Okayyyy, so I had an AWESOME comment/question left on one of my videos on Youtube where someone asked this question:
“In one of your videos you said that you have been working long hours every day even when you were generating zero income and eventually that hard work paid off. As a beginner, I’m overwhelmed and confused what to begin with and what to end each day with. Can you please do a post on what your day looked like when you were hustling, back in the day?”
What a fantastic question. The beginning stage of a business is so frickin’ overwhelming it’s usually the stage that most people quit because it’s so hard, so congrats for deciding to stick it out!
Now, there’s a few things I want to clarify before we get into the daily tasks I focused on so you know the place I was coming from when I started:
- I already had the skills and experience I needed to get started. I didn’t have a huge learning curve that most beginners have. I explain that more in this post.
- I did not take it slow and pace myself. I was a bionic robot with no social life that worked any and every moment I could. Nothing else mattered.
- Freedom was the goal, money was the avenue. My only focus was to make money. Not start a blog, not grow my social media following, not make the prettiest website on the planet. To make money. Because money = freedom.
- I was incredibly overwhelmed. BUT, I knew my goal. And the alternative (staying in my job and working for someone else) scared the shit out of me more than the overwhelm, so I powered through it.
So the advice I’m about to share in this post is specific to the goal I was going after, not for anything else. And, I already had the skills I needed to get started. Anything else I needed to learn I would Google it and implement immediately. No messing around.
Another note I want to make before we get going is that I was working on all the things I talk about in this post simultaneously. I didn’t have a schedule where I worked on one thing and then moved onto the next. It was all mixed in together and an absolute mess. That’s how I roll.
So, if that all sounds good to you then let’s begin!
List Building
If you’ve trawled my blog like a total stalker (as we all are in the beginning of this blogging journey) you will have seen me talk about the fact that I didn’t write a blog post until I had launched both my free email course and first product.
I did this because my goal was to start making money as soon as possible, not to have a blog. I knew the best way to make money was through your email list, so the very first thing I focused on doing was growing my email list.
I came up with an idea for a free email course but I knew that would take time to create and I wanted to capitalize on the amount of subscribers I could get while I created the free course. So, what I decided to do was create a one-page PDF on Canva that highlighted all the points I would talk about in the course, give a few brief nuggets and then tease that the course was coming very soon with far more in-depth lessons on those points.
I uploaded that to MailChimp and set up a welcome email so that when they signed up, they received this email explaining more about who I am, what’s coming in the course and of course the download link for the PDF. After that I made a landing page through MailChimp to direct traffic to so they could opt-in for the free course/PDF. While I drove traffic to it (which I’ll tell you how soon), I was also creating my free course on the backend.
YOUR TASKS
- Decide on what your free course (or download) will be
- Create a one-page PDF sharing a few nuggets (if you’re doing a free course)
- Write welcome email and link to PDF
- Upload your PDF to email service provider
- Create your landing page on email service provider
- Write your email course (if relevant)
Social Media:
Next up was social media, but don’t forget that I was doing this at the same time as doing everything else (bionic robot with no life, remember). List = money, money = freedom. So the only thing I was promoting on social media was the link to my landing page for my free course.
At the time I was only using Facebook and Twitter. So I joined a lot of Facebook Groups related to my niche and started interacting in them, offering advice when I could and I marked in a calendar what the groups promo days were and when they came up I would make sure to try and be one of the first to promote my free course with the link to my landing page.
For Twitter, I set up recurring posts through Google Calendar and IFTTT with the help of my friend Suzi’s post. I set it up to post several times a day promoting my free course mixed with other peoples content. Content moves so much on there that you had to keep posting repeatedly.
In saying the above, social media changes so rapidly and they’re constantly changing their policies and algorithms so you’re going to have to keep up with what’s relevant and working for the current day you’re in. At the time Facebook Groups were HUGE for promoting your businesses. I would get 80% of my traffic from them. But now, hosts are cracking down on promotion and limiting what you’re able to do. Which is totally fair because it’s their group. But it’s not a reason to not try them, you’ve just gotta move with the tide and find what platforms work for you and capitalize on them.
YOUR TASKS:
- Choose your social media platforms to promote your free course/download on
- If there’s promo days, mark them in your calendar and set up a posting schedule
- Get in as early as you can to promote your offer and capitalize on the traffic
- Automate your posting schedule (without spamming)
- Rinse and repeat these tasks every. single. day.
Digital Products:
