Along with finishing the work of moving back into a house after two years of travel, I’ve been working hard on my course…because I have a deadline.

I have to get it finished, reviewed, and set up ready for its contribution to a bundle, AND I also want to have it ready to offer as a tripwire for ANOTHER bundle that the Business Idea Blitz is in.

So I’ve spent more hours than I want to working on the course, but I’m really glad I have. Parkinson’s Law can be leveraged to help us! (and I talk about that in the course).

Also, here are a few pics of those animals we’ve collected rather quickly – as you can see, when we do something we go all in!

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Resources mentioned

I mention the following resources in this episode.

Beyond Productivity – the productivity course I’m binge-creating in this episode.

FreedomKit – Looks good after my initial experiments, but I’ll need to play more before I can give it a firm recommendation.

My contact page – It’s fairly short and to the point, but it has everything visitors need to know.

Transcript

Hello 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 travelling homeschooling life. I’ll be walking you through everything I do and why, so you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

Now, this is the update for day 160 of my new online business. It’s been 10 days since my last update, and we’re still in moving-in mode. Over the past week, the number of animals has been increasing at an alarming rate. My son got a Dachshund puppy, I got a cat, my other son got a whole family of rabbits—11 rabbits, to be exact—and my husband got two Jersey cows. We already had 14 chickens, and that’s not going to be it because they’re still on Gumtree every day looking at goats, sheep, Highland cattle, camels, and I don’t even know what else. So, I’m just going with the flow and letting them make the most of not needing to fit everything into a carry-on bag.

My business job this week has been working on my productivity course to get ready for the Freebie Fest and the following homeschooling bundle. I did end up sorting out the issues I was having with the course structure that I mentioned a few episodes back. After a few hours of work, I’ve been able to categorize it all and sequence it logically, and it is working as a course now, so I’m really happy about that. I just needed that bit of time to think about it all, plus this deadline to force me to sort it out. So, I needed some time and then no time, really.

I’ve been adding in each section, polishing up my often quite sparse first drafts, pulling it all apart and rearranging it. Of course, I’ve been finding the perfect GIFs and memes to put in because I love injecting a bit of humor and keeping things light. I spent quite a few hours on the course; I haven’t been timing it, but I’m guessing over 10 hours, possibly closer to 20. I’m pretty tired of looking at it, to be honest. If I didn’t have my deadline for the Freebie Fest, I would have wandered off to something else by now or would have spent a lot more time not working. But I don’t have a choice; I have a deadline, I have to get it done, and really, I’m glad about that. I hate things dragging out for ages, so I would rather binge now and have the relief of getting it done.

I mentioned last episode that I bought FreedomKit, which is an all-in-one website, course, ads, shopping cart—basically everything platform. That’s because I’ve been hearing rumbles about Thrive Cart since they were bought out or got new owners or whatever happened last year. I’m not quite sure how real the problems are, but I do know that some people have had issues with upsells not showing and sales pages reverting back to older versions and other really glitchy stuff, which is really quite concerning in a shopping cart because it’s the final step for people. If that step stuffs up, you lose a sale, you look unprofessional, and it could really impact income, especially if there’s a glitch around a launch time or some other busy time like that.

So, when I got the emails from Suzi from Start a Mom Blog, should I say Start a Mom Blog? I don’t know, it just sounds weird when I pronounce it like the Americans. Anyway, when I got that email from Suzi about their full website solution, I was pretty keen to try it out. I’ve followed Suzi and her husband John for a lot of years. I’ve got a few of their courses, and they’ve always seemed pretty open and above board, genuinely dedicated to helping their customers succeed. This new product, FreedomKit, includes pretty much everything—you get your whole site, hosting, emails, courses, booking forms, fancy checkout, live chat. It’s like they’ve set out to mash together Thrive Cart, WordPress, Shopify, Kajabi, Teachable, so many different things. Honestly, it makes me a little wary because, in my experience, many of the everything products tend not to do anything very well. But I bought a pro lifetime license because I trust them; they have a solid history, and I think if anyone can pull it off, they can.

