focus on digging deep and building upwards until you've built the tallest building in the city.

Marie and Jenna didn't spread their foundations. They built skyscrapers.

Psst… struggling to figure out which of all the marketing platforms is right for you? I have a quiz to help! 👇

Secret #3: Pick an A storyline and stick to it (with just sprinkles of B.)

Marie has spoken many times about the struggles of being a multi passionate entrepreneur. Her old brand was called Rich Happy & Hot (RHH). She had a live event for it and wrote a book called Make Every Man Want You.
Jenna was painting and selling watercolor prints for a while.

clearly, these ladies haven't always stayed 100% in their business’s main lane.

However, the more they've grown as entrepreneurs, the more they’ve stuck to associating themselves with one main topic.

For Marie, it's business.
For Jenna, it's marketing.

It takes a long time to become the go-to expert associated with a specific topic. Producing a year's worth of content on one topic won’t cut it. It honestly takes like a decade.

That’s why flip-flopping your direction (speaking about one thing this year and something completely different the next) will not serve you long-term in your business.

It’s true that both entrepreneurs have made pivots in the past:

Marie had her Rich Happy & Hot brand phase, and Jenna's first course was geared towards photographers (Photo Lab).

Today, Jenna serves all creative entrepreneurs (not just photographers) with marketing courses. Marie dropped the RHH branding and talking about dating. She now consistently focuses on business content.

The key thing about both ladies’ pivots is that they weren’t an annual occurrence AND they were mostly made during the early years of the business.

Over time, they have stuck to becoming associated with one main topic.

Now, one caveat to this is they're both personal brands. So naturally, as their lives and interests have evolved, some of their content has evolved with it.

Think of it like a movie… 📽️

There's an A storyline: the main focus of the movie. It's takes up the majority of the film's time.

And a B storyline: the side story. It adds interest, but it takes up less space in the film.

In Jenna's business, the A storyline is marketing education. The B storyline has been:

Her struggles to start a family
Body positivity
Maternity leave
Running a business as a new mom

In Marie’s business, the A storyline is business advice content. Her B storyline is all about entrepreneurial health:

Mindset
Manifestation
Tapping

In conclusion, if you feel called to switch topics, go for it. But…

DON’T make it an annual pivot. You should eventually settle on one topic that you feel excited to speak about for 10+ years.

DO feel free to incorporate B storylines and make your brand personable. Adding in bits of your life keeps things interesting. It makes you more than just a talking head with information.

Secret #4: Be consistent and choose progress over perfection

Ah yesss! everyone’s favorite word: consistency. 😅

Of all the strategies on this list, this is the one entrepreneurs struggle with the most. It also happens to be the most important. It's possibly the hardest to achieve and is what really sets the mega-successful apart from business owners who are just getting by.

Jenna and Marie have both shown up with consistent content, consistent emails, and consistent offers for years ( in Marie's case, over a decade).

Regardless of what platform, when these ladies decided they were going to show up, they were consistent about it. This isn't just luck. It is setting priorities and planning your time really well.

It’s also about dropping perfectionism.

Marie’s videos might look super polished and professional (and they definitely are). She clearly has a studio and a team that helps her make professional-level content. But if you look back at her first videos, it was just Marie, a laptop, and some bad audio and video quality.

During the pandemic, she was recording solo from her computer at home - just like the rest of us (Except she clearly has a much more fabulous living room than most of us do 😍.)

These ladies definitely live the “better done than perfect” mantra.

They’ll put out content to stay consistent, even when it’s not to the level of quality they wish it would be.

The reason so many people flounder for years in business is that they keep switching. They flip-flop and try to associate their name with a new thing every year.

In my business, I am always after what I call “lazy-efficient strategies”. 👆 Basically, a lot of return for little investment.

Doing so isn't just a good way to have life outside of your business. It's also an incredible method for business growth.

Complication is the enemy of great execution.

You probably started a business so you could live your dream life. Don't shoot yourself in the foot by constantly creating new offers, pivoting, and fretting over perfection.

Even if you follow all 4 secrets, you're likely still going to struggle with mastering consistency.

Lucky for us, our dream duo released a video on exactly how to master consistency and time management. I highly recommend checking it out! 👇 💯

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Life Update: Course Launch & Exploring the French Riviera

Paige Brunton — Thu, 30 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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MENTIONED IN THE VIDEO:

*That’s an affiliate link btw - I’d share it even if it wasn’t though coz this training’s 🔥

Rather read all about it?

These last weeks have been a whirlwind. 🌪️

I launched my Square Secrets Business™ course!
I spoke at a Squarespace Circle event.
I had a fabulous vacation on the French Riviera.
I’ve been preparing for my upcoming visit to Necker Island. 🏝️

We have a lot to get into so let’s get started!

First, let’s talk about the launch.

A lot of business owners who sell digital products tend to stick to Evergreen because they think launches are too exhausting.

In general, launching does have a terrible reputation. But I have to say:

I LOVE LAUNCHING! 🤩

If you’ve done it enough times and know how to organize it properly, then it actually doesn’t have to be an awful, painful experience.

If you haven’t, then yeah… it can be exhausting, and overwhelming. In fact, by the end of it, you’ll feel like you ran 17 marathons in a row. 🥵

Trust me I would know - that’s how MANY of my early launches felt. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane…

The first time I ever launched a course was in 2018 in Bali, Indonesia…

That launch was extra difficult because I was in the opposite timezone of my customers. Plus, I ran the entire thing by myself.

The launch itself actually went really well but afterwards, I felt like I’d been hit by an emotional transport truck. It was brutal. 🥲

Fast forward: here’s how I run my course launches in 2024.

I host 3 live online trainings that are 100% free to attend. They take place on 3 consecutive days leading up to the actual launch. For my Square Secrets Business™ course, the training is called Profitable & Productive Web Designer Bootcamp.

We start promoting this training a few weeks beforehand. This way, people have more than enough time to register. This is done via our email list, youtube channel, and the help of our lovely affiliates. 💕
We create a Facebook group for the training attendees and keep it active during those 3 days of training and the launch. I post, comment, and do a few pop-up lives to talk about topics that I notice are hot in the group.
At the end of the third training event, we go into the actual course sale.

The whole launch process has become pretty “rinse and repeat” for us. This makes it a lot more manageable for my teammates and I.

One of my team members runs the customer service and the tech stuff. Another teammate manages the affiliates part of it.

My responsibility during the launch is to be active in the facebook group (pop up lives) and create content for + run the live training sessions. 👇

Even though i’m not in Bali anymore, the different timezones is still a slight inconvenience. 🕥

The trainings take place at a time that’s most convenient for my audience (who are mostly living in the U.S). So that means that we do the trainings at 3 p.m. Eastern Standard Time(9 p.m. Swiss time). The trainings plus Q&A panel last about two hours. When i finish it’s around midnight and I’m wide awake, wired from all the excitement (not the ideal evening routine🌛 ).

My launch day self-care routine 💅

Because of this not-so-soothing bedtime routine, I often end up sleeping in pretty late as well.

I like to keep these days leading up to the launch pretty laid back so that I have time to recharge and stay balanced.

This usually looks like going to the gym, playing tennis, and on the third and final training day, my beloved tradition of getting a massage from my favorite masseuse.

By the way, I am going to this new gym twice a week and I absolutely LOVE it.

It's a small group personal training gym. So you just have to show up and they pretty much take care of the rest. They make you a plan, they tell you which exercises you should do and show you how to do them. You don’t have to think about or plan anything which makes it super easy.

Steve Jobs always wore black turtlenecks because it meant that he had one less decision to make in his life.

I find that the more that I can automate and simplify in my day to day, the better. This means I can spend my brain energy (which I don’t have an awful lot of during a launch 🫠) on the things that matter.

Pro Tip: the more you can create these “ rinse and repeat” processes in your life, the better your productivity will be.

👆This is exactly what I’ve done with my my launches.

We have all of the promo materials planned, prepped, scheduled and ready to go. So we pretty much just reuse the same stuff over and over again. We don't change and rethink the launch every single time.

We only make changes to the launch process if something genuinely needs to be changed.

For example:

On day 2 of training this time around, only 270 people showed up to the live. That wasn’t nearly as much as on Day 1 and Day 3. This is a trend we have noticed over the past few launches - day 2 is just not so popular.

Why might this be? Well my theory is that it might just have to do with the name. The name of the workshop on day 2 is Skyrocketing Productivity with Processes. Doesn’t have the sexiest ring to it right?

So my solution:

Change the title.
Slightly tweak the content in order to fit the new title.

I actually think the content for this training is already incredible. The main point we address is super important. So it probably just needs a change of packaging.

One thing that was interesting about this launch was the abnormal registration numbers in the early stages…

Typically, when getting the word out about this 3-day training, our fabulous affiliates are our super stars AKA they’re bringing in around 70-80% of the leads.

This time, in the first week of promoting the event, this number was strangely low…instead WE seemed to be brining in the majority of the leads.

At first, we thought there must be something wrong with the tech. We we’re honestly pretty concerned that our system was just not attributing credit where credit was due and spent LOADS of time quadruple-checking the back-end settings.

In the end, it turned out there was no tech issue - the leads really were coming from our funnels. Also, the leads from our affiliates did roll in - just a week or two later than expected.

Overall, we still brought in an oddly large number of leads. I would attribute it to our YouTube channel (which I'm very happy about! 😊 )

There were definitely a few hiccups this launch:

We had a quick Thrivcart scare. Thrivecart is our main payment processing system and just hours before the launch, we heard reports that it was out of order. We found a backup system that we could resort to as a plan B but luckily, Thrivecart pulled through so we didn’t have to use it.
My teammate Helen (who lives on an Island) lost her power on the day of the launch. So she was working from a hotspot off her phone. Luckily she was still able to make it to the Q&A.

Launching means having a couple of weeks worth of customer service inquiries hit the inbox in one day.

To be honest, this was the most exhausting launch I've had in a long time. I'm not dying or anything, but it was definitely more demanding than the average PB launch.

At the end of it, we were 15 sales down on normal (which is not great, but not the end of the world either). Our January launch sale numbers were higher than normal so in terms of revenue, it evens out.

So business-wise it’s not the end of the world. It’s honestly more the emotional aspect of it that’s not so fun.

When a launch rolls as planned, it's really not that much work. when things don't go as planned, and you have to fix, change and add things, that’s when the real work happens.

What did I love about this launch?

All the thanks, and praise we received from new students and people who attended the training. People do always give us kind words but the level of appreciation this launch was exceptionally high. ❣️

I was so touched by the comments in the facebook group and inbox:

Im also very grateful for my team

I used to run this whole company fully myself. Now, we have so many more people who come to the event that it honestly wouldn’t be possible. I always have two of my teammates there to help me. When it came time for the Q&A, there were a few questions that people asked that I actually didn’t know the answer to. I have the privilege of being so out of the day-to-day stuff of the business that details like the exact date and time that a launch will end are often not even on my radar. Thankfully, my team members know these things and can answer those questions for me during the Q&A. 😇

Psst…Sad that you missed the free training? The good news is there will be another chance! Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so that you’re the first to hear about it! 💌

Speaking at Squarespace’s Circle Live

So Squarespace asked me to speak on the topic of content creation that leads to conversion which I was THRILLED about (this topic is pretty much my bread & butter!)

I have to admit, I honestly didn't realize how much I knew about the topic until I started planning the talk on a Zoom call with some of the circle team members. It really made me realize just how much I’ve learned about content creation in the past eight years.

The talk itself went really well! It did happen to be on the day after the launch (the same day that I did the recap call with the team and packed for vacation since I was leaving the next morning). So not ideal timing but totally worth

Okay, and now the part you’ve all been waiting for…my escape to the French Riviera!

For this spring vacay, my husband and I were choosing between southern France and Greece.

In the end, we went with france (and in hindsight I will say this was a fantastic decision). I feel like people often plan their Europe trips for the summer months and then are always shocked that it's a heatwave + tourist zoo. But honestly, that’s just what a European summer entails. 🤷‍♀️

We figured Greece makes sense in high summer because we'll likely just be hanging out at a boutique hotel relaxing and swimming. The french riviera on the other hand has a lot of activities that we’re excited to do. So we thought it’s best to skip the crowd and go early.

Ready for a photo dump? 📸

We hit the road for st. tropez first thing in the morning.

on the way, we had a little lunch stop in Ticino.

It's just two hours from Zurich but it’s like a different world! and already SO much warmer. ☀️

After a long day of pretty chaotic driving ( Italy and France are a bitttt more stressful than Swierland 🚗 ), we arrived at Hôtel Lily of the Valley.

The hotel itself was lovely and so beautifully designed! Our room had a spectacular view, and we made good use of the peaceful pool area.

Since it was April, the hotel was still pretty empty. 🙌

After a good night’s sleep and breakfast with a view at the hotel’s cafe, we headed into St Tropez for a stroll….

The town is full of lovely shops and beautiful old buildings which still have this rustic charm to them.

I have to say, the town itself was already quite busy with tourists (isn’t it funny when you get annoyed by tourists and then remember that you yourself are in fact also a tourist? 😅 ).

So it’s busy enough in April, which means high summer must be a whole other level.

After exploring the town, we went to check out the beautiful beach Plage de Tahiti….

and enjoyed a tasty seaside lunch at Jardin Tropezina Beach club

Then we spent the afternoon relaxing and napping by the pool.

I hope this was a little nice sneak peek into the area for you!

If you haven’t already, I can highly recommend taking a trip there. Ideally around April - June. I would assume from July - September this place is an absolute zoo.

In other news, I took my last tennis lesson today before I potentially go play Richard Branson again….

As some of you might already know, I went to Necker Island a couple of years ago for a business trip and LOVED it. I have now been invited to go again! So why tennis lessons?

Well, Richard Branson is a freaking fantastic tennis player. I played him last time and lost…

The man has a couple of years on me but is significantly better at tennis. I mean he does have two tennis instructors and he plays twice a day (every day).

Anyways, ever since I found out I was going back to Necker, i’ve been practicing.

So stay tuned for my blog about that trip and to find out if Richard kicked my butt at tennis again!

In the meantime, check out my last vlog to hear all about how I hired my new assistant, my latest Sezane haul, and ski trip to Zermatt. 🇨🇭

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Charge More As A Web Designer ($30K Website Secrets!)

Paige Brunton — Mon, 27 May 2024 11:59:00 +0000

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Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

*That’s an affiliate link btw - I’d share it even if it wasn’t though coz this training’s 🔥

Rather read all about it?

How do you find clients who are looking to pay seriously premium prices for one design project think $10K, $20K or $30K for a website?

Yes, there are a select few web designers charging seriously impressive rates. But how exactly do you join that club and how do you find those big-budget projects?

But also, you might be wondering, are those projects even worth doing?

Are these websites just so massive that they'll actually take up half your year and not be profitable in the end?

Today's guest, Chaitra from Pink Pot Studio, has answers to these questions and more.

But just before we get going with the interview, I’ve got something pretttyy special for you! I asked Chaitra if she would host a live workshop and go deeper on this for my audience.

On June 11th at 12pm ET, she's going to be teaching all about how to scale your website or business by booking $10K plus websites. It's a live training, so if you're lucky enough to be watching this before the 11th of June, then make sure to sign up below!

Get your spot at the free training

Ok, let’s get into the interview!

Can you tell us a little bit about how you actually got into web design?

(Chaitra:) So I'm actually a computer science engineer, I studied computer science in India, did my Master's and then moved to the United States. So I've always had like a computer science web design background.

But once I moved to the States, I had like a lot of free time in the evening because I was far from my family & friends. So I started a blog and spent hours beautifying that blog with like CSS, coding, you know, the jazz and that time there was the blogger.com platform.

Do you remember that? #throwback!

So I’d spend hours coding the backend and making it look the way I wanted it to.

And so I started getting a lot of queries from people like,

Oh, how did you code this section?
Or how did you code this and that?

And so I started sharing tutorials on how to do these things on my blog.

So my readership started to grow a lot.

And eventually I opened up an Etsy shop selling blogger templates and that took off.

And so then I started doing custom websites on blogger & WordPress and things like that. And it was really going well.

I enjoyed it and I decided to try it out and see where it goes. And that's how I started my business - it's been eight years now, i haven’t looked back and I love it.

Now I'm assuming at the beginning you probably weren't charging like tens of thousands of dollars for your websites. So take me through the pricing journey from what you were charging at the very beginning to projects to more like what is like an average client investment that they're making more recently?

I love talking about this!

The first website I like charged was like for a custom website was $60.

Nope that’s not a typo!!

And this was back in 2015.

So to start off my pricing journey, I like started with $60 for a custom website, which meant it included, you know, homepage, product like blog page, everything like the services page, like the whole shebang.

And this was when I was still doing, you know, my Etsy shop part time, figuring things out.

But then when I decided to go full time with my business around like maybe 2015, 2016, that's when I'm like, yeah, $60 is not going to, you know, really be sustainable.

When you're taking you're charging $60 you're juggling multiple projects in order to make any kind of like profitable income or like feel profitable. But at the same time, you're burning yourself out like crazy. When I decided to go full time, I raised my prices to around $1200.

And people were still booking!

People were still paying!

And I'm like, gosh, what was I thinking charging so little?

But I think, you have to remember that you are on your own journey.

You learn your own lessons and you make your own, you know, errors, mistakes, whatever.

So then I started charging about $1200. This was around the end of 2015.

And then as time went on, in 2017, I raised it to around $4000 to $5000. And that was where I felt like, OK, this feels great, because obviously from $60 coming to $4000, that felt really, really good.

But even at the end of 2017, even though I was charging $4000 to $5000 it left me wanting for more. And I felt like I'd hit a plateau because I didn't know if I could charge more than that.

But I wanted my overall income to, you know, increase.

I was, I think, about at $50K or $60K that year. And I was like, even with charging $5000 dollars, I don't know how to scale more than $60,000 dollars per year without doing like passive income or something else.

And that's when I felt like I'd hit the plateau and I felt a little stuck.

And I also felt like the kind of projects that I was getting, they were fun, but they weren't really very inspiring and didn't like the future didn't feel very clear to me. And that's exactly when I also decided to, you know, grow our family.

I got pregnant with my son.

And so everything kind of came to a standstill around that time.

And this was also like a big turning point in my journey. I took a really long maternity break. I went completely off my business. So my leads, my inquiries, my revenue, everything kind of like went down to zero.

And it was like, OK, I learned a bunch of lessons like building my business this first time. And I really loved where it was. But at the same time, I knew I had like bigger goals. And the way I was operating was not going to work to make the revenue I wanted to make.

And as well as that, with my new lifestyle as a mom, I didn't know if I had all those hours to put into my business like before.

So this was I would say this was like the first innings of my story.

And I got from sixty dollars to $5,000.

And then after my maternity break, I was like, OK, I had certain goals.

I wanted to make six and I want to work four hours per day.

And I was like, how can I make this happen?

So when I was thinking about that, I wrote like it was a simple math. I knew I wanted to take one project at a time. So which meant like I could finish one project in a month, let's say.

And I wanted to hit $100K.

So there was no way I could do anything else.

Like the only variable here was how much I was going to charge.

And that was like you had to charge 10K. Like I remember dividing it like, you know, $100K divided by like 10 projects a year, like with a little bit of vacation time. And that's like that comes out to $10K per project.

And I was like, I can't do that 😂

Like there's no way anybody would pay me that much.

But then I thought, like, for a minute, if this is possible, everything can change for my business because this is exactly what I wanted for my business.

So instead of thinking what's possible for me and reverse engineering it that way, I was like, this is what I want. How can I get there?

So I started 2020 charging $2K. But I didn't wait for too long to increase my prices. So my first project was for $2K. The next one was for $6K. And then I booked one more, I think for $4,500 and a or $5,000.

And then I think in July of that year, I booked my first $10K project.

So after that, it's been definitely a little bit more of a smoother journey in terms of raising prices. So from $10K, I think I went to about charging $15K in 2021.

In 2022, I went from charging $15K to about $20 to $25.

And that's where I've been. I've booked a project for $30K, which has been my highest so far.

But more so, my my prices right now are between $20,000 to $30,000. And that's where I'm living. And that feels really good to me.

OK, so obviously, like the pricing changed. But what else needed to change in order to be charging those prices?

OK, so typically these projects take me around anywhere from six to eight weeks. So that's the timeline of the project. So I would say in terms of profitability, they feel very profitable to me on my end.

And I know like typically you would expect that the work for these higher ticket projects doubles. But honestly, it's been the opposite.

Like I said, my projects take this pretty much the same amount of time.

The two main shifts or the two main reasons are what changed was I think one,

#1 My positioning on how I position my brand, my business and what I provide to my clients

#2 The value that I provided to my clients in the projects and my process and what I really did for my clients.

So these two things.

So to dive into positioning.

Before I was catering to literally everybody, I was working with all creative entrepreneurs. That was my niche.

But when I decided to raise my prices, I realized that going deep is better than going far and wide.

When I was working with all creative entrepreneurs, I really couldn’t specialize in it because there are different kinds of business owners in it like photographers, accountants, wedding photographers, wedding vendors etc etc.

There are just so many different kinds of professionals there and each of these businesses have nuances to them.

They're different in their own ways.

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So creating a website or building websites that cater to everybody kind of was also diluting my specialty and the knowledge I bought into their projects.

So I decided to go all in on product based businesses and work with e-commerce, Shopify businesses.

So that was one big shift I made in terms of positioning.

And the second thing was what I actually offered.

Before I was building a website which did the job, which was like, OK, you need a website. I'll build a website which has all these pages, tick, tick, tick, you know, doing the job like you have a website now.

It used to look really good aesthetically and would match the client's brand and stuff like that.

But then deep down, I'm not sure if we were catering to the business's goals and what they wanted the website to do and things like that.

Like when people usually come to web designers, when clients come to web designers, they're like, I want a website.

But deep down, it's not like they want a website just for the sake of it.

What they come for is for like deeper reasons as to how the website can really help grow their business and take their business to the next level.

And I think that was one portion I was not paying as much attention to until this point.

And so from now on, I was like, instead of building just pretty websites, let's build powerful websites, which will take the business's bottom line from like point A to point B, you know, like wherever they want to go.

So I started digging more into their goals, who their audience is, how they interact with the client's website.

Where is the gap right now?

What are the problems they're facing?

And then creating a website based on a website strategy that will get them to their goal.

So that second thing was massive clients started seeing transformations and results like massively like the revenue numbers went up, sales orders used to go up and whatever the problems were were being solved.

Sometimes their problems were like, we're getting inundated with frequently asked questions or like inboxes, inquiries in our inbox, like customer service requests, and we don't have the personnel or the, you know, the staff to cater to that.

How can you help with that?

So then we created a frequently asked questions page.

We made sure to solve those frequently asked queries throughout the website and automatically those problems would reduce.

But everybody's problem is different.

Not everybody's coming to you for “I want more sales”.

Some companies have lots of sales coming in, but they have other problems like the one that I just mentioned.

So getting deep into the client's problems and why they want a website, what the website needs to do for them. That was like a big time game changer in what we provided for our clients.

So leading through value, that was another thing that changed everything.

So those were like the two main levers that we moved.

You decided to specialize in e-commerce websites on Shopify in order to have higher prices. Can you tell me, is everyone charging high ticket prices specializing in that? Is that the only thing that you can do in order to charge $30 K projects or are there other niches too?

Yeah, this is such a great question. And I love talking about this.

I definitely don't believe that e-commerce is the only niche you can charge higher prices in.

So here's what I believe.

Every niche, every target market has a spectrum, every target market, name it. There are people who are ready to pay $15 K for a website. Then there are people who are ready to pay $5 K for a website. And then there are people who are not ready to spend more than a couple hundred dollars on their website. And this is true for every niche.

Even if you take Shopify product based businesses, there are people who are happy buying the $300 templates on Shopify and are like “I don't want to put any more money into this”.

At the same time, there are people who are investing $100 K into their website as well.

So every niche, and I've observed this over and over again, as I've worked with more clients inside my program and even like inside the industry, when I talk to other designers about who they're working with, how much they're charging, this is kind of the spectrum, like even inside the program that I run, which is called the High End Web Designer, we work with web designers helping them raise their rates to $10 K plus.

And in that group we have web designers specialising in working with so many different niches from nonprofit organizations to, you know, wedding photography, there are just so many different even the paramedical tattoo industry!! there are just so many.

It just depends like on who in the spectrum you're talking to.

So even in Shopify, if you're talking to the spectrum of people where they want to just spend $300 on a template and they are okay with it, you're going to attract those people.

And you might end up thinking like even in Shopify, there's nobody paying $100 K or, you know, $30 K or $20 K.

But I think every niche has a spectrum and it totally depends on who in the spectrum you're talking to. So if you want to attract more of the higher end clients, you need to move towards talking to the higher end of the spectrum, understanding what problems and what goals these people have and talk to them specifically because the goals and problems these people have is very different from the goals and problems that other people in the other parts of the spectrum have.

When I was just starting, I could not have known like what their problems and goals were. And so it takes like talking to people who like actually do serve those clients to really figure out like what is it that you're solving? Because it's hard to imagine before you've gotten there, if that makes sense.

What are the mistakes that you see people commonly make that stops them from being able to achieve this type of price point?

I think the first thing and I made this mistake too, when I came back from a maternity break, I was like, okay, I need to charge $10 K.

How do I do it?

A lot of advice that I got was around mindset, like, oh, believe in your worth, believe in, you know, that you can charge more, go on the call, ask for it with confidence, like quote confidently and things like that.

And that is important.

I am a huge advocate of mindset, but charging more is not just about the mindset part.

And that is one mistake I made.

Like without even understanding what I went on to some of my first few calls after my maternity break. And I'm like, oh, this is going to be $8-$10,000.

And they were like, okay, sounds good. But no 😂

Because as much as I was confident communicating what I wanted to charge, I truly didn't understand why they should be paying that much.

And not did they understand.

And if I don't understand why should they pay so much, how am I going to communicate it?

What is the value in my services?

What am I providing uniquely?

And how is that helpful for them?

Why is it worth $10 K for the business to invest in a website?

So that was one thing. So I feel like with mindset and confidence and things like that, you need to back it up with value and strategy. And that's what I think infusing website strategy into my process was a huge, huge thing. And the mistake I was making was first just focusing on confidence.

But combining mindset and value and website strategy was the missing piece.

And that made the raising of the prices so much more smoother and easier.

And also the second thing I see people do is when they decide to charge $10 K, they feel like they should go there overnight or just with one step.

And it doesn't happen that way, because obviously with one project to another, you're building your own conference, you're building and owning in on your processes. You're also building the portfolio, you're building the case studies. And so from project to project, I would suggest going in like a stair stepping fashion to $10 K.

So if you are, let's say at $2K right now, I would raise it to $5K, then go to $7K and then go to $10K.

Not that you have to go like this, but if you feel like there are gaps to fill, then I would suggest going through a stair stepping process so that as your process is improving, as your process is refining, your confidence to kind of quote these higher prices also kind of organically coming with you.

You're feeling true to quoting those prices.

You truly believe in the value that you're sharing with your client as well. Because sometimes if you truly don't believe that the project is worth $10 K and you're quoting on the sales call, the energy passes on.

I'm not sure if your client will be able to see that value.

So as you come on par with the process that you're creating and with the value that you're creating for your client, I think raising your prices naturally and organically and stair stepping to $10 K is one of the ways I would recommend doing that.

Saying that many people in the program have also come at $2K and within a couple months raised it to $10 K for like within a couple of projects, that's totally possible too.

But you just want to check in with yourself on what's feeling good to you.

So that's what I would do.

And third mistake is also waiting too long to raise their prices.

There's no rule that says you have to book four projects at $4500 before you raise it to $7000 or anything like that.

I think these are unspoken rules that we just set for ourselves like, oh, if I've not done five projects at $5K, then how can I just raise it?

I just raised my prices. There's nothing like that.

It's all about value based pricing.

So focusing on the value that you're creating for the client and pricing on the basis of that is what would lead to an ideal scenario in terms of pricing both for the client and for you.

I would definitely recommend, pricing based on value than pricing based on the amount of time you're putting into the project or the deliverables into the project.

Okay, coming back to the strategy piece. I know people are going to watch this and they're going to be thinking like, what does that even mean?

And can you give me an example from a client where it's like the thing that you did in the website specifically led to an outcome, which is like, again, damn, that was a great use of $25,000.

So one of the examples I gave was just now when we said a client came in, they had lots of sales. They were already in the millions making sales.

Her main issue with her website was not that the website wasn't making sales. Her main issue with the website was we get a truckload of inquiries in our inbox on where to find this, where the shipping is, like when will it be shipped and like just normal questions about products, services, and things like that. And I have exclusively two people dedicated to responding to these emails. And if you think about it, two full time employees were dedicated to just responding to client service requests.

That's a lot of expense for the company, two full time employees.

The same time or the same resources of the two full time employees could be easily used for something else that needs more attention in their company, if this could be solved using the website.

So what we did was we embedded a frequently asked questions page, answered all the frequently asked questions on that page and put links to that in the website, wherever we felt like people were dropping off into like clicking into a custom contact form or sending an email or things like that.

And these are things you study through things like heat maps and analyzing their analytics. So you want to get the information.

Obviously, the business owner will be able to tell you a lot of things too, but also diving deep into their backend and seeing like, okay, from which page are they jumping into creating the contact form?

So making sure you embed some of the links to the frequently asked questions on that, right on these pages so that, okay, before they create a custom form, they can go and check out the frequently asked questions.

That was one thing.

And another example is like when the same client also needed, she was going to build custom furniture for the clients. And whenever clients wanted something custom of something that she was selling, they would write an email and then she would respond back. And then she would, there would be like a back and forth of an email thread on like, okay, what customizations do you want? And they would send back emails and they would send back like photos of what they wanted and things like, and that's like a back and forth process so long that it can go up to like even 50 to 100 emails threads.

And it's very hard to fulfill these orders when there's no structure, especially if she needs to pass on this information to another employee, that employee now needs to go through 100 emails in order to understand what the customizations need to be.

Now, if another employee needed to come in and fulfill this request, they could just come look at the form that the client submitted and be like, I have all the information I can take it off.

So that way the CEO of the business was so freed from a lot of these requests and it freed up her time and it was able to free up this to employees time who were busy responding to emails. So this is one classic example of how solving problems need not always be related to like, you know, sales or orders.

But at the same time, there have been plenty of other ways. For example another brand were selling lip balms.

And we saw that certain lip balms were also being bought with certain scrubs.

(There are apps that help us combine these things).

So when you go through past order data and sales data, you can see like, okay, everybody who buys such and such a lip balm also is very interested in the matching scrub of that lip balm.

And so whenever they were on the product page of that lip balm, we started suggesting,

“oh, you might also like this scrub”.

So this automatically led to them buying bundles of this and led to increase in sales and also led to a more streamlined checkout experience instead of them having to go search for the scrub separately.

You want to minimize the user journey as much as possible and try to guess what the user wants when they're on your website and make their shopping experience as smooth as possible.

You mentioned mindset is a huge factor. Can you give us some quick tips of what mindset things worked for you in order to get yourself to the place where you're like, yeah, $25,000 sounds like great price.

Okay. This, I think both of us will agree, like we've been in Mariah Coz’s programs. And one thing she always says is, “stay out of people's other people's wallets”.

And one of the big mindset shifts that I had to make initially was like, I would never pay $10K for a website. So nobody ever would.

And that makes total sense because I'm a web designer. So yes, obviously I wouldn't pay anybody else to do my website because I could do it myself.

Like it feels like something easy and basic. I can do it myself.

But this is the thing.

It feels basic to you for a reason because you're an expert at it.

And just because it's basic to you doesn't mean it's basic to your client.

If they're coming to you for help, that means, you're considered an expert in it and they need help from an expert on it.

And so truly understanding what you create is of value and charging accordingly is very, very important.

And the second thing is like many times when we see an inquiry or when we go on a sales call and talk, I used to kind of assume that this is how much this person, you know, will be ready to invest in a website.

I don't know how we would arrive at those calculations maybe because they mentioned in the form that this is my budget or things like that.

Usually in inquiry forms, they have like, oh, what's your budget?

And you give like three, four options and they check out a particular option.

I stopped asking for that option because when they check under $5K and they come on a sales call, you already have that thing in your mind that this is how much they're ready to willing to put into the website.

But then when you dig deeper, you realize that what you can do for them and what they need is completely different from what they are actually asking for or what they think they need.

So staying out of people's wallets, not assuming what they can or cannot afford because we might be totally wrong or we might be totally off and instead communicating value and what we can do for their business, how we can solve problems and then coming from a place of that value and then letting them decide if they can afford it or not is had to be one of my biggest mindset shifts.

I was I would be like, oh, this person probably can afford $4K.

So they can't even afford $10K.

But we never know what they can or cannot afford.

And it's very rude for us to assume that as well.

There have been many times when people have come into sales calls and they're like “I want to stay under $2000”. And then when we got into the value and when we when I kind of walk them through what the website can do for them, they were like, yeah, $8,000 sounds totally doable. I'll figure it out. Let's do this.

So I know you said big misconception is these bigger projects have insane number of deliverables. What is the typical number of deliverables for say like a $20K project? How big is that project or that website often?

Okay. So like in my case, I work on Shopify. So I would say typically I would say eight pages and maybe three to four app integrations and website strategy is the huge part of it.

So in terms of deliverables, the website strategy part is one of the major things.

And I think that carries the value on its own.

And once that is done, then we're building out the website.

That's like about eight to 10 pages, three to five app integrations. Pretty much that.

(Paige:) The value is in solving the business problems, increasing the revenue through the strategy and like, does it mean the website is suddenly like a 50 page monster or something?

(Chaitra:) No absolutely not.

And my websites never have like fancy animations or crazy coded effects or anything like that. They're as simple as simple can get, because I've also realized that the more animations and more these effects, it slows down the page speed. It slows down the website. It's unnecessary. The job can be done based on the business goals without all these things.

So like just to clarify, my websites don't have all those things.

Okay. So if someone's reading and they're maybe charging $2,000 for a website right now and they want to be charging more like $10K or $15K or $20K for projects in the not too distant future, what specific steps do they need to take?

There are lots of steps and I'll briefly get into it. But before that, I want to talk about the amazing training we'll be doing together in June. I think that is the perfect training that will break this down! I’ll be going through the exact steps you need to take in order to consistently land $10K websites in your design studio. So definitely make sure to come to that training.

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And the second thing in terms of exact steps, which again we'll be breaking down more in the training, I would focus on is positioning.

So instead of appealing to everyone, I would start to think about a specific target market that you would specialize in and you would be able to help them a little bit more than any other target market.

And while considering this target market, I would definitely think about who you're interested in helping with and who you probably have a little bit of experience already.

Like if you already have some case studies, portfolio examples, or things like that, and also think about the market size, the profitability in that market, does that market look like something that you would want to grow in another five to 10 years?

Consider all these factors while deciding on a target market.

But I would definitely go deeper and start to think about how to position for a particular audience and think about the problems and solutions and the goals of that particular audience, right?

So that way you can specifically talk to their goals and problems.

And when you talk specifically to them, you attract them, they come to you.

You don't even have to go finding them.

They'll come to you when you talk about it.

So your content, your marketing, when you focus it around their problems and goals, they'll find you. You don't need to find them. So that's the first step, I would say positioning.

And then definitely pricing.

Start to think about what pricing makes sense to you and what is good for your business and your lifestyle instead of thinking about like,

"Oh, what can I price so that the client would pay that?"

Instead, like turn it around like,

"Okay, I'm running a business. It needs to be profitable. So what do I need to charge in order to have a profitable business? And what do I need to do in order to attract those clients?"

So think about pricing, start raising your prices. I know it feels like intimidating at the beginning because it almost is like, "If I raise my prices and nobody books, then what do I do?"

The reality is whenever you raise your prices, nobody books. That always happens 😂

For the first couple of projects, you're going to hear no's.

As you raise your prices, hearing no's is like a common part of the process.

And I think many of us back off during that time and go back to what we were charging before. But that's the whole thing.

If you wait a little bit longer and stick out the new price for a little bit longer, you'll find the new audience that is ready to pay that price.

Again, you need to tweak your problems and your messaging and your marketing according to the prices and the raising of the prices and all that as well.

So definitely pay attention to pricing and do it in a way that aligns with you and not the other way around. Build a business that aligns with your lifestyle.

And I think the third thing would be process.

Definitely think about your process and how you can improve it in order to solve problems and not build websites that just look pretty, but also create powerful websites that will take your client's business to the next level.

Because when they see value, when they see return on investment, that's when you'll start to attract clients that are ready to put in that money. If they invest $10K and are able to make a huge ROI on it, then investing $10K is a no-brainer for them.

So the more of these case studies and more of these testimonials you add to your portfolio, you'll attract more of them to your business.

(Paige:)I'm so excited for the training that we're both doing.

So if you're reading this before June 11, click below & go register yourself. We'd love to see you there!

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You’ll Also Love...

How to Grow a Blog (Beginner’s Guide)

Paige Brunton — Mon, 20 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

*those are affiliate links - my Margarita fund thanks you kindly in advance!

Rather read all about it?

When people ask me how I built my business, my answer is so simple, they often don’t believe me.

❌ It wasn't something sexy like having a social media post go viral.

❌ I didn't have special connections to influential names in the business.

❌ I didn't receive any funding which might have allowed me to drop $10,000 a month on ads.

I built my 7-figure business off the back of a blog.

Yup, a blog. 👩‍💻

I now have eight years of blogging experience behind me. So today, I’m sharing the 5 steps I would take today if I were starting a blog from scratch.

☝️ Fun Fact: I first started blogging with the goal of reaching 1:1 clients for my web design services. My blog’s purpose evolved as my business evolved. Now, it’s a major generator of course sales, affiliate income, and more!

Regardless of WHY you feel motivated to start a blog, doing so is a VERY smart decision.

No matter what sexy new internet marketing trend comes out, improving your SEO via a blog is still massively impactful.

Smart entrepreneurs like you know that there are zillions of people googling things every day. Therefore blogging and ranking in the search results is still an incredible marketing strategy.

So let's get straight into it.

Step#1 Pick a Platform

Every blog needs a place to live online. These places are called platforms.

The two most popular are:

Squarespace
Squarespace can be compared to Apple. It's simple to use and all in one. It's intuitive, beautiful, and stylish.
WordPress
WordPress is like Microsoft or Android. There are more options, but with them comes more complication. There isn’t a big focus on style, looks or simplicity. Instead, there’s the ability to change everything. But what you get in flexibility, you lose ease of use.

First-time blogger?

I’d recommend you stick with Squarespace. It’s what I’ve found to work best for 99% of new bloggers along with people who are new to making and managing websites.

🚨IMPORTANT! Do not ignore this 🚨

Your blog MUST be on the same platform as your website.

Why? Because blogging will do WONDERS for your SEO. All of that great SEO juice generated from your new blog needs to be associated with your website - not some other platform.

I sometimes see people blogging on Medium.com or Substack.com, or social media platforms. This is a MASSIVE mistake. Please do not make it.

Having your blog and website on separate platforms is like adding solar panels to the roof of your home, and then never connecting them to the power grid. All of the valuable energy that your solar panels produce just vanishes off into nothing...

If you're even halfway serious about your blog, it’s worth shelling out $20/month to put it on a proper website.

Speaking of which, if you're using Squarespace, you can use my code PAIGE10 to get 10% off. *

*That's an affiliate code and my margarita fund thanks you.

Step#2 Choose Content Categories

Mine are:

business
marketing
design ( website design + being a web designer)
Squarespace
lifestyle content (behind the scenes)

⭐️ Tip: If you already know what your main blogging topic is, ask yourself:

“If a reader is interested in this topic, what else might they be interested in?”

Let’s look at an example:

Shea McGee runs an interior design business. Her blog comprises of the following categories. 👇

* Sunday 7 is a quick list of the seven things that she likes or is buying that week.

Rotating content through different categories has multiple benefits:

It keeps it entertaining for your readers and builds a genuine connection with them.
Imagine if I only ever wrote Squarespace tutorials on this blog…people would come when they needed the tutorial and then never return again.
By rotating my content through a variety of categories (but still focused on a certain type of viewer), I make it alot more interesting to read.
It keeps it more interesting for the writer (aka YOU).
No matter how much you love your topic, if you only write posts on one thing for eight years, you genuinely might die of boredom.

in conclusion:

If your blog is meant to support your business, then blog on the topic of your business. This means writing about the concerns and the questions that your ideal client would have so that your blogs lead them to your business.
Think about what else is going on in that reader's life and business.
Also, think about what your own passions and interests are.
Taking all of these things into consideration, pick 3 to 6 categories for your blog.

Step#3 Determine Frequency & Create Editorial Calendar

Frequency:

Obviously, If you had the capacity to post daily (or even every five minutes,) that would be ideal

But I doubt you have the time for that and neither do I.

So ask yourself: how many post weeks could I actually manage to be consistent with?

That's the frequency to go with.

For me, it was two posts a week for years, and then my life got a little wild (I was moving and traveling around Europe). So I have on occasion dropped that down to once a week.

Once you pick your frequency, it's time to map those posts onto an editorial calendar.

Editorial calendar

I know, I know…. it does sound very Vogue-esque.

But honestly, the Vogue editors do this for a reason. Without one, it would be pretty much impossible to keep up with such a massive amount of content publication.

If you don’t have an editorial calendar, here's what's likely going to happen…

⏳ It’s 6:00 AM on a Thursday, and you're supposed to have a new post published in an hour.

😰 You're massively stressed out by the time crunch. You have no good ideas, nor the time and creativity to write something.

👩‍💻 You crack open the laptop hoping a miracle will happen. Unfortunately, the universe is not playing ball today and your mind is straight-up blank.

☹️ You originally committed to two blog posts a week, but you're going to drop that ball today.

Not using an editorial calendar is like not using Google maps for a road trip. Even if you hit the road with enthusiasm, you're likely going to take detours, get lost, and run out of gas.

An editorial calendar keeps you on track and ahead of the game. This means you’re so organized that you don’t have to “stress write”. What does that lead to? Creating fabulous content. ✨

Okay, what exactly is an editorial calendar anyway?

It's a calendar in which you plan which days content will be published on.

Now I know that sounds simple in practice….

Just pick a calendar, add some content ideas to a few dates, and you're done…right?

Not quite.

Posts go through various stages before they’re ready for publication.

That’s why I like to use Asana for my editorial calendar. It has this fancy tagging feature that helps me keep track of which stage or “status” my content is currently in. 👇

Here are the statuses I currently use:

Status 1: Idea & Needs Outlining
The piece of content is just an idea and needs to be written into an outline and script.
Status 2: Needs Recording
Since my blog posts are also videos used for my YouTube channel, status 2 is recording that content.
Status 3: Needs Editing
Once the content has been recorded, the video needs to be edited.
Status 4: Needs Prepping & Scheduling
One of my team members writes the blog post as well as a newsletter email (using the finished video and script as a reference). Then, they schedule everything.
Status 5: Done
The content is now scheduled to publish on the correct date so we’re all set!

👆 Since each status has a different color, I immediately see which stage each piece of content is at.

Did this step just inspire you to set up a super-organized editorial calendar?

Well, it’s your lucky day cause I have a full video explaining how I made my editorial calendar in Asana!

Step#4 Create High-Quality Content

This step is key because it determines where Google is going to rank you in its search results.

okay, so You might be wondering…

“Once I've written a blog post, how do I get people to read it?”

“How do I promote my blog post?”

“Do I need to already have an audience on social media in order to get people to read my blog?”

Answer: if you write quality content, Google WILL show your posts in its search results and drive traffic to your Blog.

If you focus your efforts on creating genuinely good content, the promotion will take care of itself.

“But HOW do I create this genuinely good content Paige?!”

Don’t sweat it, Ive got you covered. 😉

Here’s what Google likes to see:

2000+ words 💬
Usually, posts that manage to rank on the first page of Google results have 2000+ words. So make sure each of your blog posts have at least 2000 words.
Proper blog Format 📑
the post shouldn’t be one giant wall of text or one massive paragraph. Break it up with line breaks, paragraph breaks, headings and subheadings.
external links 🔗
Add links to other pages, blog posts, and offerings (ie. your products/services). SEO is basically a giant web of links, so the more links you have within your content (to your site or other people's sites) the better.
Graphics 📊
Aim to have at least one graphic in each post. This is especially important if you want to share your blogs on Pinterest. Plus, graphics make your content more skimmableand keep it visually interesting.
Call to action (CTA) 📢
A strong call to action at the end to whatever makes the most sense. Another blog post may be a paid offer, an opt in gift, etc.

of course, the content itself should also be fabulous:

Explain it well.
Give examples.
Use analogies to help readers understand your point.
Add a bit of personality to make it entertaining (personal life stories etc.)

Psst…need some help with writing this high-quality content? I’ve got you covered with 18 pages of FREE content creation outlines!👇

Step#5 Determine Your Process

In all things business, it’s CRUCIAL to define a process and then follow it.

this assures that things don't slip through the cracks or are done sloppily.

So here's my typical process for a blog post:

1. content idea

First, you have to come up with an idea for the post. For me, this step does not occur in an “organized” or “planned” fashion.

Instead, it’s constant:

🗣️ Every conversation I have…

❓ Every question I’m asked…

🤳 Everything that I Google…

📺 Every video I watch…

All of these things give me ideas for content.

They come in the shower, they come on walks….

Pro Tip: blog ideas often come to me while I'm driving, which is why I love to use Siri to jot them down in my notes app. 📝

So what’s the result of this?

I pretty much have a never-ending list of content ideas. That means when it’s time to plan content in my editorial calendar, I simply pick the best ideas from my list and use them for my next batch of posts.

2. outline

Once I’ve chosen an idea, it’s time to map it out. I actually like to do this the old-fashioned way: pen & paper. I find that when I need to organize my thoughts, I just can't do it as well on a computer.

Here’s what the outline for this post looked like once I’d typed it up:

3. writing

I take the outline and expand on it. I tell the readers stories and also mention other content that might be interesting for them.

4. SEO+

Now it’s time to add the bits and pieces that make this post shine: relevant links, graphics, and of course, a call to action.

Call to Action (CTA)

This is just a fancy way of telling people what they should do after they've consumed that piece of content. This might look like one of the following:

Do you have the perfect Part 2 to that post?
Do you have a relevant freebie?
Do you have an offering/product/service that readers could buy to make their life better?

The CTA is the perfect time to tell them all about it.

5. Scheudle post

All that’s left to do is to schedule your post. Squarespace makes this part super easy - you just have to choose a date and time and it'll take care of the rest.

Annnnd that’s it!

You’ve completed your blog post! 🥳

A word on Blogger’s Expectations

In my opinion, the reason that most blogs fail is from having unrealistic expectations.

Waaay back when in university, sitting in my dorm room, I read a post on tips for writing blog posts. 👩‍💻

One of the writer’s points was an absolute game-changer for me. And it's just as true now as it was in like 2013 when I read it.

Here it is:

Most people won't keep going. Most people won't be consistent.

99% of bloggers will throw in the towel.

It’s not easy to publish consistently, and a big part of quitting and not staying consistent is motivation.

Motivation is often killed by expectations. So don't go into this with big goals- especially if you haven't even published 5 posts yet. If you do this, you'll likely set unrealistic goals and then be disappointed.

Instead, keep the blog fun for you to write by keeping your expectations out of the picture.

And remember, while 99% of bloggers quit. 1% don't.

When I started blogging, I decided I was going to be in that 1%, and I was serious about committing to posting consistently. Then, as luck would have it, it turned into a million dollar business, which I am so grateful for. 🙏

But it definitely wasn't the blog alone that led to the revenue that this business created…

There’s one essential ingredient that will make or break the financial success of the business-side of your blog.

And that's an email list.

Sounds very unsexy I know, but if you like revenue, you're going to love an email list. Building your email list is akin to creating your own Soho House.

Just as a Soho House membership offers exclusive benefits, Your email list offers special insights, tips, and offers to your subscribers that aren't available to just any old visitor on your blog.

This exclusivity fosters a closer relationship with your audience that turns casual visitors into loyal followers.

So check out this video and steal my list-building strategy, which gained me 48,000 email subscribers! 👀

Psst… notice what I did there? A call to action to the next relevant piece of content. 😉

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How I Upped Revenue by $400k Last Year

Paige Brunton — Mon, 13 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Picture this: you've embarked on a fitness journey with the aim of becoming a strong, healthier version of yourself. 💪

You’re super motivated and stick to your routine: healthy eating and exercise. You meet your goals and see progress quickly! 🥬

Then suddenly…it all stops.

Despite your best efforts, you seem to have hit a fitness wall…

That’s how I felt when my business was stuck on a revenue plateau. 😤

I spent what felt like an eternity stuck on that plateau!

(Okay fine, it was only a couple of years… but it felt like forever to me.)

Thankfully, last year, we finally cracked the code.

So grab your favorite notebook, because today I'm going to give a mini revenue-boosting masterclass. 📝

Whether you're looking to add a little or a lot, here are 3 powerful strategies to help you do it.

Here's the kicker: not all the strategies are created equal.

While some strategies are quick fixes, others are more like slow burns.

Today we will unpack three types of methods:

fastest
easiest
hardest

It might surprise you to hear this: I personally went for the hardest of the three methods. It’s ironic since usually I’m always looking for the “lazy efficient strategy”. Stick around to read about why I chose to do this later in the blog.

The idea for this blog came to me during a brainstorming session with two of my business girlfriends.

Both of them were on a mission to skyrocket their business’s revenue. 📈

So we hashed out the best strategies for them to meet their goals. Before diving into the three strategies with them, I posed a really critical question:

Is your current business model scalable? Or is it time for a total business offering overhaul?

Try to see your business model as a recipe that you're following. 👩‍🍳

Say you're trying to bake a chocolate cake but you keep adding ingredients for vanilla sponge. No amount of vanilla sponge ingredients is going to give you the chocolate cake that you’re aiming for.

Sometimes you have to completely change the recipe - not just the quantity of ingredients.

See where I’m going with this?

If doubling down on what you're currently doing won't catapult your business to where you want it to be, maybe it's time to pivot rather than just push harder.

This is especially true in the following scenarios:

You’re selling a low-ticket item that won't move the needle much in your business (for example, a $49 eBook).
Your current business model has you on the fast track to burnout. 🥵

A possible solution for the first scenario would be to turn this eBook into a high-value offer. Creating a course or a Done-For-You service could be a game changer. You could also consider using it as the entry point to a more lucrative product ladder (but more on that later).

If the second scenario rings true for you and service overload has you at your wit's end, it might be time to switch to an agency model or productize your offerings.

Every silver lining has a cloud of pros and cons so consider these different options carefully.

If your current offering and model ARE what you want to continue with, here are three methods for raising your revenue.

Option #1: Raise The Price of Your Current Offerings

Out of the three strategies, this one is definitely the fastest to implement. If you're looking for a quick win, this is it.

LEt’s look at an example:

You're at your favorite café (where the barista knows your name) and notice the price of your go-to drink has gone up… ☕️

But with the first sip, you realize they have seriously upped their game!

They’re using a higher-grade bean for better-tasting coffee. On top of that, they have redesigned the entire cafe and the cup branding. This place is now fabulous and totally Instagrammable. 📸

So in the end, you’re fine with paying the extra money because it's worth every penny!

That's the gist of raising your prices. If your offering is top-notch, don't be shy to ask for what it's worth.

When it comes to raising rates, it might be as simple as leaving your offering as it is and just upping the price. For those of you who massively undercharge in comparison to your competition, this could be the solution you were looking for.

In other cases, significantly raising the price without increasing the value of the offering just doesn’t make sense. Instead, you have to first figure out what changes to make to your offering so that it’s worth the amount you’d like to charge.

Even though changing offerings does require a bit of work, it’s definitely not a heavy lift compared to the next two strategies on the list. That’s why this method is the fastest option.

It’s also possible that you’ve hit a limit on what you're offering is worth (and therefor can’t up the prices). If this sounds like you, move along to option two. 👇

Option#2: New or Exclusive Offerings for Existing Customers

I like to call this the “easy method” because it’s definitely easier than the third strategy on this list. And there are a few stats that prove this. 👇

Selling more to your current audience/customers who’ve already had a positive experience with you is significantly easier (and therefore cheaper) than finding new customers.

It's like when you’ve hosted killer dinner parties, and your friends just can't get enough of them. 💃

Why not make it a regular occurrence?

Your guests already love what you serve. All you’ve got to do is keep hosting the parties

This can be applied to your existing customers. They already like your products/services, so introducing something new or exclusive could have them coming back for more.

the important question to ask yourself is: what is the next step that customers could take with my business?

This is where a product ladder comes in.

Here's an Example of What Your Ladder’s Steps Might Look Like:

You run a copywriting templates business.
A customer purchases your $200 template for writing their website copy.
The NEXT thing this customer likely needs is a website.
You consider creating these website templates but realize you don’t have the skills nor the desire to do so.
Instead, you become an affiliate of a template shop. *
*There's nothing to say that every single step on your ladder needs to be a product that you personally create.
Once this customer’s business has grown a bit, they’re like “Man...I’m writing constant copy for my emails. 🙈 ”
Enter your fabulous (and higher-priced) copywriting course!
It allows them to take off their template training wheels and write their own copy for their sales emails.
Further down the road, this same customer has successfully scaled their business and is looking for a community of like-minded entrepreneurs operating at their level.
You’ve got them covered.
You offer in-person experiences (or a mastermind or group coaching program) as the highest-level tier of your offerings.

Adding these different rungs to your business’s ladder instantly increases the potential of generating more revenue through existing customers.

If neither one of those options feels right for your business (or you're just curious 😉 ) , it’s time to unbox the final strategy:

Option #3: Get More Buyers For Your Current Offer

This is the hardest option. And yup you guessed it - also the one which I went for. 🙋‍♀️

Now true, this IS what you might typically think of when aiming to grow a business: Sell the same thing, just to more people.

But the implementation of this can take MANY different forms.

if you get it right, this method can have a truly exponential impact on your business.

It IS pretty time-consuming though. This is not a get-rich-quick method. This is the long game. ⏳

honestly, while options 1 and 2 are great, At some point you will exhaust them.

Even if you plan to go for option 1 or 2, you should never forget about option 3.

Always aim to constantly grow your reach and expand your audience.

This means getting in front of new audiences

👉 who you turn into warm audiences…

👉who then buy your offerings.

There are MANY ways you can go about this:

Ads
social media
Affiliates
SEO
Speaking

TIP: Feeling overwhelmed by all of the options? unsure which method is right for you? take this FREE QUIZ and find out which client-finding method is the best fit for you! 👇

Okay, so you might be wondering:

“Paige, why on earth did you decide to go with the hardest option?!”

You might also be curious about how I managed to add a few hundred thousand in additional revenue to my business within a year. 💸

Here's a little bit of important background:

I specialize in selling online courses that empower women to become top-notch web designers. 👩‍💻

When it came to choosing my revenue growth strategy, I found that option 1 & option 2 were not a good fit:

❌ Raising Pricepoints

I'd already raised my prices in the past and felt satisfied with the price point of my offering. So I wanted to leave the price where it was.

❌ Doubling down on sales to my current audience

I’d also already given this one a go.

Although it did increase revenue, it wasn't anything monumental.

I even launched a higher-tier program but I started to feel like I was trading too much of my personal time for dollars. That was definitely a situation I was keen to move away from so the idea of expanding into an agency or building up a coaching team wasn’t super appealing either.

what did spark Joy was my course content.

I had already spent years crafting and perfecting it. 💖

It was clear that my heart was with my current offering. So, faced with the crossroads of how to scale it, I landed on option three: broadening my reach to new potential students.

next, it was time to find the best approach….

Ads?

👎 The idea of pouring thousands of dollars into ads with my fingers crossed for a good return was not my cup of tea,

Social Media? or SPEAKING?

🙅‍♀️ Constantly sharing my life on social media, or constantly jetting around for speaking engagements both just didn’t jive with the work-life balance that I wanted to have.

SEO?

🧐 I had a really good run with SEO. It definitely did offer a linear trajectory but as a primary method, it felt kind of limiting.

I was craving a method with exponential potential…and then, the light bulb turned on💡

An affiliate program!

This wasn't going to be just any affiliate program…we were going for gold. 🏆

So here’s what we did:

We meticulously curated a group of 30 affiliates whose audiences perfectly aligned with our offering.
We held personalized calls with each affiliate.
We had detailed briefings on our courses (some of the affiliates were past students, so they already knew the courses super well).
We created an incredible prize ladder that ignited some fun competition. It offered luxurious spa treatments & dreamy vacation getaways. Basically did everything we could to ensure that our affiliates were as excited about the program as we were.
We wrote LOADS of sales emails for our affiliates.
We hosted a training for them where they learned about what our launch looked like AND the best tips we’d gathered over the years for how to sell the courses.

this project was no walk in the park.

It took us six months of preparation but it was well worth it. It paved the way for what turned out to be a game-changing year!

By focusing on empowering others to share our courses, we managed to smash through the lead generation barrier and add significant revenue to the business. 💥

The lesson from this? picking a strategy and sticking to it is crucial.

Diving headfirst & with determination into your chosen method can transform whatever dream you have into a reality. 🙌

I know it can be hard to make these big business decisions alone (depending on where you live and your social circle, you might be the only business owner that you know.)

Lucky for you, you’ve got me as your business bestie!

I'm more than happy to share my future growth strategy and plans for my business with you.

That’s exactly what I do in this video. I break down exactly what is happening behind the scenes in my business and what my big plans for this year are. 👀

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How To Hire A Virtual Assistant (Fast!)

Paige Brunton — Mon, 06 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Do you feel overwhelmed when you look at your daily to-do list?

Do the projects that you’re actually excited to work on keep getting delayed because you’re constantly caught up in the tedious day-to-day tasks of running a business?

I’ve been there. 🙋‍♀️

When I start to feel this way, I know it might be time to consider adding a new team member. Today is an exciting day for my business because we’re doing exactly that!

I’ve hired at least twenty individuals over the years and have learned countless lessons along the way. Today I will share my top tips as well as my business’s current approach to hiring - it might not be what you expect!

You might be surprised to hear this… I still don’t know anything about our current applicants! Yep, you heard me. On top of that, today I will choose our fabulous new team member without ever having met them!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.

Why am I hiring a new team member?

The role that I’m hiring for is Virtual Assistant (VA). At the moment, the main tasks of this role will include content management and customer service. This might expand to other areas in the future.

Truth bomb Alert 🚨

Okay, I don't know who needs to hear this… it IS possible for a VA to take over the little tasks that are currently cluttering your to-do list.

The result?

You’ll have more time and energy to focus on the work that you love AND the work that really moves the needle in your business.

I definitely used to be skeptical about handing tasks over to other people. I didn’t believe that they would get the job done to my standard. Turns out…I was wrong! and I'm thrilled about it!

Okay, I’ll admit, it does not always go perfectly. That’s why hiring intelligently is super key. It’s what makes the difference between hiring someone who’s a blessing to your life versus hiring someone whose work you have to redo & correct every step of the way. So here are my 5 steps for hiring intelligently so that you can find the perfect fit for the position.

👀Psst…make sure to subscribe to the email list to be the first to know next time we’re adding to the team!

Step #1 Track your Time

When it comes to hiring, the first question to ask yourself is:

WHAT exactly should this person do?

A very common mistake is hiring for the wrong task. Say you’re a booked-out web designer who doesn’t have time for new clients or projects. You might think the solution would be hiring a fellow web designer to help you take on the workload. Although this might seem like the logical course of action, it’s a huge blunder. I would know…I’ve done this! Such mistakes can cost your business BIG TIME so we definitely want to think ahead and avoid this. This is where time tracking comes in.

Time tracking is the most accurate method to find out what tasks you are currently spending time on. For this to be effective, it’s important to be as exact and specific as possible.

and when I say specific, I mean it.

Stepping away from the computer for a few minutes to sign off a package delivery?
Taking a quick break because your husband walked in the room?
Just got off a 3-minute phone call with a team member?

Yup! All of these should go in the time tracking sheet. That way you’re left with a truly accurate overview of how you spent your time.

Here’s what the result might look like. 👇

As you can see, it’s down to the minute. Another great benefit of doing this is that I find out what types of things are distracting me from my work.

not only does this allow me to create a system and environment through which I get as much work done as possible, it also helps me determine what types of work I should be spending my time on.

Step#2 Determine the Hourly Rate of the Tasks

Okay, so I’ve tracked my time and have a clear overview of how much time tasks like writing emails and finding receipts for the bookkeeper take. Now it’s time to estimate the dollar-per-hour rate for someone doing these tasks. Is this a $20/hour task? or more like a $50 or even $100/hour task?

Storytime 📖

There was once a law firm where four lawyers worked. All four lawyers were booked out with clients so the manager considered hiring another lawyer. However, before doing so, he had the four lawyers track their time for a one week period. When the manager looked at the results, he saw that each of the laywers was spending ten hours every week on general office tasks: fixing the printer, sending emails etc. So instead of hiring another lawyer (for $100K per year), the manager hired one assistant (for $40K per year). This assistant took over the general office tasks and freed the lawyers of all their random activities. As a result, they had more time to focus on serving clients which effectively generated more revenue for the law office. 💰

The moral of the story? track your time (down to the last detail). Then find the lowest dollar-per-hour tasks that you are currently spending time on. These are the tasks you should start outsourcing first.

Step #3 Find the Tasks That Bring You Joy

Ask yourself the following questions:

which tasks do I enjoy the most?
which tasks would I be happy to give to someone else?

I learned the importance of this question the hard way…

The things I enjoy doing most for my business are all forms of content creation:

Courses
Content/Videos
Website design

What I don't enjoy doing are the admin and management parts of the business. So you might be surprised to hear that there was a time when the majority of my hours were spent managing people. How did this happen? Well, since hiring managers can be costly, I decided to just do the tasks myself. However, that meant I had to outsource the other area I spent time on: content creation. I figured this would be easier and more affordable since content creation is a lower dollar-per-hour task.

So here’s how it worked: I had a team member write blog posts for me. These blogs were then used as scripts for the YouTube videos that I would record. All of these early videos on my YouTube channel, were written and scripted by someone else. 👇

All that I did was sit in front of the camera and read the scripts from my teleprompter. So I was pretty much a show pony. As you may have already guessed, I was not happy with this solution. Mainly for the following reasons:

I love creating my own content.
Even though it was technically my YouTube channel, it was run by someone else. They came up with the ideas and scripts. They also oversaw the video post-production. The only part I had in it was recording the videos.

Even though this setup technically worked, it left me in the role of managing projects and teams which was ultimately not the work that I enjoyed. During that time, just looking at my list of tasks for the day left me feeling drained.

I found myself dreading the workday. I even started to wonder “why am I running this business if I don't actually like working at it?”

So as you can see, while it’s important to take the dollar-per-hour amount for tasks into consideration, it shouldn't be the only factor.

Prioritizing that you as the entreprenuer enjoy your work is super key to running a business long run.

Step #4 Define the New Team Member’s Role

Once you’ve figured out which of your current tasks you enjoy most and which you enjoy least, it’s time for step four: create a list of the roles, responsibilities, to-do's and tasks that you want to hand over to a new team member.

As I hinted at earlier, we entrepreneurs often think we can’t trust someone else to manage projects in our business. We assume that team members can only handle certain tasks within a project and that we need to be the ones managing the whole project.

This is a limiting belief that needs to be broken.

