Behind the scenes: August 2021
I’ve been inspired by some amazing women sharing Behind the Scenes of their businesses, offering transparency around their streams of income, the tools they use, and what they are working on. Thanks to Ruth, Sandra, and Dani for the glimpse behind the curtain. I hope that this post about my Squarespace web design business offers some information you’ve been wondering about or answers questions you’ve been asking in your own business.
Income Streams
This month had four income streams: 1:1 work, course sales, template sales, and affiliate income.
1:1 Work
August was a bit out of the ordinary for 1:1 work:
I helped with a nonprofit website (not my typical client, but this nonprofit is close to my heart). I don’t normally work with nonprofits because there are multiple stakeholders and it’s difficult to keep timelines in check and have a good outcome with so many cooks in the kitchen. But when it’s in your backyard, sometimes it’s a cause you are excited to work with and it’s worth the extended timelines and additional edits.
Designer for a Day® for a higher education copywriter. Her new site isn’t live yet as she’s still making some copy tweaks, but here’s what she had to say after our day together: “Thank you so much, Christy!! You've thought of everything in this follow-up email! I so enjoyed spending the day with you and looking at my site is the main way I cheer myself up now!!” I love these days. They tend to be part educational and part collaboration and it’s a joy to work with microbusinesses and entrepreneurs.
Designer for a Day® for a Forbes 30 under 30 Game Changers in energy, except this was for her personal website. I normally don’t start from scratch in DfaD, but I’ve worked with Katie on other projects and we decided that 2 DfaDs would be perfect to get her set up, let her run with the site, and then launch together. We have the second DfaD scheduled for late September to get her ready for launch. Here’s a sneak peek of her new color palette:
I also did some hourly work for an author, an entrepreneur, a mental health group, an artist, and a financial advisor. It never gets old!
Course Sales
I ran a 30% off sale on my course Make Money with your Blog in August and had quite a few purchases. Some affiliate sales came through too - thanks affiliates! I’m planning on adding more to the course next year and the price will be increasing then, so if you’re interested in taking the course, you can purchase now at the lower price with access to all future updates.
Template Sales
I’m working on opening up a Squarespace template shop and, while I wasn’t planning to offer presales, I did sell 3 SWAY templates before I’ve launched! I’ve now set up a wait list, so if you’re interested in the template you can sign up and receive a discount when I officially launch, which should be at the end of September 2021. I plan to launch with the SWAY template for service providers, course creators, and bloggers as well as two templates for authors. Then I plan to roll out at least one more template before the end of the year. Check out the SWAY template:
Affiliate Income
This month I had payouts from:
Expenses
This month I spent money on:
a few Virtual Assistant hours to help with reviewing the upcoming Template Shop
my last (I think) annual Vimeo Pro subscription since all my videos now go directly into Teachable
new office furniture from IKEA - I’m converting part of our spare bedroom into an office space as the mini office in the corner of my bedroom wasn’t working as well as I’d hoped
payment to a Zapier expert to help me with some Zap workarounds that were frustrating me
Domain name renewals
Content
Blog
It was a slow blog month for me. I updated my Squarespace Plugins post and that was it.
Instagram @christypricewebdesign
I decided at the end of July that I was feeling burned out with Instagram. For over a year I’ve maintained a schedule of posting 3x a week and it was just too much. This month I posted once a week for a total of 4 posts and I quickly shared some stories from friends’ posts. I’m much happier with this schedule of once a week posting! I feel like I’m sharing things that I want to share, rather than feeling like I need to come up with filler content. I don’t get many leads from Instagram anyway, although it’s possible this will change with my Squarespace Template Shop, but for now, with the reduced number of posts, I’m enjoying it rather than feeling overwhelmed.
My monthly email went out to subscribers at the beginning of August. You can view 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.
Tools & Tech
Here are the tools and tech I relied on this month:
- Squarespace for my site and client builds
- Canva for blog thumbnails, website mockups, and Instagram posts
- SquarespaceWebsites Tools Extension PRO porting over a blog to a new website with one click, backups of site style tweaks
- SQSP Themes plugin bundle for blog sidebar, related posts, lightbox anything
- Will Myers' Split Screen Layout Design Pack for split layouts on The Gathering website
- Coolors for The Luckiest Woman color palette work
- Heather Tovey's Squarespace Block ID Finder Chrome extension to easily target blocks with CSS code
- HoneyBook for proposals, invocing, and all the CRM for my full website design service
- MailerLite for email marketing
- Wave for accounting and one-off invoicing
- Zapier for adding transaction to Wave automatically
- Teachable for hosting courses and templates for sale
The Numbers (compared to July)
Website Visitors: ~12,000 (+1,000)
Email List Subscribers: 1,466 (+128)
Instagram Followers: 1,088 (+34)
YouTube Subscribers: 492 (+30)
Personal
August was a slow month in my business, as is typical. It’s still strange to me that web design is a “seasonal” business, but it absolutely is - August is always slow. I took off a week of work to spend with my daughter before she went back to college and did less content creation than normal. I’m planning more time off in September to celebrate a big wedding anniversary, as well as less 1:1 work to focus on launching Squarespace templates.
Writing this post was an interesting exercise. I don’t normally take time out monthly to review exactly what work I’ve done, what tools I’ve used, and my numbers. It was helpful to me and I hope you found something valuable here as well! Thanks for following along.
