So I said I was taking a 4 week break…4 months ago 😳

And while I seem to have disappeared, I’ve been doing a LOT behind the scenes – bundles, summits, AND beta-testing a new online course.

Listen in for all the details!

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Resources mentioned

I mention the following resources in this episode.

Some of these links are affiliate links, meaning I will receive a commission if you purchase via that link (thanks!) – see my disclosure here.

Master Your Minutes – my course that I included in the bundles

Fearless Homeschool Membership – this is where I did the neurodivergent homeschooling workshop

Bougie in a Backpack Summit

Transcript

Hey there, 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 so you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

So right now I’m at day 347 for my new online business, but this update is for around day 280 is of the business because I disappeared for a while there, and right now I’m going to explain why.

In the last episode, I told you that I had started a job 3 days a week and I was having four weeks off my business to settle in. That was actually 4 months ago, which is obviously a lot longer than 4 weeks. And that is because I ended up deciding to test an online business foundations course, which I’ve just finished now.

That has been a wild ride, and I’m going to dedicate the next podcast episode to talking about that—why I decided to test the course, why I dropped everything else like this podcast, how and why I beta test, and all the stuff relating to creating a big course. It is a huge thing, and I think I do it in a way that enables me to create the best course that I can but also make sure that I actually do create it because I have accountability and I can’t procrastinate or put it off.

If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, please go and do that now because if you’re thinking about creating an online course or other digital product or you’ve created one and it hasn’t really worked that well, then this next episode is going to be really, really useful for you, and you don’t want to miss it.

I technically had four weeks off my business while I started a job 3 days per week. That’s like an actual job where I go somewhere and work and get paid by the hour. And it’s actually been great. I’ve really liked it, which I’m so surprised about because I haven’t enjoyed a job in a really long time. Like, I’m not a job person overall, but it does involve a lot of research and learning and teaching about health stuff. It’s pretty quiet, I’m able to find problems and triage them, set my own goals, and pretty much manage myself, so it’s actually really good for me.

Now, most of the people I talk to about my job have told me that they would completely freak out and quit because it is so open-ended, but I really like independence. So it’s kind of like being a contractor brought in to assess and fix issues, and so it’s really fun in a nerdy way.

I also started a graduate certificate in innovative learning design, and I thought that would help with both my new job and my online businesses. I did the first 3 weeks of that but then ended up dropping out because it really wasn’t covering much content at all. The content it did cover seemed to be stuff that I had done before in MOOCS, free online courses.

After sitting back and assessing it, I thought no, I really could be spending my time better. I don’t actually need the qualification. I’m doing it for my own learning and benefit, not the bit of paper. So if I’m not learning much or really benefiting, there’s no point. So I quit, and I haven’t regretted it.

The first few weeks of this job were really tiring because I was meeting all these new people, trying to work out what my job was actually going to be because I’m kind of creating the job as I go along, I was doing the grad cert work, and I was just wrecked. I knew that would happen, and that was why I built in the four weeks off my business.

I paused this podcast, didn’t write any new content, and stopped selling business idea reviews, but I did have a few previous commitments that I fulfilled in that 4 weeks, and I’ll detail them now.

The first one was a homeschooling bundle, and I’m not going to name it because I really wasn’t very impressed. Now, it had really great advertising to get people to sign up. The host was talking about their huge email list and lots and lots of experience that they had, and it looked pretty good. So I signed up and gave a 50% discount on my Master Your Minutes course.

Now, because they asked for discounts, I assumed it was a free bundle, but just before they launched it, I got all the details and found out that people had to pay to get the bundle and then pay for each of the products in the bundle. If I’d known that at the start, I wouldn’t have signed up. Admittedly, it may have been in the details, and I missed it, but it just seems like too much work for people.

So you’re saying, like, hey, first up decide if you want to buy this bundle. Then you’re going to need to go through and decide if you want to buy each of these products and then buy them all separately. That is just a huge pain in the arse. It makes me feel like I have decision fatigue just thinking about it.

It is far too much work for the customer, so I think with that, either have a paid bundle with free products or a free bundle with heavily discounted products but definitely not paid and paid. So that bundle was not a great success for me. I sold a grand total of one course, so I got one new subscriber and a couple of dollars.