Freedom Kit is meant to be on a fairly short lifetime sale, then move on to being a monthly cost for new signups. So, I grabbed the pro lifetime account, and I spent a few hours one afternoon trying it out, just seeing if I could set up the productivity course to go in there easily. I worked out a lot of it, but it was also obvious after those few hours that I would need to spend more time learning how it all works and testing it before I could actually put it out there and have people use it. So it’s got a lot of features, but it’s still brand new. Now it has people using it; the usability will improve.

I found it quite straightforward overall, but the weird thing is that everything is set up in a different place. I could set up my sales page, then my checkout, then my product and my course content, but then I couldn’t work out how to actually connect all those steps together. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a criticism because I didn’t watch any of their tutorials and I only spent a few hours on there. But I’m definitely too time-poor right now to go jumping headfirst into putting everything onto a new platform. So, I’m putting Freedom Kit aside for now. I’m putting the productivity course and checkouts into Thrive Cart, crossing my fingers that some of the glitches people have been talking about won’t happen to me. If they do, I have FreedomKit as a backup. If the glitches don’t occur, I’ll just think about switching once all the new software issues have been ironed out by their early adopters. Hopefully, I can then hire someone who knows it all backwards and can do all the boring transferring stuff for me.

In other news, I may have a bit of a plot twist coming up. See, I’d pretty much given up on nursing. I thought while we were here, I might do a shift every now and again just to keep my registration and to get out of the house for a bit, while my main focus would be growing this business. Then, I took my 18-year-old son to enroll him in the local disability employment and day programs. This place is pretty good; they’ve been around for 70 years, they’re really client-focused, not your standard cowboys jumping on the NDIS funding bandwagon like so many places seem to be nowadays. I asked offhand if they employ nurses, and he perked right up because they do, and they actually have a clinical educator who is just about to leave, and they’re looking to fill that position. So, I think I’m kind of applying for that. It’s pretty accidental, but it sounds right up my alley.

I’ve thought about working in disability before because I have the personal connection and experience with my son, and I love teaching and evidence-based practice, and that’s basically what this job involves. It’s a new and emerging position. There are not very many jobs available in this area, but it’s growing quite rapidly because there really needs to be that clinical healthcare connection and education for community disability support workers. They do a lot of pretty advanced clinical stuff like tube feeds and giving meds, so they need decent training. The NDIA is starting to ask providers to put that into place, so it will become a mandatory requirement in the next few years. This disability clinical educator role will become pretty standard. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do if I get the job, but I’m going for an interview next week, so I’ll just roll with it now and see how it goes.

In little things, I updated my contact page to add details about working with me. That’s stuff like, yes, I will consider being on your podcast or in your summit, no, I won’t put your link on my site or take guest posts—just the basics so that people who are messaging me for that sort of reason know what to expect. I’m starting to get a few of those emails now. The vast majority is spam, but when someone who actually has a legitimate question comes along, they can self-select and say, “Oh cool, she wants to do workshops for other people’s groups, better email her,” or “Oh, she doesn’t do paid reviews, no point asking.” That saves us both a bit of bother.

So, it’s been a busy few weeks business-wise. I’ve nearly finished my first paid course for this business while still settling into my new house and new area, setting up our new semi-permanent home. But it’s been pretty fun.

Now, I’m going to do my time traveling thing and jump forward into the future when I’m actually recording these podcast notes that I took a little while ago. That productivity course is now finished. It’s called Beyond Productivity. It will help you find the time to get your big goals done, even though you’re homeschooling or traveling or have an otherwise very busy life. See, I’m a very disorganized person with ADHD, and this is how I’ve managed to get a degree, start and grow multiple businesses all while having a rather hectic and unpredictable life with many years on the road. You can get the course right now; the link will be in the show notes. It’s still quite new, but I’m going to be adding videos and a few extra bonusy things as I go. If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I tend to launch the course, then keep improving and upgrading based on your feedback and needs. So, grab it now while it’s pretty cheap, and you can start spending more time building a business that gives you financial security and freedom, and also have a project and set of achievements that’s all yours because I have always needed that.

Alright, so that’s me done for this week. Thank you for listening, and I will see you next time.

Thanks for listening!

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