Thinking about how long I’d been going at this point, It’s probably 4 months in. This thing had honestly become an absolute monster in my life. From day 1I’m absolutely loving the weekly calls, I’m starting to see an end to the massive amount of setup effort required, but it’s still demanding more of me than I’d ever expected. The first cohort is working their way through the first few modules of the course but I can see things starting to run more smoothly now, and I’m starting to think about turning my attention to how to attract people to the social media profiles I’d set up last year.

*insert screeching tyre noise here*

My students- my wonderful, amazing human beings, with amazing, challenging businesses had been going through the course for about 3 weeks now, and we were in our regular weekly call. And they told me that they felt that although the content in the first couple of weeks was ok, they found that they’d done plenty of things like it before, and they were wondering if I could add a bit… MORE… in there?

*Insert picture of me dramatically collapsing to the ground with a hand to my heart as if I’d been stabbed*

More? They wanted MORE? (I feel like someone may have used that line before me somewhere…🤔)

Let me be clear- they weren’t complaining, they just wanted more of a challenge than I’d given them. I’d deliberately kept the first 2 weeks light to help people doing the course get used to fitting in extra things to their workload, but it looked like I’d overdone it and instead of overwhelming people, I’d underwhelmed them. (Now I’m wondering if someone can be just ‘whelmed’?) So (after beating back my ego who was wanting to throw a temper tantrum there and then) I got their feedback on what they were expecting to see, and what they would find valuable, and put it on my to-do list. This is one of the reasons why I’m now so grateful that this was a small cohort- because in a larger one there may not have been the ability to hear each person’s feedback and I may have missed something that I could use to vastly improve the course! (And this feedback was so valuable it actually led me to make a significant change to the timing of the module releases and the course length as well!)

And now- to social media. Oh joy. Oh happy day.

I may have mentioned I was a Type A (somewhat) reformed perfectionist at the start of this, and the combination of the appeal of getting ‘quick and easy wins to attract hundreds of your ideal clients for free by building your personal brand’ combined with a growing determination to get things out there fast to get back on track to where I wanted to be just bought out all the worst bits of that in a flood! I knew that the so called ‘experts’ said to just choose 1 or 2 channels and go with that. Pfft- I am not just your average business owner, and anyway, we have AI now, so why shouldn’t I do ALL of them??? (Look up the meaning of hubris if you want to see what’s going on here- hint- it’s not an endearing term 😉) So, the list looked something like this: a YouTube channel, Facebook page and private group, Instagram, BlueSky, a newsletter, and a blog. (I’d set up a podcast as well but the automation was broken and wasn't autoposting like it should- it’s still on the list of things to go back and fix, I promise!) Then a couple of weeks into regular posting I realised I was missing threads and google business so threw them in for good measure too. (Now lets get clear here, I was NOT doing all this manually, if we were still in the times we had to do that I would NOT have taken on anything even remotely like this- because remember dear readers, I still had to do 90% of this work in my after hours and weekend times. But setting up automations for repurposing and content can now be done reasonably quickly- or so I believed!)

And so my rise to world domination began! (…see how that’s working out in the next episode 😉)