I’m delighted to highlight Sarah Moon in this Creator Spotlight. She is a goldmine of information for anyone doing business online. I’ve been following Sarah for about five years and have learned so much about marketing from her newsletters and posts.

Sarah Moon (she/her) is a veteran marketing and design expert, and one of the original Squarespace Specialists. Prior to starting her company in 2008, she led public and nonprofit sector communications departments — including managing public outreach when a food fight turned into a riot (yes, this is a true story). Sarah and her team specialize in movement marketing for thought leaders and game-changing companies, using their proprietary Aligned Authority™ framework for all that they do, from SEO to content strategy to website design. Subscribe to her awesome weekly newsletter at hey.sarahmoon.net.

Hi Sarah! Tell us a little about how your business got started.

I started SM&Co out of necessity, quite frankly. I was part of the first wave of layoffs in 2008, during the Great Recession. Portland, where I live, was hit particularly hard and there were no jobs to speak of— I would be competing with 500 other people for positions that were effectively a demotion from what I had done previously. I always had entrepreneurial side gigs (content writing, blog development, etc) and basically started offering that to people locally. Over time, I started teaching these subjects at a local college, and that helped raise my profile as well. SM&Co grew from a freelance business to a fully-fledged "real deal" company and I eventually hired my husband, whose background is in program development, and several awesome freelancers. Now, we're a team of four and my core team are all employees of the company (we still do maintain a roster of freelancers, though). Hiring people and nurturing their growth is a core value of mine, and I hope to continue to grow our team in this way.

How did you come to work with Squarespace?

I discovered Squarespace when I was teaching at the local college. Many of my students were less comfortable with technology than I'd expected and I needed to find a solution that allowed them to not have to worry about things like hosting. Squarespace was on version 5 at that time, I believe — this was when Anthony, the founder, still occasionally answered support tickets, believe it or not! We work with a variety of platforms, however, and strive to match clients with the right tech, whether that's websites, newsletters, scheduling, or CRMs. Our clients really rely on us to give them advice and guide them in these choices, so we work hard to stay current so we can continue to be that resource for them.

Is there a product you've created that you're particularly proud of? Can you tell us a little about its main benefit and target audience?

We're extremely thrilled with our new flagship solution, the Aligned Authority™ Accelerator. This is a solution that no one else offers, and is the result of a year of work refining and fine-tuning our methodology and framework. This is quite honestly the distillation of two decades of work and point of view around how to create a marketing movement that's aligned with our values and uses accessible tools such as search engine optimization, content creation, and clear-eyed perspective. Basically, movement marketing has historically been inaccessible to most businesses and organizations because it relies heavily on paid advertising and access to earned media. We know there's another way to achieve the same results — basically, we're democratizing movement marketing in our accelerator. I wrote about this in my weekly newsletter — here's the link to check out that edition.

What is the best piece of advice you've ever been given as a designer/developer?

I may sound like a broken record at this point, but have a point of view. Remember that clients have many choices and if you stand for something and communicate your why, the right clients will follow. This is something I learned many, many years ago in one of my first marketing jobs and it's stuck with me ever since.

If you had a piece of advice for developers or designers, or something you wish you'd figured out much sooner than you did, what would it be?

Aside from all of my talk about point of view, I encourage creatives to think about creating a really sellable productized service—this was an absolute game changer for us in terms of revenue and developing deeply refined processes. If I could go back in time, I would create a productized service BEFORE we offered custom projects, as our processes would have been much more dialed in and projects would have been more profitable. (I have written a lot about this, this blog post is a good starting point.) There's a lot of perceived glamor in complex, custom projects, but those don't teach you to get really really efficient and to have a very dialed in process. They don't allow you to train others to do all or parts of the work, so you can't scale. Those are lessons that you've got to learn if you're going to thrive and not burn out.

I'm going to cheat and also give a second piece of advice, directly related to the first: Hire before you're ready or comfortable. It's okay to start with freelancers, but if you really want to grow, you'll need to hire real employees who are dedicated to your business and believe in your mission. I should have done this far before I did. A lot of the designers I mentor are very resistant to hiring and it's because they fear having people dependent on them for their livelihoods. I would challenge you, if this is your thought process, to question why this is so frightening. What messages have you received that have led you to believe you can't build a company that nurtures others? A lot of these messages come from systematic issues in our society and when you see it, you can't unsee it.

Do you have any words of wisdom for those developers and designers looking to get into the passive income world by creating Squarespace resources, such as templates or plugins?

Passive income isn't passive! It may actually be HARDER income to earn than your client work. Our company does make a fair amount of revenue passively through affiliate relationships and our Productized Services Quick Start Course, but that's the result of years of work in building a reputation (your reputation is everything), high quality content that drives problem-aware searchers, and having a body of work that proves we're an authority in the subjects we teach or promote. I see far too many new designers and other creatives jump into the world of templates and course creation without really building a point of view and a way for people to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Then they're frustrated because they aren't making sales, spend money on ads, but target the wrong audience, and end up in a spiral. I'm not saying that to discourage anyone, but rather to encourage you to get really, really good at what you do, speak up about what you care about in the industry, and then the passive income becomes far easier.

When you aren't hunkered down at the computer, creating amazing Squarespace tools and resources, how do you like to spend your spare time?

Our team operates on a four day workweek in general and I have built in a lot of downtime, as I believe that's essential for creative work and brain work in general.

In the summer I spend a lot of time on rivers and lakes, stand up paddle boarding. I'm very lucky to live in Oregon where beautiful outdoor spaces are preserved and accessible to all of us. I also spend a lot of time working with my dogs on new skills — one of my dogs and I take a freestyle dog dancing class on Zoom on Wednesday evenings with our awesome trainer, Coralyn of Venus & Mars K9.

I also enjoy things like bread baking, gardening, and enjoying the lovely inner Portland neighborhood. While we haven't gotten to do so in the last couple years, due to the global pandemic, I enjoy traveling and hope to make more time for that when it's appropriate.

I also am an avid reader and am always pushing books on anyone who will tolerate me!

What is your go-to karaoke song?

Islands in the Stream - but you don't want me singing!

Any new and exciting things coming up for you that we should be on the lookout for?

We're always refining and improving everything we do. At this point, we'll all in on our Aligned Authority™ model, and our team is focused on delivering that to our clients. However, we are going to offer that in a group coaching type modality in the future, which we're very excited about.

Additionally, we're in the process of updating our productized services course and will be adding a marketing unit to it based on the Aligned Authority™ framework.

We're also rolling out a new website program based on this model soon as well (we retired our old website program at the end of 2021).

Finally, we are once again offering done for you SEO services after a year off. While the Accelerator is a much deeper, more impactful experience, we realize that folks earlier in their businesses may not be ready for such an intensive experience, and we do love helping people get found on Google and build their authority online.

Any other tips or advice?

Start an email newsletter right now. Literally, stop what you're doing and start building your list — and talk to them regularly. We encourage our clients to begin emailing every other week and build up to once a week or more. Provide meaty, relevant information no one else can and make that connection.

I see far too many business owners distracted by what I call fancy busy work (think curating their Instagram grid) rather than engaging people in an audience that's literally opted in to hearing from them and it frustrates me to see so much potential wasted because it's literally not seen.

If the idea of writing seems overwhelming, do what we call a "walk and talk"—literally go for a walk and use the transcription feature on your phone and get your ideas down in the Notes App. Edit this up and voila! you have a newsletter.

Sarah Moon website / instagram