It’s day 33 of my new online business!

And the 13 days since my last update have been a whirlwind of activity. We travelled from Melbourne to Athens via Singapore, and I spent my surprisingly minimal jetlag time eating all the Greek food with my boys…while my husband spent FIVE DAYS getting tattooed.

I did the live workshop I talked about in episode 8, and it was great! It went really well, and I learned a lot.

Plus I made a signup page for my not-ready-yet free resource, and had a surprising but positive result.

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Resources mentioned

I mentioned the following resources in the podcast.

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

Lizz Quain’s  Worldschooling 🌏 Traveling ✈️ Digital Nomad 💻 Trailblazing 🥾 FAMILIES 👪 Facebook group – fantastic community, and don’t miss the HUGE library of workshops about anything and everything worldschooling (including mine).

Come along the next time I do the Worldschooling Income workshop!

Heartbeat – brilliant software that hosts your community, courses, workshops…everything you need for digital products.

Sign up for the Business Idea Blitz – my free find-your-business-idea course, which morphed from a workbook into a fully guided mini-course.

Transcript

Hey everyone! I’m Kelly Kotanidis, and welcome to Online Business from Scratch where I am 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 will be walking you through everything I do and why so you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

So, this is the update for day 33 of my new online business, and it has been another really hectic two weeks. We had a couple of days of travel from Melbourne to Athens via Singapore, adjusting to our new time zone, which actually wasn’t that bad. The jet lag was pretty good, and I’ve been sleeping well. It didn’t hit me too badly, but it’s the other way, going back, that is usually really terrible.

My husband has spent five of those days in Athens getting tattooed. Five whole days! He now has a full sleeve with Poseidon, an octopus, and a trireme on one arm. He’s got Jason, the Nemean lion, Athena, and all this stuff on the other arm. So, fully Greek arms now! The boys and I have been entertaining ourselves and eating all of the Greek food in sight. We all got sick, you know, just colds, which is fairly routine after a lot of travel and exposure to other people, changing body clock, and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it’s been a pretty full-on two weeks, but business progress still happens.

I did do the live workshop that I was talking about in the last podcast about earning online while traveling. That was for Lizz Quain’s World Schooling Traveling Digital Nomad Trailblazing Families Facebook group, and it went really well. Lots of people attended live, and we had lots of good questions.

Now, one thing I’m finding is every time I talk to people, I have to revise my starting point. I’m realizing that the world schooling audience is starting at the very beginning. So, I have to work out how to explain the absolute basics of stuff like what you can do with an email list, how to get people on your email list, search engine optimization, and searcher intent, all that kind of stuff.

My brain is very happy about this, and it’s looking for patterns. It’s been buzzing away in the background, working out how I can produce some content to get people’s heads around the basics. Because a lot of it is stuff that they will need to understand before they actually make the decision to work with me. If I’m selling courses or other products about creating digital products and driving traffic and sales with email lists and all that kind of stuff, then people need to have a clear picture of what that actually is before they decide if they want to do it. Even talking to Lizz before and after the workshop gave me more good ideas.

She’s doing an excellent job with her world schooling course and running it in cohorts, but she had a lot of questions about SEO and email versus social media and other ways of marketing. So it’s really sinking in for me that the way I do things isn’t flashy or obvious from the outside, so people don’t understand it, but it works. Most people think that lots of content on social media, all that very visible stuff, is the way to go because that’s what they can actually see. So, when I say no, I wouldn’t bother with an Instagram account—actually, I’m not using mine—here’s what I would do instead to get better results in less time, then it kind of fries their brain.

That’s another interesting challenge for me: to work out how to communicate it all clearly, how to show them that all this non-flashy, non-obvious stuff like email automation actually works really, really well for much less work.

And this bit is funny. I made a landing page for the “Choose Your Topic” workbook. So, all I’ve got right now is a messy Google doc. I have nothing to send them, but I figured, hey, I can tell people at the workshop about it and they can sign up, and I will send it to them when it’s ready. I put the landing page up one afternoon and closed my computer. The next morning, I logged on and, because the page had been automatically listed in the menu bar, which I forgot to turn off, I had two people sign up for it overnight just from visiting the site. So I scrambled to write an apologetic automatic welcome email explaining that no, I’m not quite done yet, but I will send it as soon as I can.

That’s really good. My site isn’t getting much traffic at all yet, but I still had two people see that sign-up page and like it enough to sign up, and that’s great validation. It means that yes, it is a very needed and wanted topic.

So that is my other thing that I’m focusing on now: working on the “Choose Your Topic” resource. I’m really enjoying it. I love putting stuff like this together. I keep challenging myself to make it simpler and clearer and really cut all the fluff and zero right in on the important tasks and decisions that you will need to do. Right now, it is just a messy Google doc, but I think I have the essence in there. So I will keep working at polishing it. After a few more reviews, it’ll be ready to move out of the Google doc and into its proper home at Heartbeat, probably. We will see how all the tech works out. Like I keep saying, you don’t know how something will work until you’re actually using it for your purposes.

Okay, so that’s my progress up until February 2nd, and it is time again to jump forward in time to now where the “Choose Your Topic” freebie is up and ready for you to do. So please visit the link in the show notes and sign up for that if you haven’t already. My workbook idea morphed into an entire free course with videos and everything, and it’s very, very good at helping people make progress and start their online business.

So, if you haven’t already, sign up for the Business Idea Blitz to find your perfect business topic and make it nice and specific for your audiences. I’ve had some great ideas come from people already in there, and it’s fantastic to see.

As always, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen to this, and I will be back sharing my next steps and useful tips and ideas with you very soon. So, I’ll chat to you then.

Thanks for listening!

Got any questions? Feel free to to drop them in the comments below.

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