I’ve had 17,400 Instagram followers for YEARS now.

Sure, it tracks up a bit.

Down a bit.

But overall, it HOVERS around that number 🛸

Same with my trusty email list.

A few subscribers up.. then a few down.. and repeat.

But, what can I REALLY expect?

I HAVEN’T TAKEN AUDIENCE GROWTH SERIOUSLY SINCE 2017.

Since I became a “real business”.

With real problems.

And real distractions, which took me away from tinkering with Reels and writing e-books with 100+ social media tips just “because” and sharing blog posts documenting my Instagram growth because it felt FUN.

In 2023 though, I changed my business model.

I gained clarity on my founder type and ditched the big, stressful business to to intentionally go back to my creator roots.

Here’s why:

In November 2022, I turned 40.

And let me tell YOU:

There’s something about turning 40 that puts everything into perspective.

It makes you realise that you are not, in fact, immortal.

That “later in life” has actually come WAY FASTER THAN YOU THOUGHT IT WOULD.

And that the spritely 19-year-old-you who thought that forty was VERY, VERY OLD existed MANY years ago.. and could in fact have a 21-year-old child by now.

What a mind f&^% of the MOST epic proportions.

Turning 40 made me take stock.

Of the time I’d spent.

Of the time I might have left.

My life left in weeks (you can check yours here).

And of what I wanted to achieve in that limited window that would most likely fly by FASTER that I could say “60”.

It helped me – in the best possible way –  to define my dreams and what I REALLY wanted to do with the increasingly limited time I have left.

Here’s what I realised in the process:

That I was really, really proud of what I’d achieved in the 7 years prior since I’d started my business.

.. Even though I was a late bloomer.

… Even though  I’d spent FAR TOO MUCH of my life *ahem my twenties into my early thirties* waiting for the weekend and losing myself in happy hour.

.. And even though I’d veered a little off course in building the wrong model for me.

With every misstep, I’d had the tenacity, courage and clarity to course correct and keep chasing after my dreams.

And ALSO?

I realised that I was in NO WAY DONE YET.

That in many ways, I was just getting started.

—

In 1990, I was a gawky 8-year old printing hundreds of copies of her own “Especially For Kids” newspaper and handing it out to every student in my Grade 3 classroom.

And, ever since then, I’ve known one thing for sure:

I want to impact others at scale.

Happily, the last few years have revealed HOW I want to do that:

By sharing the possibility that comes along with building these  beautiful, magical, leveraged Internet businesses that you can run from home with your babies, or from an Airbnb by a lake in Slovakia.

To that end, I have spent the past 12-months painstakingly building out Lifestyle Business School.

My body of work.

My complete, end-to-end, operating system to help people to grow simple, highly profitable and time leveraged online businesses.

My anti-dote for the “get rich quick”, “passive income in two seconds” rhetoric online.

And also?

Step ONE in a multi-step plan to fulfill a BIGGER mission.

When I turned 40, I admitted this to myself, too:

I ALSO want to share this message through my writing.

I want to build a MOVEMENT of people all building simple, aligned businesses to their enough number.

I want a book that is read by millions.

And *EEP*? I want to breathe that little 8-year olds writing dreams into reality and be a New York Times Bestseller doing it.

You know, no big deal.

—

The truth is, though?

Right now, I have no hope in hades of that.

If I want to build this beautiful business, and write that damn best-selling book?

I need to fix my traffic problem.

My audience has stagnated, and that’s because I haven’t had the CAPACITY to breathe life into it.

That is changing, though – and intentionally so.

And so, in today’s edition, I want to share with you HOW I intend to grow my footprint, and to bring those big, lofty dreams to life.

The business.

The book.

All of it.

Listen On: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

1) Building the Right Business Model

Every founder needs clarity on the right model for them.

I’m a creator-founder, and that means a leveraged, lower-ticket model where I am able to create leveraged assets up front, and then spend 80% of my timeBut now, with that hard work wrapping up? marketing them.

To do that, in 2023 I shifted  from a high-ticket, high-touch model to a creator model that was more aligned to my founder type.

It meant shutting down a multi-million dollar revenue stream, and taking a big step back to take a leap forward.

Over the past 12-months, that has meant doing the up-front work of building out the infrastructure of my Lifestyle Business School membership.

It’s HARD WORK, and given the scope and breadth of the program, has meant that I haven’t had the capacity or bandwidth to focus on thought leadership.

But now, with that hard work wrapping up?

I do.

2) Keeping Score

I’m a data girl.

The best thing about these leveraged Internet businesses is being ABLE to look at the numbers and see which lever to pull next.

For me in terms of traffic, that means two things:

Knowing My Starting Point

There are two “parts” to traffic:

1) Direct Response: You need to know how many people you need to drive to your offers to buy.

For me, that means clarity on the clicks I currently get to my Lifestyle Business School sales page each month to reach my sales goals.

Later, it will mean the number of people that click over to purchase my book (I figure the more I talk about it as a given, the more likely it is to happen!)

The game changer for ME in that respect has been setting up dashboards, so that every single day I can see who is clicking over to my sales page.

It means that I know how much traffic I am getting, and WHERE that traffic is coming from.

2) Brand: The “brand” side of the coin refers to the size and warmth of the audience that I am able to build around my business.

Both of these things will have a direct impact on (1), and is something I call developing your  “Click Power”.

It’s doing the work to develop your thought leadership and unique perspective, build your “audience” (even if that feels fluffy) and to serve them over time, SO THAT when you need to deploy them to buy something from you – they do so in droves.

Solving my traffic problem STARTS with knowing where I am currently AT in relation to these “audience” metrics, SO THAT I can more easily control the direct response side of the things later.

For claritys sake, this is my current “starting point”:

👉 Email: Approximately 7,000. Note that I DELETED 12,000 contacts that were inactive to arrive at this number.

👉 Instagram: 17,400 followers (always).

👉 Threads: 2,700 followers.

👉 LinkedIn: 1,661 followers.

These are the platforms I will be most focused on at the start, so I’m recording this so that I can report back in a year or so from now and see how things went.

Knowing the Endgame

1) Direct Response: Reaching a specific sales goal  requires clarity on the exact – to the click – number of leads you need to achieve your goals.

Most people don’t know this number, and so they grossly underestimate how much traffic they need to drive to a page to achieve whatever their desired revenue number is.

The math goes like this (this is something we teach in DEPTH in our Traffic Playbook course in Lifestyle Business School).

[Sales Goal] /

[Percentage of Clicks to Page That Buy] =

[Traffic Required].

So, for example, if you wanted to sell 10 courses, and 3% of people buy (which is a great benchmark):

[10 Sales] /

[.03] =

333 Clicks.

That means that you need 333 clicks to achieve your goals.

I am very clear on my revenue and sales goals.

I won’t disclose exactly what these are, only that they equal my revenue “enough” goal number.

I also know the percentage of people that come to the sales page that buy.

Clarity on both of these metrics means that I also  have crystal clear clarity on the amount of TRAFFIC (clicks) that I need to drive to the page to reach my goal.

2) Brand: Here’s the flip side of the coin, though. Most of  the time, you need to deploy whatever your goal number of clicks IS in a small window of time – for example, during a launch, or a monthly promotional period.

For that reason, it’s POWERFUL to ensure that you have built up enough of an audience on your platforms  to generate your traffic goals mostly FROM that audience.

For me, that means growing my email list in BETWEEN launches and promotions so that I am able to deploy that email list when I do want to sell my offers.

Why email?

I am SO BULLISH on email, which is why I am all in on this newsletter!

It’s the HIGHEST ROI platform, and it therefore makes sense to make it the PRIMARY focus with an “all roads lead to the newsletter” focus.

So, my primary “endgame” brand goal is to grow my email list AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

The SECONDARY goal is to  build up my social audiences, but with the goal of using them to further drive my email list growth.

I will be focused on the platforms listed above.

Of course, my model ALLOWS a heavy focus on multiple social platforms.

I wouldn’t recommend this for everyone.

To grow? I will focus on studying other creators to learn and reverse engineer the intricacies of what was successful for them.

My primary “metric” will be the thing I can control:

ACTIONS TAKEN.

Yes, engagement comes second – but often, that comes as a RESULT of the actions and the learnings from it.

A heavy focus on ACTIONS TAKEN is why I am committed to spending three hours every single week writing this newsletter.

As long as I spend the time doing it, I will learn from what works and what doesn’t and the growth is inevitable.

I will apply the same discipline to the quality and quantity of social posts I am able to generate.

3) ROI-Focused Growth

Recently, I invested $3,000 on ONE software tool.

Most wouldn’t, and the truth is that I’m not FLUSHED with cash right now.

I’m re-building my business model, and that means a BIG revenue step back to leap forward.

So, it wasn’t an “easy” decision or one I wouldn’t notice.

It put a dent in my bank account, but here’s why it felt like an easy “yes” for me anyway:

It was a  return on Investment focused decision.

The tool was to help me generate referrals from my email marketing.

Here’s how I think of it.

If, over the course of the year, I get 2,000 referrals, and even 3% of them buy something from me – it has MORE than paid for itself.

“Do I think that people who are referred by others who read the newsletter will be of a higher quality than, for example, a Facebook lead?” – I ask myself.

Again, for me, an easy “yes, most likely”.

Which means that if I CAN get 2,000 referrals, the cost per lead is $1.50 apiece.. AND the lead is MUCH better quality than a Facebook lead.. And so, the “expense” is a savvy investment.

Another happy side-effect of the investment itself?

That I am now COMMITTED to doing the work to ENSURE that I get the 2,000 leads I need.

If the tool was free? Maybe I wouldn’t be so all in.

This ROI based approach is how I plan to approach ALL of my audience growth in 2024.

Ads.

Software.

ALL “expenses”.

If I can do the ROI calculations and can see the potential for return, I am willing to bet on myself and DOOOOO ITTTTT.

Side note — I have fancy calculators that help me to do this easily, and I share them in Traffic Playbook (inside of Lifestyle Business School).

So, here’s where I’ve landed:

I can’t be a New York Times Best Seller with 17,400 followers.. or maybe I can, who knows.

But right now? I am willing to do the WORK to make a plan to get more traffic to make it SO possible for me.

Because, here’s the big, fat truth:

Achieving your big, scary dreams doesn’t happen by chance.

The first step is being brave enough to admit you have them in the first place.

The second? To believe it’s possible for you (and it ALL is, if you believe).

And the third? To solve the next right problem.. And then the next.. And then the next.. Until you get there, and feel really damn proud that you did.

And PS: I want to be clear:

Your “big, scary dreams”  don’t need to be “big” in the traditional sense of the word.

My whole ethos is the ANTITHESIS OF THE RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF MORE.

You don’t need to have “New York Times Bestselling Author” on your life bucket list for your cause to be worthy.

Just as worthy is a beautiful, simple life built prioritising the things that make you feel good, and happy.

But they do need to feel big, and important to you.

They need to feel worthy of chasing towards.

And you DO need to do the work to make it happen.

—

If YOUR dream is to build a lifestyle business, Lifestyle Business School is the thing I have personally built to help you get there.

It’s NOT for everyone, but it IS for those that desire a simple, highly profitable business (eventually) working 5-hour days with a tiny team.

It helps you decide on the right, most aligned model for you – whether that be courses, or coaching, or mastermind, or something else.

It then gives you the step-by-step roadmap to then build or re-build that entire model — the irresistible offer, the sales systems, the automated funnels, the TRAFFIC.

And it packages it up into ONE offer, so you don’t need to drop thousands on a high ticket mastermind or seven different courses to unlock the full roadmap to take you from where you are to where you desire to be.

I’m so damn proud of this process and what it is doing to help founders find success on their terms.

(One day – I’ll write a book about it ;))

Keep Listening!

Listen On: Apple Podcasts | Spotify