Recession-Proof Your Business with Creative Revenue Streams

[00:00:00] The Women Conquer Business show is an educational how-to women in business podcast. That features stories, marketing news and real life experiences from fun and friendly hosts. Jen McFarland and Shelley Carney. Join us as we dive into the details. So you can slay marketing, overwhelm, streamline processes and amplify your impact.

[00:00:21] You'll learn strategies and tactics, leadership skills, and practical advice from successful women entrepreneurs. To help you grow, nurture and sustain your business.

[00:00:31] Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome to Women Conquer Business. I'm good. We're conquering it. We're doing it. For those of you who are on YouTube, this is take two. Yeah, because when you live stream things happen and I had a power blip. And for those of you listening on the podcast, it's like nothing ever happened.

[00:00:52] Woohoo. This is the show. That's right. What we are talking about today is how to recession proof your business with multiple revenue streams. Having only one revenue stream means taking a chance that it will never fail or never get out of date or that it's perfect. when the economy experience changes that affect your business income can quickly dry up.

[00:01:15] If you realize solely on a few steady clients for all of your income, what happens if they suddenly leave you. That's why we recommend creating multiple and diverse revenue streams to support your business. That's what I've been doing and building for over five years. And that's a lot of what we're gonna talk about today.

[00:01:33] In this episode, we'll explore both passive and active revenue streams. How to open up new pathways to earning new revenue? This is good. Not only because I can speak to what happened during COVID. But it's also knowing that we have some inflationary economy things happening. How do we also prepare.

[00:01:52] For what could be a recession? We haven't had a recession in 14 years. It's actually the longest we've ever gone without an official [00:02:00] recession. so a lot of economists think that we're overdue for one. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. Assuming the power doesn't go out here again, which is what happened.

[00:02:09] There was a little blip on the grid over here, Portland, Oregon. How you doing over there? Shelley.

[00:02:16] I'm recovered now from my, oh, I do. Where's

[00:02:18] Jen. Ah, the trauma of the lights going out and me disappearing which is rough.

[00:02:25] We're good. That's the story with live streaming and it's all good.

[00:02:28] You just try again,

[00:02:29] make it better the story with live streaming and it's it. The risk that we take when we each have different expertise that we speak to. I was shell sharing with Shelley. How, if we were talking about. Live streaming. I'd be like who wants to talk about apps?

[00:02:44] Like I would, I would just pull something off the shelf and talk about something different. And because this multiple revenue stream is something that I fell into and it's something that I can speak to a lot. And it's not necessarily just something that Shelley can pull out a thin air. We can each speak to our own expertise, but in this case, this is something where I've.

[00:03:07] Doing this, it has become my business model and that I stumbled into. And I think that I was taking the lead today. So glad to be. Yeah, Shelley's glad that she's not having to tap dance anymore waiting for me because it took longer than I anticipated to get back. And for those of you who don't know, I am heavily caffeinated and very chatty today, so I was happy to hop right back on and talk that's

[00:03:34] right.

[00:03:35] That's right. Good. I'm

[00:03:36] I'm glad. Yeah, we've been on the phone for two and a half hours this point, except for the little blip. Yeah. For about 20 minutes that I couldn't get on. So Shelley, do you wanna talk about what's been going on over in your world? Sure.

[00:03:48] So right now Toby's on vacation visiting his family in South Carolina.

[00:03:52] So I'm on my lone some here and For messages and methods today, we started back with interviewing guests. [00:04:00] So I'm hoping that's going to go well, we started a new funnel for guests this last week. Make sure all of our links are working and we can send them through and get them signed up and tell them what to do.

[00:04:12] And have to see if all of our. If it's all copacetic today is our first try at and I'm by myself. , it'll be another interesting experiment to see how that goes.

[00:04:21] Oh, that's right. Cause Toby's in South Carolina. That's right.

[00:04:25] That's right. That's awesome. So last week we taught, we did a show on Saturday since we do normally do one on Wednesday and he wasn't gonna be here.

[00:04:31] We did a show on Saturday and we're talking about, traveling and boating and we're getting into making more travel videos, more vlogs, more unboxing. Things, Toby ordered a boat and a motor and a trailer and what yeah. Life jackets. We got it all. And it all came this week. So we're like unboxing and doing videos about it.

[00:04:53] And he's doing little vlogs from South Carolina with his family. So yeah we're getting more into some travel videos and hopefully. Entertaining people with that.

[00:05:03] That's super fun. I have to share all that stuff with my brother who at some point wants to have a travel blog. Yeah.

[00:05:09] He's really, he's always been super fascinated with airplanes and cars and travels and all kinds of stuff. I'm the one who's traveled a lot. And I'm kind like whatever, just get me there, and he's the one who's into. He, I remember when we all went to London together, he knew everything there was to know about the airplane.

[00:05:26] And was sending us all kinds of information. So it's fascinating, but so I'll have to send him your way so that he can look at all that, the gadgets and stuff and put all that stuff together. Cause I've talked to him about it and he gets, he's not into all the gadgets the same way. You could actually share more in depth expertise, whereas I'm like, just get the stuff and the things, and then it'll work at some point.

[00:05:47] Cuz I, I just love toys. Yeah.

[00:05:50] That's Toby, right? I'm not a professional drone and we have the the Osmo pocket. Yeah. And we've got all the toys, so we

[00:05:56] gotta just, yeah. I like to have fun with discovery, I have [00:06:00] my expertise, but then I have never had a travel vlog. You know what I mean?

[00:06:06] So I don't know the ins and outs so yeah, I'll send him your way and that's so cool. And then who are you interviewing today?

[00:06:11] We're interviewing John Fallis and he is. He calls himself a marketing therapist. So they talk, he helps new business owners to understand online marketing, digital marketing and what it is they need to do to, especially if they're transitioning from a, a mortar, brick and mortar.

[00:06:31] Yeah. Physical location to a, to an online business. So he helps them with that transition.

[00:06:37] That's cool. I did read that in your newsletter. Yeah, but I, like I said I guess we'll talk about what I've been doing. I got away. I went to some place. If you go to yeah. getaway.house, it was, I'm a sucker for Facebook videos and ads and stuff.

[00:06:52] I think this used to be called outpost like years ago, and now it's called getaway and they have locations all over. The country and it was lovely. It's like a tiny home and it has it, they just, it had a huge picture window in the end. And I was visited every day by a family of deer. It was lovely and wonderful.

[00:07:10] It convinced me that I never want to live in a tiny home because I was thinking about what that would look like my family to be in a small space, but it convinced me that I need. A way to just get away like that, and part of it was that I didn't have my computer. I didn't have wifi. I didn't have, I didn't even have cell service, which was delightful.

[00:07:31] It was exactly what I needed. I had amped myself up to like maximum stress, just so many things going on. I need to hire somebody working on that actively. And I reached a point where I just couldn't think anymore, like I just had too much. And so I scheduled this last minute getaway so that I could kinda reset and everything.

[00:07:50] And it was amazing, taking all kinds of hikes. The place is just decked out. Like it's not like going to a campground with the state of [00:08:00] Oregon. It's , the finest of everything is inside this place. and it was great, air conditioning, they have heat, they had, they it's they thought of everything.

[00:08:09] So it was perfect for me because I could just get away be like in this other place and really think about, what I'm working on and things like this, like the, all the revenue streams and how all of that is working out and how these pieces are really gonna fit together, moving forward, which is the complexity of what we're gonna talk about today, which is just, when you have multiple revenue streams, you do have.

[00:08:33] You have to be organized in different ways. And sometimes when you add new things go a little haywire or sideways. And I have these little rough patches sometimes because of the complexity behind how I run my business. And it's because I have all of, this collection of W-2s.

[00:08:50] Of like this goes with this and this is

[00:08:52] how things work. Mm. Tax season must be a lot of fun for you.

[00:08:55] That's why I have a person. So it, and then also we've started getting people into the Strategic Marketing membership, which is just amazing. I released a course last week on the Strategic Marketing Membership about making the connection between Etsy and creating a lot.

[00:09:11] Graphics for your social media feed that came up with a client. So I thought, oh, I might as well just share it over there. So that's neat. So the Strategic Marketing Membership is working all kinds of things are happening. But yeah, my, my brain just kinda went and couldn't do it. Getting away was wonderful and beautiful.

[00:09:24] We'll definitely put the link to getaway house in the show notes. I have some pictures of the deer and some of the hiking I did and I think I'll put those on the website as well, cuz it's just neat. And I think that they do it so that they are, they say it's in Portland, but it was actually like two hours from Portland.

[00:09:40] And I was telling Shelley that so no wifi. No. Messages, no text, no nothing, which is great. And what they said, like print out the map and figure out your stuff. And I, but I was stressed out when I left and I didn't think about it. So I go to leave and I'm like, how do I get, how do I [00:10:00] get home?

[00:10:02] and that's what happened. Like I get out there cause I was telling Shelley I'm like, it was like an hour from Hood River, which is like the touch point. Like I've been. I haven't been to Mount Adams before, which is where it was. And so I basically had to get from Mount Adams to the river so that I could get on the highway to get back to Portland and I'm driving and I'm like pulling over when I have a bar to be like, okay, can this Google Map's gonna work now?

[00:10:26] And it like didn't work and it didn't work. And then finally I was just like We're just gonna drive and see if we can find it, and so I drove for an hour and figured out how to get back. And then, then by the time I get to something, I recognize I'm like I don't now I don't need Google maps.

[00:10:38] So by the time Google maps worked it, it was over. So so that was pretty fun. But I would definitely recommend going to getaway.house and seeing if there's something there. That's near you that peaks your interest because it's it was definitely worthwhile to to get away for sure.

[00:10:55] So, are we ready for breaking news?

[00:10:56] Go on old school. Oh yeah, we're ready for your breaking news.

[00:11:01] Let's do it. Okay. So my friends over at Near Media. Broke some news. I guess Facebook has announced that they are doing some B2B targeting. So if you've ever run ads on Facebook for your business, I'm making this a little bit bigger.

[00:11:20] If you've ever run ads on Facebook for your business, you know that if you are in the business to business realm, it can be really hard to make sure you're targeting the right people. It can be hard to get those decision makers. Targeted to your ads. It's a real issue. It's a problem. So what they've done now is Facebook has changed their segmenting to help with B2B targeting in particular.

[00:11:46] So you can now search for things like. This example here Near Media took Near Media, took this from Facebook. We'll put the link to the Near Media.co article in the show notes. But for example, you can segment [00:12:00] out like it decision makers or business decision maker, and then like their titles and interests.

[00:12:05] This is a much more targeted way of Of getting to the right people. And one of the reasons why this is really important is because if you go down below, when I work with people, I'm like you might wanna think twice about LinkedIn because LinkedIn advertising is really expensive. The cost per click for Facebook is about a buck, versus.

[00:12:27] 5 56 bucks on LinkedIn, but then it's it was easier to target people by position on LinkedIn. So if you had an ad, you could be looking for someone who is, a marketing specialist or CEO or, whatever it is that your particular target is. You could do that a lot easier on LinkedIn, but then the ads are just almost cost prohibitive for a lot of people.

[00:12:48] So this is something you'd wanna test out if you're gonna do ads and you wanna do Facebook ads, because most of your people are on Facebook. You think they're active there, and then you can search based on their particular demographic by decision making. I think it's a really big it's a really big help for People who are running ads.

[00:13:07] Yeah. So that's a really big thing that's going on in the news. The second thing is this report let me pull this up and this really leads into what we're gonna talk about today. I think Shelley's gonna put this Put the link to the report in the chat. It is a form to sign up for the report if you're interested.

[00:13:26] This, so this report is all about recession. Recession proofing your business and the marketing that it takes. It's like the rules of recession proofing it's pretty nerdy. I'll be honest with you. the link is pretty nerdy and it is a lot about recession proofing and like how you run ads. The thing from this report.

[00:13:48] And I also have learned about this from Near Media. I just trust, trust Near Media so much. One of my trusted colleagues, David Mim is connected to it and will put a link to them as well. I think that their link [00:14:00] is in the article, but they have a podcast and they also have a lot of articles that come out and they send them out.

[00:14:04] This is, this report talks a lot about ads. There's a lot in there about billboards and all different kinds of things. The piece that I think is the most interesting for our audience, for the people who are listening to this show is that when is this part right here? So play the long game for the best odds of success.

[00:14:24] And if I were to share. What my philosophy is for my own business and what it means to have multiple revenue streams. It is very much about playing the long game. I go into a lot of things thinking like, in the long term, this is gonna be good. Even if the immediate answer, maybe isn't there.

[00:14:43] Meaning if I, even, if I can't immediately say, oh, I'm gonna make a hundred thousand dollars from this. I don't know. I don't just walk away. Like I'll look into it and I'll see what'll happen. So here's the interesting thing here. So when we talk about the recession and marketing, I actually had a prospective client ask me about this.

[00:15:03] Last week. And it was like, what do I focus on in my marketing with, there's gonna be a recession. If money's gonna be tight, what do I do? Do I focus on the people I have? Do I focus on the people I don't have? Do I stop marketing? What do I do? Cuz a lot of people stop marketing.

[00:15:19] Which is what a lot of people did during COVID in the beginning of COVID and. The longer COVID went on, then they had to go back and build up the brand awareness again, and they had to do a lot of stuff. So what I like about this is you. If you're watching this, you can see play the long game for the best odds of success.

[00:15:38] So what that means is you work on the top of the funnel. So you're always working on people, knowing who you are. You're always working on a lot of the stuff that we do on this show is top of the funnel stuff. So marketing, how tos, when we look at. at the top of the funnel. That's like when people wanna get more information, they wanna learn some [00:16:00] basic tips, that's the top of the funnel. And then. We Shelley. And I hope that some of you will subscribe to our newsletters and learn more in depth about what it is that we do. That's the top of the funnel is like how to informational stuff. This whole show is like about getting you the tools that you need.

[00:16:19] And then if you're like I really wanna take action. Do I know anybody who can help me? Oh, wait, I've been listening to this podcast, like that's top of the funnel stuff, and then the podcast is top of the funnel and then you hope to get people down into it. So when this company did this research about marketing, they found that the top of the funnel gives you the best odd success, like the overall impact.

[00:16:42] If you have like limited resources, that type of thing is if you can focus on the top of the funnel during a recession, it will yield better results than if you focus on the people that you already have. So constantly be building it constantly, be adding to who it is that you have out there.

[00:17:00] And then you can also focus on the bottom of the funnel, but if you are always bringing people in it's one way of recession proofing your business.

[00:17:09] Very good. So I was listening to a podcast last week with Amy Porterfield and I wrote about this in my LinkedIn newsletter. And she said that if she had to go, if she could go back to when she first started and she could do three things that would make the most difference for her business, the number one thing she would do would be.

[00:17:31] Consistently create content and distribute it consistently every week. Cuz she had started off. It was, hit and miss and sometimes she'd podcast and sometimes she'd send out a newsletter, but it wasn't, there was no rhyme or reason there was no framework to it. So when you want to grow your business, Stay on track with it, even when all kinds of stuff in your life is blowing up.

[00:17:59] If you can [00:18:00] just, and this was her suggestion, have a weekly podcast and a weekly newsletter, then at least you are not gonna lose all that momentum that you've built up. And you're going to continue to gain in momentum and have that top of funnel working for. And

[00:18:19] yeah, I totally agree. and the research bears it out.

[00:18:24] , I think that sometimes, sometimes we. Look to like Amy Porterfield and we say she's, what does she know? She's so much further ahead than like where some people are in their business. , that, it seems that's easy for you to say you have a team, you have all of these things, like how, but there's something to that, not being hit or miss being, being available all the time, answering questions talking.

[00:18:48] Talking to people when they ask you questions, making sure that you're responsive and replying. These are all top of the funnel relation relationship, building relation, relational marketing. So when you know, and they say 20, 22 is the year of relationship marketing. So building relationships, talking to people, we're seeing such an increase in that personalization, people wanna feel.

[00:19:16] Because they are special. And the more that we can help people understand that we understand what's going on with them and ask questions and then answer them, ask people to reply to a newsletter. And then when they do thank them and answer their questions, these are all activities that help you grow your business because it's top of the funnel.

[00:19:40] But it's also about like you just being available. And being responsive. And that's what a lot of, when we start talking about building out multiple revenue streams, a lot of times it is about showing up consistently. Yep. And being that person that somebody thinks of when something [00:20:00] comes up, that's right.

[00:20:00] And they ask you are we ready to move into the training? Part

[00:20:05] are we gonna do? Oh, we have yes. Training.

[00:20:07] Okay. Training. I thought we were already in it. are we in it? OK. We kinda had the transition, right? Yeah. So the repro, the, we have the proof. So we shared the rules of recession proofing, focusing on the top of the funnel.

[00:20:19] The other piece of that is where does the money come from? Okay. Yeah. So I have, so we're gonna, we were gonna start with active and then passive. But the first thing we wanted talk about was brainstorming out like what it is that you do , so you have like your active services that you do, and then. There's we were calling him spinoffs when we were talking before the show. But I would say that, everybody has their own methodology for like how they brainstorm what it is that they do or what the possibilities are. I love this book. So Sally Foley Lewis still one of my favorite interviews of all time.

[00:20:55] She is in Australia and she did. She did a lovely interview where she was talking about how you always put your own oxygen mask on first. And you know that you have a compass in your heart. And she's just all about leadership. And the interview went really well. We really enjoyed each other and she sent me this book.

[00:21:16] Afterward because it was how she was building her business. And I will say that this is exactly what I've tried to do for myself. And it's, do work. You love with people, you like the way that you want. And it is called the thought leaders practice. And I know that for some people being called a thought leader is people don't like, people don't like thought leaders, but I'll say that they don't like thought leaders. If they don't actually know what they're talking about. so whether or not you call yourself a thought leader is like your own business. I don't tend to call myself that, but I am a subject matter expert on a few things and I speak to those things and what this book is really great for.

[00:21:55] And it's the only one that I know of that is this is it. [00:22:00] It goes. Painstakingly through how you build a business that is based on your expertise. And it tell, goes into what can I do that? Am I a teacher? Am I an author? Am I it's like kind of breaks it down into all these different areas.

[00:22:17] And then it's But then it goes further than that into what are the different things that you could talk about? And it's like building that like Rolodex of expertise and it walks you through specifically how to like, brainstorm all of your ideas and you build out and they want you to build out like 50.

[00:22:34] So this isn't come up with five things that you can do. , this is what are 50 things that you can do? And then it goes through the process then of breaking down those ideas. I think they're called like, Into like yellow sheets, something like that. So you ha so if somebody asks for you for something, you always have something that you can pull and talk to that thing, it's kinda like your quick sheet, and then they have some different ways of breaking down presentations and things like that. So you can draw people in then the other half of the book is about how you build your business around that. And a, and it goes into like how you manage your finances different levels. Of businesses and things like that.

[00:23:11] So I came across that before. I think I had one passive income stream at that time when I read that book and then it's really laid the groundwork for okay, I'm a teacher. Like how do I build a business around teaching? Cuz that's, I like to teach. And so something like that.

[00:23:29] So whether it's the thought leaders practice or something else, you need a way that you can start recording all of the things that you can talk about. And then all of the things off of that, that you can talk about. , and like you build off of that and however you go about doing it, think of it as.

[00:23:52] Not just if I was on a podcast, what would that look like? It could be what would be all the presentations I could give, and then you take this [00:24:00] and then it becomes like your offers or it becomes your services, or it becomes courses, and it's like all of the different pieces.

[00:24:09] And that's how I. Brainstorm, like all the different ways I can make money. all the different things I could talk about to make money. All the things that I could put out into the world that could eventually lead to something else now, but I've done things that led to money that I never even considered could lead.

[00:24:27] To money or or like I just write things that I care about. And then I get contacted by documentary. What is that? So there's also some luck and kismet, like in the whole thing, there. Things happen. But that's one of the ideas that I have around brainstorming when I'd never seen anything and the thought leaders practice, I'm not a part of their group, but they do have a group.

[00:24:48] And at that time, Sally Foley Lewis was in their group where they walk people through this entire process. Yeah. They're very. They seem very kind. I actually talk to them about it. It just wasn't the right time or place for me to do it. How do you go about brainstorming some of the different expertise and different things that you can be

[00:25:06] speaking well?

[00:25:07] Yeah. And this is a good place for content creators who want to transition to content entrepreneurs to really pay attention and to. Have a tool for that transition. And that sounds like a really great tool. What we did was we took a step back and said, what do people come to us for?

[00:25:26] What are they asking us? What kind of help do they need from us that we. Are one we're good at it. And two, we enjoy doing that. We enjoy helping people. And so the first thing was okay, we are great at putting out livestream YouTube videos. And we are always being approached by people is to say, how do I build a YouTube channel?

[00:25:49] How do I do live streaming? What kind of equipment do I need? But, created a business out of helping people to transition from a non creator to a creator. [00:26:00] And then of course, this show helps us go take people from creator to content entrepreneur and by introducing these methods of finding these ways that, that you have your primary and your passive yeah.

[00:26:14] Streams of income and. Of course, once you start your primary, then other things start to spring up, as you said. So we started helping people with live streaming and production, and then other people came to us and had questions about starting a podcast or Publishing a book and we said, yes, we've done that.

[00:26:32] We can help you with that. So once you tell people what you do, then they'll start coming to you and saying, can you help me do that? Yeah. And then it Springs from that some people might say I already have this piece of it. I need this piece of, can you help me with that?

[00:26:49] Yeah. And so much came up for me while you were talking.

[00:26:52] I didn't talk about like in the beginning, I'm an accidental entrepreneur. Like I was a, an executive at the city of Portland and I had worked there for 10 years and the job that I had created in my last position. Actually the one that made me an executive, I was like, this is so boring.

[00:27:12] I wonder what the next project is. And then when I found out that was it, I was like I'm not gonna be able to do this, and. And it ended quicker than I had anticipated. And I found myself, and I had started helping people with websites and with marketing and stuff on the side.

[00:27:29] And then I ended up like suddenly oh, I guess this is what I'm doing now. But I never really enjoyed building websites. It was never really my thing. What I really wanted to do was help people with a lot of what I do now. A lot of my skills are around apps and helping people build text tech stacks and helping people articulate what it is that they do.

[00:27:51] But I. Had a hard time articulating what it is that I could do for people, and so a lot of times you don't know how you're helping or [00:28:00] impacting other people until you start asking them. And until you start, like figuring out the words that they use to describe what you do and how you help them.

[00:28:09] And then it's exactly like what Shelley was saying. You figure out what people want and then you go after it. In the process, like I've also continued to develop some of my other ideas and it becomes like the tricky business of finding ways to articulate what it is that people actually need.

[00:28:29] Which is different from what everybody's telling them that they need. It's interesting. And that's one of the things about what I do is it's very different and I was sharing this with Shelley before we got on, I'm always looking at opportunities. And researching them, even if they come in from people, I don't know, like in a LinkedIn connection, that's how the documentary happened or just some of the emails that I get that everybody I think throws out, I actually read them.

[00:29:02] And that's how I got my passive income stream for Creating audio content, which then from the audio content became the Strategic Marketing Membership. I'll go into meetings with people. And if I think that if I stick with it and I meet people, it can grow into something or the people paying me or a large organization that I know I'm never gonna have to fight for money.

[00:29:23] They're gonna pay me. I'm more willing to go into it, even if the immediate amount is smaller than o other clients that I could get, I have a very different perspective around how to do it. I feel like once I'm in and I do a good job and I show up like anything could happen.

