Today I’m talking about growing your team with AllieDanae Walker and we also get into what an online business manager (OBM) versus a VA. It’s two different topics that AllieDanae blends perfectly.

We’re going to talk about finding the perfect person to work with, what to expect when you bring someone on to your team, and who is responsible for what. We also discuss the difference between an OBM and a VA and her best tips for growing and managing your team.

AllieDane is a great person to help us with this topic because she has worked as a VA and an OBM for a lot of great online businesses, so she gives some great insight into who you should hire for your team, how you can figure out what you want to outsource, and then how you can grow once you’ve hired that first person.

There are so many moving pieces to your business and AllieDanae understands it can get overwhelming. However, when it is all run and done well, you are able to live a life that you truly love. As a business owner herself, she wants to help you take your business from just getting by to flying high. Her goal is to remove as many admin and social media tasks off of your plate so you can focus on the creative side of your business, the side you love! The Social Walker Agency services are meant to walk alongside of you and enhance the efforts that you are already making. Consider AllieDanae and her team your team!

When she's not cheering on her business teams, AllieDanae is cheering on one of her favorite sports teams - the Georgia Bulldogs and Atlanta Braves. You can also find her sipping coffee throughout the day, spending her mornings in the Word, and enjoying time with her family and friends. She loves sharing about her passions of faith and business to anyone who comes into her life. 

Topics Discussed:

• How you can find the right person to work with
• What you should expect when bringing someone onto your team
• What your new hire will need from you and what they should have in place already
• The difference between an OBM and a VA
• What to do if you aren’t working well with someone you’ve hired
• Tips for growing and managing your team

Resources Discussed:

• Christy Wright’s Business Boutique
• Business Boutique Podcast

Connect with AllieDanae:

• Website
• Instagram
• Facebook

Whether you’re a photographer or not, the images you choose for your website can draw in or turn away your dream clients. The trick isn’t finding images – there is stock photography all over the internet – but finding the right images and making them work for your website.

Topics Discussed:

• How to choose images for your website
• Things to avoid when choosing images
• Stock photography vs. custom photography
• Why starting with design is so important when choosing images
• My favorite places to find stock photography
• How to optimize your images for the web

Resources Discussed:

• Connecting with Your Clients through Brand Photography with Mallika Malhotra
• Haute Stock
• Turquoise and Palm
• SC Stockshop
• Creative Market
• Morguefile
• Unsplash
• Pexels
• Pixabay
• TinyPNG
• JPEGmini
• Google PageSpeed Insights

Today I am talking about mindfulness and entrepreneurship with Lee Chaix McDonough. We have a great, in-depth conversation about what mindfulness is, the key aspects, why it’s important to us as entrepreneurs, and how we can practice mindfulness in our own lives.

She gives some great insights and I know that this episode will be really useful for you to listen in and then put into practice. As  Lee says, we don’t have to do everything and we don’t’ have to get it right all the time, but by starting off with a mindfulness practice even once a week can help us deal with some of the things that come with being an entrepreneur, like overwhelm and all of the ideas.

Lee Chaix McDonough is a coach, therapist, and founder of Caravel Coaching. After over a decade as a clinical social worker and public health professional, Lee entered the coaching field to help creatives and creative entrepreneurs create lives they love.

Her coaching philosophy fuses the principles of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, Energy Leadership, and mindfulness in order to help her clients excel at their work, feel in control of their careers, and transform their lives.

Topics Discussed:

• What mindfulness is
• The key aspects of mindfulness
• Why mindfulness is so important to an entrepreneurs
• How you can practice mindfulness
• How focusing on mindfulness in business can serve your clients

Resources Discussed:

• Gimlet Media
• West Wing Weekly Podcast
• Judge John Hodgman Podcast
• Courage & Clarity Podcast
• Steph Crowder with Fizzle

Connect with Lee:

• Website
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Blog

Today I’m talking about finding keywords for your website and some SEO basics. Many of my clients struggle with SEO and some of them don’t even understand what it is, and so I wanted to get on the show today and go over what SEO is, why it’s important for your business, and how you can work on your website so that your SEO is better.

If you’ve ever gone into a Facebook group and seen people asking about SEO, search engines, or keywords and you’re not sure what that means or how you can apply it to your business, this episode is for you.

