089: Social Media: To Do Or Not To Do?

Earlier this year as the pandemic was just getting its hold on American soil, I quit all my social media except for my YouTube channel. I closed down my Facebook account, Pinterest and Instagram. I didn’t have a Twitter account so nothing to be done there. Although this is not a strategy that fits everyone, for me it was the right action that I needed to take to make some big changes in my life and my business. And it worked! In this article, I want to share the reasons why I quit, what transpired in my business during the time after I was social media-free and how I am intentionally coming back to social media. I want to share all of this in hopes to help anyone out there who is feeling overwhelmed by social media and is bombarded with mixed messages about both the pros and cons of participating in it.

Al’right, let’s dive in.

1| Why I quit social media in March 2020 and should you do the same?

As you may remember, March was an increasingly tense time here in the USA as the virus was spreading rapidly across the country. In the region where I live, people were still not seeing the growing intensity of the situation and my social media feed was being bombarded with posts from both people who were pro-masks and those who thought that we are just in for another type of a flu. My mind was influenced by this and I was getting obsessed with trying to sharing data to inform. So I took upon the role of information-sharing on my Facebook page. I was stressed by people not wanting to do the bare minimum of wearing masks or keep social distance. I spent many hours researching stats about the virus from University websites as well as various news sources and would post links to “inform” those who were not getting the news about the rapid spread and what we can do flatten the curve. Clearly, this was affecting my focus, my time and results at work.

On top of that, I also felt that if I wanted to succeed in business, I needed to be on all social media platforms, well, at least on the big ones - FB, Insta, Pinterest, Twitter. But as a solopreneur, this was just a bit too much to handle. Plus, I was not really good at any of the platforms, let alone all of them. And I also wanted to publish on my blog weekly.

Enter: overwhelm!

What I found out was that although social media was a way clients were finding me, when I looked carefully at my stats, it was really only my YouTube channel that brought me paying clients (many of them actually mentioned that that’s how they found my website). So I knew that YouTube was working but everything else was just creating a sense of overwhelm for me. Besides, I was spending way too much time scrolling my social media feed.

I am inspired by what immense successful folks do and there are stats noted in this Business Insider article that show that millionaires spend on average two and a half hours a week on social media versus 14 hours that the average American spends on it. My situation was less than 14 but enough to drag down my use of time in an effective way.

I considered just doing a social media detox and go off of it for a couple of weeks. But I had a feeling I needed to do something more drastic to send a clear message to my brain. Finally, I decided that I had to quit cold turkey. This may be what you need to but I won’t make that as a blanked suggestion for everyone because your needs may be different. But for me it was the right thing to do at that time because without any social media accounts to “waste” my time on, I found other rather useful ways to use my time which I will come to next. I also re-watched a Ted talk on why you should quit social media by Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism and I was inspired to make the leap.

Question: How is your relationship with your social media accounts and activities? How is it affecting your results in your business and your family life and your relationship with yourself? Is it time to reassess how you use it? How can you be more intentional in using social media for your business?

2| What was the impact of quitting social media?

There were several positive changes that transpired when I quit social media in March 2020. These changes were both in business and personal and here are a few of them:

1. I read 20 books last year, more than I did in 2019.
2. I opened up to new opportunities for my business that made a tremendous impact.
3. I substantially increased my business revenue in 2020, markedly more than 2019.
4. I actually connected with a lot more friends than I have, not just compared to 2019 but in the last few years even!
5. I was more present with my husband and my kitties.
6. I took care of my home in a way that I now have the most organized home and belongings I have ever had.
7. I had greater peace of mind as I was not incessantly worrying about the world and focused on my zone of influence.
8. This peace of mind allowed me to be more present with my clients and serve them generously.
9. My focus was not drained by distractions. More focus, less distraction.
10. Learning to say “No” to what was not good for me or was not working for me.
11. Being in touch with real people in more meaningful ways.

I’d say generally I was much more conscious and present in my day to day activities, had more focus and less distraction.

One of the most important side-effect was that my sense of belonging increased. The friends that I would have lost touch with by dropping Facebook, actually found other ways to stay in touch with me: via whatsapp video chats and Facetime video calls. It seems that on Facebook, we felt that we kinda knew what was happening in each others’ lives because we were watching and reading the posts. This sadly superseded real communication and real connection. Having no Facebook account, meant that we had to reach out in more meaningful ways and that has been especially powerful and a real solace during the lockdowns and the forced isolation due to the pandemic.

This connection was immensely important for me as it build a sense of belonging, friendship and sisterhood which helped to keep a happy mind when serving clients. And serving clients when in a happy mind is much more fun, right?

Question: What could be the benefits of a social media detox (or on the extreme case like me - quitting social media)? How would you show up in the world differently? How would you show up to your family and friends (your animals) and in your business to your clients differently?

3| How I am re-instating my social media portfolio in 2021?

Having such positive results not having social media, why then am I even considering to reinstate it in 2021? You see, I needed to quit social media and get to tabula rasa, a blank state, in order to remove the thing that was in my way (distraction) and to understand what I wanted.

Now that I know the benefits of not having social media, I am in a better position to strategically use it for my business goals as I know there are certain benefits of it that I do want to take advantage of. The benefits include building a brand identity, connecting with clients and colleagues, gaining search engine visibility to name a few. Plus, I am putting into place better structures so that it will not consume my time and attention.

How will my social media activities look like then?
I will be active on just this social media platform:
1. YouTube.
2. Twitter Update September 2023: I am now adding Twitter (link in the footer).

3. Pinterest and Update August 2021: I am dropping out of Pinterest again.
4. Instagram Update August 2021: I am dropping out of Instagram as well again.

YouTube is a huge source of client projects and it allows me to serve meaningfully to people with useful content. I will continue to post tech tutorials around web design and email marketing with a focus on Squarespace and ConvertKit. I will also be posting content that will be specifically serving budding web designers who want to build a successful web design business. As of August 2021, YouTube will be my one and only social media platform of choice.

Pinterest is a search engine powerhouse and your content is quite evergreen. Instagram allows people to more closely connect with me on a human level and I will use it specifically to present the person behind my business (me) on a personal level, including the occasional business tips and announcements. Instagram is also a wonderful way to build relationships with my colleagues in the web design field as well as other entrepreneurs that I admire and want to connect with.

Update as of Aug 2021: I am leaving Pinterest and Instagram to focus on YouTube. I want and need to declutter and focus my activities.

Question: What would a newly crafted social media strategy look like for your business so that it’s helpful and beneficial to you and your business instead of a source of overwhelm and burden?

I will be reassessing my social media engagement periodically and I am certain there will be refinements on how I show up on social media. But one thing that will continue to guide me is the question: how can I best use my time and resources to serve my clients, grow my business and grow as a person, so that it creates greater peace and harmony for myself and others.

I hope that this article has been helpful to you in how you approach the question of social media for your life and business. Let me know in the comments what your experience has been as I’d love to know!

Warmly,
Sophia

088: Success Habit of Millionaires That Will Speed Up Your Business Success

Do you know how many books you read in 2020? I am asking this not to make you feel bad if you didn’t - hey, 2020 has been tough on many fronts, needless to say. But the number of books and what type of books you read can be a key indicator and a key contributor to your financial and business success. And when you borrow books from the library, this reading habit doesn’t cost you a dime.

In this article, I will share some data on how many books millionaires and billionaires read, what my reading list is for 2021 and some links to blogs on how you help us build a reading habit ⏤ all of this to inspire you and myself to read more books in 2021, in order to learn, grow, and make a bigger positive impact in our world.

Let’s get started!