[00:29:40] And I feel like that is really what has been happening for me in my business over the last five years is I have met people. I have said yes to things I've said no to a lot of. And then when I'm in there, other people notice and they think of me, when something else comes up. And so I have in my [00:30:00] business, my active income stream is as.

[00:30:04] Of marketing a one on one marketing person. I can, I don't build websites anymore unless it's like super special. cause it's not my favorite thing to do. But I do a lot of marketing coaching. I help people build out their tech stack. I review people's marketing. That's what I do. That's my B2B. One to one let's work together.

[00:30:26] Thing, that's the primary service. If you go to my website then I have all of the other stuff , that's just happened, the other PAC active income streams are, I work with the economic development division for the city of Portland and I meet with small business owners.

[00:30:42] I. A coach for accelerate fund. That's a large fund in Oregon that helps women entrepreneurs get access to capital and they have a coaching pool of people. And they send people to me, if it's a match for my skills they may, we work together for a set number of hours. that's a whole other thing that happens.

[00:31:03] I have an opportunity to potentially teach at an area university to teach marketing. I'm currently evaluating that one. I have like all these different things that can happen. The teaching thing came about because when I first started my podcast, I got this random.

[00:31:22] And this is the passive income stream is I got a random email from a company. It turned out that they're like a really large ebook company in Europe. But they distribute eBooks and they were just breaking into audio. And they asked. If I could edit, this was like back in 2018. If I could edit old podcast episodes and put 'em on their platform and they would pay me and I was like okay.

[00:31:47] So I did 10 episodes. These were like early shows and put 'em up on this platform and then Three or six months later, they said we wanna pay you. And I was like, okay. And I was like, really careful, cuz I was [00:32:00] nervous. I was like, why how you want my banking information?

[00:32:02] I don't even know you, I sent you something like six months ago. But then when the money showed up, I was like okay, what else would you like? so then I just started making more and more classes. And they, many of which were never podcast episodes ever. I can still send them emails and just be like, what do you need right now?

[00:32:18] And then I can just make stuff. And it's not an immediate payout. But I just do it once and they send me. Money. It's the most passive thing in the world. It's like a dream, it's like pat Flynn, passive income stuff, do it once and make a billion dollars. So I actually have that and that's a passive income stream.

[00:32:35] And when. The pandemic hit, I, I help small business owners with marketing. So when the pandemic hit and everybody is whoa, we don't know what's gonna happen. We're gonna stop. We're gonna stop doing marketing. I leaned into teaching because I knew I had this passive income stream. I knew that with everybody being.

[00:32:53] At home, there would likely be an increase in training for especially big companies cuz the ebook company gig is really for large companies. And I just pressed into that and started saying yes to teaching for Thai, Oregon the small business development center and worked really hard on the passive income stream knowing that I would get paid later.

[00:33:17] And it's set me on this other trajectory of teaching and I've met a lot of cool people there. And all of that speaking and teaching then also goes into your primary revenue stream. Like you can't just talk about whatever, and, you have to be staying within your lane of expertise.

[00:33:36] and just being out there and available where people can see you and showing up again, like over and over again. And then people think of you when opportunities happen. And some of them, my best clients that I've ever had came from speaking. Like my best. One of my favorite clients came when I spoke at a group and a friend of a friend told them about me [00:34:00] and they asked me for a proposal and then they hired me and it was a huge contract and we're still connected and their business is doing really well.

[00:34:07] So you can't ever look at something and say don't know what I'm gonna get about out of it today. I'm not gonna do it. You have to think strategically and set yourself up for success by building out the relationships. And I'm not saying do it for free. I do very little for free , but it may not be like that.

[00:34:29] $10,000 client, like there are a lot of gurus out there that say offer $20,000 packages and then you only have to sell five. And it's they're not telling you how hard it is to sell those five packages.

[00:34:44] All right. I was like, wait a minute. Is she freezing again? Oh, no, I'm not freezing. no, but they don't tell you how hard it is to do that. It's a lot easier to build out these relationships and then it just means the back end of your business requires a little more effort than, I guess if you have five clients and they're each paying you $20,000.

[00:35:07] But it means that then I'm not tied in to any one way of doing business yeah. I make a good living and if one thing dries up, then it usually means one other thing is increasing. That's good.

[00:35:23] That's good.

[00:35:23] Yeah. And that's how you have to map it out.

[00:35:25] When I wrote the description, I said, what if your clients dry up?

[00:35:28] That happened to us. We had one really strong client that we were very happy with. And even though we were looking for more clients we were happy and then he died and then we had nobody . So you can't put all your eggs in one basket and hope that that it just continues on anything can happen.

[00:35:47] So you gotta start padding where you can. Now we have a couple of passive income sources. We have a course up on Udemy that we occasionally get money from. We have YouTube [00:36:00] videos that still get views and are monetized. So we get a little bit of money from YouTube every now and then we have books up on Amazon.

[00:36:07] So every now and then we'll get some money from Amazon. We have a store that is on Amazon, where. Put all of the equipment that we use and recommend, and we send people there. And so we can get commissions from that. Yeah. So these little things they can add up, but they are passive. Once they're up, you don't have to think about them anymore.

[00:36:26] And occasionally you'll get a check from it, but you can't really count on that either. You have to really always be looking for that next thing to, to replace whatever you might lose.

[00:36:38] No, that's totally true. And I, I also know about having one really big client and then, that, and that client left.

[00:36:49] Maybe close to year at this point, and there, but there were a couple years where, I felt like that client was sustaining my entire business. Yeah. Cause they had just take, they'd take taken over enough resources. That was my big thing. And I was always very nervous about it because yeah.

[00:37:06] You never know what could happen. And I was very blessed that when They, we stopped working together cuz they were just in a different place. And I was in a different place that I was, I had a pretty soft landing, and part of it is because I had set up all of these other opportunities and think of it as like a garden, really.

[00:37:25] You're planting seeds with everybody that you meet and. They blossom over time. And like I said, no one thing was super lucrative, but now. Some of the parts is much more lucrative.

[00:37:41] You don't just want zucchini in your garden and nothing else. You want some tomatoes, you want some peppers, you want some other things in there to make a nice salad.

[00:37:49] exactly. So I've been very fortunate in that I have all of these different things and I'm always looking for other opportunities as well, and it's a different way of doing it. [00:38:00] Honestly, it's a lot less effort. I've tried to sell the $20,000 package. I know what goes into that.

[00:38:06] Could I do it? Yes. Is it fun for me? No, , my way of doing it and I still get the big sales, but they just come through different channels because I've built a lot of relationships. So really for me, it in. In my own business, a lot of stuff has happened because of building strong long-term relationships with other people.

[00:38:32] That's

[00:38:32] right. And speaking of long-term relationships, if you haven't yet signed up for Jen's newsletter, get on it. Cause she puts out great content every week and additional resources are in there. So how do they do that?

[00:38:48] Oh, you can go to women conquer biz.com/newsletter. And yeah, with this last newsletter we talked about.

[00:38:58] Twitter is a great place. Now they've got something that's very similar to Google business profiles. You can also add your products there. So that was, I'm always highlighting one thing that's really going on and giving small business tips for helping your business and Shelley, what do you have going on?

[00:39:15] I have a framework that can help people. If you were paying attention, when we talked. Putting out content and being a content creator. And that's the first step, then go to framework dot educate media.studio and get your framework and schedule and get started on your consistent content creation.

[00:39:38] That's right.

[00:39:40] Yes. That's awesome. Does anybody have any questions about passive income streams? We haven't. I know people are watching. I can see you out there. , but we don't know if anybody's got any questions. All right. So are, do you have any else, [00:40:00] any, anything else to add or should we move on to tweaks of the week?

[00:40:03] I

[00:40:03] think I'm ready to move on. I think we've covered it. You guys better have your main, your primary and you gotta have your your backup passives and and keep adding in revenue streams when they become available. Okay,

[00:40:17] Carl Jody's here. I'm here. No questions. There you go. All right.

[00:40:22] Cause we're thank you for answering everything. That's right. All right. So I love this listen being productive. Yep. Let's know how works see productive, highly productive listen,

[00:40:32] Highly does at work. I like

[00:40:34] it. All right. Let's get into

[00:40:39] some tweaks a week.

[00:40:42] So today I wanted to share it's called looped in.

[00:40:47] It is, as it says, here on their website, keep your customers in the loop. All in one tool for collecting feedback, building roadmaps, sharing, change logs, and publishing knowledge bases. Okay. So what this is. If this is something I'm using for the Strategic Marketing Membership, and you'll find this a lot. If you do a lot of apps, like the people are always sharing their roadmap.

[00:41:13] This is what I'm building. This is, these are the features that you can expect next. So it's but it's also a place where you can collect feedback from people they can vote. They can comment and leave some reactions. All different kinds of things. So there's a lot of bells and whistles on here that I'm not going to use, but for the Strategic Marketing Membership, we have a whole slate of courses that we want to offer, but we're not the hugest team.

[00:41:40] There's not a lot of us. And so we need to figure out the best courses that are really gonna hit the mark with people as, as good as possible, as close as, as much as possible. What I am using. So I decided to use, I'm trying it out. And I liked it. I like it is for [00:42:00] the Strategic Marketing Membership.

[00:42:00] We are using looped in, this is what it looks like here. I just put in a few, I'm gonna add more later. And so it's a place where we can say, Hey, these are the courses that we're working on. These are the topics that we can speak to. People can vote, you can add a vote or. Oh, I just voted for myself.

[00:42:17] Okay. I should probably take that off. just UN voted. They can also submit like ideas for what courses they want, which I love. So we're gonna open this up to our members. I haven't even added everything yet. And then as we get more information about what it is that we're doing next, this will be where we'll keep our roadmap so that people are.

[00:42:37] In the loop around the different classes that we're offering what it is that is coming up next, I feel like that builds excitement around What's in the membership what's coming up next, keeps people interested. And I think that you can use it. You can certainly use it for an app. I think a lot of people do that where they're like, feature building excitement.

[00:42:56] I've been really happy with it so far. We were using a different tool called canny. And it wouldn't do what I wanted it to. And it was partially because the, I was using the free version and the paid version was like, $400 a month and I'm like, I'm not gonna do that. I'm never gonna do that.

[00:43:13] So I went on the hunt for something that was more cost effective and so far it's been great. And if I pay for it, it's affordable. I think that the pricing is, let me take a look here. The free product is pretty, pretty substantial. And then, the startup plan is like $12 a month, so that's pretty cool.

[00:43:34] Oh, you have it up. Look at that. Oh, I have it up. You just shared my screen. that's right. So it's pretty neat. You can have like feedback boards. We can do an awful lot on the free plan. But I'm thinking about bumping up so that we can have in embeddable pages, cuz a lot of what we're doing with the Strategic Marketing Membership is we wanna keep everything on one platform as much as possible.

[00:43:53] So we're not saying go here for this and go here for this, but it is important I think to constantly be [00:44:00] working on feedback and getting information. If you go down here. There are a couple things that are on. So this is CSTAT. So this is a really important metric in marketing that doesn't get talked about enough.

[00:44:12] It's like we are going through like the lifetime value of a customer. A lot of that is, is done by. Polling people and making sure that they are happy. And this is something that is you can get like the sentiment of the people you're engaging with. You can get more information about how they're interacting with their, with your product, how likely they are to recommend it to somebody else.

[00:44:36] These are all things that are really important. . So that was one of the reasons why I decided to go with this product too, is if you're trying to build something and you're trying to get attention around it, and you're trying to find out like, one of the best things that you can do is ask the people who are already here.

[00:44:51] what it is that they like and how things are going. And then you can continue to build that credibility and that relationship with people. I guess that U unbeknownst to me, the real theme of today is about building relationships.

[00:45:05] That's always great when you discover things as you're doing the show.

[00:45:08] That happens to me frequently, and sometimes I discover it is I'm writing the blog post about the show. I'm like, oh, look at that. Oh we discovered this together. Yeah,

[00:45:17] it's good. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the tweak of the week looped in it is at loopedin.io and I would suggest using. If you are building an app, if you're building a community if you need to collect feedback from people, I was thinking about it.

[00:45:31] Like we could actually do something with the show as well, if we wanted to oh. And have a roadmap where we're talking about the different topics and get people to vote on show ideas and things like that. Yeah.

[00:45:43] Very good. All right. I guess we are ready for our inspirational moment. If you are.

[00:45:50] All right. So today we're talking about the world and the shape that it's in and how we want to make the world a better [00:46:00] place to live. First we have to accept what is before we can move forward on changing what it is into what we want it to be. That acceptance has to come first. And begin where the world is, change it as we think it should be. There are plenty of small steps that we can take on the way to that bigger goal. I talked about this again in my LinkedIn newsletter this week that sometimes all we can manage is to get that little bit of content out that week. And that's all we can manage.

[00:46:28] We have too much going on in our lives. Like Jen, get burned out, need to be back and away a little bit so that you can come back with fresh eyes and fresh ideas. Maybe there's some. We all have stuff we all have stuff going on in our lives that overwhelms us sometimes. But if we can eek out just one little piece of content that week to keep our momentum going so that we don't slide into oblivion and podfade and whatnot then we.

[00:46:56] We are accomplishing something. And that is important. That is the thing that's going to make the changes that change the world. Those little things, just like adding on that one little revenue stream that Jen added on, and then eventually it grew bigger and adding on those little pieces onto what you're already doing.

[00:47:18] Just one little extra thing that can make a big difference in the.

[00:47:24] Absolutely. And I think that you're doing it, Shelley, you're doing it. I'm

[00:47:29] I'm working it,

[00:47:30] working it that's right. And that's what all of you out there are doing as well is you're doing it every day.

[00:47:36] Focus on the top of the funnel, build on those relationships and just be

[00:47:42] consistent. Be consistent show up and that's what we plan to do. We showed up today. We're gonna show up again next week and we hope that you show up as well.

[00:47:51] Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. Have a great week. Everybody.

[00:47:57] Thank you for joining the Women Conquer Business [00:48:00] podcast hosted by Shelley Carney and Jen McFarland, please subscribe and leave a comment or question regarding your most challenging content creation or business problem. Then share this podcast with family and friends so they can find the support they need to expand their brand and share their message with the world.

[00:48:18] Check the show notes for links to valuable resources and come back again next week.