Pooky bears!

Yay! Our new tradition! A monthly review!

I’ll cover:

  • life blessings & challenges
  • what I’ve created in my business
  • how much revenue generated
  • my goals for next month.

You can read previous monthly reviews here:

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To start, let’s review the goals I had for October!

WORK GOALS

  • Release new workbooks – DONE. You can find them here.
  • Release new workshop – NOPE. But it got launched in November instead.
  • Weekly zines – DONE.
  • Batch create 6 Business Success Series blog posts – DID 3.
  • Finish another Project 10% – DIDN’T. Launched workbooks instead.
  • Test tripwire product – DONE.
  • Finish Project X – DONE! Calm Christmas Planner was launched!

LIFE GOALS

  • Do another 21 day challenge – decluttering & organising – DONE!
  • Weekly pilates – DONE!
  • Do whatever I need to do to get my creative juices flowing! – DONE!
  • Finish food e-course – NIET!
  • Go for 10 walks – DONE!
  • Finish reading “Die Empty”– NIET! Only 3 chapters in.

All in all, pretty stoked with the progress we made!

What else happened on the life front in October?

  • I spent a lot of time in the parenting trenches working through some new issues with my kids. I feel like I’ve had a pretty lucky run with my kids – since they have been out of baby & toddler ages, they’ve been fairly easy to manage. Or maybe that’s just my parenting sweet spot! But now I have a tween running towards being 12 and I feel wholly unprepared for being Mama of Teens. I don’t know how to do that! So that’s been tricky to work through, but I know we’ll get through. And I’m really bloody glad I have Dawsy to parent with. He’s really good at parenting in ways I’m not, and also makes an excellent venting partner.
  • I also did a Zoom career talk for the Year 11 & 12 students at my old boarding school. I went for the “Eccentric Creative Aunt Encourages Them All To Disobey Their Parents And Follow Their Dreams” vibe, and I’m pretty sure I NAILED IT.
  • I did a 21 day decluttering challenge and my house feels so much more organised! I feel quite chuffed with myself!
  • I finished estate planning and I feel very very very very fucking smug.
  • I did a lot of abstract painting, just for myself. It was glorious.
  • My big kid went to school camp for 3 days. Even though it’s her third year going and we know it’s her favourite thing everrrr, it’s still strange when she’s not in the house, and it makes me wonder how on earth I’ll ever adjust to being a parent of adult kids.
  • Our little kid had her first go on happy gas at the dentist. It was brilliant (compared to the usual car wreck of an experience that dentists can be for her).
  • I had a rad weekly routine of going to pilates, then hanging out at my favourite bookstore/cafe, talking shit with the owners, drinking tea & eating cake. It made my heart happy.
  • I got my second vaccine. Feels fucking TERRIFIC to be fully vaccinated. After having Swine Flu a few years ago & having a godawful time for six months, I’ve been fanging for this vaccine.
  • Was social TWICE! Had dinner on the river with a friend & tea and cake with another. Sometimes I forget to be social, but then I get a bit sad and remember that even homebodies need people.
  • I made a practice of keeping my eyes open for beauty, and taking Instax-looking photos of it using the NOMO CAM app.
  • This month’s ridiculous injury: I bruised my heel while stomping around the house like a monster playing with the kids. It took 3 weeks for it to recover because OF COURSE IT DID.
  • Halloween! We had a Halloween treasure hunt at home and it was hilarious fun. I made it into a Taskmaster style event where they also had to work out clues and complete tasks to proceed. The final prize was Halloween Beanie Boos (which Dawsy and I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to buy). I don’t know what it is about Beanie Boos… they are crack cocaine for children!

Favourite books I read in October

Favourite TV in October

  • ALONE! I just fucking LOVE this show. A reality show about people trying to survive in the wilderness does NOT sound like it would be up my alley. But it IS. It so is. It touches me deeply!
  • Taskmaster. It’s our family’s favourite bar none. (In related reading, this amused me.)

What I created in my business in October

October was alllll about books!

First up, for something completely different, I thought I’d try something new. I created an illustrated Calm Christmas printable planner to sell on Etsy. It was a bunch of fun to make. I used Procreate on my iPad with my Apple Pen to create. (You can sell all the tools I use in my business here!)

I created the Calm Christmas printable planner for a few reasons:

  1. I was bored & needed some novelty
  2. I’m not naturally an organised person whatsoever, but have managed to get a lottttt more organised in recent years. And getting organised for Christmas has been a really fun project for me!
  3. I thought I’d see if I enjoyed selling on the Etsy marketplace again, and if it exposed me to a new audience.

I knew it likely wouldn’t be a major income producer for me, and that’s fine. I still need to give myself room to experiment and try new things because doing the same thing again and again is kryptonite to my spirit.

We also released the new Goal Getter workbooks & planner range – four books in total for that range. I’ve been creating these workbooks for 13 years now, and they’ve been used by over 450,000 people which is incredible. This year I decided to make them undated so they can be used again and again. You can read all about that decision here.

For something free I released something odd & weird & didn’t talk too much about it… but the emails I’ve gotten back about it have been just LOVELY. Makes me want to make more weird free books like this.

This month I also discovered that my accountants have missed including our investment property in our annual tax returns for two years, so I’ve been collecting all the expense accounts for that property. I’m fairly sure it will result in a 5 figure tax return for us. Nothing will show up in October’s income for this of course, but I’m glad I’ve discovered it.

Current list of software I use to run my business:

  • Kajabi for most things in my business:
    • selling through their shopping cart
    • teaching my courses through their learning management system
    • running my affiliate program
  • ActiveCampaign to send all our marketing emails.
  • Optin Monster to create all the pop-ups, reminder windows & lead magnet forms on my website.
  • Calendly to screen interviewers and book in interviews.
  • Xero is my accounting & financial management system.
  • I host my WordPress websites on WPEngine.

More tools of the trade here if you find that kind of thing useful!

Current run down of what I offer in my business:

FREE GOODIES:

BOOKS:

COURSES:

How much we earned this month:

Total income for this month was $46,700. 

I’ll do a breakdown of where that came from in a second. 

In terms of volume, it’s small for a usual launch period for me, however normal for a BOOK launch period. I had two book launches this month which are always fun – they do however tend to result in lower income in e-courses. Still…. it’s more in a month than I used to make in a year so nothing to sneeze at.

What I’m noticing is that I really like having a diversified income coming in from lots of different buckets. I’m starting to consider what retirement will look like. I dare say I’ll always be doing something creative in the world. It’s more about shifting my focus from active wealth creation to just doing whatever the fuck I want whenever I want because our investments, passive income and royalties cover our expenses.

Income streams:

  • E-courses: $16,000
  • Passive income business: $11,000
  • Shares & managed funds growth: $10,000
  • New workbooks: $8,000
  • Kajabi affiliate: $1,000
  • Calm Christmas Planner on Etsy: $700

Workbooks breakdown

  • Digital workbooks: $6,500
  • Royalties for paperback books: $1,400 (payable in 3 months or so)
  • Amazon affiliate income: $100 (payable in 3 months or so)

E-courses breakdown

Insights out of these figures:

I didn’t really market any of these courses in October, so it’s great they all still bring in cash anyway!

In terms of why Marketing Without Social Media was our #1 seller in October… I have no fucking clue. Ha! This course seems to just get more and more popular. It feels like so many people are yearning to do business differently, especially with more & more research coming out showing how harmful social media can be to our mental health.

The e-course course was second most popular because I ran a live round in September, so part of the cash would be late enrolments for that, as well as the monthly payment plans that go for 3 months.

I was fascinated to see that Sales Star, the Book course & the Money course all earned the exact same amount. And that a $7 product was selling nearly as much as them! The $7 product is still relatively new however, so I’d expect for sales to drop over time on that one. But maybe not! We’ll see. I’m also going to test using this one as a tripwire product.

Shares & managed funds growth

My ethical managed funds rebounded to their previous height after a slower month in September. I was yakking to a mate this week, and she thanked me for telling me when I invested in Australian Ethical shares last year. Since then they’ve grown by over 2.5x. At the time, I had shares in Commonwealth Bank, Telstra & Woolworths – but I sold them all after the Australian bushfires, determined to only invest in ethical and climate-crisis worthy shares. I’ve kind of ignored them since I bought them – and when I logged in to check them out after our conversation, discovered my $24,000 of shares are now valued at $60,000 (!!!!) About $10,000 of that growth has happened in the last month, so I’ve counting that as income as well.

If you want to know more about exactly how I create & grow my income streams, Money, Manifesting & Multiple Streams of Income is the resource for you!

Goals for November

LIFE

  • Have a fucking rad birthday
  • Celebrate the fuck out of my husband’s birthday
  • Go for 10 walks
  • Keep my kids chilled out & full of love as we finish up the school year

BIZ

  • Launch Work Less, Earn More
  • Batch content to be used over December & January
  • Have a bonza income month & prepare for taking time off over Dec & Jan
  • Get back into a good rhythm with Project 10% again.

This was fun!

Thanks for sharing the journey with me, as always.

FREE GOODIES:

BOOKS:

COURSES: