As I mention at the start of the podcast, I’ve launched my first paid course! 🥳

It’s called Beyond Productivity, and if you’re a homeschooling parent it will help you find the time you need to reach your big goals (without waiting a decade or two).

Check out the 50% off launch sale here.

Back to the podcast, and I sensibly took the time to finish off the Business Idea Blitz PROPERLY.

It’s so tempting to jump ahead to the next new thing, but it’s much better business strategy to make the most of what you’ve got first.

So I recorded and added videos to the course, and set up some ongoing promotion – and I’m really happy I did.

It’s very satisfying to look at it now and see that it’s all been done properly.

I also explain the strategy behind putting the course videos up publicly on YouTube – it’s an odd approach, but here’s why it works for me.

Listen to the episode right here

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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.

Beyond Productivity – my brand-new course! It’s 50% off for its launch, the coupon is already applied.

YouTube course playlist – the videos for the Business Idea Blitz. Note the descriptions with keywords encouraging people to sign up for the course.

Convertbox – the best pop-up maker I’ve used by far. It has so many features but is really easy to set up, and they look great. I’m looking forward to using this to its full extent. Check out the BIB popup below 😍

Nicheing for multipassionates post – part of the longer-term strategy to get more search traffic that wants to sign up for the Business Idea Blitz.

Homeschool Freedom Club interview – I chatted to Richard about worldschooling and how we earn while travelling. So laid-back!

Photos – yep, I did the hard thing and took photos of myself. Here are a couple of less-than-ideal ones to show you that it’s not something I got perfect straight away, I can definitely see why photography is a profession. But I did get a few decent ones, so we’ll keep experimenting.

Taygetos challenge – if you want a breathtaking, fun, and rather challenging trail race in Greece this is for you! And I only did the 22km, not the 40km. Maybe next year?!

And this is why I do online business – so I can hike and run in beautiful places with fantastic people. All the time, not just on occasional holidays!

Transcript

Hey everyone, a quick note before we start. I launched my very first paid course for my new business, and it’s called Beyond Productivity. It’s all about how to find the time to reach your big goals while you’re parenting and homeschooling and have your attention pulled in so many different directions. Everyone keeps telling me that they just don’t know where they’ll find the time to start a business. Well, I’ve gotten a degree, run a couple of businesses, traveled, and done all sorts of stuff while homeschooling my five kids. So, in the course, I’ve shared all the strategies, ideas, and attitudes that have helped me get so much done over the years.

As you know, most productivity advice is given by people who don’t have primary responsibility for a family and home, let alone also educating their kids. So I hope you find my course much more useful than the standard productivity advice you get from people who often have long stretches of free time, which seems like an unimaginable luxury to me. If you want to start a business, get a degree, write a book, or pursue any other big, audacious goal and have no idea where you could fit it in over the next decade or two, head over and check out the course. It’s 50% off for its launch, and the link with the coupon is in the show notes. I would love to see you in there and hear all about you working towards your big goals.

Now, let’s head back into the past of the podcast and see what I was doing a couple of months ago.

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

This is the update for day 71 of my new online business. In my last update 13 days ago, I said I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. I decided to do the thing that I often try to skip: strengthening and polishing my existing stuff before making new stuff. Let’s face it, new stuff is often a bit more fun and exciting. In this case, it meant that I’ve put some time into making the Business Idea Blitz the best it can be. After all, there’s probably not much point in making something if it’s hard to find or could be better.

First, I made videos, and this went so smoothly. I recorded five short videos of me going through the steps as an example for everyone. I edited them, put them on YouTube, embedded them in the course, and even emailed everyone to tell them all on the same day.

A big frustration with my last business was that many tasks would take me forever to do, mostly because I wanted them to be absolutely perfect, and I would get so sick of tasks hanging over my head for ages. So I’m consciously making sure that I just smash things out now when I need to do them. I got the videos done, ad-libbed a lot instead of sticking to a script (which was so much faster), and set up my YouTube channel nicely for them with the banner images, description, and all that stuff.

Let’s talk strategy briefly for my decision to put the Business Idea Blitz videos up on YouTube publicly. Usually, I would host the videos privately, and no one except people enrolled in the course could watch them. When I thought about this, I realized that right now, I need growth, which means I need to be as public as possible. It’s a free course, so it’s not like I’m giving away paid content. I decided to put them on YouTube, write good descriptions with some SEO, tell people to sign up for the course for all the content, and I might get a few signups from that.

Long term, I want to do a fair bit on YouTube because YouTube is not social media. Don’t confuse it with stuff like Facebook and Instagram. YouTube is a search engine, and people use it to look for answers to their questions, just like Google. It worked really well for me in the past in terms of driving website traffic and hitting the top three in Google search results. It was a decision based on making the most of the content. I can always remove it in the future, but for now, I need to be out there, starting to show what I do, sharing as widely as I can in a strategic way, and getting some followers. I already have 10 subscribers on YouTube, which is pretty good considering I haven’t made anything specifically for YouTube yet.

Then I moved on to promoting the course. It’s already a link in the header bar as “Free Course,” and I also made a ConvertBox popup so that anyone who visits my site on desktop gets an invitation to it. This was actually really easy to do. It’s the first time I’ve used ConvertBox, and I had my account set up and the whole thing done in about an hour, including making the graphic on Canva, and I’m really slow at Canva.

It was really easy to set it to only show on certain pages, load after a certain time or percentage, and also not show to people who have already signed up or who have closed it or seen it a couple of times already. It’s not a pushy popup like so many are, so I’m really impressed with that. It looks great. It’s only had 17 views so far and no signups at the time of writing this, but most of the views are probably mine checking that it’s all working. I’ll have to wait and see how it does once it gets a bit more traffic. I’ll pop a screenshot in the blog post if you want to see at what it looks like.

Then I finished another post about how to find a profitable business niche and why you absolutely need to choose a specific topic for your online business from the point of view of a multi-passionate person who has way too many business ideas. I already had this partly written, so it took a couple of hours to finish off and get posted. This is a longer-term strategy for getting more signups to the course once it starts ranking in search. Then I’ll get some passive ongoing traffic, and I can also share it when people ask questions about choosing a business topic. As a bonus, all of these posts I add show that my site has a specific topic. It strengthens that topic, and they all interlink together, which helps with SEO. Google really likes sites that are very focused on specific topics, so that means that I’ll get more search engine points that increase the ranking of the entire site.

Promo-wise, I did a quick interview with Richard from The Homeschool Freedom Club about how we earn while traveling. It was pretty laid back and quite a relief after my usual in-depth, high-prep workshops. That is up and ready for you to watch. I will link to it in the blog post, so check the show notes for that.

Next, I took some photos of myself. This is actually a really big thing for me. I don’t mind video or spontaneous photos, but I don’t like attempting to take posed photos. The last time I did it was in 2018, so I really, really needed an update. My husband and I got together, and I found some ideas for posing on Pinterest so that we could look and try to recreate them. I made myself presentable, and we had a shot at it. Overall, we didn’t do a fantastic job. We only have our phones with us, and neither of us are great at photography in general. Lots of them have odd lighting, my face looks weird, or the angle isn’t great. I’ll include a couple of dodgy ones in the blog post, so check that out if you want reassurance that not everyone photographs wonderfully or has a professional photo session. I’m just making do here.

But I did get a couple of nice photos to get started with, and I’ve added some to my site and other accounts like YouTube and all those places so I can say, “Yes, a real person is behind this business.” It feels really good to have it done. We learned a bit along the way, and I’ll try some more photos soon because it would be really nice to have a folder of photos that I actually liked and that are suitable for whatever I needed. At the end of it, I even took some short videos so I could make some GIFs. I even added a GIF to the Business Idea Blitz on the welcome page.

It’s been a pretty good fortnight overall. I had a couple of intense work days, but I don’t feel like I’ve done a massive amount. Apart from work, we also did a 34 km long run in Kalamata, which is a beautiful city with gorgeous surroundings. Running along the beach and the farms there was lovely, even though it was such a long way. The week following that, we did a 22 km trail run with huge elevation—it was 1600 m up and down. That’s the Taygetos Challenge near Kardamyli in Greece if you want to go and do that yourself. It was absolutely gorgeous with breathtaking views and cute little stone villages all along the way. It was so much fun and had a great vibe.

All that exercise means that I’ve been sleeping a lot too and generally feeling tired all the time. But when I look at Business in Your Backpack now, I feel like I’ve finished everything there really well. It looks complete and polished, and ready to add something new. Now I just need to decide what the new thing is. I feel like sitting back and basking in my progress rather than building new stuff at the moment, but we’ll see. I’ll let you know in the next episode.

Thanks so much for listening! Don’t forget about the 50% off launch sale for my Beyond Productivity course. The link is right up at the top of the show notes. I will be back next week with the latest update. See you then!

Thanks for listening!

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

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