💪Challenge accepted

it’s time for FAST business progress

Let’s just say that moving into a house (and then needing to furnish that house after travelling for 2 years) can replace a LOT of work time.

But in good news, our sight unseen house turned out to be pretty good, so our gamble in renting it before we even saw it worked out well.

In between our settling-in activity, I’ve decided that it’s time to get serious with my business and throw myself into making paid products (because it’s not a business unless I actually make money, right?)

So I’ve committed to taking part in a couple of events that give me a VERY short time frame to get a lot done.

Challenge accepted!

Listen to the episode right here

If you enjoy it, please give it a 5⭐ rating and review in Spotify and Apple Podcasts, plus subscribe and like in YouTube – it really does make a difference. Thanks so much!

Resources mentioned

I mention the following resources in this episode.

I bought FreedomKit – stay tuned for more details when I have a chance to use it. Lifetime deals keep popping up, so sign up and keep an eye on your inbox if you’re interested.

Business Idea Blitz – my free course that helps you choose your perfect business idea and GET MOVING! And yep, you’ll see the Beyond Productivity ‘tripwire’ when you sign up.

My Master Your Minutes sales page – I wrote this while I was still creating the course and it was so helpful in structuring and finishing the course.

Transcript

Hey, I’m Kelly Kotanidis, and welcome to Online Business from Scratch, where I’m taking you behind the scenes as I build my new online business from scratch to a full-time income while making sure it’s a great fit for my traveling homeschooling life. I’ll be walking you through everything I do and why so you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

This is the update for day 150 of my new online business, and that’s a huge 18 days on from my last update because we have been really busy. I’m not sure where the last 18 days have gone, to be honest. We packed, drove up to our new house in northern New South Wales, unpacked, and found and bought an entire house full of furniture because we sold pretty much everything before we went overseas.

We’ve had to do ALL of the settling in stuff. It’s been really full-on, and because we’ve come back to somewhere we’ve already lived, we were straight back into the social scene as well. So, one to three days per week of homeschool group activities, catching up with a lot of people, all that sort of good stuff. I’ve been very, very busy but haven’t got a lot of work done at all.

If you listened to the last episode, yes, the house is good. Thankfully, it’s clean and comfortable and really a wonderful outcome in the middle of a housing crisis to find a good house on acreage at a decent price, even though that decent price makes me want to cry when I think about it doubling in the last few years. So, yeah, we got here, and we breathed a sigh of relief.

Business-wise, everything fell apart. Not really, I suppose, but it felt like it overall. I was ahead on podcast recordings, but I did have to spend one Monday morning doing all the posting stuff. I had edited the audio and video and uploaded it, but I had to write the post and make the images, and it was just a crap way to start the week. I normally have a really productive deep work session on Monday morning because I’m fresh, but instead, I was working through a checklist doing tasks that I am really ready to outsource. So, I have resolved not to do that again, to get far enough ahead that it doesn’t happen again. I’m not beating myself up, of course, because it’s an unavoidable part of the chaos of moving and setting up house, but I definitely don’t want to do it again.

I also paused my evergreen emails, so one didn’t go out one Tuesday. I did have time on Monday afternoon to write one, but I was tired and knew it wouldn’t be my best work, so I decided to cook a great dinner instead with my husband. That was great; we like cooking together, and it made us feel like the house was under control, and we were getting our routine back. So, no regrets there in skipping that email.

It made me think that sometimes I do get stuck in the whole “well, I HAVE to do this task” mindset, like I have to write an email because people are used to getting them every Tuesday, and I can’t skip a week. Then I have to figuratively slap sense into myself and say, “Hey, that’s not an unbreakable commitment. No one has paid for this, no one is going to be disappointed or heartbroken, and probably no one will even notice. Just give yourself a bloody break and look after your real life”, because that’s why I’m in business, right? So I can structure my time and commitments and have a life where I get to do what I want without all those outside obligations.

In the last few days, I’ve been able to get back on track a bit, and it feels like it’s all gotten serious now. Not in a bad way, though—in a good way. I always said that while we were overseas, I would do the foundation work and mainly the background stuff so I didn’t have any commitments or expectations on me. But once we got back to Australia, it would be time to knuckle down and do stuff like test and launch courses and do more live workshops and put a lot more effort into doing stuff that actually gets me paid. So, I’m looking forward to that. It’s a bit of a challenge-accepted type of situation.

To get all that happening, I now have an outside deadline for finishing my productivity course because I’ve submitted it to a bundle. It’s still mostly a messy Google doc, and I’m still not exactly sure how I’m going to put it all together. I talked about that a few episodes ago—about sitting down to put the whole course together and realizing it just wasn’t working and needing to put it aside while I tried to work out how to fix it. But now the course has a beautiful sales page and a checkout ready for the bundle submission, and I have to have it finished in a few weeks. I’ve actually also had the Business Idea Blitz accepted into a freebie bundle, so now I’ve got the deadline of three weeks to get the productivity course all finished so I can use it as a tripwire and hopefully make some money.

