Work Less, Earn More

Every month, I’m peeling back the curtain and sharing the ins & outs of my monthly revenue.

These income reports are an in-depth and honest look at how much my business earned, what it cost, and how many hours it took me to do it.

I’ll also share which tasks and projects really ended up paying me best so that you can see how I’m optimizing my business so that I can work less and earn more over time. Plus, you’ll get a time report, breaking down the time I spend on each activity and how that created a financial result (or not).

I hope that you’ll be able to learn from my trial and error, as I work to grow my business, my impact, and my income––all while keeping clear boundaries on my time and personal life.

Today, we’re looking back on May 2020.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Links:

When you’re selling online, most people assume that a bigger audience is better.

More people, more money, right?

According to today’s guest, a six-figure launch isn’t about your list size and it’s not just about how awesome you are—really! Instead, it’s about how you structure your offer, how you price it, and how you build a relationship with your audience. There’s a method behind it.

Tarzan Kay is an email marketing expert and former copywriter-for-hire who’s been able to generate massive revenue with a small audience. In this episode, Tarzan shares exactly how she did a $151,000 launch last year.

And, naturally, she shares all of her expert email marketing and copywriting tips on how she stands out in a crowded market—and how you can, too.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Tarzan’s Links:

Gillian’s Links:

Last year I spent over $20,000 on copywriters.

That is a lot of money by the standard of any small business, and it was a very significant chunk of my expenses last year.

You might think that it sounds crazy to spent $20,000 on copywriting services.  But consider this:  if you're earning $50k with a 1% conversion rate, you could bump it up to just a 3% conversion rate and generate $150,000!

That's a really big increase!

By improving my copy-–and increasing my conversion rate–by even a small amount, I can generate significantly more revenue and profit for my business.  So spending $20,000 on copywriting suddenly doesn’t sound so crazy.

In today’s episode, I want to share what  I learned through the process of spending so much money on copywriting services.

I’m going to break down whether or not it was worth it, as well as how to consider whether hiring a copywriter is a smart move for your business. I'm also going to share with you the impact that investing this money has had on my business – good and bad.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Links:

I’m not the only one who runs a successful business in less than full time. Every month, I’ll share a conversation with another business owner who is prioritizing working less and earning more.

We’ll get into the choices they’ve made, the tools they use, and how they organize their businesses to maximize profit and minimize effort.

Today, I'm bringing on my friend Lilah Higgins to share with us a little bit about how she runs her business in about 20 hours per week.

Lilah is the co-founder of TheForge, a leadership training community for faith-driven business owners, along with her husband, Zac.

Lilah is also a leader in the online business space where she uses her fine art training and strategic mind to work with her clients and students to create cohesive and effective brands, helping them find the confidence they need to become industry leaders.

And she does all that while being a great mom to her two little kids.

Lilah definitely needs to save time wherever she can, especially now that she’s shifting her business to prioritize more fun in her life.

Lilah is a perfect case study for how you can strategically run your business in fewer hours, achieve real “success”, and meet your goals without compromising your values.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How Lilah knew she was working too much and what she did to cut back on working time so she could prioritize her lifetime
• How and why Lilah’s making a conscious effort to spend more time on purely fun activities
• How Lilah transitioned from working with 1-on-1 clients to selling digital products… and the impact that had on the number of hours she works per week
• Why Lilah works “on the margins” and how the time she spends working breaks down between clients and products
• Her favorite tool for helping her company earn more with less effort

Links:

• Lilah Higgins Brand Design & Art
• TheForge
• Lilah on Instagram
• Lilah on Facebook
• Startup Society
• GillianPerkins.com

Selling digital products is a fantastic way to be able to work less and earn more.

If you run an online business or you're planning on starting one, chances are you are very familiar with digital products and all of the benefits digital products can bring to your business.

You already know that once you create the product, you can sell them for months, even years, without having to regularly invest more time and more money into improving them or additional inventory. Digital products are something that you can create in your business to generate profits for a long time to come.

Take courses and membership sites as an example.

Courses and membership sites are two types of premium digital products you can sell, and they both offer amazing opportunities. They both offer opportunities to increase your profits without having to continually increase your work hours.

So how, when both are potentially really smart things to invest some initial time and money into, do you decide which one is right for YOU?

In today's episode, I am going to explain to you the difference between these two digital products and help you figure out which of them is the best fit for you and your business.

I'm going to help you make that decision by sharing with you some of the pros and the cons of each, my experience with them, and which one is best for you, depending on your situation and your goals.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Links:

Every month, I’m peeling back the curtain and sharing the ins & outs of my monthly revenue.

These income reports are an in-depth and honest look at how much my business earned, what it cost, and how many hours it took me to do it.

I’ll also share which tasks and projects really ended up paying me best so that you can see how I’m optimizing my business so that I can work less and earn more over time. Plus, you’ll get a time report, breaking down the time I spend on each activity and how that created a financial result (or not).

I hope that you’ll be able to learn from my trial and error, as I work to grow my business, my impact, and my income––all while keeping clear boundaries on my time and personal life.

Today, we’re looking back on April 2020.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Links:

There is a dangerous pitfall that we can fall into when we work to optimize our business so that we can earn more and work less. This mistake can steal our joy and force us to waste countless hours each week.

Growing up, my mom was really into healthy eating. She always wanted us to eat our vegetables and take our vitamins, and she tried to feed us as much organic food as possible. Before dinner, she would always put out a giant salad and we couldn't eat our dinner until we had finished it. And we certainly weren’t going to get dessert until we had eaten our dinner.

I don't think that this was a bad thing because, to this day, I am a fantastic vegetable eater, but something that I've noticed is that this eat-your-vegetables-first mentality has carried over into other aspects of my life.

Whenever it’s work or play, I always tend to focus on getting the work out of the way before I spend time playing.

In general, as you would expect, this is a really good thing.

It’s good to focus on strategies that help to achieve as much as possible with little time and effort.

It means that I get a lot done, both because I focus on getting the work done first, and because I'm working towards some sort of a reward – dessert, fun, or relaxation.

This is so important to me because I don't want work to take over my life. I want to make sure that I've plenty of time left over to really enjoy life – to spend time with my family and to do the things that I truly love.

In today's episode, I'm going to explain what this pitfall is, why you might be making these mistakes, and how you can work to reframe your mindset and restructure your schedule to make sure that you're getting the most out of every hour you work all while enjoying the process to boot.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Links:

Copywriting has such an incredible power to allow you to work less and earn more.

If you have put the time and energy into your copy and your website is converting – convincing more people to join your email list and buy your product – that means you don't have to put in the leg work to make each individual sale yourself.

If you set up your website do the heavy lifting for you, you can take some time off and keep making money – even if you're not in the office.

In this episode, we’re talking with the brilliant copywriter and my good friend Ashlyn Carter.

Ashlyn is a conversion copywriter and marketing strategist specializing in wedding & creative industries. She trains Fortune 500 clients in corporate marketing to bring in more than seven-figures. She has worked with creatives like Jenna Kutcher, Beth Kirby of Local Milk, Julie Solomon, Katelyn James, Hilary Rushford, Lara Casey/Cultivate What Matters. Her launch funnels have generated results for clients including upwards of $1M in revenue in a single week. She's been a contributing educator with Creative Live, ConvertKit, and HoneyBook, and has been featured in Forbes, Southern Living, Style Me Pretty, and more.

I wanted to have Ashland on the show so you can learn some of the copywriting secrets that will help you improve the writing that you do to market your business.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Ashlyn’s Links:

Gillian’s Links:

The reason I wasn't making any money was that people can't buy your products if they don't know they exist.

When I first started my online business, on top of being a mom and working a day job to pay my bills, I was pouring a ton of time into my business every single week without seeing much results.

I had a solid product and I had built some great automated sales funnels that should have been able to produce sales. I was wondering why they weren't working. Why wasn’t this creating the results I was looking for?

What I finally realized was that it didn't matter how amazing my product was or how good my sales funnels were. If there wasn't any traffic flowing through my funnel, then the funnel wasn't going to produce any sort of results.

And because nobody knew that me, my business, or my products existed, this wasn’t going to change.

I had to figure out how to get noticed

Now in retrospect, this seems incredibly obvious. But at the time, when I finally realized that that was true, it was quite the revelation and I realized that I needed to shift my focus in my business. I needed to get that visibility or else my business wasn't going to go anywhere.

I didn't just need to work harder–I needed to change my strategy to get the visibility that I really needed.

In today’s episode, I'm going to share with you what I did to get people to finally start paying attention and the huge difference this made in my business. I am going to share with you the strategies that really took me from earning no money with my business online to earning multiple six figures.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Links: