Behind the scenes: April 2022
April ☔️
Oh, April in Austin, Texas... bluebonnets, great weather, and enough pollen to fill in the Grand Canyon. I escaped my allergies for a week celebrating my mom’s 80th birthday on a trip to Florida. It was a good time to not work for a bit, as Squarespace has been particularly buggy lately. I hope they get their act together soon for all our sakes.
I hosted a Squarespace Designers meet-up that was so much fun! If you are interested in meeting other designers in Austin who use Squarespace, follow me on Instagram and I’ll post the next meetup. I’m shooting for one each quarter.
Coming Up
👉 Mark your calendar. Will Myers (a Squarespace Expert and developer) and I are co-hosting an Ask Us Anything session on Tuesday, May 17 at 10am Central Time.
Drop questions in the Q&A section and vote for others. During our session, we'll answer questions in order of votes for about an hour.
Can't make it live? There will be a replay. Click here to see your local time and register.
Income Streams
This month had three income streams: 1:1 work, course and template sales, and affiliate income.
1:1 Work
This month I was due to build and launch a website, but it will be coming next month instead. COVID got in the way of my client completing their content, so we pushed the project. Instead, I ended up taking some time to evaluate my client onboarding process and made some tweaks there. I’m finding that getting content from clients has become more challenging lately for me - my processes hadn’t changed, but the world sure has and I need to make adjustments.
I did 5 Squarespace Help calls, created a pdf workbook for my Make Money with your Blog course, and took some time to reflect and plan.
Course & Template Sales
I sold 2 Squarespace templates (both SWAY) and had 2 enrollments in the Make Money with your Blog course this month. I’ve got my next lesson planned out to add to MMWYB and will record that this month. Some of these came later in the month, so we’ll see only part of this income reflected in payouts this month.
Affiliate Income
My affiliate income was back up to over $1500 this month, so I’m happy about that.
This month I’m highlighting the not-glamorous but SO IMPORTANT legal stuff that goes along with online businesses:
1. Termageddon is my preferred source for website legal polices - you add the code to your site and the policies are automatically updated when the laws change. I use these on my own website and recommend them to clients. They've also just rolled out a GDPR-compliant cookie policy.
2. The Creative Law Shop is where I purchased my web designer contract. They also offer legally sound contract templates for everything from hiring to incorporating. Use coupon code CHRISTY10 for 10% off.
2. Fathom Analytics to replace Squarespace Analytics and Google Analytics on my own website. It's beautiful and easy to use. If you are concerned about digital privacy, you'll definitely want to try it out.
This Month’s Income Percentages
This month I took a week off and had to push a website build to next month, so my 1:1 income was much lower than usual. Which means that affiliate sales and courses and template sales make up a bigger chunk. Thank goodness for passive income!
Expenses
This month I spent money on:
- A new course ($997) and I'll keep you posted on whether it was worth it.
- An evergreen summit pass ($84) on evergreen funnels. I will let you know what I think after I work my way through it.
Yeah, I still haven’t finished the copywriting course or Lizzy’s course I bought in January. And now I’ve purchased more. I guess I keep thinking I’ll find the magic bullet? It would probably help considerably if I actually took the courses I bought.
Content Creation
Blog
I had 4 posts this month! Yay me! I guess that’s another thing I spent more time on. I do love blogging, so it’s more fun than work. The Auto Layout roundup post in particular was a lot of work, but I think turned out to be a good resource.
Instagram @christypricewebdesign
Email Newsletter
My monthly email went out to subscribers in early March. You can read it here.
Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn
I use MissingLettr to schedule my blog posts to automatically share on each of these platforms on a set schedule. Save 50% off the first three months with any new plan.
Tools & Tech
Here are the tools and tech I relied on this month:
- Loom for recording quick screenshares for clients & course videos
- HoneyBook for proposals, invocing, and all the CRM for my full website design service
- Canva for blog thumbnails, website mockups, and Instagram posts
- MailerLite for my monthly email newsletter
- Wave for accounting and one-off invoicing
- Zapier for adding transactions to Wave automatically
- Teachable for hosting courses and templates for sale
- Zoom for client calls and screenshares
- Squarespace for my site and client builds
- SquarespaceWebsites Tools Extension PRO for porting over blogs from Squarespace 7.0 sites to new 7.1 sites
- SQSP Themes plugin bundle for related posts and blog sidebar for client sites
- Heather Tovey's Squarespace Block ID Finder Chrome extension to easily target blocks with CSS code
The Numbers (compared to March)
Website Visitors: ~12,600 (-1,500). I have no idea why this went down. I did more blog posting. Maybe there is just more competition for keywords or maybe my posts are shorter? If I continue to see a downward trend, I’ll look into it.
Email List Subscribers: 1,840 (+55). Most new subscribers sign up for my lead magnet.
Instagram Followers: 1,368 (+31). A few posts from me, but some friends shared a couple of those and I think that drove most of my new followers.
YouTube Subscribers: 736 (+34). I didn’t have any new videos this month but did a few kind comments on older videos.
The Wrap-Up
I know! I still haven’t gotten through those courses I bought back in January and I bought two more! Ugh. Can you hide my credit card until I finish these?
April was a slower month. I took a week off and then ended up having a two-week build rescheduled which lead to a lot more free time than I was expecting. Revenue definitely reflected that, but that’s part of being a solopreneur. When you don’t work, you don’t make money. Fortunately, I had some passive income from courses and templates and some Squarespace Help bookings.
I’m expecting May and June to be slower as well… I have some big chunks of planned time off and I’m only taking on one new custom build (in addition to the delayed build).