Let’s look at some research on how many books Americans read. According to the research done by Pew Research Center, the average American reads four books a year while 25% of Americans surveyed didn’t get their hands on even one. Compare that to immensely successful and influential billionaires such as Bill Gates who was mentioned article in this Inc.com article, and you get 50. Yes, he reads 50 books a year or around one book a week. If you want to know which 5 books he just recommended, check out his personal blog, GatesNotes.

Correlation between wealth and reading books
In this blog post, Sam Klemens lists ten data points that shows how many books the highly successful read. Now there’s no causal relationship established to show whether reading books led these people to become immensely successful. But in his article, you’ll see that Mark Cuban reads three hours a day while Warren Buffet reads 500 pages a day. Also, just think about Oprah and her love for books and one starts to wonder if indeed there is a causal relationship between wealth and reading. Plus, what type of books you read is equally important, right!

Making Reading a Daily Habit
To make reading part of the actions you take daily, it is important to make it a habit. Building a new habit is a skill and there’s research that says that it generally takes about 21 days to build a new habit. There are tons of books and Ted talks about how to build good habits. One trick that I learnt some years ago from Shawn Achor in his book, “The Happiness Advantage”, was to create positive triggers to help you build that habit. For example, if you want to practice the guitar everyday, keep the guitar in the middle of the living room instead of tucked away in a closet, so that it’s right in front of you. There’s less of an obstacle between you and the guitar. Using that example for reading then, one can keep the book next to your bed on the nightstand, carry it with you so you can read whenever you have to wait, and carve out a reading hour in the day where nothing else will compete with your attention. If you want to learn more about building a reading habit, read this book by James Clear called “Atomic Habits” which is all about building good habits (it’s was recommended by Sequoia Mulgrave of the DailyMode Studio and I’ve purchased the book and added it to my reading list for 2021). James Clear on his blog wrote on how to build new habits which you can read in a snap and use the tips he shares to easily implement right away.

Question: What strategies or tricks can you use to help yourself build this new daily habit?

Setting a Reading Goal for 2021
I want to read a lot more in 2021 and one thing I am doing to help me accomplish this is to create a reading goal. Earlier this week, I set the goal of reading 21 books in 2021. But then I made a list of all the books I read this year and it totalled at 20. So I am now changing my goal to reading 30 books next year. Seeing the stats of successful entrepreneurs who read up to 50 books a year, 30 is just a bit more than half, but for me this is a good goal and it’s both exciting and challenging. That’s roughly 2.5 books a month. I’ve also made a section in my bookshelf where I have placed some of books for the first half of the year. Seeing all these books in one place is motivating to me and I can’t wait to read them and gain golden nuggets of wisdom from each one of them.

Question: What will your reading goal be for 2021? And which books will make the list?

Sharing What You Learn
When working towards a new habit, not only sharing the goal can be very helpful but also sharing what you learn from them can be motivating. I’ve done that in the past on my personal development blog some years ago and I know that it greatly benefitted me when I shared some insights I gained. In fact, my very first YouTube video back in 2010 was a short book review where I shared 3 insights I gained from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are. I will get back to doing this in 2021 writing blogs or making videos about what I learn from each book.

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This is my lovely little bookshelf. Books from the 2021 reading list marked and set aside. Let’s get reading!

My Book List
It’s good to track what books one has read to encourage oneself to read more. So here are the books I read in 2020 and you’ll see a lot of them are about success mindset and motivation. It just so happens that the list totals at 20 books however, I had not made a goal of reading 20 books in 2020!

1. The Secret Door to Success by Florence Scovel Shinn (This was written in 1941. It’s in the creative commons and there are legally free PDF versions you can find on the web).
2. The Game of Life. Ibid.
3. The Power of the Spoken Word. Ibid.
4. Your Word is Your Wand. Ibid.
5. Dollars Want Me by Henry Harrison Brown (An old book written in 1903!)
6. The Abundance Code: How to Bust the 7 Money Myths by Julie Ann Cairns
7. It’s Not Your Money by Tosha Silver
8. You are Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero
9. The Ending of Things by Ajahn Brahm (freely available from the Buddhist Publication Society’s website).
10. Meditating on No-Self by Ayya Khema (freely available from the Buddhist Publication Society’s website).
11. The Decision: Overcoming today’s BS for Tomorrow’s Success by Kevin Hart (Audiobook)
12. Miracle Morning Millionaires by Hal Elrod, David Osborn, Honoree Corder (Audiobook)
13. Goodbye Things by Fumio Sasaki
14. Making Space Clutter-Free by Tracy McCubbin
15. The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley
16. Stop Acting Rich by Thomas Stanley
17. Become Your Own Banker by R. Nelson Nash
18. Building Your Warehouse of Wealth by R. Nelson Nash
19. How Privatized Banking Really Works by Robert Murphy and Carlos Lara
20. The Anapanasati Sutta: A Practical Guide to Mindfulness of Breathing and Tranquil Wisdom Meditation by the Venerable U Vimalaramsi

To Read in 2021
(Update Dec 2021 - I read 25 books in 2021 which I’ve indicated below as Read. See complete list of books read in my 2021 Books Read Post).

1. We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman’s Guide to Earning More, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power by Rachel Rodgers - Read
2. Chillpreneur: The New Rules for Creating Success, Freedom, and Abundance on Your Terms by Denise Duffield Thomas - Read
3. Everything Is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo
4. Profit First by Mike Michalowicz - Read
5. Atomic Habits by James Clear - Read
6. 10x Marketing Formula by Garrett Moon
7. Invested by Charles Schwab
8. Weekend Millionaire Mindset by Mike Summey and Dawson
9. Playing the Matrix by Mike Dooley - Read
10. Show Your Work by Austin Kleon - Read
11. This is Marketing by Seth Godin - Read
12. Traction by Gino Wickham
13. Being Nobody, Going Nowhere by Ayya Khema
14. Why Not Me? By Mindy Kaling - Read
15. How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang
16. Thought Vibration or The Law of Attraction in the Thought World by William Walker Atkinson - Read
17. Everyday Millionaires by Chris Hogan
18. The Millionaire Mind by Thomas Stanley
19. The Next Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley - Read
20. Millionaire Women Next Door by Thomas Stanley
21. Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day by Jay Shetty
22. Becoming by Michelle Obama
23. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal
24. Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals by Rachel Hollis - Read
Six more to add to this list and I am sure I will be inspired next year to complete this list.

Until then, please do let me know in the chat what your book reading goals are for next year, and which books you’d recommend, especially those written by women entrepreneurs as both me and my book list need more woman power!

You have a dream to build a thriving web design business? You can make it happen!

Peace,
Sophia

087: 5 Traits of A Successful Web Design Business Owner

You want to run a web design business that is successful? Of course, you define what success is and it will be different at each stage of your business. And to create that success, you need to develop the traits that will help you get where you want to go. These are the traits that will not only help you achieve that revenue goal you are aiming for but also help decision-making easier, serving your clients better, and even articulate yourself better in both client communications and content creation. It’s a win-win-win!

So let’s get into some of those traits that I believe have helped me tremendously to move the needle in my business in recent months.

Here are the five traits:

1| A Successful Web Designer Actively Generates Clarity
2| A Successful Web Designer Cultivates Patience
3| A Successful Web Designer Keeps An Optimistic Mindset
4| A Successful Web Design Business Owner Cultivates A Resilient Mind
5| A Successful Web Designer Knows She Is A Force For Good

Traits for a Successful Web Designer:

1| A Successful Web Designer Actively Generates Clarity

This is not the easiest one to start with but it’s been very important for me in the last year especially. Clarity, I realize, is not something that just exists. I have found that I have had to generate clarity in my business through a combination of thinking deeply about things, journaling, discussing with my coach or mastermind buddy and most importantly, by doing.

