Dearests,

Yay! Our new tradition! A monthly review! You can read April & May’s here, June’s here and July’s here.

I’ll cover:

  • life blessings & challenges
  • what I’ve created
  • how much my business earned
  • what business experiments we tried over the last month (and what the results were!)
  • my goals for next month.

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My goals for August that I set last month:

  • Help my kids get through their online schooling – DONE
  • Keep the energy up with our reading intensive program – DONE
  • Stay sane, gentle and happy with good self care. – DONE
  • Finish promoting next live round of 40 Days To Create & Sell Your E-Course – DONE
  • Finish new workbook editions – DONE
  • Take X course for self study – DONE
  • Start Project 10% – DONE
  • Read “Atomic Habits” – HALFWAY
  • Study more Noom – DONE

Here’s what happened in August

LIFE:

  • We spent the first week in lockdown doing online schooling. Our state managed to squash the Covid outbreak again, thank goodness. So back to school the kids went.
  • I started doing private reformer pilates classes at Noosa Flow. I have done mat pilates before, and this is my first time doing reformer. I.fucking.love.it.so.much. I am THRILLED!
  • I went back to my naturopath to get results of a bunch of tests I did.
  • We had a handyman in to fix my leaking office.
  • I did a bunch of bushwalks and bloody loved them.
  • I studied Tara Brach’s “Freeing Ourselves with Mindfulness” course
  • My husband got vaccinated! Hooray! And I got a vaccination appointment for next month! I am excited! (Australians nailed the suppression of Covid for the first year or so through lockdowns. What it did not nail was ensuring vaccination supplies, so we’re much later to that game than other countries. As my husband reckons: probably best that other countries got them first – they needed them more!)

Operation De-Blah

I felt a bit uninspired this month, to be honest. I wrote about it here. It’s always a bit of a surprise for me when I’m unmotivated – I’m usually chockfulla the excitements and drive!

I did a few things to de-blah myself: I took myself off for an afternoon of art galleries & doing a photo walk. I finished a couple of work projects that felt like they were hanging over my head. I reduced my work hours and started a new 21 day challenge of no spending. And I created a new mini workshop about my money & finances because mama loooooves making new stuff.

I think I’ll probably still need to monitor my excitement levels over the next wee while. I need to prioritise NOVELTY: hanging out with mates, taking solo artist dates, doing more DIY projects & making room for play.

WHAT I READ THIS MONTH

My favourite books this month were:

BUSINESS

We had a busy month on a few fronts in the business.

We did a couple things this month – we launched a new live round of 40 Days To Create & Sell Your E-Course. We were planning on leaving it just at that, but I got bored so thus why I launched a new mini workshop about my money & finances. I don’t know if it was the smartest idea – to do a launch inside another launch period. But it was worth it to de-funk myself, and it was a great experiment. I’ll give more details about it in the money section below!

One of my part-time assistants L needed to take personal leave this month, so my other part-time assistant Z had to manage customer service emails. I decided it was a great opportunity to treat myself like an Inbox Consultant. I went into our customer service inbox a few times a week to see if I could find ways to reduce the amount of emails we were getting and how long it took to answer them. It ended up being a fun and successful wee project, and I documented the results here: How We Halved Our Inbox Time.

On an organisational front, I tried out the Getting Things Done inbox system, and fucking LOVED it. I wrote more about it here. I’ve been doing it religiously every week since, and feel SO much more organised! I didn’t continue live blogging my weekly reviews, but they now really only do take me an hour or so. I’ve gotten so many weird odd tasks done that I’ve been putting off for yearrrrs. Plus, as part of my weekly review, I set priorities for the next week for my assistant Z, and it’s been helpful for both of us.