Overall, I don’t think the bundle was very well thought out, and it wasn’t well marketed at all. It’s yet another example of someone who can have a huge list numbers-wise, but those numbers mean nothing if you’re not giving them what they want and they’re not engaged with you. That one was really not worth my time, so I won’t be doing anything else with that particular business again.

I actually had better results from my next event, which was the Fearless Homeschool Neurodivergent Summit. This was not something that I did for my business, really, because it’s pretty unrelated. I was talking about being neurodivergent myself, homeschooling neurodivergent kids, and raising and homeschooling a kid with a disability.

It wasn’t business at all, but Fearless Homeschool is my previous business that I sold last year, and I loved running summits and talking to homeschoolers. So this is a way I can still contribute in a smaller way than I used to. Even just emailing about that to say, hey, the summit’s coming up, here’s what I’m talking about, go get your ticket if you want to come along—even just that got me a few affiliate sales on my tickets. I feel I was actually reimbursed well for something that I would be happy to do for free, so that’s win-win.

I also had another summit with less than excellent results, but I feel this one is related to just a single breakdown. Overall, the summit was quite good, but there’s one small thing the hosts missed that made a huge difference to my results.

This one was the Bougie in a Backpack Travel Summit. I recorded a workshop about the best way to earn income while traveling, which is obviously having your own business with digital products. I mean, come on, that’s what I’m all about.

I also made a workbook resource guide to go with it, and the workshop got hundreds of views. I could see the stats, and it was one of the most watched workshops overall, so I’m pretty pleased with that. It had quite a few comments over the few days it was live, which was great to see as well, but I only got a handful of signups because my free course wasn’t linked with the workshop.

Neither was my download, which had lots of links to my site. I didn’t track that specifically with a link or a coupon or anything like that, but compared to my normal level of new subscribers, I probably got about 10 more that week, so that’s not very many.

For that one, even though the summit was great quality and people were watching my workshop, they didn’t actually have the links to the stuff I was talking about. You know what that’s like—you don’t want to open a new tab, Google someone, and try to find out what they’re talking about because that’s a lot of work. You just want to click a link, and if that link isn’t there, 90% or probably more of people are going to think, “too hard, don’t want it that bad,” and just not do it.

The download also wasn’t emailed out. It was just listed in a Google Doc, which is quite disconnected from the workshop. I ended up going into the comments to the workshop after probably 24 hours and putting those links in myself, saying, hey, here’s this workbook, you can download it here, and here’s the free course I’m talking about, which I think is where most of those 10 people came from.

While I did get some new signups from that, I feel that my results would have been much better if those links were included in a prominent place with the workshop. As someone who has run many summits, it is something that I always did for my presenters.

I always encouraged them to provide a download and links to their stuff, and I would share those in the email about that day’s workshop and also with their workshop to try to get them the best result from the summit. I would also put those links with the recordings later so people could access them at any time.

That wasn’t all that hard for me. It was only a couple of minutes extra work per workshop, but it helped them get much better results. So, that’s something to think about if you’re planning on running a summit or any sort of event where you’re asking other people to provide content for you. Do those little things to help your presenters to make it win-win for both of you because that’s how you create great events and make fantastic connections with people you can then work with for many years.

So, yeah, I got 10-ish new subscribers, but for the hundreds of views the workshop had, that’s a pretty poor conversion rate. I haven’t signed up for any future versions of that summit—they run it a few times a year—but I do now have a really nice recorded workshop that I can repurpose. One day, I will need to sit down and work out the best way to do that and make the most of the time that I put into it.

As you can see from that, I still did a bit during those four weeks I wasn’t technically working on my business. It was mostly maintenance and writing a couple of promo emails because I’d already put in all the setup work when applying for all of those things.

And that gave me a bit of time and space to be able to step back and think about what I needed to do next for my business.

The very obvious answer was: make more stuff to sell. Because that’s what businesses are all about, right? We need stuff to sell; we need a way to make money. Otherwise, it’s not a business.

As I mentioned at the start, I’m doing that right now—beta testing my course. I will be talking about that in detail in the next episode—all about how I’m creating it, how I’m beta testing it, and how I’m making a course that will hopefully go on to be a huge asset for me.

So please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss that episode. If you have never really heard of beta testing and creating products with your audience, it is going to blow your mind. It is the best way to do things, and you’re going to love it.

So that’s me done for now, thanks for listening, and thanks so much for popping back in after my huge break.

I will be back soon with my beta testing episode. See you then!

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