Here’s a list of roles that my team members have held in my business:

customer service:
This is the first position I ever hired someone for. Believe it or not… even here I had my doubts. I thought that in order to give customers the best possible experience, I had to personally respond to all their emails.
Flash forward: turns out I’m actually not that great at customer service and that other people can do it way better!
I also had to accept that if I wanted to prioritize creating content, I would not have time to run customer service. My audience is certainly better served by more content than they would be by me individually answering their emails.
⭐️BONUS: staying clear of the inbox means I completely miss out on negative emails (although I have to say, as far as PB customers go, these cases are VERY rare). Since I built this business from the ground up, I'm very emotionally attached to it and can take such emails quite personally.
So it’s better for everyone if I steer clear of the inbox.
Tech & Running Launch:
This is a larger project so that’s probably the reason it took some time before I gave it up.However, my team now has a detailed template for running it, and the tasks just repeat with each launch. Of course, there are occasional tweaks but for the most part, the process stays the same.
It involves scheduling emails, testing purchase links, setting up the software used for affiliate tracking and live streams, and updating price changes.
All of these tasks can be done by a team member.
Website page redesign
This one pains me a bit because it does fall into the category of tasks that bring me joy. However, I’ve accepted that I don’t have time to do all the redesigns.
I now have a team member who is incredible at design so she is responsible for this area. I do still like to find ways to contribute.
Example: we're currently doing a complete rebrand of the business including a website overhaul. I ofcourse want to be involved in the process but also have to accept that I do not have time to do it all.
Copywriting
Although I run the content creation and write the scripts for my channel’s videos, I do have team members who help with recording and updating things like the email welcome sequence, sales pages, and website copy.
This works surprisingly well because over the years I’ve developed a strong brand voice. After having observed my content for long enough, team members are truly able to speak like me.
🙈 One team member even told me that her husband said “you're starting to sound like paige in your personal life”. So she really got into the voice! 😂
Markeing Strategies
It brings me joy to come up with ideas as well as to write, and shoot the content. However, it does not bring me joy to edit the videos, design the thumbnails, and format the accompanying blog post. All of these tasks are done by two of my team members.
I’ve also had team members take over entire marketing strategy projects. For example, the affiliate program for our courses has been run by one of my team members since day one. In this case, I decided what marketing strategy we should do, found the course that we should take to learn more about it, and then spoke with my team member about how to design the program.
After the initial prepping, the actual implementation itself was fully on this team member from start to finish.

As you can see, team members can handle WAY more than you might first imagine. Ultimately, hiring is going to challenge a lot of those “only I can do it” beliefs.

Step #5 Find your New Team Member

You have defined what you need and now it’s time to find the right person for the job. There are various ways for going about this:

Ask your own audience
I’m really lucky in that my audience happens to also be the perfect hiring pool for my business. If that's not the case for you, don’t sweat it - I’ve got some other recommendations up my sleeve!
ask Entrepreneurial friends
They just might have the perfect audience of candidates for your role. Even though we have our own audience, I still like to share the job posting with a few friends. The benefit of this is once the hiring round is finished, we can pass over curated lists of the top candidates (who we didn't take) in case our friends would like to hire them for their own business (and they do the same for us).
post in Facebook Groups
Facebook can also be a very effective route! In addition to posting on my personal page, we posted in the following groups:

Pro Tip: if your VA position involves web design, you can always reach out to my team. We’re happy to pass on aligned jobs to our student community. So if you’re looking for someone who’s super savvy with Squarespace, our community is an absolute goldmine. Just send an email to hello@paigebrunton.com 💌

Looking for ways to grow your audience? Try this free guide! 👇

Our hiring process

So I bet you are just dying to know how it’s possible for me to hire someone I’ve never actually spoken to.

Up until this point, the entire hiring process has been run by my team member Helen. Let me catch you up on what her hiring process was:

Shared job listing with email list, Facebook groups & business friends.
Narrowed down 400 applications to 25.
Ran twenty-five 15 -minute interviews.
conducted a test project with the remaining candidates (the purpose of this was to give applicants a preview of what their work would be like).
Held 8 full-length interviews (and recorded them for me).
Narrowed it down to 3 final applicants.

At this point, I come into the picture.

Today Helen sent me the list of her top 3 picks along with some notes and the interview recordings. All that’s left for me to do is to watch the three interviews and decide who my top pick is. After a chat with her to see if our favorite applicant is the same person (it was!), Helen takes care of organizing the contracts and the onboarding process,

once we hire the team member, I really do like to meet them and get to know them. when we bring new team members on, we like to host a Team Social. Since our team is spread out over the globe, We do online socials. I definitely prefer doing activities vs. just chatting. Our favorite so far have been virtual cooking classes that you can book through airbnb experiences. 👩‍🍳

So that’s it! now you have all the tools you need to find your dream VA.

A word about our affiliate program…

If you have people in your audience who would be interested in learning about web design, you might just be our next affiliate! Many of our affiliates are companies who teach accompanying & complimentary skills (copywriting, brand design, VA, CSS).

You might also just be a student who loves our courses and thinks that your audience would love them too. We want to hear from you!

Please do send us an email, hello@ paigebrunton.com to let us know. We're always looking to add to our family of really fabulous affiliates. We love to organize really fun affiliate prizes (like ski trips in Switzerland ⛷️) and it's an amazing revenue stream for both sides.

Speaking of revenue streams… I know we talk a lot about how to build online businesses, but we don’t often talk about what to do with the money once we’ve made it. I’m passionate about helping more women having wealth. A key factor in this is managing your money well. So I created an entire video on what steps to take when money arrives in your account.

Give it a watch to see my payday routine and learn all about how I manage my expenses, savings, and investments. 👀

You’ll Also Love...

Payday Routine: 6 Money Management Tips

Paige Brunton — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

*Yep - those are affiliate links - my Margarita fund thanks you kindly if you choose to use ‘em!

Rather read all about it?

It's payday today, so I thought it’d be fun to show you:

How I figured out what amount to pay myself from my business's revenue.
The finance-related tasks I do every month as a business owner.

It can be pretty confusing to know what a reasonable income is to take from your business.

I personally was very confused by that question for quite some time 😅 and I know y'all are curious about all things to do with how I manage my money, finances, and business. So let's get right into it!

Step #1: Calculate my salary.

I do this by calculating my business’s average monthly revenue over the past 12 months.

the reason that I do this is because businesses have massive fluctuations in revenue.

If our business makes a really big sale one month, then we make a lot of money. 💰 However, if we DON’T make a big sale that month, then the business makes much less money. On the other hand, my personal expenses stay roughly the same month to month.

So in order to even out the revenue roller coaster, I average the past 12 months of business revenue. That means my calculation would be the total revenue of my business divided by 12 (for 12 months of the year), and then I keep a percentage of that.

I actually set up this system with the help of the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz . I love this super handy chart in the book. 👇

It explains the target percentages that you should allocate to the different envelopes of your business. Of course one of these envelopes would be paying yourself (Owner’s Pay).

So for example, if your business makes under $250,000 per year, the goal is to pay yourself 50% of that.

Now, as your business grows in revenue, the percentage that you pay yourself goes down because your expenses typically grow. You're therefore getting a smaller percentage BUT since the revenue is growing, your income still grows as the owner.

Okay let’s look at an example:

Your business made $200,000 last year. 💰
So you divide that by 12 months = $16,666/month
Now you calculate 50% of $16,666 to find out what you pay yourself.
Your salary is $8333/month.

If you want to learn all about setting aside money for paying yourself, your business expenses, savings, taxes etc. I would say that the book Profit First is absolutely essential reading for every single business owner. So definitely grab yourself a copy on Amazon or your local bookstore.

*Psst…your business isn’t making enough yet for you to pay yourself what you want? I’ve got you covered! 😉 Here’s a free webinar on 4 steps to double your site sales:

Step#2: Transfer the Money.

And I know that sounds simple, but in my case, it actually isn't because there's a lot of currency exchange involved.

I charge U.S. dollars in my business because the vast majority of my customers are American and I want the sale to be easy for them. I don't want them to be freaked out by paying in Swiss francs, or be concerned about fluctuations in the currency exchange rates between Swiss francs (CHF) and USD if they're on a payment plan.

So to make it easy for my customers, I run the whole business in USD 💵

But because I live in Switzerland (and use Swiss francs for my day-to-day spending), I have to do this currency conversion thing. In order to do that, I use Wise.

*This blog is not sponsored by Wise. I really do just LOVE their service.

if you're dealing with currency exchanges in your personal life or for your business, do not trust your bank when they say that they don't charge fees for their currency exchange! I totally fell for that one.

Banks have their own “special” exchange rate, which is worse than what the actual exchange rate should be. Over time this exchange rate adds up MASSIVELY. 🤯

So Wise is my solution to getting the best possible exchange rate.

We use wise for my business bank account, and I also have a Wise account for myself personally. So I transfer the money (and currency convert it in the process from USD to CHF) from my business bank account to my personal bank account.

And in that process, I can see really clearly what amount of fees Wise charges. 👇

Again, this is SO. MUCH. LOWER. than the banks that I used in the past. So I'm in love with Wise. 🙌

Step #3 Review Budget & Organize Funds.

My bank account has spaces in it, and I will not use anything other than a bank account which has spaces anymore!

I have used almost all of the European fintech banks (N26, Revolut, Starling, Wise). The reason that I love them ALL is because they have spaces where you can organize your finances.

These spaces have been the biggest game changer for simplifying my monthly finance routine and helping me to know wHICH money is for what.

I actually have no idea if spaces in bank accounts are normal in the U.S. or not… 🤷‍♀️

If someone could let me know in the comments that would be super lovely!

If it is an option, I highly HIGHLY recommend it.

These spaces help me know what’s my money to spend and what's intended for something else.

So since the money for the usual bills gets taken out of my account at the beginning of the month, I know that whatever is left in the main account is my money to do whatever I want with!

I used to track every single expense & transaction in A budgeting app (like YNAB). But it was SO time-consuming to categorize every transaction. I just could not be bothered to keep up with that. 😮‍💨

So I gave that up and went for my lazy, efficient method: organizing my money in a way that whatever is in my main bank account space is my daily spending money.

If that account starts to get low, I know to rein back in on the spending until I get paid next month. And that's basically how I stick within a personal budget without having to categorize every single transaction.

Now, for things like housing, phone bills, and utilities, I leave the budgeted amount for those in my main banking space, and they all just get taken out and auto-debited a few days after I pay myself. Things like grocery money, vacation savings, or savings for my annual car insurance bill or my tax bill have their own budgeting categories/space in my bank account.

again, the reason for that is if I have that money in my main bank account space, I find it very confusing to know what is mine and what needs to be used for something else later.

Step #4: Check Emergency Fund.

Typically, people like Dave Ramsey will tell you to save three to six months of expenses and an easy-to-access emergency fund. However, when you run a business, however, it's typically recommended to save a few more months of expenses.

My husband and I like to keep nine months on hand. It took us a really, REALLY long time to save that. But we did it! And that emergency fund has been the best peace of mind to help us sleep well at night.

But it also serves a really practical function too. We have used it on many occasions:

An unexpected $7,000 car repair bill right after buying said car. 🤦‍♀️
A $5,000 bill to get the gutters replaced on our house…3 days after we moved in.
A tree cutter quoted us one price and then sent a bill for double the amount. 🙄

These types of things happen all of the time so it's just really great to have money set aside for it. It makes the whole experience of those rather annoying things way less difficult.

The money in the emergency fund is scattered across a few different accounts. So that means that every month I tally up what's where and check if we need to fill it back up or if it's happily full with nine months of expenses money in it.

Step #5 Add Money to Retirement Savings.

The percentage that I take for my retirement savings has changed over time but right now, I'm taking 25% of what I make and investing it to grow for my retirement.

In order to invest my money, I send it to a brokerage account.

A brokerage account is an account THAT allows you to buy AND SELL A VARIETY OF INVESTMENTS, SUCH AS STOCKS, BONDS, MUTUAL FUNDS, AND ETFS.

At the moment I have an investment account with Interactive Brokers. I am loving it because as a resident of Switzerland, it gives me access to American ETFs which tend to have the lowest fees.

And if you know anything about investing, you know that there is a massive difference between a fee of 0.03% vs. 1% per year on your investments.

I know that might sound like a small difference in percentage, but that difference can result in literally hundreds of thousands of dollars less for you come retirement age!

If you would like to know how I plan and manage my investments, definitely let me know in the comments below.

Investing isn’t typically a massive conversation topic for women. I’ve definitely noticed that a lot of women I speak to are really uninformed about these things. I'm really passionate about making sure that all women live happy and wealthy lives (both now and in their retirement). 💪

So basically if giving you a SparkNotes version of what I've learned about investing helps, I would be more than happy to share!

If you're wondering what my investment choices are…

So instead of picking individual stocks, which I definitely do not have the time or the desire to do (plus, literally every single investment book says that's a bad idea!) I buy baskets of companies, also known as ETFs.

This also means that my risk is diversified between all of the different companies within that ETF basket. For example if one company in the basket does terribly and the others in the basket do really well, then overall I'm still doing well with my investment.

At the moment I'm buying three different types ETFs 📈

VOO: this is investing in the 500 biggest companies in America.
VGT: this is the riskier and more growth-focused area of my portfolio. It's all American tech companies.
VEA: this is investing in large companies in the rest of the West. Companies in places like Japan, the UK, Canada, Switzerland, etc. It doesn't have any US stocks in it but I already have those in the VOO. So basically VEA assures that I diversify my portfolio between companies all over the world.

Now, what investments you choose is a super personal choice and should reflect your risk tolerance and level of knowledge on investing. So what I choose to invest in might not be right for you.

I truly believe learning about investments is probably the best time ROI you could ever make in your entire life.

So definitely check out this list of my favorite finance books. There are a few beginner-friendly ones as well as some more advanced reads, so feel free to pick the books according to your current level of financial knowledge.

Step #6: Track my Progress toward Financial Freedom.

This is an idea that’s quite popular in The Fire Movement. I am actually not a fire person (that is not my goal or the way I want to live my life). However, I do like this specific idea from the fire community:

tracking my progress towards my financial freedom or financial independence number.

I'm different from The Fire Community because I do NOT plan to stop working early. That’s because I genuinely love my work (actually, I think I have the best job I could ever dream of 🥰).

But I DO totally see the value in tracking progress toward a goal.

*Feeling motivated to plan out your business’s goals and strategy? Check out my free workbook & checklist here! It might not be the new year but any time is a good time to start!👇

So even though hitting my financial freedom number is a fair ways into the future, I find a lot of joy and motivation in just keeping an eye on it. I like tracking the progress towards hitting my financial freedom number.

Now, these six steps are great but if your business isn't making enough money to pay yourself quite what you want yet, it's definitely time to focus your efforts on upping the revenue in your business.

This video will help you do exactly that. It's all about six income-boosting ideas for service providers, so be sure to give it a watch!

You’ll Also Love...

Digital Product Marketing Tips for $5K+ Months!

Paige Brunton — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s tHAT VIDEO FOR YA!

Mentioned in the Video

*those are affiliate links - my Margarita fund thanks you kindly in advance!

Are you hoping to separate the relationship between the number of hours that you work from the amount of income you generate?

Digital products might be having a moment on social media right now, but people have actually been selling them very successfully for literally years. Today's guest, Erica, has been selling a certain type of digital product, which she has made a minimum of $5,000 a month with for the past seven years.

So no, this isn't a fad, it's a proper, genuine, in-demand business model if you do it correctly. In order to make $5,000 a month or more, there are really two vital things that you need to know, which most new digital product sellers don't quite get right. So enjoy this marketing and sales masterclass from the absolute expert on digital product sales, Erica from Big Cat Creative.

Okay, Erica, tell us all about it. What digital products exactly are you selling? And also, how long have you been doing this for? So I sell Squarespace templates and have been doing so since 2017.

(Erica:) Seven years? Maybe just under seven years? Is that the right math? Haha!

So quite a while.

It took a little while to get started in the beginning, but within the first year, everything became pretty consistent after doing a lot of marketing and getting everything to a good place.

And since then, it's been generally pretty consistent.

So yeah, that's some good longevity in the website template game.

What kind of experience does someone need if they want to start their own website template shop? What experience did you have before you started?

Yeah, that's such a good question. And I get asked that all the time by people who want to do the same thing.

I feel like there's a difference between experience and skills.

So in terms of my personal experience, I had experience in graphic design and had been doing brands and other graphic design stuff for a few years. And also I had just started with web design.

So I didn't have a ton of experience in web design.

I had been working with clients for that year and I was self-taught. But in terms of actual skills, I would say that I deep-dived on the learning skills portion.

So not a ton of experience working one-on-one with people in that industry, but lots of skills that I learned and taught myself.

I don't necessarily think you have to have any experience working in the web design industry or working one-on-one with clients.

But I would say you want to be really confident in your skills in the platform you use.

So for me, that's Squarespace.

(Wanna give Squarespace a try? You can grab 10% off with code PAIGE10) Yep - that’s an affiliate link!

As well as the platform you need to have great web design skills, and the strategy of web design and never stop learning those skills because you're going to be selling templates and people are going to be looking to you as an expert.

So having those skills is important, I think. But obviously you never stop learning because you’re building templates along the way.

You're going to continue building your skills, so you don’t need to know everything right away, but you do need to have a base level of skills on whatever platform you're choosing to build your website templates on.

Okay, so next up, let's talk about where exactly you sell your templates. Talk to me about marketplaces versus your own website for selling your templates and the pros and cons of marketplaces vs your own website.

Personally, I've always prioritized my own website sales. I've dabbled in marketplaces, and I do know a lot of people that have quite a bit of success selling primarily on marketplaces, but my preference is my own website.

I think you can find success either way, but I also think the best way is having your templates on both of those platforms.

Why would you choose one when you can have both?

I personally prioritize my own sales from my own website because I don't necessarily trust in marketplaces to be around in five to 10 years. Who knows if they have the longevity to last.

You're putting all of your eggs in that basket and things can change.

They could potentially shut down.

Their fees could increase by a big amount.

They just have so much control over your sales and your business that it's a little bit scary putting all of your trust into one marketplace.

If you use multiple marketplaces, that's better.

Multiple marketplaces plus working on marketing your own store. I think that's probably the best approach.

The thing about marketing your own store is that it's yours.

You have full control over it.

You control the pricing.

You control everything and you just don't have to worry about the potential changes with marketplaces and their structures and their pricing and if they'll even be around and you don't want to put all of your trust into that.

Can you talk about what are the best or most common marketplaces to list your website templates if you want to go that route?

I personally only have our templates on Creative Market, but I know that a lot of people sell on creative market and also Etsy. Those are probably the two biggest marketplaces for website templates that I see people having success with.

Particularly Etsy, which I've never delved into.

I do think there's potential there to make a lot of sales. But again, I would always recommend if you are going to use creative market or Etsy to at least have your own shop getting built up on the side.

And so if we wanted to sell the templates on our own website, how exactly are customers supposed to find our templates? How do we get people to our website to buy them in the first place?

I think that's the biggest question, isn't it?

So if we just jump back to marketplaces for a second, the good thing about marketplaces is that they often do have this built in audience.

Unlike your website. You're not going to just get people seeing your website straight away. It's really reliant on how much marketing you do.

There are so many different ways you can get people to your website.

So you can create content on a blog or content like YouTube that is really searchable.

And by searchable, I mean people googling things or looking things up online and you showing up in the search results.

So creating searchable content is a really, really big one. Paige, I know you love it as a marketing strategy as well. Blog, YouTube, and even podcasting is good in a way.

Podcasting isn’t quite as searchable, but podcasts combined with a blog is going to get people arriving on your site through search engines.

And then from there, you can also do create content on all the social media platforms, you know, choose, whatever one you want.

Probably don't do all of them at the same time. It's a lot of work, but there are so many to choose from depending on what you like to use and maybe where your ideal client is actually hanging out.

And also you could use affiliate marketing. I think that's a really, that's a really good way to get people to visit your website through basically recommendations of others that customers trust.

Trying to find a way to reach large numbers of people and get them back to your website is the goal.

There are tons of different ways you can do that through different marketing strategies.

But the first ones that come to mind are always like blogging and YouTube and creating that searchable content, then all of the social media platforms and affiliate marketing.

What’s the breakdown or percentage of your sales that come from Affiliates, versus YouTube versus Social Media?

I know that 90%+ of our traffic and audience building comes through Google and search engine through SEO.

That's really worked for us because that's where we put all of our energy for the last seven years.

So I don't want to tell everyone like that's, you know, this works way better than anything else. I know that it works really well, but if you look at the amount of effort that we put into that compared to all of the other things that I just talked about, like social media and affiliate marketing, it’s the thing we put the most effort into that’s worked the best.

And then talk to me about topics we should be creating content on? Sometimes people are like, oh, well, if I give a tutorial, then they're just going to go build their own website themselves.

I think it really, really depends on who you're trying to attract, as in your ideal client.

So getting relatively clear on who that is first, it doesn't have to be like super, super niche though. You don't have to pinpoint an exact person, but getting like a general idea of who you're trying to attract and sell your templates to and who you've created those templates for, that's going to make creating searchable content so much easier because then you'll know, or you can at least do some research into, okay, what are these people trying to figure out?

The most obvious thing is creating content around Squarespace, creating content around how to build a website or like how to do this or that on Squarespace because we're targeting those beginners.

But you can even niche down more than that because I know a lot of people selling templates, they specifically are targeting, let's say people in the health industry or imagine someone's creating website templates for yoga studios.

You're going to want to create content about creating websites for yoga studios because that's what the people you're trying to target are going to be searching.

So really, really important, you get relatively clear on that first.

Otherwise you're going to create a lot of content that might get clicks and might get people on your website, but it's not going to convert to sales.

So you've got to find that sweet spot where it's like, okay, this is going to get a lot of traffic, but it's also going to attract those right sort of people.

Can you talk about running like sales and promotions in your business?

I think that's a really good question. And I think it sort of depends on what you focus your marketing efforts on for the majority of your business.

Like I said, we’ve focused all of our marketing on this long term SEO or search engine optimization, getting people to click on our posts. And those sort of marketing techniques have last a long time. They're really long term. And because we've done this, we haven't had to rely on promotions.

Promotions are awesome, but we've spent the majority of our energy focusing on that long term stuff.

If you’ve chosen a different marketing technique, for example if you’re using social media and maybe not focused on those longer term things and you are getting most of your audience and your sales through social media, then promotions are probably going to be like a way bigger part of your strategy because you don't have as consistent sales coming in through Google traffic.

So it depends what you've chosen for your marketing.

I think regardless of whatever marketing strategy you've chosen, promos are really awesome and can be a great way to boost your income for a certain period of time and just like even build your audience, get more sales. I don't think they're ever a bad idea, but it's whether you have the time to work on them and whether you need them in your business, I guess.

(Paige:) That's interesting so if I think about the example of if someone's searching in Google, Squarespace website template or website templates for photographers or yoga studios or whatever, then they probably want to buy relatively quickly and so therefore, they probably just buy on a more day to day basis.

Whereas on social media, they followed you at some point because you make pretty stuff. Then when you have a sale, that's the reason to buy. It's a good point about how the marketing strategy relates to the importance or lack of importance of running promotions in the business.

(Erica:) Yeah. And I think you can bake promotions into your strategy. Having promotions is a strategy in itself. It's not something we've done because we haven't had to and we've spent the time that we could be focusing on promotions on more blogging.

But if you bake promos into your strategy, I think they are a really, really awesome way to boost your sales.

And by the time you get to the end of the year, you'll notice that your sales will be less consistent than if you were focusing on something that had a more consistent return. But at the end of the year, it might look the same overall because you've had big highs and it's gone up and down. So yeah, I think that's, they're cool.

How many promos do you actually run in a year?

We used to focus way more on putting more effort into our promos and we put way less effort into them now for that same reason. We're spending all of our time doing other marketing stuff that we prioritized.

When we did put more effort into them, they saw a much bigger return.

So like I said if you're going to bake that into your strategy, you can really put a lot of effort into those promos and you can see really good results from those like we used to. But it does take time and, you know, it's like there's only so many things that you can do.

Right now we typically run maybe like two or three a year. We usually do Black Friday and maybe mid-year sale.

And then we might have a couple of template launches where we'll do a little bit of a giveaway. I wouldn't say any of those are worthy of me saying that they're like big promotions because we just didn't put like enough effort into them for them to be like really successful.

They still generate more sales (even with minimal efforer and depending on whether it's a giveaway or a sale or like some sort of promo. our audience will grow on Instagram or our email list or however we've decided to run it.

If you want run a promo week or whatever, like Black Friday, for example, what does that even entail?

Well, like I said, it sort of depends on the kind of promotion you're running.

The one thing we do when we launch a new template is we often do a giveaway week.

So just to promote the launch of the new template, we'll run a giveaway on social media or through our website.

And basically people will enter by commenting or you can choose whatever entry requirements you want.

Sometimes we get them to sign up for our email list, whatever we decide we want to do that for that promo period.

And it just generates a bit of buzz and a bit of traffic and a bit of audience building around that giveaway.

So that's quite fun.

Otherwise, we generally do sales.

So whether we've launched a different product or whether it's just like a sale period, like I said, we run a maybe a mid-year sale and a Black Friday sale, then it'll just be like 25% off or 30% off for this week.

For both of those promos, we generally send out a few emails to our email list and we post extra on social media about it, on our stories and on our feed.

But like I said, it could be done a lot better.

Don't use this blueprint for promo haha!

But I do think like emailing your list, if you do have one, if you don't have one, find a resource. Because that can be really important, especially if you're going to do sales and promos.

But it could also just be really, really helpful and really good for your audience to run some sort of event too. There are loads of options!

Over the last like seven years what have you done to make your templates sell better?

Did you tweak your sales pages to get better conversions? Or did you do things like switch from Photoshop graphics to Canva graphics?

Were there any other hesitations to buy and that you like changed that you stopped maybe coding on the website so people were less afraid of the website templates or what did you do to make these things sell better over time?

That's a good question!

OK, thinking back to the last seven years, we've definitely changed a lot of stuff. But I would say that the majority of stuff that we've actually changed about the templates is on the back end.

But that doesn't really correlate to the sales.

So if we're just talking stuff that actually helps the template sell, I would say just making sure that you're hitting those up to date designs that your audience is looking for.

At the end of the day, the longer I'm in this business, I really see that like the design is super, super important. People buy because they like a design and making sure those designs hit the mark.

So when a design doesn't hit the mark, we do less of those and we do more of the things that are working.

So basically experimenting with the different designs that we've definitely tried a variety of designs. And it's pretty clear what ones are more popular. And so we do more of the ones that are more popular.

And to be honest, from where we started, which was very, a very, very basic website to where we're at now, which is much more advanced, longer sales pages, hasn't made that much of a difference.

I think the majority is getting the marketing out there and having people like your designs. They’re the two biggest things.

Well, that's what I always tell people because a lot of people compare their template business to ours, which looks like a lot from, you know, you go on our website and there's a lot of stuff on there. We do a lot of marketing. Our website is big.

And I just tell people like you don't really need that.

You just need really good design that you're confident that is going to sell to your ideal customer.

And you need to work on your marketing and just ignore all the other stuff we're doing because we've been doing this for seven years.

Like it's a it's just like a buildup of stuff for us, you know, and it's not none of it is super necessary.

I think having a really solid design and people actually getting traffic through marketing. So people actually see it.

Like I said at the beginning, the majority of stuff we have actually changed is on the back end. That's to keep the existing customer happy and to keep the or to improve the success rate of people using our templates.

So that's different than what's actually selling them in the first place, because I feel like what actually sells a template is different from what gets a good review of the template.

It makes people actually successful with it and actually be able to build their website with it.

So I would say we've learned more and have changed more and have done lots more trial and error on that back end stuff just to make sure our customers are finding as much success as possible. Front end stuff just comes down to a good design and marketing.

Paige here! If you want more details on like what makes a good design, Erica and I actually created an entire video where we talked a lot more in depth about that. You can catch that below!

So now as well as website templates you have social media graphics and you have sales page templates. Can you tell me why did you make the decision to start offering those things?

So sales page templates was actually one we just got asked a lot about if we had them.

So always listen to what your customers are asking for, because that's obviously going to sell.

A lot of people asked us, do you have a website template that has a sales page in it or do you have just like a single page website or just, you know, people ask, do you have a sales page template?

So we made sales page templates.

We partnered up with one of my friends who's a sales page copy and strategy expert. And we worked together to develop this amazing sales page.

And it's been awesome.

People have loved it, but I knew they would love it because we were getting asked about it.

So that is the biggest reason we created those.

And the social media templates, similarly, like people will ask if we have matching social media templates.

If I could create every single template that a business owner would ever need to DIY any of their design, I would like I would create so much more if I had the time!

There's like a laundry list of things that I want to create, but we've prioritized marketing and working on our Squarespace templates.

But at my heart, I want people to be able to DIY all of their designs.

So that's really the reason why.

But they just they work together perfectly.

Obviously, sales pages are just an extension of your website. And it's just great for selling, which is, the priority for most of our customers who want to make money online. And social media templates are similar. It's so good for your marketing and the opportunity to help our existing customers in a slightly different way.

And I was just I couldn't say no to that. So that's why.

Thinking about like percentage breakdown of those different things? People always want to know that. So what's the percentage of website template sales versus social template sales versus sales page sales?

The majority of our sales are definitely for our standard Squarespace website templates. And that’s because that's what we've marketed. That's what we've put all of our effort into for the last seven years. I strongly believe that if you just sold sales page templates or if you just sold social media templates, you could definitely find success in just those.

But you need to be creating content around them.

You need to be marketing them. And we've just spent all of our time and effort marketing those website templates.

And so the sales page templates and the social media templates are more of an add on and like an additional thing to buy alongside a website template rather than their own products.

And that's only because of the way that we've positioned them.

We've done that purposefully because I just don't have the capacity to market another product as heavily as our website templates.

So if someone's thinking, I'm interested, I want to test my hand at building website templates. What would be like the best place for them to actually start? What do they need to do first?

So I'm assuming that you guys want to use Squarespace, but it’s kind of the same thing if you want to use a different platform to do your templates.

Either way, you need to learn the skills.

So dive into Squarespace and start learning Squarespace skills. There's tons of resources online. Just get in there, start practicing, start building some mock templates.

If you have friends or family that might need a website, that's a really awesome way to learn new skills and practice your Squarespace skills.

Start working with some friends and family and then ideally choose an ideal client. So who do you really want to work with? And that can be relatively broad, but you want to narrow down to a certain extent that you can say, like, OK, this is what they might be looking for in a website template.

And these are the sort of people that I want to work with. And maybe go try and find some of those people, reach out to them, see if you can start practicing your skills by creating websites for them.

You might be doing this for free or for really cheap at the beginning.

And that's fine because you're just learning.

So it's really just about diving in, learning those skills and web design.

You can learn so many of them online for free through our blog & our resources. Oh and of course our Youtube channel!

Erica clearly knows her stuff, right?!

Now I'm guessing if you read all the way until the end, you're pretty seriously about trying your hand at creating and selling templates, in which case, it's time to educate yourself on what they keys are to taking on thie project and doing it successfully! you have to GRAB (with both hands) Erica’s awesome free training! It’s SO GOOD!

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$760/ Day as a Web Designer & Mom of Two - Kelly’s Story

Paige Brunton — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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Here’s tHAT VIDEO FOR YA!

Mentioned in the Video

The secret to having time to spend with your young children isn't a hack on how to complete the household chores 20 minutes faster so that you can squeeze in a few more moments together before bedtime.

It's also definitely not cutting down your hours part-time at work like so many other women have done and then finding yourself with just as as much work as before, just with less pay and more stress.

The secret is truly finding a job that naturally allows you to be home and work on flexible hours, an hour of tasks here in the evening and a few hours there during nap time.

What no one tells you about that coveted job however is it's probably not going to come from your current employer unfortunately.

That's actually what Kelly, past Square Secrets Business™ student from Potting Shed realized.

Kelly had worked in PR and marketing in London but with her first on the way she knew that leaving the house at the crack of dawn, eating dinner at her desk at work and then coming back on the train from the city at 9 p.m. was no longer going to be an option for her.

Thankfully Kelly found the holy grail of jobs that works with family life and which pays well and that was teaching herself to be a website designer for fellow small businesses.

So Kelly is one of many new moms and past students of mine who have gone through my Square Secrets™ and my Square Secret Business™ courses and I'm so excited for you to hear her story.

But first - let’s take a peek at her gorge site!!

Alright Kelly share with me what were you doing before you became a website designer?

So before I was a website designer I was in advertising - I used to be an account director for creative agencies so we were doing big campaigns like TV websites and I was handling the client liaison and selling the ideas not actually being the creative person.

I used to work very very long hours - I had dinner in my office all the time and I used to commute in so I'd get up at six to get to the office for nine and then some days I wouldn't be home until 10 at night, it was like that for months and months and months you know projects and weekends.

Then at 38 I had a little girl and I was working in an agency in London Bridge and I thought I don't know how I'm going to do these hours with this thing growing inside me!

So I need to either go back to it part-time but that doesn't really exist in that world or come up with an alternative side hustle or something and that's when it all started.

I think you've heard of a few different side hustles so tell me about all the experiments and what you learned.

I had a children's tent company where we used to go to weddings and set up play areas for children with these little teepee tents (cute!!) that we set up, but that involved really unsociable hours at weekends or going to pick it up at one in the morning when the party finished - so not that great if you've got a child in the mix.

I did a website for that business so that was actually what opened up the world of web design for me. Not knowing at the time that that might be something I look at later but looking back that was where it kind of started for me.

I also studied to be a reiki healer for horses!

But when I got pregnant I didn't realize that you can't actually do reiki on animals when you're pregnant because they can feel that you're pregnant because you’re letting off some sort of hormone so they they won't let you do it.

I also had a horse box company building horse boxes on the side but it was very expensive to get a demo together and get that out in the market.

I had a clothing company as well, because I've traveled a lot over the years a friend & I decided to come up with a online clothing store where we’d sell clothes from small businesses that we'd found on our travels that we then wanted to import over to the UK and Canada. The sorts of clothes that you just wouldn't get on high street.

You know all those little things that you wear when you go to parties and people are like “oh where's that from?” and you're like “oh I picked it up in India” or something like that! So we decided to piece all these little businesses together and we did that for quite a few years and it was it was really good fun.

You definitely have no shortage of ideas and effort and motivation! That's fantastic. So you built the website for your company - can you tell me how you learned the skills & how you picked the platform?

So yeah I built the website and I was kind of thinking we need to pay somebody because you know I've been around I know how websites are built and it's usually code and quite difficult.

Then when I started looking around it was a time when those platforms were becoming more accessible and people were kind of DIYing websites so I thought I can give it a go I've got some time on my hands so I started just looking around at which website platform might be the best to use and I I suppose I just went with Squarespace because I wasn't sure which for a DIY website which would be the better one.

Then I found a company called Station Seven who sold templates so I bought a template and then worked off that for the first website.

When it was done I was thinking oh that it actually didn’t look too bad! We had some branding photos done for the company and when it was all put together I was like I didn't even know you could kind of pull a website together this easily!

It was basic when I look back now but at the time I was happy with it!

But I didn't think oh this is my new career until later on when a couple of people asked me how I did my site - like my hairdresser & the doula that looked after one of my little girls when she was young.

Another friend’s a Pilates instructor and needed a site too and it just started to evolve very organically!

Slowly I started thinking oh actually I’m kind of getting a paycheck out of this, maybe this is something that I can look into!

At first I wasn't looking for something sort of to go gung-ho with because I’d just had a baby and I thought it's quite nice to do on the side and a bit of cash for me to go and have coffee and a cake down the road with with the baby.

then I started putting my prices up, which is when I think it hit me that oh I need to maybe think about this being a serious thing and not just a hobby job!

So what did you do exactly to turn it from a hobby job into a serious thing? Were there any investments that you made or steps that you took to turn it into a real business?

So I did my own website and then I was like because I've come from an advertising background I know what goes into a website commercially you know like in terms of the copywriting strategically so the first investment for me was to get a copywriter and some brand photography done to up level my own website.

I took ages to do my own website! I can wing out clients sites in a few weeks but my own site took ages of tinkering around. I actually used a graphic designer to do all my rebranding and it was quite minimalistic. I wanted a better feel because all I had before was a logo which I think I'd originally spent about 70 quid on.

And then I invested probably about two thousand pounds ($2,400 USD) with a copywriter to sit with them & go through my brand strategy, not just what I was going to say on the website so that I was clear on my story.

It was also the process that led to me figuring out my niche.

I realized that I needed to be targeting people like me because there are so many that I met when I was in my village or on the school drop-off and I have the same conversations with the mums.

They’re all saying, I've had this career all my life I can't do it with children in the mix. I'm trying to find something new.

And I could completely empathize because because I've been in the same situation so I think naturally those people gravitated to me because they feel like I get them.

And then the word gets round!

I remember I think you said at some point that it took you a while to figure out the niche and it was kind of staring you in the face but you didn't realize it for a really long time. Can you talk about the process of figuring that out?

When I was just going through the process of doing a website for my hairdresser and my Pilates instructor I was just taking whatever I could and it wasn't until later on that I niched.

I think it takes you a long time to realize that you can have a niche because at the beginning you just want to take everything because you're still not that confident so you just take on whatever ever gets thrown at you.

But once you've got your confidence in building a website and how to talk to the people that you want to get through the door I think at that point is where you realize that these are the people that you need to attract.

I still do stuff that maybe isn't my niche but I won't ever promote that stuff because I don't want similar projects coming in but I do need to still put some beans on the table you know for dinner!

So I can't be too fussy all the time!

So a lot of people think about trying to serve moms who are starting businesses are worried that they don't have any money and therefore this is not a good niche. Can you talk about whether you’ve found that to be the case?

I would say yes , like me at the beginning, when you're starting out the thought of putting three or four thousand pounds for a website is really daunting.

At the beginning, I discounted my prices for projects I really wanted to take on - for example an interior design website for a friend.

But now I'm finding because I've upped my prices (probably from double from what my friend paid) I find that I get people that are maybe three or four years into their business. They’re still working Moms but they're they've maybe not had a website or they've tried to get someone to cobble a website for them together but now they're earning a bit of money they can see the value in investing.

I also changed my offer a bit.

When I was just doing the websites I was getting some really horrendous branding graphics to work with!

I was like I don't know how to make you a good website with those elements!

So then I decided that I wasn’t going to take anyone on unless they're a rebrand and a website because my portfolio is going to look like a complete dog's dinner if I don’t insist in quality branding!

I have like just a client down the road who's a jewelry designer and she's only been going maybe a year but she's invested in starting right, by having a rebrand and a full custom website.

So it does vary, and I think it also depends on the industry

I think that it’s true though when people start off they often start with a template, something really really cheap or maybe with no site at all, just social media. Then when their business starts making some money then getting a really good website is the thing that they want to spend their money on and they're really excited to do it!

I also think I think if people have come from a commercial background they understand that actually that still is quite a reasonable price for a website and branding because if you go to an agency you're going to be talking treble!

So, of course, everyone wants to make money but the money wasn't the most important thing for you if I understand well - it was the freedom & flexibility. Has your web design career enabled that?

I would definitely say so!

I had another child after the first one so I've now got a five-year-old and a three-year-old and I started just dabbling in web design when my first daughter came along which was five years ago so it's been a very slow process, because I had a child in between and we had Covid!

I've now managed to build a process where I only work two days a week. So every project that I do is spread across five weeks and I only work with one client at a time.

I find with working with mums they need a little bit of extra time to feed back because if they're trying to work and manage the kids it's a bit hectic so they're often not into this kind of you know quick turnaround two-week website.

And if I'm doing branding as well I also need to pop that time in too.

I go to all of the assemblies, all the school trips and I can be around for essentially anything that the kids need.

I don't need to send them to after school clubs or anything like that.

For me it’s not realistic to say on a Wednesday and Friday I'm going to work and the other days the client's going to feed back etc.

In an ideal world that would be great but I find if I get feedback and I need to react to it I'll just do it in the evening so there's just the fact that I can do that and not be clocking on and off that makes it so flexible & fit so easily with my life.

For me the most important thing is the flexibility and earning more money in less time.

Now I’m working 2 days a week, which is my choice, and earning twice than I was at my advertising day rate.

And that's just me deciding what I want to be paid.

Every school holiday I take off so I just book the projects in where it suits me and I’m quite strict with people booking in. I tell them “this is the window, if you miss it I'm not working that month so you're gonna miss your spot” but if people want to work with you then they’ll respect that.

I’ve tracked my time & worked out that that I'm earning an average of 600 pound a day.

I think with web design as well, it’s very scalable. Once I’ve got both children in school I can just scale it up you know, instead of working with one person across five weeks I could easily be two people across those five weeks because I'll just up a day or two.

Let’s peek Kelly’s beautiful portfolio!! 👇

So obviously the job comes with financial benefits, but what can you do as a family now that you couldn't have done if you didn't have this job?

My husband has quite an unusual job and he works away a lot so when he's back for say a month we can go traveling and spend quality time together. It’s that flexibility that if we've got a month to play with but I've got a project on I just take my laptop with me.

I haven't got to say no whereas if I was working in London that wouldn’t be an option.

What are your best hacks & tips for other Moms wanting to run a web design business with small children?

The biggest thing that I found hard when I was starting out was having meetings set in my diary where I knew the children would be around.

It felt like quite stressful.

So what I started to do was have those original meetings when I knew they wouldn't be around that kind of face initial chat (I try and do face to face as much as I can if clients are local because I think that first meeting is really important - it kind of just gels that relationship from the beginning and just flattens any questions they've got rather than hundreds of emails)

Then I found, it was easier, instead of having meetings to present things over loom rather than trying to slot in meetings.

It works because I'm working late at night whilst the kids are in bed I can just do a Loom presentation and then send it across for them to have in their inbox in the morning and it’s so much less stress than me dashing back from the school run to have a meeting at a certain time.

It's really just trying to work out a schedule that works for you. For me Loom kind of like saved my sanity!

Paige: It’s my fave fave software! Not familiar? Loom records your screen & voice so you can send explainers of anything & everything & it’s so efficient (not an affiliate link, just a fan girl!)

You have to remember it's your business and I think sometimes we can be over pleasers which it's not realistic or sustainable.

So you found my courses at some point can you tell me how you found them and explain the experience of going through them and whether they were beneficial to you?

So I every time I put Squarespace in you popped up! So I thought she obviously knows her stuff!

I think I was just struggling at the time, I was clambering through the processes of starting out with a client and ending with a client and struggling slightly with building the website the best way I could and I think when I saw your courses pop up!

I used to just watch or read some of your blogs & videos - the helpful tips were really great and then again I was like right I definitely need to schedule in time to do a course so then I can kind of finesse things.

There were things I was starting to do myself already but even just having some of the the sheets you'd already done, like the content planners and things like that just probably saved me about three months!

I kept trying to get things set up, but you kind of did the job for me! And then I could add to that as I needed.

So I found it really helpful to give me that confidence that I wasn't going wayward with what I was doing!

Also I didn't always know all the options I had on Squarespace, so I'd build a website but then I'd be like oh I didn't know about that little tool there which I learned about in your course and I'm finding now even four or five years in that, for example, if I haven't done an e-commerce website for a while I'll just pop on your course and I'll just walk through that section.

I know you update things too so it’s always up to date & it’s so handy to know it’s there.

Something that we haven’t really spoken about is your marketing strategy. I know you get a lot of referrals, is it just that or are there other things you do?

So I I have a huge marketing strategy in my head which I haven't managed to implement just for time!

I'm finding that when I’m busy with client websites it does take a back foot and I know from experience that actually a marketing role is a one-man job in itself let alone doing all the other stuff yourself!

So for now it’s mainly recommendations but I do have an Instagram presence so I try to put up I use a lot of stories to be honest I find them the quickest and easiest to show that I’m busy and that I’m doing stuff and that is pinging up on people's accounts just to remind them that I’m here and I do websites.

I do have quite a bit of strategy because I think it's really important but I implement it quite slowly.

I think it's important that as well as showcasing who I am and my work, that I offer strategic support asking the questions that probably people are sitting there thinking about like “what is brand strategy?” you know.

So I kind of use a lot of the nuggets that I've written in my website that I just pepper in on my social media account so when they look for me and see my feel and kind of get a feel and vibe about what I’m about.

For me it’s not about the follower count. I think a lot of people push themselves to get the numbers up but they'll come you just have to keep plugging away at your own speed.

Pinterest is my next one to hit but I've just not an opportunity to do that yet, so word of mouth mainly and some Instagram.

So when both children are in school what are the dreams or visions or things that are on the to-do list?

I think once they're at school I'd probably just move it up a day and then you know just slowly increase it as it feels manageable around everything else. I am still very into my work-life balance and I like if I've got essentially enough income coming in I still want to be able to go and have a Pilates class on a Wednesday morning and have that time back.

Then I'll probably increase it to four days and for me I'll be starting to take on two clients at a time so that I can maximize my monthly salary that way and I think probably longer term I've got a couple of people you know freelance that work for me at the moment and I would definitely utilize them more so then I can start to move along with projects a bit speedier.

How did you find those freelancers that you’re working with?

Some were contacts that I've had for other side hustles that I tried. I’ve got people in Canada and Seattle and also friends of friends. I haven't really used sort of the Squarespace contacts bu I find that once you find one person, then they know somebody who does coding or they know somebody who does branding and I think those recommendations are really helpful because you know that those people have worked with them and that they're good!

Someone else who’s helped is Will Myers who’s given me a few contacts which have been really helpful on the coding side.

In every project I try to do a bit of coding and try to learn maybe just one thing - no pressure maybe just to make a button do something, so that I can kind of tick mark that I've learned something on that project even if the client's not requested it and I've not charged for it.

But I found with bigger coding jobs you can spend hours trying to sort something out, and it’s much easier to just go and find someone who can sort it out for you in an hour that's not going to cost the earth. It's not going to eat massively into your profit so it’s totally worth it!

Okay well thank you so much Kelly I truly appreciate you coming and sharing I know people are going to really appreciate this conversation and I really encourage everyone to go look at your absolutely drop-down gorgeous website because it is really amazing!

Wondering how to do the same as Kelly?

Now let me guess your first fear is probably all about okay well if I start this business how am I going to find clients for it?

Am I a mind reader?

Yes yes I am.

I actually created a quiz called which client planning method matches your personality type and you can take it below to learn which marketing strategy will be right for you to bring in a long line of dream clients!

But after that the next question that you probably have is likely okay what do I need to learn what do I need to do to actually become a self-taught web designer?

Now luckily for you I released a video on literally exactly that just the other week so definitely watch this video next!

I'm breaking down for you how to start a web designer business in three months with exact guidance on what to do every month from start to business launch.

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$1.2k/day web design side hustle - actor, Nadine's story

12 Outdated Web Design Trends & What to Do Instead

Paige Brunton — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

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Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Ever look back at your old photos and think

"What was I wearing?"

Just like fashion, web design trends come and go too. What was hot yesterday can make your website look kind of neglected today.

Today we're diving into the 12 web design trends that have gone the way of the flip phone and what you should be doing instead to keep your website looking fresh and functional in 2024.

Okay, so our first outdated design trend is full-width banners.

I love Nomadic Matt, but this trend on his website right now is a good few years old at this point. So here we can see it's just the top of the page, a whole going from side to side, wall to wall, one photo.

Typically there's some text over top and a button and everything and we can see that happening in Matt's website here or also in this Lady Nomad template, you can see just a full-width banner is at the top of the page.

Now this is a little bit outdated so instead what is really on trend these days is sprinkled photos, smaller photos throughout your banners.

Here’s a Squarespace template from the wonderful Big Cat Creative (yup - that’s an affiliate link, the team at BCC creative some of the best Squarespace website templates out there!) that nails it beautifully. There's one main color background and then we have a few photos sprinkled throughout, not necessarily aligned or anything, a very unaligned look and it looks really fresh.

And we can spot the same thing here on Heather Talbert's website too. She has a few photos, text, and a solid color in the background - again nailing this website trend of sprinkled images.

Outdated website trend #2 - Sidebars

Over to Tim Ferriss's website, he has both the full-width banner happening and also the second outdated trend which is a sidebar.

Sidebars really have gone out of trend in the past few years. Yes they're good to show your bits and pieces and calls to action and books and all those things but to be honest it does make your website look a little outdated at this point.

So instead of the sidebar, what I would do at this point is just nothing.

Choose a nice white space or having your content fill up a bit more of the width of the page and just say adios to the sidebar.

Outdated website trend #3 - services layouts

Another thing that was very typical and trendy back in the day on websites was to list out your services or your offerings in a way where you have a graphic image and then the service below.

Here’s an example.

Having your services laid out in this way does feel a little dated to me and a much more modern way of doing things is over here on the philosophy of leisure website.

We have some images, we have some blocks of color, we have the details of the service but as you go down the page you see the different offerings and they're designed in a way that is a bit more elevated, a bit more creative.

They’re using a variety of different font sizes and types to keep it interesting. We also have an image, we have the blocks of color, some sideways text.

This looks a lot more modern to me as a way to lay out your services or your different offerings.

Outdated website trend #4

Another trend that is out is what I would call basic color backgrounds.

We can see on this website here we have a full-width brown background going on to the next section is a full-width gray background. This was used a lot a few years ago, but things have changed - although you won’t necessarily need to make a wholesale change to your site.

Something which is similar but just ever so slightly different and more elevated is when you have a border around your section.

So we can see on Marie Forleo’s site a one-color background, but there's also a white border happening around the edges and that looks really modern.

So as you can tell from this one sometimes your website doesn't need an entire redesign, just a few tweaks here and there can really make it look a lot more with the times.

Want to attract more of your dream clients so you can show off your on-trend design skills? A polished portfolio is the way to do it. Grab the mock client briefs to help you get started today!

Outdated design trend number five is Scripty Fonts.

If we're here on Melissa Griffin's website you can see that her Hey There font looks handwritten and this is actually something which truly everyone and their cat was doing a few years ago but isn't as common now.

If we also head over to the Female Entrepreneur Association website there's also a sort of like hand-drawn scripty-looking font that says “to help you build a wildly successful business”.

That would actually be really fabulous if they would switch it over for something like what I'm calling the Mega font.

So here on Jenna Kutcher's website we can see her ginormous text.

Another great example of this is if we head on to Jasmine Star’s website. Here her name is in the ginormous text which is really something that is looking very modern right now.

If by the way you're thinking okay I know how to design the font on my website now but what do I actually write and where do I put what copy on the page then click below to download my homepage content planner!

It is the exact content planner that I use for every single website I build and it was also shared exclusively with students of my Square Secrets™ course. So be sure to grab your copy!

Design trend number six which is out is icons.

We can see here the

let's launch
let's manage
let's chat

With the little coffee and clipboard and light bulb.

This was super common a few years ago, but really makes your website look outdated at this point whereas here at the bottom of the page on Ashlyn Carter’s website we have a little what looks like an abstract sort of squiggly quickly drawn line. Something like these little abstract touches sprinkled throughout the website can really elevate your site & keep it looking modern & fresh.

Outdated design trend 7 - alignment

Out of all of the design trends which I think will give away the fact that your website was built five or six years ago the biggest is this one and that is alignment.

Having everything perfectly aligned is a dead giveaway your site was built a while ago.

So we can see here we have the different course topics which are all perfectly aligned side by side they're all the exact same ratio and everything when we go down to these sections here it all is perfectly aligned in a grid.

Having this look on your website is kind of a telltale sign that it hasn't been updated in a while because instead the vibe right now is all about unalignment and items sprinkled throughout the page.

So as we can see here we have two text areas one starts higher than the other one as we scroll down the page we have a vertical image beside a horizontal image they are purposefully unaligned

This look is a little bit harder to pull off but honestly if you follow the guides and look at some other similar websites and you decide to make a layout similar to one of their sections this can look really really good.

Design trend number eight which is out is staged photos

As we look at this image it looks like it was exactly prepared for this picture. It just looks very planned out and very staged.

When we head over to Shanna Skidmore's website here on the left-hand side she has a fantastic photo it's a little bit abstract it's a little bit blurry it's a little bit hard to fully even understand what you're looking at but it also does look beautiful.

Here on DropCap design’s site the photo on the right-hand side we can see this image seems to be taken through some glass or window that may be a little foggy and that also gives it a very creative look and feel.

Coming over to the madebynf site there is an obviously very intentional blurry photo happening on the right hand side and over on the feathering twine website we have an image from a wedding.

These abstract creative more blurry or even grainy photos can actually look really really good when mixed in with some really well shot ones.

For these next 2 design trends you’re gonna wanna check out the video because they’re actually about moving elements on your site so it’s easier to get what I’m explaining there!)

Outdated design trend #9 - a lack of dynamic elements

This might be a video or a gif or series of images that slowly change - nothing too crazy, but something that just adds a little more visual interest than a simply static page. I love this example from madebynf (scroll down to the “meet nikki” section to see what I’m talking about).

The next design trend which is in is what I call “interesting movement of the page”.

What i’m talking about here is where elements on the page move differently to how you might expect when you scroll. That could be anything from a split/ sticky section where one part of the screen stays still whilst the other one scrolls, or even something a little more jazzy like this from tonicsiteshop.

Now this is a design trend that if overdone can be very confusing for your user so I would say to use this one but use it sparingly and just a touch here or there on your website.

Outdated design trend #11 is over the top girly websites

Another trend which is out in the female entrepreneur space is the sort of girly over the top pink type websites aka the ultra feminine look like these examples below.

Instead what's in is what I would call mature and minimal

There is a lot of beige happening on websites these days for female entrepreneurs and that seems to be the style direction that female creative entrepreneurs are taking. We can also see again this more minimalistic and mature look over on LexiHands website too.

Now while I love the design of this website and it is currently on trend I will just say that my prediction for the next website trend which is on its way out is actually the all beige background.

For the longest time we always had white backgrounds on websites, and it has more recently changed to all beige.

I feel like this has just been so so so done in the last one to two years that my prediction is that the all-beige background is going to be the first trend that we're talking about to actually make its exit.

I find that the harder and faster a trend comes the faster it also leaves because it is just too overdone. Sadly for the all-beige background i think that's probably the one that's exiting stage right next.

And just like that we've swapped our virtual shoulder pads for something a little bit more timeless.

Now one video on website trends is great and all but if you really want to be a successful website designer it's going to take a little bit more than just knowing how to follow trends.

You're going to need to know …

how to find clients
how to manage projects,
how to set your prices
and so much more!

Make sure to grab your spot at the Profitable and Productive Web Designer Bootcamp where for three days I'll be sharing all of the things that you need to know in order to start and grow your web designer business. I cannot wait to see you there live. You my friend are going to love it.

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How To Start A Successful Web Design Business (IN 3 MONTHS)

Paige Brunton — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

*Yup - that’s an affiliate link! My margarita fund thanks you kindly!

Rather read all about it?

If you're an aspiring web designer, then look no further. You have found the exact video to help you learn what you should be doing from one month to the next when you're building and launching a web design business.

The truth is really all you need to do is answer three questions when you're becoming a website designer.

what am I offering?
who to
how will I reach that person?

When you answer these three questions, you basically complete the Venn diagram of any business circle, one is your offer circle, two is your ideal client. And circle three is your marketing strategy.

Because you’re reading this I can tell that you've already basically decided what it is you're going to offer. And that is web design services.

But what you might not have yet is the actual skill of website design.

If you're like me, you never actually went to college or university for computer science or anything tech or graphic design related.

And so you might have a few valid fears around what would happen when a client asks you what your degree is in and where you went to school for website design.

Well, I'm happy to report that that's fear that a lot of aspiring website designers have, and the truth is that I actually got asked a grand total of zero times by clients, those questions. And since then I've gone on to teach over 5,000 people how to be website designers.

It’s a very common thing for new students to be really worried about what to say when someone asks them “where did you go to school for web design?”

So I chatted with a ton of past students about this.

And every single time all the past students say, no one's actually ever asked me that.

So it looks like it's something which a lot of us worry about, but isn't actually a very, let's say grounded in reality type fear!

My past students who became website designers literally started off as past figure skaters and accountants and stay-at-home moms.

You can check out past student success stories here!

They have all become website designers because truly it is something that you can learn from home in an online course or some tutorials.

So let's talk about how exactly to learn the skill of website design.

If you have some budget to put behind it, then definitely a course is the fastest way to get going as a website designer.

My Square Secrets™ course is open for enrollment a couple of times a year.

However, there are many different web designer courses out there, so you can actually learn the technical skills.

It is also dependent on which platform you want to learn as to which course you should actually take.

The other thing you should really make sure of is that you actually like the teacher who you're learning from.

You want to be sure that you can stand to listen to them for 10+ hours because to learn the skill truly and thoroughly, a lot of courses tend to be that long!

The other thing you want to make sure of is that you actually personally vibe with the person who you're learning from and you maybe find them entertaining because you're about to spend a lot of time listening to that person talk in their videos.

So I would recommend you think about that too.

I find that actually a lot of people who decide to get into the website industry decided to do so because in some other job or role that they had, they were just handed the task of like,

“Hey, go edit this website or update this thing”.

And then they got into a website builder and realized they actually loved playing around with the website and redesigning things. 💃

And so that is often why they have the idea that maybe they should be a website designer.

So oftentimes a lot of you might even have more skills than you realize of this because you have actually potentially been practicing this already!

Now we talked about what to do if you have some budget to put behind it, but if that is not the case, no worries. You can still get going.

There are some incredible web design tutorials on YouTube, so definitely recommend binging those.

I have a whole Youtube Playlist on everything Squarespace here!

Then of course you can also just go into the actual website builder, that you've chosen and start practicing on the thing!

Chosen my one true love Squarespace? You can get 10% off your first year with code PAIGE10 (yup - that’s an affiliate code!)

Making demo websites on your platform of choice is a totally valid way of starting to learn and is definitely something I did at the beginning.

Coz honestly, back in the day, there weren't any courses to help! (Hence why I created my web design course Square Secrets™ so you’re not in the same predicament!)

Even if you are doing it the budget friendly way with tutorials and practice, I would definitely recommend taking a course at some point, but maybe you've taken on a few projects and therefore you've made some income that you can invest.

Why?

Because tutorials will teach you a lot of the tech stuff, but not so much the strategy behind websites and the conversion and design best practices. And that tends to be the thing that people are often missing if they don't take a course.

So at some point when the budget allows I would highly recommend jumping into a course like Square Secrets™.

Okay. So let's say that you're doing some sort of online course right now, or maybe you just binged every single tutorial on YouTube and then gone and done some practice with making some mock trial websites, then…

The second thing that you need to do in that first month is answer the question of who you want to serve with your services.

Now I am not telling you to pick a niche from day one, but what I am saying is you want to get an idea of the direction you’d like to go in and I have a really easy way for you to figure this out.

Look around at other website designers and other website agencies that are out there right now and think about if you wanted to go get a job, if you don't want to run your own business, but you want to work for someone else, who of all of those website agencies would you want to work for the most and then take note of what are the projects that they're working on.

Who are the clients that they're working with?

That can give you a really good idea of what is the niche direction.

Think about what is it about this specific web designer who I would want to work for?
What is it that attracts me to their business?
What is it about the work that they're doing or the personality of the brand that I really like and that appeals to me?

I would say that answering those questions are probably the easiest way to start getting an idea of who it is that you might like to work with.

Now I'm not saying that you have to choose something super specific right now, but let's be real.

There is a big difference between designing websites for people in the construction industry versus people in the natural wellness business industry or designing websites for corporate accountants or dentists.

Or minimalist businesses or businesses with a really bold, colorful, like look and feel like say, Drunk Elephant.

So while you do not need to pick and marry a niche today, what I will say is that picking a niche direction is a very useful thing to figure out in month one and making this decision is really going to help with the work that you have to do in month two and three (which will all make sense in a moment!

So month number two, let's get you some real actual projects to work on.

Now the absolute easiest way of doing this is reaching out to your friends and family and anyone who you've ever met basically and letting them know what it is that you're starting to do.

And that is that you're offering website services.

Now in an ideal world, you would find some sort of friend or family member who is a business or needs a website in the general direction of the type of people or industry or design style or niche that you’re interested in.

Because this project, which you're about to do, can be a portfolio piece for you.

And if you want to work with bright and fun and colorful and young brands like Drunk Elephant, and you have a friend or family member who wants a website with that style and vibe, then that is the perfect project to take on!

And so if that’s your niche direction, that’s definitely worth your time doing versus maybe your Uncle Gary who wants a website for his woodworking business.

However, if rustic and natural is your vibe, then you would be a lot better off choosing to do Gary's project than Jane's playful, colorful, personal brand.

Now, a good starter portfolio for a website designer could have three pieces in it.

Struggling to find “real” clients? Mock portfolio pieces can also work beautifully! Grab my portfolio polishing mock project briefs below to get the inspiration to get started!

As you build these different websites out, I want you to start observing what is it that you liked about serving, for example, Aunt Stacey as opposed to Cousin Sarah.

You're always going to be reflecting back & developing your understanding of what you like & what you don’t like to determine which niche direction would you like to go in.

Do you want to stay in the one that you already picked or did you learn something in this project, which makes you realize, Oh no, actually want to take a hard right.

The goal is to always be informing yourself through these projects of exactly what it is that's bringing you joy and what you want to do more of in the future.

Now I know, I know it can be very scary to reach out to people and then tell them that you're starting to offer this, but truly, I think you're about to find that so many of your friends and family are going to deeply appreciate and love the fact that you are now offering this.

You don't even know until you get into it, just how many people need a website these days, and they're going to be exceptionally grateful to have someone to help them with it.

I’m imagining you’re asking yourself how much you should charge for these first few projects.

Really it’s up to you!

So you can do these projects paid and you can do them for free. You can do them for discounted rates.

The most important thing, however, is that you are getting a testimonial and a portfolio piece.

And of course you’re also building up confidence in yourself.

That is also a major part and reason to do this.

Okay. So let's say it's the end of month two and you have a whole portfolio of fabulous pieces now, and so let's move on to month number three.

In month three, you want to answer the question, how will I reach my ideal clients?

So you pretty much want to pick your marketing strategy and get started with it.

Now, depending on how well socially connected you are, you might find that you can just get a good number of projects just from your own friends and family, but let's be real. That method is not something to count on forever.

A little while back, I did a survey of 770 website designers and I asked them the question

How did they get clients in their business and how do they market their business?

Here’s the results!

10% did it through Facebook
16% through Instagram
3% through LinkedIn
3% through freelancer websites
34% through referrals
6% through networking events
3% through cold pitching
12% through SEO/ blogging and content marketing
2% through Pinterest
5% also got clients through other methods. These are typical things like speaking or business networking groups or PR.

You can see the full breakdown & answers to a ton of other fascinating questions by checking out the full survey here!

I do want to let you know of something fabulous coming up soon - the Profitable & Productive Web Designer Bootcamp! Inside I'm going to share with you three days of amazing trainings and one entire day is literally just dedicated to helping you figure out which marketing strategy is right for you.

It’s a live training so click the link below ASAP and get yourself registered and together we will figure out which of all of these different marketing options is actually going to be the one to lead you to an avalanche of clients.

(Pst - if you missed the training, you’ll see a pretty sweet secret Youtube vid below you can catch that’ll also help!)

So picking the marketing strategy is just one thing, but actually implementing it is quite another.

Now this is again, where it comes down to the question of how much money do you have to put behind this?

If you do have some budget, then this is what I would highly recommend.

Go find a course from the expert on whatever the marketing strategy is that you have chosen to do.

So for example if it's blogging, go find the expert on blogging.

If you've chosen Instagram, go find the expert on Instagram.

If you've chosen referral networking, then go find the expert on referral networking to give you a proper marketing plan that you can just stick with and actually implement the strategy.

Now, if of course, you're building the business on a budget, then similar to learning the web design skills that we talked about earlier, you can find so much good free content online these days to help you get started.

And then of course you want to dedicate your time to actually practicing the strategy that you've chosen.

Now if you’re still struggling to decide which marketing strategy is for you, or you started one but you’re not loving it - I’ve got something else that’ll help! My “Which Client Finding Method Matches your Personality Type” quiz is a sure-fire way to find your perfect match!

Now, the next thing that I want you to do is to pick a cadence and frequency of your marketing strategy.

Committing to doing your marketing strategy (however much you can realistically fit into your life) is typically the clearest route to success.

Just doing your marketing strategy, however often you just kind of get around to it, isn't really as clear of a route to success as picking an actual frequency and trying your darndest to actually stick to it.

Now, when it comes to your marketing strategy, one way in which most new business owners often make mistakes is they set goals on the outcome of the marketing strategy.

For example, I want to get 3000 Instagram followers by the end of three months.

Now, the problem with this is pretty obvious.

You don't actually have a ton of control over whether or not you hit that goal.

But what you do have control over is how much input you put in.

That is how many reels you post or how many stories you put out there.

And that frequency is what you can actually control.

So pick your cadence and frequency and then judge yourself, not based on the outcome, but based on the input.

Now, the reason that I say this is because so many business owners have highly unrealistic expectations at the beginning as to how quickly they can grow something, a following, for example, and then they get really discouraged when it doesn't happen when it truly wasn't that they're not doing a good job. It's that they maybe picked an unrealistic number, that they wanted to hit, which just anyone would fail at achieving.

Of course, over time, you will want to start tracking and recognizing is the amount of input, which you're putting in leading to the results that you want.

If not, then that might be time to readjust and figure out how you can change the level of input or improve on the strategy, but truly don't beat yourself up for the result because it is a road leading to a lot of hard feelings.

So now you know your steps of what you want to be doing each of the first three months of launching your web design business!

But what about figuring out your process and your pricing and whether you want to offer some services other than one-to-one custom full website builds?

Now, those are some really good questions, which you should start thinking about right now, but I realized that figuring them out can be a little bit difficult to do solo.

So again, know that on days one and two of the Profitable and Productive Web Design Bootcamp, we're actually going to talk about determining your offerings and your pricing and setting a process and setting boundaries with your clients and managing all the content collection process and all of those little things that you need to think of when you set up a new business!

Again, the event is live April 15th, 16th and 17th. Grab your spot below!

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Life Update - Business Challenges, Books & What’s Next!

Paige Brunton — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

📚 Who Not How
📚 Mastering the Rockefeller Habits
📚 Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller
📚 10x Is Easier Than 2x
📚 The Magic of Thinking Big
(Yep - those are affiliate links - my Margarita fund thanks you kindly if you choose to use ‘em!)

Rather read all about it?

Welcome back to another life update video!

I've got a mix of personal reflections, business insights, and a bit of daily life to share with you today. It's been a whirlwind of experiences, recently, which I can’t wait to share with you - oh and we even have an unexpected surprise that arrived in the mail to unwrap together.

Where I’m at with content creation

Lately, I've been grappling with the difference between the content output I aspire to achieve and what I've actually managed. I’ve spoken before about how I’ve always had a 2x a week rhythm with content creation…

But not recently - I’ve totes dropped off the wagon, and am down to one video a week!

The gap between where I am, and where I’d like to be is really frustraing, considering how crucial content is as the marketing engine of my business. PB is, and always has been a content-focussed biz.

Now you might be thinking - 1 time a week vs 2 times a week really isn’t a big deal Paige, but I gotta tell ya, for me it really is.

Double the content not only doubles the opportunities to engage with my audience it also doubles the chances of gaining new followers and serving my existing community better. Yet, despite my passion for creating content, it's been challenging to maintain my desired pace. I've chosen to cut down to just one video a week and right now it’s tricky to see how I’m going to pick up the pace to do two again.

So why did the drop in content frequency happen?

Admin nightmares

Running a business isn't just about pursuing your passions; it involves a significant amount of administration and management.

We time track in the biz & yesterday I worked… wait for it… 14 hours! Yep 14.

And NONE of it was what I actually wanted to be doing!

I sorted out my Swiss pension, dealt with banking issues, spoke to financial peeps & helped my team get back into systems that were blocked due to 2FA 🤯.

It was a reminder of the less glamorous side of entrepreneurship, filled with "nonsense and admin and annoyance." Yet, these challenges also come with the territory of living an international life - which defs has its perks (although my advice if you’re considering it - is to spend 5 months & 29 days traveling & slightly over 6 months in your home country so you can stay resident there! Saves a truck-load of admin!)

But before this becomes the most depressing post of all time, let’s start talking about the things bringing me joy & energy RN!

Unboxing a surprise gift

On a lighter note, I received a delightful surprise from Kadie of Drop Cap Design. Kadie, is an AMAZING brand designer (check out her incredible work here), sent over a beautifully curated box as a gift. It was filled with little treasures like Prosecco, cookies, a candle, and some risotto—a thoughtful gesture that totally brightened my day.

I always talk about the power of community & connection as opposed to competition & this is SUCH a good example. I met Kadie when we were both just starting out in our businesses & she’s a true gem that I’m so grateful to have on my business besties list!

Expanding the team - wanna join the party?!

In other news on the business development front, we've decided to hire again to bolster our content creation and customer service!

With nearly 400 applications, I'm thrilled at the prospect of finding the right person to join our team. This expansion is not just about growth but about enhancing our ability to connect and serve our audience more effectively - something that’s absolutely at the heart of everything we do.

It’s been so much fun getting to know so many incredible people - all 400 of them!! But it’s defs really timeconsuming, so we’re hoping to have some fabulous people in the pipeline for future roles as the business grows.

Interested?

Make sure to subscribe to the email list to be the first to know next time we’re adding to the team!

Business books I’m loving right now

Recently, I've been contemplating the direction of the business & growth. I took a coupla weeks vacay & true to form #businessgeek took a pile of fabulous books with me to help me think about the next steps for the biz.

I’ve always said I didn’t want to build the next amazon, and I still don’t, but recently I’ve surprised myself by thinking “I wonder how far the business could go, and what’s possible for it & me”. I’m not driven by the things you might think, more of a curiosity of - what might happen!

Oh, those books are here for you if you want to take a peek at what’s shaping my thinking!

📚 Who Not How

📚 Mastering the Rockefeller Habits

📚 Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller

📚 10x Is Easier Than 2x

📚 The Magic of Thinking Big

(Yep - those are affiliate links - my Margarita fund thanks you kindly if you choose to use ‘em!)

Thinking about an evolution, or even a revolution in your biz? Grab the guide below to help!

Settling in in Zurich

Amidst the hustle, I've also been preparing for a special dinner with two friends from my mastermind group. It's a rare treat to be living in the same city as these wonderful Mastermind Ladies, and I'm looking forward to an evening of good food and great conversation - they’re a riot!

On the menu - a cherry tomato pasta dish with spinach and ricotta - it’s a crowd-pleaser for sure! (It’s defs one I make allll the time haha - need to expand my repetoire!)

Life beyond work: skiing and my fave new toy

Outside of work, I've been indulging in my love for skiing, enjoying the slopes across Switzerland and Austria. I was chatting with Florian (my husband) the other day and I think this is the most skiing I’ve even done in a season!

I’ve had a tonne of friends, family, and even business besties visiting, and have absolutely LOVED going to so many different places.

And while my gym routine took a brief hiatus during vacation, I'm back and motivated, partly thanks to my new Oura ring*.

OK, I was absolutely a skeptic at first, but I have to say I’m a convert. It defs reinforces what I know already, but because I see it in colorful graphs I’m taking it more seriously haha!

One of the things it’s been showing me, is that on working days my stress levels tend to be a teeny bit high, so I’m hitting the gym even more regularly, in part to help combat that.

*That’s an affiliate link btw!

What’s next?

So what’s next on the horizon at PBHQ?

I'm excitedly preparing for an upcoming ski trip with Erica from Big Cat Creative*, the winner of our affiliate contest. She’s the best time, and happily loves skiing so we’re heading out to Zermatt to check out the powder (and the àpres ski over there!) Legit can’t wait!

Spoiler alert! I managed to sneak a few pics of our trip - check ‘em out below.

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Marketing Without Social Media - How I Grew My Business without Instagram

Paige Brunton — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Are you feeling chained to social media because of your business?

What if I told you that you could throw away your social accounts forever and still grow your business?

Stick around because I'm going to show you exactly how.

Two years ago, I did the unthinkable. I officially broke up with Instagram.

Like a bad boyfriend, it had me questioning my worth, my work, and my way of life. And here's the kicker. My Instagram breakup post got more attention and engagement than any other content I'd ever put out there.

It turns out I wasn't the only one ready for a change.

I previously thought being on social was just one of those necessary evils that comes with being an entrepreneur.

I mean, an online business without social media. It kind of sounds like the punchline of a joke.

Now, let's be real.

Quitting social media overnight might leave you with a severe case of "What now?" and "But how will I get leads for my business?" and that's why we're going to craft a marketing strategy without social media so solid you will feel uber confident saying goodbye to all of the socials without one backwards glance.

Marketing without social media

Now, I want to walk you through a very intentional strategy for marketing without social media to help you get off social media for your business because honestly, I don't think it's a good idea for you to just quit cold turkey tomorrow.

You do need a marketing strategy for your business and we want to make sure that it is working well for you before you cut off social media as a lead generation option.

The key thing that allowed me to get off Instagram, Facebook, and all of the rest and continue making multi six figures a year in my business at the time was that I already had other marketing strategies going.

So we need to figure out what other marketing strategy is going to be there for you and what are you going to start building up before you say "Adios" to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or TikTok tomorrow.

Now, before you get swept up in the next trend and think that affiliate marketing is the next hot thing or that blogging is gonna make a comeback this year, I want to talk about making this decision really intentionally because you are about to implement this new marketing strategy for years and years and years and years and so we want to make sure that you are investing your time and effort into the right thing for you.

Now, if we compare this to financial investing, I think you're gonna understand my point.

So imagine this, you've paid off all of your debt, done your Dave Ramsey debt-free screen, and now you have your sites set on investing your money.

You're standing at a crossroads of investment options or tools.

On the one side, you have cryptocurrency, volatile, exciting with potentially high returns, but equally high risks.

On the other side, there's real estate, tangible, traditional, generally stable, but requiring significant upfront investment and patience for growth.

Choosing which of these two investment tools isn't just about picking cryptocurrency or real estate.

It's sort of about zooming out of those specific tools and understanding your overall bigger investment strategy.

What is your risk tolerance?

What is your time horizon for seeing returns?

Your desired level of involvement?

These questions matter because they're going to guide you to the investment tool that most aligns with your goals and resources and lifestyle.

And the same goes for selecting the right non-social-media marketing strategy for your business.

It's not just about deciding whether you to use email marketing over social media or SEO over traditional advertising. Those are all just specific marketing tools and to choose the right one, you first need to have your overall strategy really well defined.

Basically, it's about stepping back and considering what you're really trying to achieve.

Are you looking for quick sales of a low price product?

Or are you building a long-term business and maybe selling something that requires a lot of trust for your ideal client to actually pull the trigger and make the sale with you?

Do you have the resources to play the long game or do you need to see immediate results to keep the lights on?

Each marketing strategy, like each investment type with your money, has its own set of risks and rewards.

Just as with investments, the best marketing strategy for you depends on your business goals, your audience, and yes, your budget.

By understanding the bigger picture, your overall marketing strategy, you can make a really informed decision about which marketing tool to use and when you decide to quit social media (and all of your business owner friends' jaws hit the floor like mine did), you could be really confident that you're making a wise decision for your business and that you're not going to need to go crawling back to Instagram a few months after your breakup post because you're desperate for leads at that point.

So as we explore the world of marketing beyond social media, let's keep our eyes on the bigger strategy.

We start with the strategy and then we pick the appropriate tools and social media is just one potential tool, which obviously if you're reading this post is off the table for you.

So here's the marketing without social media strategy laid out in simple steps.

Step number one, define who it is that you're talking to and what it is that you're selling.

That's your ideal client avatar aka ICA and your offering.

This step is so critical.

Try to move forward without it? It's like trying to hit a bull's eye in darts without knowing where the actual dartboard is.

Imagine your ICA is right here sipping coffee with you.

Who are they really?

What keeps them up at night?

Now, let's not just go service level here. Dig deeper.

What are their pain points?

What are their dreams?

What are their daily struggles and their 3 a.m thoughts?

This isn't about just figuring out their age or their favorite color. It's about really knowing what makes them tick.

Let's say you're running a web design business and your ICA might be Sarah.

Sarah is an ambitious entrepreneur with a killer product but a website that's well a digital ghost town. She needs a site that not only looks fabulous but also converts visitors faster than you can say click-through rate.

And your offering is a customized SEO-optimized website that's as strategic as it is stylish, turning that ghost town into Grand Central Station.

Now for the wedding photographer, maybe your ICA could be Chris and Jordan, a couple planning the most Instagramable wedding of the year in their local Charleston, South Carolina.

They want someone who doesn't just take photos. They want someone who captures moments, tells a story, and creates a legacy.

And your offering is a wedding photography package that promises not just pictures, but a ticket back to the most beautiful day of their lives anytime that they want.

So before you dive into the ocean of marketing tools available, take time to really nail this step.

It's about connecting with your ICA on a level so deep they feel like you're reading their minds.

Once you've done that, you'll be able to craft an offering and messaging that is just so aligned with what they desire. They literally can't help but say like take my money, purlease.

And as we wrap up step number one, remember knowing your ICA and your offering inside and out is what will guide every marketing decision that you make. It's the compass for your business journey, ensuring that you're always headed in the right direction.

Now, if you need help with this step, make sure to grab the free ideal client workbook below to uncover this first!

Now on to step number two.

Step number two is to get to know all of the marketing tools at your disposal.

Let's be honest, there are more ways to market your business than there are fish in the sea, from SEO to influencer marketing to PR to ads.

Each has its own place, but which tool is right for you?

Let's find out & to help I’ve created a list of non-social-media based marketing tools you can choose from

Now, there are a few things to consider when deciding between these 20 or so options.

You have either one of two things to invest in to your marketing, time or money.

Some of these marketing options require time, some of them require money, some of them require both.

Now next on the criteria list is are you building or borrowing an audience?

Here's what I mean by that. If I run my own podcast, I'm building the audience for the podcast every month I create new content. As I create content, the podcast audience grows. It's slower to build, but you have your own audience, which you can get in touch with as many times as you'd like.

On the other hand, guesting on other people's podcasts is borrowing an audience. The audience already exists, the podcast host already has built that audience, and you get the chance to get in front of that podcast audience when you guest on the show. The upside is that you get in front of a lot of people quickly. The downside is that you can't connect with that audience anytime. The host probably doesn't want you on their show every single week.

Now, building an audience takes longer. Borrowing an audience is faster.

Next thing we need to talk about is scale.

Some marketing strategies are small-scale, what I call relationship marketing strategies. You go and you talk to one person at a local event, and now you have one potential person buying your offering.

You're more likely to convert that person because you build a lot of know, like, and trust with them, but it's marketing on a very small scale.

And then we have mid-scale marketing options.

In-person speaking at events fall into this category. You go speak on stage in front of 50 or maybe 100 or 500 people.

Ads on the other hand are mass-scale marketing. You can get your ad in front of 100,000 people in literally the click of a button.

And as we move from smaller-scale to larger-scale marketing options, the number of people that we reach tends to go up, but the conversion rate tends to go down.

And finally, specific to our two business owners, the website designer and the photographer, I've also ticked in here which marketing tools fit each type of business, the online business website designer and the local business photographer.

Step number three is picking the tool that fits like a glove.

It's aligned with your skills and your budget and your business needs. Grab the list that I put together for you & make it your own.

In your industry, there might be marketing options, which aren't even on the list. Or you might want to play with the list and add your own criteria.

Make sure to grab the list below so you can go through the process for your own business & industry.

And step number four is to go all in and implement and only then can you wave goodbye to social media with your head held high.

Now before you go and say adios to Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and everything.

If they're the ones that are bringing leads into your business right now, I honestly would not quit them today.

If you still want your bank balance to be happy with you in a month or two, that is.

Instead, work on building up one new marketing strategy, which you've decided on from your list first.

And then when it's bringing you in leads, you can confidently kiss social media goodbye like I did.

My non-social media marketing strategies (that built my multi-six figure business)

If you're wondering what my marketing strategies are, by the way, I've built up a few over the past seven years.

My ideal clients are women who want to start web design businesses and my offering is online courses. I have a purely online business and a totally scalable offering.

So doing mass marketing strategies are kind of the only option for me.

I also personally hate social media, so that was not going to be an option for me.

So the marketing tools, which I selected were

SEO with a blog, two,
My YouTube channel
Aaffiliates who helped me promote my courses.

We did dabble with ads and social media in the past, but neither one of those things brought me joy or felt right for me.

So I scrapped both of those things years ago.

And that's how I have such a successful business, which has served over 5000 students without having spent one soul sucking minute on social media in the past few years.

Now, nailing your marketing strategy is one thing, but if you haven't nailed your pricing strategy yet, let's talk numbers. Check out this video next where I'm going to spill the beans on pricing strategies that will boost your profits sky high.

You’ll Also Love...

Squarespace 7.1: A complete tutorial for beginners

Paige Brunton — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the step-by-step video!

MENTioned in the video:

Home Page Content Planner
Complete Guide to Fonts on Squarespace & Canva
Squarespace.com Use code PAIGE10 for 10% (Yep! That’s an affiliate link!)

Rather read all about it?

Here’s everything we talked about in the video!

Feeling overwhelmed by all the tech it takes to get your business up and running online?

Thankfully, Squarespace has made it super simple to get started building a website, and this drag-and-drop platform is perfect for the DIY’er looking to quickly and easily tackle this to-do!

By the end of this post, you will have nailed all the basics you need to know to confidently build and launch your website to the world!

The beginners guide to Squarespace 7.1

Starting your Squarespace 7.1 Free Trial

If you haven’t already signed up for your Squarespace free trial, you’ll need to do that before you can start your site-build.

So visit Squarespace.com (Yep! That’s an affiliate link!) and click get started.

P.S. I snagged you a little discount!

Use code PAIGE10 for 10% off your first year!

How to choose a Squarespace template in version 7.1

It’s up to you whether you decide to use their little quiz to help you pick the perfect template, but just know…

Every single template can achieve the exact same thing in the new version of Squarespace.

So if you get halfway through your site build and really wish you had picked another template, you don’t have to start over!

You can actually take your current template, and make it look and act exactly like the next using Squarespace’s built-in editing features.

The only reason you would choose one template over another here is that visually one seems like a better starting point for where your end design is headed.

I’d even encourage you to browse categories that are different from what you actually offer.

Why?

Say your competition is also DIY’ing their site on Squarespace…which template do you think they will be most likely to choose?

The one created specifically for your industry or niche, right?

So branching out into different template categories is the best way to make sure your website doesn’t end up looking exactly like the competition! 👍

Watch this video for the step-by-step on choosing a Squarespace template.

You can preview the demo pages of each template by hovering over it and clicking preview, and even preview how it will look on different devices by clicking the mobile and tablet icons on the top left of your template preview window.

Not seeing a page you need?

If the template you like doesn’t have a shop, blog, or some other page or feature, just know that it can be easily added, and Squarespace will even allow you to select from pre-built page layouts so you don’t have to feel like you are starting from scratch with each new page you add.

To select a template, click start.

You can skip over the tutorials they show you for now since they will be covered in this post!

Editing your site title & adding your custom logo in Squarespace 7.1

Ok so the first thing we need to do is name our site.

Even if you will be replacing the site title with a logo image, Squarespace will need to know what to call your website in search engine results.

To edit the site title, go to edit > edit site header > click on your logo & then click the edit pencil.

If you have a logo you want to display rather than your site title, go ahead and upload there.

If you have a smaller secondary logo, you can choose to upload there as well to be used when your site is viewed in mobile.

If you want to change the little icon or logo that appears beside your site title in a browser tab (also known as your ‘Squarespace favicon’) you can upload that under design > browser icon.

Understanding the backend of your Squarespace site

Ok, now for a quick tour around the backend of your site!

The window on the right that shows your actual website content as your visitor would see it is called your editing window.

When you click the paintbrush icon you access your site styles panel. This is where all the back-end settings of your site live, the things your site visitor cannot see, but still affect the design and functionality of your site.

Changes made in your editing window are specific to that one page you have open in the window, whereas changes you make in your site styles panel will be applied across your whole website, even pages you aren’t currently viewing.

The exception to this rule is when using the editing window to make changes to your site’s header and footer, since these will look the same no matter what page your visitor lands on.

So let’s get started with building the first page of your website.

Ever struggling to find a menu option on Squarespace?

Here’s a hot tip for you! Hit the forward slash button & you’ll see a search bar pop up - start typing in what you’re looking for & voila!

Adding & editing your site pages in Squarespace 7.1

To view all the pages that currently live on your site, head under your pages panel under “website”.

You can choose to just edit the demo content that came with your template, or start from scratch with your design, deleting out the demo content by hovering over the page in the panel and clicking the trash can.

To add in a new page, click any of the little plus signs in your pages panel under “website”.

To keep things from looking cookie-cutter, I typically recommend starting with a blank page, designing your layout around your own unique content (rather than the other way around!)

Though if you need a little help knowing where to get started and what to include on certain pages, the pre-built page layouts Squarespace offers can be helpful!

You also have the option of adding a blog, store, portfolio or event page to your site.

These are known as collection pages, and they are pre-built layouts used to display thumbnail previews of all the items in that collection.

Each individual collection item, like a single blog post, shop product, portfolio piece, or event will also have its own page, though it won’t get added in the same way a regular page does.

Instead, collection items are added by clicking on your collection page. This will open up your collection management window where you can add, edit, and manage your content related to that collection.

Using the site styles editor to customize your Squarespace site

In order to make changes to the default style settings that came with our chosen template, we have to visit the site styles editor.

You’ll find that by clicking the paintbrush icon.

Remember, changes made in your site styles panel are site-wide, meaning if you tweak a button color here, buttons everywhere on your site will follow.

But you will still want to have a page open in the editor window that contains an example of the content you are trying to style, so that you can watch those updates happen in real-time!

How to customize your fonts in Squarespace 7.1

The template you chose came with what’s known as a font pack (a special font pairing Squarespace designers came up with that will be used consistently across your whole site.)

If you want to change your template’s default font pack, you’ll head under paintbrush icon > fonts.

You can choose to use a pre-made font pack by clicking switch and selecting from a list of other Squarespace suggested pairings, or you can customize your heading fonts, paragraph fonts, and button fonts individually by scrolling below your font pack.

The tweaks you make up here will be applied to all fonts within that group (say for example, for your headings 1-4).

So while it’s not possible to select a different font-family for every one of your heading formats, you can use the size sliders below to differentiate between the different headings.

Once your template’s font pack has been set in the backend of your site, you can come back over to your page editor on the right and decide where to assign each of your different font formats locally on the page.

Now if you also use Canva I highly recommend choosing a font that’s available there as well as on Squarespace to keep your branding flawlessly consistent. Luckily I made the complete list of fonts available on both Squarespace & Canva - it’s yours for free - grab it below!

How to customize your website colors in Squarespace 7.1

If you want different colors than what came with your Squarespace template, you first have to set them within your design panel by going to paintbrush icon > colors.

First, you will pick the 5 colors that will make up your site’s overall color scheme.

Do that by clicking edit on your color palette, and then using the little drop-down to select your method for creating your palette.

You can use a:

Designer Palette: pre-built palettes by the designer pros at Squarespace
From Image: a palette using suggested colors pulled from a favorite image you upload
From Color: a complementary palette Squarespace will automatically generate based on the main accent color you set
Custom: a completely custom palette where each color is individually hand-selected by you, using the built-in sliders, or by pasting in your exact color codes, if you happen to know them.

Squarespace section themes (A.K.A color themes & background colors)

Squarespace will take those 5 colors from your palette above and create what are known as your section themes.

These section themes can then be applied to individual sections to help one look different from the next, but still cohesive with your overall palette.

So if you have one section where you want to have a light background, but the next you want to use a contrasting background to help break up your content on the page, then these themes are how you achieve that.

To change the theme applied to a section, click on its style icon and head under the colors tab.

If you want more control over how your colors are used within a theme, or want to introduce additional colors to certain details within a section theme, just open that specific theme in your site styles panel and tweak the appropriate design element.

If you’re not sure what a certain design element is called, just make sure to have your colors panel open (paintbrush icon > colors), then just click on the element on the page, and it will show you which options apply to that bit of content.

When making tweaks to a section theme in your design panel, make sure that the section theme has already been applied somewhere on the page so that you can watch those changes update in real-time as well.

How to customize your buttons in Squarespace 7.1

If you aren’t digging the style or shape of your buttons, you’ll want to head to site styles panel by clicking the paintbrush icon to the buttons tab.

This is where you set the actual design of the buttons, like whether it will be square or round, filled in or just an outline…

Then, if you remember from earlier, you use the local button block style settings on the page to tell Squarespace whether you want to use a small, medium or large button.

The fonts of your button were decided earlier when you set your template’s font pack and the color of your button is decided by which of your 10 color themes you applied to that section.

Adding content to the Asset Library on Squarespace

You’re likely to want to upload images to use on your Squarespace site, and to do so the quick & easy way I highly recommend using the asset library where you can mass upload your images all in one go!

Top tip - make sure to compress your images & rename them before uploading to make them easy to find later on & so you can simply copy & paste your image file names to use as alt descriptions later!

Wondering what an alt description is? It’s text added to an image on your website that allows someone accessing your site using a screen reader to “see” the image (via a description of it in words). You add an alt description by clicking on the image block, edit pencil & then scrolling down to type your description in the box.

Organizing your pages & setting up your site navigation

Each page you create will have its own unique link, also known as its URL.

To find and edit a page’s URL, just head back under your pages panel under “website” and hover over the page you want to view.

Click the little gear or page settings icon that appears, and then head under the general tab.

Look for the URL slug.

Your page’s complete URL is going to be your domain name followed by the URL slug. (ie. paigebrunton.com/url-slug-goes-here)

It’s best to keep URL slugs short and using only super relevant keywords so that it will be easier for people to remember it.

How to set up your site navigation & header links

There are a few different ways to link to your pages from within your own site.

So obviously you have your main navigation, the main pages you want visitors to be able to see and access the moment they land on your site.

To make sure a page is appearing linked in your site header, you’ll want to drag it up into the main navigation section of your pages panel under “website”.

The order they appear from left to right in your site header is the order you drag and drop them here in the main navigation section.

But you can’t go sticking every last page you ever create in the header!

It’s best to limit your main navigation links to 3-5 top priority links to make sure that visitors don’t get distracted and are actually taking the actions you are hoping they will on your site.

So what do you do with all the other pages you will build?

You let them live in the unlinked section of your pages panel under “website”.

These are the pages you link to either from a button, graphic, or text link on one of your main pages, your website footer, or shared externally on something like social media.

Additional page options in Squarespace 7.1

Okie dokes! Heading back to our pages panel under “website”, let’s look at the last few options we have when adding a page:

Drop down: when you want to have several pages appear in a drop-down under a certain link in your header.

(ie. Say you’re a photographer and you want to have a link in your header that says “portfolio” but then when someone clicks that link they can select “family, wedding, engagement, or newborn” from the drop-down menu that appears.)

Link: this is useful when trying to link to an external URL (a page that doesn’t live on your website), and want that link appearing in your main navigation.

In this tutorial I went ahead and added one of the pre-built page layout options to use as my mock site’s homepage… But you’ll see I pretty much built the thing from scratch anyway!

But again, I highly suggest starting with that blank page option to make sure your site winds up a perfect reflection of your business, not a perfect reflection of your chosen template!

Wondering which content to include on your homepage?

This is actually a home-page content planner I share with students inside my Square Secrets™️ course (the one that teaches you how to use Squarespace to build a completely custom, nothing like the template website that attracts and converts your ideal clients & customers 24/7.)

It’s the perfect tool for planning out that first impression visitors will have when they visit your site, and today I’m sharing it with you for free!

So be sure to grab your copy before you sit down to start building.

Adding & editing the content on your pages in Squarespace 7.1

So I’ve got my new mock home page open...

(To open a specific page in your page editing window, just click on that page in your pages panel under “website”.)

Now I’m going to click edit in the top left of the editing window.

Before you can actually add content like your images or text to a page, you first have to add a section.

Building your page in sections makes it easier to manage, rearrange, duplicate, or delete whole sections of content as needed, and makes it so that you can style one section differently to the next, say, choosing a different background color.

(To duplicate, rearrange, or delete a section, just hover over the section and you’ll see a section toolbar appear.)

Inside each section, you’ll be able to add your content blocks, A.K.A the actual images, text, buttons, and so on that make your site.

Content blocks are added by clicking any add block on the page and selecting which type of block you want to add.

You can then drag & drop your content to where you want it to be, resize it using the white handles on the corners & sides, and even select where it goes in the layers (in front or behind of any overlapping blocks)

So if I want to add a bit of content below another content block, I would just click add block and then drag & drop my new block to where I want it to sit.

To make one content block wider or narrower just drag the side of the container to resize it.

The content blocks you need to know to get started

Text block: to add the written content or copy to your site.
Image block: you can upload your own image, or select an image from the free stock images that come with your Squarespace subscription, or pay to use a premium photo.
If you need to find a photo that you’ve already uploaded somewhere else on your site, look under the library tab.
Once an image is uploaded, drag the little circle icon that appears around to tell Squarespace where you want the focal point of that image to be. That way, if Squarespace needs to crop an image in order to fit it into a certain block, you will be able to decide which part of the photo to prioritize displaying.
You can select from fit or fill (where the image fills the exact size of the block) or even different image shapes.
Button block: your button style and color will be set over on the left in your design panel (A.K.A your site styles editor) but you do have a few settings right there inside the button block settings window like whether you want it to fit or fill.

Tips for Uploading multiple images

If you want to add multiple photos at once, make sure to add them to your asset library in one go, rather than adding and uploading each image individually.

Editing your content block settings

Each bit of content you add to your section will also have its own style settings or pencil icon, helping you to further customize how that particular block appears like its layout, or any design or animation options, as well as any special functions it will have like linking to another page.

The exception to this is the text block. Rather than a pencil or style icon, you’ll have a pretty standard little text toolbar to help you format the text inside your block.

So you can bold, italicize, align, and link bits of your text as usual, as well as tell Squarespace which size or format from your template’s font pack you want to use.

How to add images or videos as your section background

It’s also possible to add images or videos as your background, rather than just colors.

To do this, open up your section settings on the page, and head under the background tab.

Upload your media there, then decide whether you want your background to be:

Full bleed: where it spans the entire width of the section with no white space around it
Inset: where there is a margin of white space (or whatever color your section theme background color is for that section)

You can also choose to add an overlay that can give a different vibe to your image.

And in order to make sure you don’t lose your hard work, always be sure to press save in both your backend panel, and when working on the page builder.

Squarespace page settings to know when building your site:

Disabling & password protecting pages in Squarespace

If you ever need to delete a page, you can do so by hovering over the page and clicking the trash can.

But what about if you just want to disable a page so that you can keep it for later, but nobody would be able to visit or search for it in the meantime.

Open up your page settings again using the little gear icon, and toggle off the enable page button.

If you want to leave the page live, but want to password protect it instead, simply add a password in this same settings window.

To edit your lock screen page (the one where visitors would have to type in their password), you just head to Website tools > Lock Screen

Customizing your 404 page not found page & checkout page

Say for instance you want to design your own custom 404 (or page not found) page.

You can actually build out a regular blank page in your pages panel under “website” however you like, then you would head to “System Pages” (scroll right down past all your website pages to find it under utilities & click 404 page to set which page will appear then a visitor stumbles upon a broken link on your site.

The System pages panel is also where you’d make any changes to your checkout page if you have an online shop.

Duplicating a page in Squarespace 7.1

Going back to our page settings, it’s also possible to duplicate an entire page!

Say, if you liked your design for a registration page, and you wanted to tweak it to use for another event, you could instantly create a copy of the page by clicking duplicate.

Setting which page will be your home page

You also have the option to set different pages as your home page in your page settings.

This is useful if you have a temporary homepage you want to direct people to during a special sale or event when they try to visit your domain, but then later want visitors to be taken to your normal homepage.

How to link to the pages in your unlinked section of your pages panel

Things would start to get pretty chaotic if you included a link to every last page on your website in your main site navigation!

So let’s talk about the different options you have for linking to your pages from your content, instead of from your main navigation section or header.

Many types of content blocks have an option for linking right inside their content block settings, but I’ll use the button block to give you an example.

To link a button, just add your button block, click the style icon and add the URL you wish to link in the clickthrough URL field.

How to link a phone number, file, or email address in Squarespace 7.1

No matter which type of content block you are using to set up a link (ie. a button, text block, image) you have a few other options for linking if you click the link gear icon! You can:

Link an internal or external URL: deciding whether it will open a new browser window when clicked, or just redirect them using their current window, leaving the page they were on.
Link internal page: searching a specific page on your own site without having to go manually track down its unique URL slug.
Link email: when someone clicks it, their default emailing app will open a blank draft with your email in the TO: field.
Link a phone number: which will make it possible for mobile users to call you without having to copy and paste your phone number.
Attach a file: upload a file that will automatically download when the link is clicked.

Managing responsive design & site-wide headers and footers in Squarespace

Designing for desktop view vs. mobile view in Squarespace

So now you’ve got a pretty good start on getting content added and styled for the desktop version of your site, let’s quickly pop into mobile view (by clicking the mobile icon top right in your page editor) and talk about what’s possible there.

Now, depending on the order that you added your content, it’s likely you’ll need to completely redo the design of how your site shows up on mobile. Luckily, by toggling to the mobile icon you can do just that!

You’ll be doing exactly the same as on desktop - dragging & dropping your blocks, resizing them, and bringing them forward or backward until your mobile design is on point!

If you’d like to also style your mobile header & navigation, you can edit the following…

The layout of your mobile header
The color theme applied to your mobile drop-down navigation menu
The style of your mobile menu drop-down icon

These can be found by clicking edit on any page, then clicking edit site header and clicking on the mobile icon.

Clicking the desktop icon will give you a few options that are specific to desktop-sized screens, but you’ll find your header button, cart & social media icons and color settings under that universal tab.

How to customize your site-wide header & footer in Squarespace 7.1

Besides tweaking the settings mentioned above for your mobile header vs. your desktop header, there are a few other things to note about headers and footers!

When it comes to colors, your site header acts just like a normal section, where you assign one of your 10 section themes.

But if you want your header to seamlessly blend in with whatever background color or background image it’s closest to, you’ll want to click the edit site header button and toggle on the little adaptive button under the colors tab.

Since we talked about headers, we should probably skip down to the bottom of the page and touch on footers as well!

Footers are also site-wide, meaning if you tweak your footer on one page, all pages across your site will follow.

You can add multiple sections to your footer, each section having its own custom styling options, and you can even select from pre-made footer layouts to make your job easier.

Getting started with your blog or online shop in Squarespace 7.1

If you plan to add a blog or shop to your Squarespace 7.1 site, you’ll want to check out my blogging and e-commerce series using the new version of Squarespace.

I walk you through step-by-step how to start adding and managing the individual products or posts on your site, as well as further customizing the look and layout of your shop and blog pages.

Squarespace 7.1 E-Commerce Tutorials for Beginners

Squarespace 7.1 Blogging Tutorials for Beginners

How to start a blog in Squarespace 7.1
How to customize your built-in blog page in Squarespace 7.1
Not happy with your built-in blog page? How to build a completely custom Squarespace blog page from scratch

Connecting a domain and launching your Squarespace site

If you want to show your website to the world, you’re going to have to pay to play!

So it’s time to bite the bullet and upgrade to a paid Squarespace subscription for your new site.

To do this, head under settings > site availability and click upgrade to publish.

It will take you to the current Squarespace pricing plans where you can look over their comparison chart and decide which features you really need in order for your site to serve your business well.

Which Squarespace plan should I choose?

Which plan to choose is 100% dependent on what you plan to use your site for, but here’s a quick little rule of thumb to go by for each:

Squarespace Personal Plan
If you don’t have plans to make money off your site, and you don’t need any of the premium features Squarespace offers like custom coding and e-commerce to name a few, then you are probably just fine going with the personal plan.
Squarespace Business Plan
If you plan to somehow monetize your new site, most businesses are going to go with a business plan or higher, so that they can have access to e-commerce, but also to things like promotional pop-ups and announcement bars.
Squarespace basic Commerce Plan
Planning to add an online shop? You can technically do this on a business plan, but upgrading to an e-commerce plan does save you on transaction fees. So it’s worth your time to sit down and do a bit of business projection math and figure out if based on your expected sales, that% commission will end up costing you more than just upgrading from the start.
Squarespace advanced Commerce Plan
The advanced plan offers several fierce e-commerce options not available in the business or e-commerce plans like abandoned cart recovery, and the ability to sell subscriptions and gift cards.

For a complete guide to Squarespace plans and premium features, check out this post.

There’s definitely savings to be had by paying annually over monthly, and I snagged you an additional 10% off your first year when you use the code PAIGE10.

So now you’ve paid your dues and set your site availability to public for all the world to see, there’s just one last step.

And that is to link up your custom site domain name!

How to connect a custom domain name to your Squarespace site

This last step isn’t quite so straightforward, as there are about a million different places you could have purchased your custom domain name, each one having a completely different means of connecting to your Squarespace site.

But if you check out my post on connecting your domain and launching your site, and scroll down in the post a bit, you’ll see I have links the exact step-by-step help articles you would need for all the most popular domain purchasing sites!

So there you have it!

Hopefully this post/video has you feeling equipped and ready to finally check off that giant to-do of building a website off your list!

Remember, there are a few important resources I mentioned (linked below the video) that you’re going to want to get your hands on before you sit down to get started…

But the most important one is going to be that home page content planner!

Your home page can make or break a visitor’s impression of your whole business.

You have literal seconds from the time someone lands on your site to win them over, so you want to make sure your home page strategy is on point, and that it is set up to convert all those clicks into actual paying clients and customers!

So don’t forget to grab your free copy of my Home Page content planner below!

Blog - Paige Brunton

Passive Income Through Digital Products: Worth It?

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Today, I'm sharing some eye-opening revenue numbers and hard-earned lessons from my 8 years in the digital product game.

How Much Money Can You Make Selling Digital Products?

1. Online Courses

2. Memberships

3. Wedding Signage & Invitation Templates

4. Website Templates

5. Legal Templates

Here’s my full list of digital product ideas:

So, do these digital products make money?

But are they worth doing?

The Secret to Success: Building an Audience 📣

So, Is It Even Worth the Effort? 🧐

But don't throw in the towel just yet. Building an audience is not impossible, and we have a massive advantage, or “secret weapon” available to all of us, no matter our budget or connections.

Your Secret Weapon: Leverage 📚

Labor:

Money:

Products with No Marginal Cost of Replication:

Content creation is the most effective and easiest-to-access form of leverage any of us have.

Join My Masterclass! 🎓

We'll be covering:

You’ll Also Love...

Selling Digital Products in 2024? Read This First.

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

You've probably heard that you should build your email list in order to sell digital products.

Thinking outside the box is basically half the entrepreneurial job description.

You consider the following.

Maybe social media is the answer…

Or even better, affiliates!

You could also consider running ads to get sales…

I'm hosting a live masterclass in just about a week on "How to build an email list of buyers" and you're reading this, it's basically tailor made for you.

It's 90 minutes long, so we're going WAY more in depth than I can in a single blog post.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Discovery 👀

Relationship Building 🤝

So if social is great for building a new audience and relationship, it must be fabulous for sales too, right?

So if you feel like your people are seeing less of your posts, you're not crazy, it is actually happening.

Social is great for discovery & relationship building but not great for sales.

Okay so if social isn't the answer for selling your digital products, what about affiliates?

Pros:

When people ask me to affiliate for products, I have a list of about 15 questions I ask them first. One of them is:

Experienced affiliates look to affiliate for proven products which sell well.

When you get your product converting well and have a ton of social proof & success stories and have a team to manage the affiliates, that's a good time to add affiliates.

What about ads?

So... if ads, social & affiliates aren't great options, what the heck ARE you supposed to do?

An email list is the most effective sales tool we have. 90%+ of my revenue comes from my email list, and that's the same for more successful digital product entrepreneurs.

For 90 minutes I'm going to explain the complete strategy for list building to sell digital products. I'm hosting a live masterclasS:

How to build an email list of buyers (without spending a second on social or a cent on adS

You’ll Also Love...

How to Grow Your Email List

Prefer to watch?

Here’s the video!

Mentioned in the Video:

Rather read all about it?

Read this blog till the end cause I'll spill the beans on my exact strategy which works, even if you're a complete beginner.

This is the exact strategy which has led to over 60,000 opt-ins to my list over the years.

This is what I call the "traffic" problem.

Creating a freebie is just one ingredient, not the entire recipe.

only with traffic will your list actually grow.

The problem isn't that your freebie idea is terrible, the problem is you don't have traffic going to the freebie.

When experts tell you to create a freebie and then promote it and you're thinking "Promote it to who?! I don't have an audience." just know, you're not crazy, they're just only explaining half of how list-building works.

the reason this happens is because of conversion rates.

If you hear this next piece of terrible advice from an expert, I would honestly walk directly out the closest door and don't trust a word more that person says ever again.

Ads are not a beginners game with a beginners budget.

Yes you can get leads for $1, but those are not what we call "quality" leads.

If you choose to run ads to build your list, expect to spend around $17,000 - $21,000 to start.

So if posting to your own social media doesn't work and running ads isn't right unless you can risk loosing $20k to start... what can you do?

On July 10th at 2 PM ET, I’m sharing everything you need to know in my masterclass:

In the masterclass, you’ll learn:

If your entrepreneurial dreams have been on hold whilst you try, and fail to figure out list building, you need to be there.

LIVE attendees will walk away with an extra bonus - my Irresistible Digital Product Blueprint.

There is no quick hack to list building and business success, so if that's what you're looking for, you're going to need to go somewhere else to find it.