You can also download the SEO Content Guide I use with my clients at http://www.lemonandthesea.com/episode38.

Topics Discussed:

• What is SEO
• How SEO works and why it’s important for your business
• What you can do to improve your SEO
• How to find relevant keywords and phrases
• The importance of unique page titles
• Meta descriptions and what they’re used for
• Why you should update your old content
• How to use internal linking
• The importance of external linking and social proof
• My best practices and implementation tips for all 6 areas you should be focusing on

Resources Discussed:

• Using Verticals to Connect with Your Dream Clients with ReinaPomeroy
• Quarterly Website Maintenance for Your Website 
• Build and submit a sitemap to Google

Today I’m talking with Krista Miller of Krista Rae all about managing multiple businesses without complete overwhelm. Even if you aren’t managing multiple businesses right now, this episode is still really relevant because we’re talking about practical steps you can take to avoid overwhelm in your business as you’re adding side projects or just juggling client and business work.

I’m excited about the way Krista runs her business and her willingness to share the systems she uses. She gives great advice on how we can run everything without spending 24/7 on our computer or in our business. She also talks about how you can break your tasks up to get everything done and gives her biggest tip for running multiple businesses without getting overwhelmed.

Krista is a WordPress developer, co-host of the Get Back To Design Podcast, and co-founder of Coded Creative Themes. She specializes in collaborating with passionate designers to craft strategic websites that directly support their clients' goals, while helping them ditch the tech and spend more time doing what they love - design.

Topics Discussed:

• The businesses Krista runs and how each got started
• How we can run our business and pursue other projects without working all the time
• The systems Krista tried and what works best for her
• Exactly how she organizes her week to allow for client work, business projects, and flexible time
• How you can break down all your tasks so you can get it all done
• Her biggest tip for running multiple businesses without getting overwhelmed

Resources Discussed:

• Inito
• Coded Creative Themes
• Get Back to Design Podcast

Connect with Krista:

• Website
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Facebook Group

Today I’m talking about a website redesign versus a refresh or customization and which option is best for you.

Right now, as we go into 2018, a lot of us are looking at redesigning or updating our websites, refreshing what we have so that we can better speak to those dream clients and really start to grow our businesses and meet those big goals in the New Year.

For me, this included updating my website with my new signature process, The Strategic Website Design Roadmap, and I wanted to talk through a couple of the options that are included in order to help you figure out the best way to go about updating your website.

Topics Discussed:

• The Strategic Website Design Roadmap process
• What’s included in a Website Redesign
• What’s included in a Website Customization
• When you need a complete redesign
• Examples of clients who designed their websites from beginning to end and why they chose that option
• When you don’t need to redesign and should consider customization instead
• Examples of customizations I’ve done for clients and why that option was best
• How to prepare to update your website

Resources Discussed:

Episode 29 Creating Content for Your Website

Today I‘m talking with Reina Pomeroy about using verticals to connect with your dream clients. This is a topic that I have learned from Reina in person and I was so excited to be able to share it with you. We talk about what verticals are and how they help you in your business, how you can figure out what that is for your specific business and what makes you different in the areas to talk about, as well as how to plan content based on these big topics.

Reina also talks about how she uses this method to create products, courses, and different items for her dream clients. We have a discussion about serving her dream clients well has benefited her business and I share some of what I have seen from the client side.

Reina Pomeroy is the Owner and Founder of Reina + Co, the Life + Biz Success Coaching® Practice for creatives who are right brained and heart-centered. She helps clients stop spinning their wheels and take action on what’s most important. She’s a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach with over 1,500 hours of coaching under her belt. Reina also co-hosts the Creative Empire Podcast where she interviews leaders in the creative industry. She’s based in Washington DC but her clients and creative entrepreneur community live all over the globe. You can find Reina’s work featured on Entrepreneur on Fire, Entrepreneur.com, Brit + Co, The Huffington Post, Honeybook, The Rising Tide Society and Best Friends for Frosting. She also travels around the country speaking and educating creative entrepreneurs.

Topics Discussed:

• What verticals are and how they help you in business
• How you can find your verticals
• How you can stand out even when other people talk about the same topic
• An outline of planning your verticals
• How you can plan content based on your verticals
• How this method benefits your clients
• How Reina has built her business on creating what her clients are asking for
• My experience working with Reina

Resources Discussed:

• Verticals Trello Board
• Powersheets

Connect with Reina:

• Website
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Big Plan for the Creative Mind
• Creative Empire Podcast

Today I’m talking with Marva Goss all about standing out in a crowded industry. We cover a lot of topics including why standing out in a crowded market is so important, how you can figure out what makes you different, and how you can build your visibility with your dream clients.

We also tackle the question of why being visible actually a benefit to your clients. Plus, Marva gives us a few steps that we can take today to stand out and get noticed online.

Marva is the brand + content strategist behind Marva J. Coaching Co. Marva helps female creatives position themselves as the go-to expert in their industry, while building a brand they're excited about. Marva is a veteran turned life coach turned strategist that encourages her clients to step out of their comfort zones to build an online presence that stands out from the rest. For more information, visit www.marvajcoachingco.com.

Topics Discussed:

• When to work with a brand strategist
• Why standing out a crowded market is important
• How you can figure out what makes you different
• “Your greatest selling point is you”
• Why connecting with people on an emotional level is the most effective way to find clients who align with you
• How to know what to share about the personal side
• Building your visibility with your dream clients
• How to know what to share and what to keep to yourself (at least for now)
• Why planning your content in advance really helps you be visible
• How to engage authentically in Facebook groups
• Building trust and saying the hard things
• Sharing your story

Connect with Marva:

• Website
• Facebook
• Instagram

Today I am looking back on 2017 and talking about what’s next for the New Year. I’m going to be sharing my big accomplishments, what worked and what didn’t, and even getting into some of the numbers. I hope this episode gives you a chance to see what it’s like behind the scenes of an online business and encourages you to reflect on the past year as you start to make your goals for 2018.

Topics Discussed:

• My Focus for 2017: Abundance
• My big accomplishments
  • Starting Process to Profitability
  • Buying a house
  • Creating a signature process for website design
  • Deciding to stop offering brand design and focus on websites
  
  
• What worked in 2017 and what didn't
• The intentional investments that I made in my business
• The new tools I invested in learning and using
• A comparison of my numbers from February 2017 to December 2017, including my income, expenses
• How I'm giving back in my business
• My big goals 2018
• Announcing Showit Custom Website Design

Resources Discussed:

• VIP Intensive 1.0 & 2.0
• Social Glue Sessions
• Podcasting for Creatives
• Dubsado
• CovertKit
• Later

Today I am talking with Deneen TB all about using LinkedIn to create connection and establish expertise. She has some great information to share about the LinkedIn platform and why we shouldn’t be scared of it as creatives. She goes over some great tips about creating a profile that people will be able to find, connecting with your dream clients online, the experience of building connections and getting into groups, and how we can use LinkedIn to share our expertise.

We talk about a ton of stuff that will help you get started on this platform if you’re not there already and I would encourage you to check out Deneen’s LinkedIn profile as an example of all the things we’re talking about so that you can start using LinkedIn.

Deneen Troupe-Buitrago, M.Ed., is a Motivational Keynote Speaker & Trainer relieving the guilt from Faith-based Businesswomen by Linking Faith & Business. Her organization is called Grow From Your Overflow, LLC. She is a Development Strategist that connects you to Professional, Personal, and Spiritual growth opportunities through Speaking, Workshops, Online Courses, plus, one-on-one Consulting and Coaching. 

Some areas of expertise include Developing Goals, Writing Action Steps and Time Management as well as personal areas such as Developing New Habits, Procrastination and Presentation Skills. She weaves everything she does with Faith and has created the Personalized Faith Plan for your success in Faith & Business.  Her background in Education mixed with her experience in Drama gives her a unique Speaking style that is truly a ‘hands-on’ experience. By linking all of it to her Faith, she has combined all the best parts of her life to give back and serve others. 

Topics Discussed:

• Why it’s important for business owners to be on LinkedIn and how it’s different from other social platforms
• Creating a profile that your dream clients can find
• Finding keywords and the right image to connect
• How you can use the sections of your profile to connect with the right people
• Why you don’t need the paid version
• Ways to connect with people outside your circle
• How we can connect with our dream clients
• The etiquette for connecting and following up
• Using groups on LinkedIn
• Who should be using LinkedIn

Connect with Deneen:

• Website
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• Facebook