It’s like knowing the path that leads to your home from your favorite cafe or a place you frequent. You don’t need to follow a GPS or read instructions on how to get home. You just know it because it is clear in your mind. Such clarity is something you actively need to generate about your life, about what you value, about what you aspire towards (both in personal and business life), who your business serves, what your business offers (as services, products, programs), what design guidelines you hold valuable, how you want to communicate to your clients/students, and how you want to build relationships with your peers, and so on and so forth.

For example, if you are a parent and being present with your kids each evening is important to you, you then know clearly at what time you need to shut down your computer - without fail.

As you can see that this clarify goes beyond simply knowing your niche. It’s about what is important to you. Not all parts of you business and life are completely lined up neatly in a row at all times. But if you can take some time to get some of these overarching things crystal clear for yourself, you will find many other decisions and projects and actions will fall into place neatly. Also, once you get clear it seems that with regular reflection and journaling, you enter into a deeper level of clarity!

2| A Successful Web Designer Cultivates Patience

This is something that I am continuing to cultivate and patience is certainly a virtue. Patience is needed at all stages of starting and growing your business. Patience in gaining that clarity (mentioned in point 1), patience in acquiring clients, patience in building a portfolio, patience in crafting your voice, patience in seeing your bank balance grow, patience with your own design skills, patience with your business skills and so on and so forth.

One of the most important aspects of patience we need to cultivate is towards clients. As a self-employed web design business-owner, you are most likely dealing with clients directly. And your clients will come from all types of backgrounds and regions of the world and they will have various levels of intra-personal and communication skills. Plus, even the nicest, kindest person may have a bad day which will lead them to do certain things that could potentially trigger or upset you. Moreover, we may be having a bad day and could misinterpret a completely innocent comment of a client. (I have sadly done that one time and I know that he would never want to say anything intentionally hurtful). So the more we can cultivate patience for our clients, the easier the projects will be and our own experience in creating a successful result for them.

3| A Successful Web Designer Keeps An Optimistic Mindset

There’s a proverb, I believe, it’s an ancient Chinese saying that goes like this: “Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps, a singing bird will come”. What I understand this means is that if we keep a positive mind, green and untainted by dirt, then we create a welcome home for a joyful singing bird, or opportunities and goodwill. Now being optimistic doesn’t mean being unrealistic and throwing facts out the door. But cultivating a positive mindset that is uplifting and focuses on the good is very important for persevering. You see, too often, our mind follows the line of what’s wrong: What’s wrong with my marketing, what’s wrong with my client acquisition skills, what’s wrong with my design skills, what’s wrong with me. And this is a very dangerous path. This tendency of the mind to notice what’s wrong puts a dark filter on our eyes through which we only see the “mistakes” and “errors”. And that can quickly drain one’s energy and self-confidence.

Of course, we can look at things that can be improved and tightened and refined in our business and I have shared in Blog 084 with the BBB method how to spot the bottleneck in your business and resolve it.

But we need to cultivate a habit of noticing progress made so far. We need to be aspirational for future opportunities. We need to cultivate an optimistic mindset so that when we face dire times, we can rely on our positive mindset to lift us up and out to the path of joy, peace and success.

There was a moment in my own business when I was lamenting how slowly my business was growing and how revenue was barely just trickling in. That’s when, sitting there in the middle of the living room, with tears flowing down my face, my husband brought up the spreadsheet that I had built to track my revenue. He took the data and made a graph out of it. And lo and behold, I was shocked. The graph showed me how my average monthly revenue was on the rise. I could not read the date on the spreadsheet to see that, but once I saw the graph, I was uplifted. That was the turning point in my business mindset. Now when thinking about my business revenue, instead of the voice in my head repeating “It’s growing so slowly!!!”, the voice in my head now said, “It’s on the rise!”.

4| A Successful Web Design Business Owner Cultivates A Resilient Mind

This is about being resilient in the face of rejections. And this trait has to be cultivate as well over time. Especially, in the early years of your business, when the momentum has still not picket up, you are likely to hear things like,

“You pricing is beyond our budget”
”Thank you but we have decided to go with another designer”
”We like what you have presented and at this time we have decided to stick with the site we have”
”We would love to work with you but right now we are swamped with projects”

And that’s if you are lucky. Often there’s just crickets - where the client seems to have fallen off the face of the earth and is no longer responding to your follow-ups. They could have run into personal challenges or just gotten busy with the million other things in their lives.

Also, if you are building an email list (which I highly recommend you start asap), you will notice that with each email you send out, somebody or the other will unsubscribe. And may be because we are so excited for the people in our email list, or we are just too sensitive as a starting business owner, I don’t know what all the reasons are, but that unsubscribe can hurt real bad. It’s like someone breaking up with you over the phone or worse just falling off the face of the earth (see earlier reference to people falling off the face of the earth!).

Yes, I have been there in both scenarios. Your fledging new business has not yet built the strength to withstand this kind of rejection. But the key word here is: yet. Soon, you will realize that clients who don’t want to work with you are creating room for you to focus on those who want, or creating time in your schedule so you can work on parts of your business that still need some care. Soon, you will realize that when people unsubscribe, it’s really nothing against you. They may even like you and follow you elsewhere but right now they are simply overwhelmed and want to streamline their inbox because they are working on their own sense of clarity. And you will realize that they are self-selecting themselves out of your email list and in that they are really doing you a favor because otherwise you would have to pay for an email subscriber who is not really your ideal client. How kind of them - you will soon thank them for their thoughtfulness!

And finally, the rejections from clients will not ping your heart that much. Soon, you will be focused on serving your dream clients and then when a potential client project doesn’t work out, you will know that divine timing is in play and they may come back to you at a later date when the stars are better aligned for your collaborative project. So, no big deal!

5| A Successful Web Designer Knows She Is A Force For Good

What do I mean by that? A force for good! Yes, a force for good. This is what I mean:

When you have cultivated the clarity in your business that you exist to serve and to help your clients, that because your business exists you are making a difference in someone’s life, then you know that you are a force for good. When so many clients are struggling to get their business become visible online, when they are striving through their own mind viruses of “I am not good enough” and still trying to make something happen, when clients have kids at home from school lockdowns and ailing family members, and find time at midnight to respond to your emails and make something moving in their business, when clients are trying to make a dream come true with their business while working a full-time job, when clients are afraid of technology because when she was a little girl some male-figure told her that she will break the computer or mess it up, and then she puts all her faith in you to help her navigate the scary online world, then you know that your business is needed and is making a difference for all of these people.

When you know that your business is helping people, you build a sense of confidence in your ability to make a difference. This confidence shows up in how you write client proposals, how you convey to them your design process over that virtual zoom meeting, and in how you deliver the work and work through challenges. When you know you are a force for good, all good forces come to uplift and support you.

What Traits Have Helped You On Your Journey?

So these are the five traits that a successful web designer needs to cultivate. And you may already have these and many other such traits helping you along the way. Let me know in the comments which other traits you’ve cultivated that made a difference in your business journey for the better!

You have a dream to build a thriving web design business? You can make it happen!

Peace,
Sophia

086: Inner-Circle Method of Finding Your First or Next Web Design Client

Finding your first client as a new web designer might feel like climbing Mount Everest - an arduous, unfamiliar and challenging endeavor. But once you have the right approach and strategy, it doesn’t have to be. In this article, I will share with you one of many (web design) client finding strategies that you can put into practice today.

If finding your first client or even your next client is what you are trying to solve, then I’ll guess that you are working on solving through the bottleneck in the first quadrant of your business. I highly recommend that you read through blog article No. 84 which outlines the four categories of your business (quadrants) as well as introduces you to the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough strategy that you can use over and over as your business grows.

See that article here: 084: How to Grow Your Web Design Business Using the BBB Strategy

So this category you are working on solving is Marketing which includes any action you take to create traffic to your site and to build visibility of your business and specifically of your services. You need to start getting the word out about your web design business and let people know what your business is about and that you are ready to serve new clients.

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What do Web Design Clients Need?

Now, think about what do clients need before they can hire you? And here we are talking about people who know they need a website and are in the market for a web designer. These clients are already informed about what they need (their pain point) and have some sort of an urgency to get the website made.

They first need to:
1. know that you exist. They need to have seen your website or your content online or seen you in person or seen your business info in print somewhere.
2. they need to see that you can deliver what you say you will deliver. They need to see a portfolio or some kind of a qualification and expertise.

So let’s target the second need first - the need to see a portfolio. We address this first because if you don’t have a portfolio, then even if they know that you exist and find your website, they are less likely to hire you without a proof of your expertise. So let’s prepare your business to receive those clients by building a portfolio, building that credibility factor first.

But as soon as I said that, it sounds like a catch 22, right? How do I build a portfolio, if clients don’t hire me, and if they don’t hire me, how will I build a portfolio?

Don’t worry. Here’s my solution out of this dilemma:
Build a portfolio that you can then use to find your ideal clients in the future.

Reach Out To Your Inner-Circle

As a brand new web designer, what will be the quickest ROI (return of investment) of your time so that you can quickly build out a portfolio? The answer: reaching out to your inner-circle. You can reach out to your family, your friends and close relatives and let them know that you are doing web design and offering that as a service.

Now reaching to friends and family may not sound that exciting. But I am not talking about contacting every friend and family member. Consider a handful of close people at first whom you feel comfortable of reaching out. It’s quite likely that they may have a side-hustle or a project they would love to have a website for but they never told you about it.

Bank On Your Existing Social Capital

Why do I suggest reaching out to your inner-circle? Because these are the people with whom you have the greatest social capital. In other words, they already know, like and trust you. You don’t have to convince them of your skills. They know you and are familiar with what you are capable of and can trust you even without you showing them a portfolio. Plus, they know you can’t run away - they most likely know where you live. LOL.

That’s why you can very likely convince them to give you a chance to build a website so that you can create your first or second website and build out a portfolio. And this is what you need ⏤ a portfolio of websites to showcase that you know what you are doing. This is what will help you get out of your inner-circle pretty quickly and start getting clients outside of friends and family.

How many sites to aim for? My suggestion is to aim for minimum 3 and maximum 6 for your starting portfolio.

And just because you are building sites for friends and family, doesn’t mean you’ve gotta do it for free. You may not charge your full going rate that you are aiming to be hired for but a nominal fee will help them be invested in your project and value your work. You may feel the need to undercharge enormously for your first website and hey, if it’s for your mama or papa, don’t sweat it. There’s so much they have done for you that very likely that cutting them a deal won’t be a big deal! Most important is to get that portfolio of 3 to 6 websites created and under your belt.

This strategy of reaching your inner-circle is a great one for starting web designers. But it can literally be used any time in your career. Of course, as you become more established you will want to get paid like a business-owner ⏤ appropriately. There are other strategies that you can put into place once you have exhausted the friends and family inner-circle. And I will be sharing with you those ideas in my upcoming blogs and videos.

Action step: Think of 3 people whom you can reach out to today and offer them to build a website for your portfolio. Jot it down and see how that feels. Then write or call the first person you feel inspired to reach out.

Peace,
Sophia

084: How to Grow Your Web Design Business Using the BBB Strategy

On your journey to building a successful design business, you will inevitably run into challenges. These are the bottlenecks to your progress. Each challenge, once you overcome it, brings you to the next level. Solve for the bottleneck and you unlock the next level. Knowing what kind of a challenge you are facing will help you tremendously in breaking through that bottleneck. In this article, I will share with you how to spot bottlenecks and ways to solve them using the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy.

Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy is all about understanding what the four main business categories are, how they apply to your specific business model and then learning to assess the revenue bottleneck through this lens. Read on to see my examples and explanation.

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Four Categories That Need Your Attention

As an online entrepreneur, these are some overarching categories in your business that need your attention:
1. Marketing (Content Creation, List Building, Public Relations, Ads - long term)
2. Acquisition (Short-term Client acquisition)
3. Production (Serving Clients)
4. Administrative (Accounting, HR, Taxes)

To make the distinction between Marketing and Acquisition, think of marketing as all the things you do to create traffic to your site, to create inquiries for your services. And acquisition is everything that you do to turn that traffic/inquiry into clients. So that means responding to client requests, writing proposals, doing complimentary consultations, these all fall under Acquisition.

Production is the actual delivering of the task you are hired for, so in your case the web site end result. Things that can be a bottleneck is your workflow, how you set boundaries, communication with your clients, scope creep where the project included x number of things and now it has grown to include several other things, delivering the launch training, domain transfer/redirect process, and so on.

Administration includes everything you need to keep the business running. Keeping records of income and expenses, doing the tax work, managing your team, taking care of legal aspects like establishing an LLC, privacy policy, and so on and so forth.

You need to find out what that bottleneck is, solve for it, and then move on to the next level. At each level, you will find a new bottleneck, either in the same category or in a different one. Round and round this goes!

Example of My Bottleneck

Let me give you an example of what I am currently facing in my business. I have a web design business where I am serving clients in a variety of ways. There are full website builds, smaller redesigns, quick fixes and tweaks, third-party app integration and one to one trainings or hourly packages. My previous marketing efforts are paying off for my design business as I have clients who find me and hire me. And now I am running into a bottleneck.

My bottleneck: hitting a revenue and time ceiling with 1 to 1 design projects.

The bottleneck is that I can only serve so many clients in the number of hours given. My time is limited and with 1 to 1 client projects so is my revenue. I am working for dollars in exchange of hours and so this is to be expected. I can continue like this and that can work fine. But I aspire to create more breathing room in my schedule. I aspire for more time and I want to find leveraged ways of serving so I can earn more as well. That’s where my bottleneck is.

That’s one of the reasons I created the Millionaire Web Designer Program so that I could serve more people in the limited time that I have while increasing my earnings. But now I am running into a new bottleneck.

New bottleneck: I am still building an audience base of web designers and I am at the early stage of marketing.

So my new bottleneck is marketing and finding the budding web designers for whom my offer can be really valuable. Once I can find them, build the like, know and trust factor, then we can work together in building their web design business.

This type of bottleneck is typical of any new business where you do not have an audience or a client base. So your first step is to find the right marketing tool that will help you find the clients for your product or service. New web designers face this problem where they have the skills and the desire to serve but don’t know how to find the clients who will hire them. Once you solve for this bottleneck, then you have made it to the next level. Later on that new level, you will solve for the next bottleneck such as communication, workflow, finance management, leveraged services/packages and so on. But for now, you have made progress!

So if you are new web designer working on creating a consistent income stream with web design projects, there’s one question I want you to ask yourself:  

What Bottleneck Am I Facing In My Business Right Now?

Is it that you don’t have your first client? (See blog 085 for a Client Finding Strategy you can put into place today.) Or you have clients but you are not scheduling them properly and finding that you are overbooking your calendar. Or you find a client, work for them, then you have no clients and you are in acquisition mode again. Then you get a client, deliver their website and after the project is over, you are back in search for the next client. Tell me in the comments what your bottleneck is. I will be happy to give you laser coaching in the comments to help you forward!

If marketing is a bottleneck for you, I want you to brainstorm ways you can get more eyes on your business. What kinds of things can you undertake so that you can get seen? There are many different options from creating content on your site, to guest-posting, to finding platforms where you can present your services, connecting with your existing network.

This is how you apply the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy to open up the revenue flow. Use this strategy and unlock the next stage in your business.

You have a dream to build a thriving web design business? You can make it happen!

Peace,
Sophia