I also got my assistant Z to start on a new idea I’ve been wanting to try – improving different areas of my business 10% at a time. It will become a series of mini projects, each with a specific mission & outcome. This month, her first Project 10% was to pitch me to 20 podcasts and schedule me as a guest. We’re just about to have our meeting this week now the project has been completed, and we’ll talk about what we learned, what methods worked and what didn’t. And then we’ll brainstorm for our next Project 10% for her to work on… at this stage, increasing the number of subscribers to our mailing lists.

WHAT I BLOGGED THAT I HAVEN’T ALREADY LINKED ABOVE:

RIGHT… LET’S TALK MONEY!

Before we begin: I want to acknowledge that you may get your money buttons pressed when I share about my income. I share my income details because few women & non-binary do, and I want to give you an example of someone doing it. I think it’s really important for our financial literacy to talk about money – it’s how we learn! Straight white dudes talk about money all the time without shame, and I want the same to be true for us as well. Research shows that women and non-binary folks are much better money custodians – they spend their cash on their families, communities and to charities.

I also want to acknowledge the numerous unearned privileges I have and benefit from: I am white, I pass as cishet, my disabilities are not visible, and I live in a developed country.

If you’d like to know more about how I donate, I have more details about it here.

HOW MUCH DID I EARN IN AUGUST?

  • E-courses: $61,000
  • Passive income business: $17,000
  • Ethical managed funds growth: $25,000
  • Investment property: $2,000
  • EMDG: $30,000 (this is for the last financial year – the Australian Government pays for 50% of international advertising costs for exporters)
  • Affiliate commissions: $1,000

TOTAL: $136,000

Which e-courses made the most?

Money Lessons Learned This Month

To be honest – I wasn’t happy with how I did with the launch of 40 Days To Create & Sell Your E-course this month. Last time I did a live round of it a year ago, I sold $77,000 in enrolments. So I anticipated about that – but pretty quickly realised I wasn’t going to hit that figure. This time we sold about $40k with a reduced launch (that includes payment plans coming in over the next 4 months). I think it was due to doing a Prices Doubling sale in April – so people who were interested in doing the e-course jumped on board then.

Once we didn’t hit our goals during the early bird period, I quickly decided to do a much quieter launch and start working on something new. I always earn more the first time I launch a course – most new course releases bring in over $100,000 because it’s completely fresh and new for all my peeps, and all my students end up taking more than one of my courses.

Anyways, between the e-course launch not being as robust as I wanted, and me being freaking borrrrrred, I decided to launch a mini-course at the same time. I made Behind The Scenes of a Multi-Millionaire’s Finances in 2021 and decided to:

I haven’t tried selling a program for such a tiny price before, so it was all a glorious experiment.

I sent two sales emails about it, and sold 683 for a total of $4,787.30.

My intention with creating such a tiny priced course was to maybe entice people who hadn’t bought from me before to buy, get a huge amount of value and useful information, and maybe consider buying one of my larger programs.

After I’d made it, I realised there were two courses that would be useful for people finishing that workshop – the Money course and the E-course course. And I thought it would be fun to experiment with giving peeps $50 off vouchers if they wanted to sign up for either (or both) of those courses. Buy a course for $7! Get up to $100 off other courses!

Again: I haven’t really tried anything like this before so it’s all a big experiment!

So far, we’ve had 20 people use the coupon to buy another course for US$149. So all up that’s another $2980 in sales from the mini-course.  All up, about $8,000 in sales from a mini-course experiment. Next up, I’ll probably try using the mini-course as a tripwire product and test that out.

It’s not a huge amount in sales for a business my size, but worth testing it out. I’ll likely just continue to do courses around the $100/$200 price point – I have a bunch of topics I keep getting asked about and need a training for. I do like doing these kinds of experiments and trying new things however!

Goals for September

  • Release new workshop
  • Project 10%: Email opt-ins
  • Test tripwire product
  • Weekly blog posts
  • Enjoy school holidays & our mini-trip away
  • Stay creatively inspired!

All My Love,

FREE GOODIES:

BOOKS:

COURSES: