Building It diary

How it’s going…

I set out to start this blog as a way to share my experience as I leave my full-time advertising career to become my own boss. Self-employed, entrepreneur if you will. I really started putting time and focus into educating myself in the ways to make passive income so that I can supplement my Marketing Consulting business with more revenue streams. I said it before. My goal is freedom. This is the word in all caps that I see when I envision what success and happiness looks like for me personally. To me it doesn’t mean not working. It’s the ability to make my day what I want it to be. To be in charge and intentional with my time which feels like the most sacred and precious of all things. So as of September 3rd, I have been dedicating a few hours every day to learning new ways of making an income.

Maintaining a clear focus

I have ADHD. (This isn’t what you expected next, but I’ll get to why it is important.) I didn’t have an official diagnosis of this until I was 41 years old, although I knew I had a lot of the traits or symptoms of someone with this condition. While I could get into this as it’s own blog topic, I’ll try to keep myself on track. Having ADHD is not overall a negative thing for me. I see all the good qualities that come with it, and how when I’m really excited about something it actually provides even more motivation to do the thing. Well some of the downsides are distractions. When something else seems interesting, I’ll completely shift attention over to it. Here’s an example. I’m picking up my phone to put up a post that a new blog is up on my website. I click into the app and I refresh my feed without even thinking about it. Then I see a video where some guy I don’t even know is going to teach me how to sell products online. He is working with Shopify and will build me a Shopify site for free because Shopify is paying him to do it. He is super successful at selling products by dropshipping and he has a course to teach me all about it. An hour later, I have a Shopify site up and I have no idea what to do with it. This is real. The point here is that I want to do all of it. I’m excited about this passive income journey and there are multiple ways to make money online. So I want to do them all right now. I’ve bought courses that I haven’t finished, because honestly some courses are $7 so they can get your attention long enough to sell you a $2500 course. By video four out of the ten, I can see the writing on the wall. 

I’m three weeks into this journey and I’ve learned I need to stay focused on one thing at a time. There is a rabbit hole calling my name and I can’t go down it. So here are some wins from the past few weeks.

How I started my blog on WordPress

I’m celebrating that my blog is up and live. I’ve learned so much already about how to start a blog just by jumping in. I have some knowledge about WordPress but really I just jumped in, used a template provided by WordPress and went for it. It’s a very entry level WordPress website which you are on right now if you are reading this, YAY! I have zero photography so I’ve used resources like Canva, AI and stock photography for visuals to pair with my blogs. I learn new ways to use this platform every day. I am certainly subscribing to the practice of creating something that is good over perfect. I already know I’ll look back at these first posts with a little bit of embarrassment because I will know so much more in a year from now. But the best advice is to just get started, and frankly jumping in is the best way for me to learn.

Setting up new Social Media accounts for my business

I need to get traffic to this blog, and I want to find a small community that can really find my content valuable. I’ve set up Pinterest and Instagram for buildingitdiary.com so far. You might think that Pinterest is an interesting choice to start with, but I have follow a mentor online, Jenna Kutcher, and she swears by Pinterest. Is it okay if your mentor is 10 years younger than you? I’m not gonna sit with that one too long! I find myself drawn to Pinterest as well because I don’t necessarily want to be this spokesperson or a brand personality. I like smaller groups, intimate settings and deeper connections. I’m not the best candidate for an influencer because I just value integrity and authenticity too much. And by saying that I don’t mean that Tik Tok famous people aren’t authentic, I just don’t know if I could be in that situation. So the status here is that I have Instagram and Pinterest. And they are pretty sad looking right now. But that is where you start right? Photos below. I share these because I want to look back and remind myself where I started. And I want anyone else who has an idea and is chasing a goal to see how something looks when it’s new. We see thousands of examples every day of people who are miles ahead of us, who have already achieved success but we really don’t see what it looked like on week two of their journey.

Diving into learning about passive income opportunities

I’ve exposed myself to a few different ways to earn passive income online. The first is affiliate marketing. I wrote in an earlier blog about a course I bought and committed to finishing. This course required a live phone call with a coach in order to open video session number four. I had the call, and the coach seemed like a great person. My takeaway from the call was that this course I purchased was only a very high level introduction into marketing techniques. Marketing funnels and methods that I already know well as a marketer. He asked if I had hear of the blueprint course and basically said that is where I get the actual instruction on executing the steps to make money. I had not, but I Googled it after the call and it’s $2500. So this left me feeling a little disappointed. While the basic course may be a good starting point for some, I couldn’t help feeling like I fell head first into a bit of a bait and switch. After that day I paused on any further affiliate marketing education.

The second method of passive income I learned a little bit about was Amazon reviews. I found a really great account on YouTube where a woman shares step-by-step the way she creates her videos. This was solid free content. I think I could get on board with this way of earning income, but I will need to learn video editing in order to be efficient at this. I will definitely go back to her content to learn more. Here is the YouTube channel I found and liked.

Lastly, the good old Shopify store. I wasn’t kidding when I said I set up a store on a total whim. Just went right down the rabbit hole. Now I have a draft of a website set up, I’ve paid for a Shopify account and a domain, and I have no idea what to do with it. I took the steps to get the FREE Shopify website stood up, and then came all the required content I had to watch and workshops I had to sign up for in order for the store to be completed. This was also disappointing as it was not the time investment I had expected to make. And again like I said, I went to Instagram to make a post and I ended up an hour and a half later with a Shopify site in drafts.

Optimizing focus and consistency

Reflecting on the past couple weeks I know I need to dial into one thing at a time. My Achilles heel is getting distracted and moving away from a current focus, to something else shiny over there that catches my attention. I want to learn it all, and my impatience is allowing me to get distracted from getting good at one thing at a time. I’ve been fairly consistent with blogging and I need to get more consistent with posting to social media. My traffic to the site is super minimal, and by that I mean pretty non-existent! I’m not too worried about that right now, because I’m focused on learning and creating content. Once I have the content, I can always utilize it later in social posts to get more people here to read it. I also need to stay the course when it comes to consistency and output. I know what good design looks like as I worked in advertising with very talented creatives. I know a lot about the importance of brand identity and brand perception. Therefore, I know my blog website, social accounts and anything I create should follow a established identity guide. However, I’m not a creative, so finding a color palette and font family and sticking to that makes me feel like a fish out of water. The brand element is going to have to evolve over time. And as much as it bothers me to know my look is a little scattered and my writing is far from perfect I know the first step on the staircase to great is starting and those details will be solved along the climb.

Thank you for reading! I would love to hear from you. What are the goals you are working towards? Have you started yet? Let’s connect. Fill out the form below and I’ll respond within 24 hours. Courtney