A tripwire is when you sign up for something and then on the next page it has a special offer, like “if you buy this thing in the next 15 minutes, you’ll get 50% off.” Really, that’s a horrible name—a tripwire. It’s like I’m going to trip my customers over and make them buy something. I don’t know; it doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s what people call them. Maybe we can come up with a better name.

With the bundle, one of the things I always try to do is make the most of any existing opportunity. So, like I was saying in the other episodes about adding the paid business idea review to the free Business Idea Blitz course, that means instead of just building my email list with this bundle, which is still a great result by itself, I can build my email list and hopefully make some sales at the same time because I can piggyback that limited-time sale onto the free course and make the most of it.

Anyway, back to the productivity course. I have found that doing the sales page while creating something is actually really, really helpful. I always do it partway through the creation process because I usually pre-sell stuff or sell it before it’s finished, which I will talk about more later. Needing to write about the product really helps to narrow down the goals of the course—what people can expect if they do it, why they should do the course, how it will help them, all that kind of stuff. You can’t get vague with that stuff; you have to be able to communicate to someone what it is and why they should consider buying it and how it will help them. Having that very clear also helps make the product clearer and informs its creation. From doing the sales page, I now have a bit of a structure and logical progression worked out. I have all sorts of promo copy I will go back and revise and edit over the next couple of weeks, but putting all of that together—the sales page and everything—was really, really helpful.

Submitting it to the bundle too means I have to get it done. I have a deadline, I have outside accountability, and that moves it up my priority list. I’m really ready for that because I want to actually have some stuff to sell because it’s a business, right? I’ve been putting together the structure and foundations, but in the end, to be a business, it has to make money, which means I have to sell stuff. It really is time for me to create some more products and start increasing my income.

I also got some reviews of my business idea review because I finally put a Google form together and actually sent it to the people who have done a review. They’ve been really great. It’s really positive, so they’re saying stuff like I helped them get clarity and confidence, helped them create a plan to move forward with their business. One said that she’d still be stuck overthinking her ideas if she didn’t have the review, but now she has a plan to move forward with her business. That’s really reassuring to read and see that I’m on the right track with that.

Now, in big scary cost news, I bought Freedom Kit, which is a new, well, I suppose it’s like an everything platform. It does checkout, website, product hosting, and all sorts of stuff. I’ll talk more about that next time, I think, because I haven’t even looked at it since I bought it. But that was definitely a whole “just tick the boxes and put the card details in, and then shut my eyes and click it and try not to think about how much this costs.” It’s a great deal overall because it’s a lifetime deal, but it’s still painful when you have that big chunk of money disappear from the bank account.

I also emailed my list to ask for ideas for live workshops. I really enjoy doing them, so I want to book some in. I don’t even have internet at the house yet; we’re still waiting for the NBN installation, so I’m hotspotting my phone and can’t do a workshop. But I want to be ready with a list of ideas once the internet finally gets done and also push myself into committing to do them. If I have the requests, it’s much more likely to happen.

All that sounds pretty full-on, and it has been. I’m tired, but a few days ago, it was a Sunday, and enough of the essential house chores were done that we got to have a really cruisy day. Sundays are always a day off for me, but more importantly, they’re screen-free. It’s a day where I completely ignore anything online apart from WhatsApp messages from my kids. I can’t do work, I don’t check emails, I don’t get distracted by social media, and I just don’t do any of the seemingly endless chores that need to be done online. Because I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, my brain just knows that. I wake up feeling very relaxed and usually spend the day doing not much.

So last Sunday, we went for a run, cooked a great lunch, and then I spent a couple of hours just sitting outside in the shade. It was this lovely sunny day, and I read my book and watched my pekin chooks, my fluffy little mini chickens, free-range around on the grass. Then we all played Monopoly with our extensive house rules that make no sense to anyone except us. That was really nice. It feels like we’ve mostly settled in, so hopefully we can get back to a somewhat normal routine very soon because I’m actually really tired of finding and buying furniture. I’ve had enough.

If you’re still not sure what your online business should be about, don’t forget my Business Idea Blitz mini course, where I will walk you through choosing the best topic for your online business. It’s free, it’s short, but you will get results quickly so that you can know your topic is a winner and you can start moving on with your planning and building your own online business. There will be a link in the show notes, and I would love you to join in and share the idea you develop so you turn it into an actual business.

Thanks for listening. I will be back next week sharing my next steps from my permanent, or probably semi-permanent, house, really, because let’s face it, travel will always be calling me back. So, I will see you then.

Thanks for listening!

Got any questions? Feel free to to drop them in the comments below.