Last week I told you the story of how I wasted at least 6 months of progress in my business because I didn’t believe in myself. Because of fear. Because I put too much emphasis on making sure that if I failed, there would be no consequences and not enough emphasis on WHY I was doing it. And then I gave you two action items:
- Action item #1: Write down your #1 goal.
- Action item #2: Clearly articulate your WHY.
The responses that came in were incredible:
“I'm 29 and disabled from disease, but know from the fight I've been on I have something of value to offer. My husband has worked so hard these past years supporting my care and I want to take some of that load off.”
“My what is flexibility and my why is no one being able to tell me when I can and cannot see my child.”
“My WHY is because I've felt imprisoned, depressed, and stuck in my regular day job for a decade or so and I need to get out of it and start living the life I was designed to live.”
“My why is now to overcome the single mom mentality (everything has to be a struggle)”
“My Dad has cancer and I help him as much as I can. I am not able to do as much as needed. Also my husband works himself to death and has no dreams and goals due to the fact that he has numbed himself to ever dreaming or wanting.”
And so many more like this!!!
If you didn’t write down your WHAT and WHY last week, take 5 minutes and do that now. I’ll wait on you 🙂
Once you finish, hit reply and share it with me.
How to reach your goal
Now that you’re super clear on WHY you want what you want…
• “To make enough money to be able to be there for my family both financially and physically.”
• “To build a successful business that allows me to live life for me and my daughter and do it with abundance.”
• “To free my husband up to dream and to live.”
• “More control over my future (instead of my boss dictating it)”
• “To hit 10K+ months so I can visit my family in England any time I want and not just when flights are cheap.”
… what it takes to do the WHAT comes much more easily.
Last week, I also told you I’d share with you three common mistakes that solopreneurs make (myself included) when building website.
Mistake #1: Not buying what you need.
You’re working your way through the Free 5 Day Website Challenge, but you decided not purchase the few tools I recommended in the Challenge because your budget is tight. So you skip adding an email optin plugin, or you find a free one that doesn’t let you create the Perfect Homepage Layout, but you figure hey, it’s close enough.
You also decide not to get any professional photos taken of yourself and instead use stock images that you find in Canva. You decide not to pay extra for automation in Mailchimp either because don’t want that extra expense when you don’t even have anybody on your list.
If this sounds like you, you may be offended and what I’m going to say next:
Either you don’t want it badly enough, or you’re afraid.
You’ve learned exactly, step-by-step, a proven formula for building a website that is going to serve as the foundation of your growing business. You’ve been shown the best tools for the job – not the ones that would make me the most money from affiliate commissions. (If that were the case, you’d be building a Divi website using LeadPages for your opt-in and running everything through Infusionsoft and it would be a 30 Day Website Challenge LOL!! Hmm… no wonder why so many people recommend Divi and Leadpages… but I digress…)
You’ve saved thousands already just by doing it yourself, and you’ve learned an invaluable skill that you’ll find increasingly important as you move forward in your business.
So to me, when you say you can’t afford it, what I hear is that it’s not a priority for you. And I’m totally okay with that – as long as you’re okay with that.
I understand that we need to take care of our families first, but if we are not willing to invest an extra penny in the tools and education we need to build a website that’s going to serve as the foundation of our business, then either our why isn’t strong enough, or our fear of failure is stronger than our why.
As your BFF, I can promise you that I’m going to share my answers with you and I’m not going to lead you astray, but you have to be committed.
I know what it feels like to be afraid that it won’t work out. I know the tricks we play on ourselves to make sure that we don’t get hurt if things don’t work out the way we want them to. But I also know how much faster you will get to your goal when you do go all in.
Mistake #2: Saying you don’t have the time (or using your time on the wrong things).
You signed up for the 5 Day Challenge and then only opened the first few emails I sent. But you saved them all in a folder because you swear you’re going to go back and look at them when you have time to sit down and work on your website.
If you don’t have time to work on your website, how are you going to have time to serve your clients? Write blog posts? Interact on social media?
No matter what stage of business you are in, it takes TIME! I believe that the concept of the 4-hour workweek is possible, but I also believe that it takes months of 40-hour workweeks to build the foundation to get there.
Once again, if you’re not willing to shift your schedule around and make sacrifices to build your business, then your why isn’t strong enough or fear is getting in the way.
And I’m not mad at you for it – I just want you to be happy. And if you really want it but you’re scared, then I hope you take some time and figure that out.
Everything I teach you now is going to save you time in the long run, I promise.
When I first started WP+BFF and opened up my Facebook group where I provide support, I spent all my extra time in there helping people for free. And it really stressed me out. How am I ever going to have time to create the courses I want to create, write the blog posts I want to write, plan all the webinars I should be doing when I’m spending all my time helping people and making zero money??
The whole point of starting my own business was to have more time, but where was it going to come from??
What I didn’t understand then is that time was going to pay off later. Time spent helping people in my Facebook group turned into new customers. Even if the person I helped never became a customer, other people saw that I was willing to help and that I knew what I was talking about. Time turned into word of mouth and more people on my list, which means more opportunities to see my courses and services.
That time was spent developing the know, like and trust factor and building up the confidence and knowledge of others in the group so they can help each other.
You may not see the value of all the things you are spending your time on at this very moment. But time invested in the right things will start giving you returns. But If you’re spending time to avoid spending money, or you’re wasting time being a perfectionist and you’re not putting that time into developing relationships, helping people and interacting, then you won’t get much in return.
Mistake #3: Thinking people will find you by Googling.
Whew! Your website is done and you submitted that sitemap to Google. You spent some extra time tweaking those SEO keywords and descriptions, and every detail is in place. Now let’s remove that coming soon page and watch the money roll in!
That’s what happened to me. I thought I would be able to show up in search results for “free WordPress tutorials” And I do. On page 5. Does anybody ever go to page 5? People are not going to find you through Google unless you are in a really unique niche.
Not at first, at least. That’s going to come with a lot of time and effort.
People are going to discover you through social media. But once they find you, they are probably not going to remember to visit your website to check for new content. You have to tell them about it via email, which they do check every day to see if there’s new stuff there.
And then when you deliver on what you say you will, people will find you through word of mouth. And when you take time to build relationships with people who are serving a similar audience as you, you’ll create opportunities to have more people visit your site.
The more real people that find you, like you and link to you, the higher you will rise in Google search rankings. But it won’t happen right away.
Avoid these mistakes and do this instead:
1) Write down your WHY (if you haven’t already). Your WHY is what drives you through the confusing and tough times.
2) Create a monthly spending plan for your business. Include all the initial, one-time costs of building a website plus ongoing fees for things like email automation, etc. When you have a plan, you'll have much less anxiety about making purchases for a business that’s not yet making money.
3) Decide how much time you will commit to building your website and schedule that time as non-negotiable time. And on the flip-side, don’t work on it all day outside of that time because you’ll likely feel unfocused and like it’s taking FOR-EV-VER.
4) Focus on providing value and solving problems for people with your content. It’s the best way to learn what resonates with your audience and leverage that information to find more people just like them! Which builds your list and gives you a customer base to market your products and services!
Next week, I’m going to share with you how I overcame this mistakes to have my first $5K month.
