Behind the scenes: September 2021

Behind the Scenes
Written By Christy Price
Behind the Scenes of my Web Design business - September 2021
 
Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you click through and pay for a product, I’ll be compensated at no cost to you.

Last month I started this behind-the-scenes series. My goal is to give you a look at what a web design business actually looks like. The good AND the not-so-good. What I’ve found helpful as well as what isn’t currently working for me.

September

Earlier this year, I decided that I would devote September to launching the first Squarespace template in my template shop. And as the year wore on, I knew I needed some time off as well. (I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a lot of overwhelm and fatigue lately.) So my September revenue was only about a third of a normal month - and most of the income was thanks to course sales and affiliate payouts. The upside to decreased revenue? I had 10 days in Cozumel with my husband and only opened my computer twice. And I got that template launched!

This month I also started setting up a “real” office in our house, so if you have calls with me I won’t be in the corner of my bedroom anymore! We had a rarely used guest room upstairs that is out of the way and quiet, so I can have more focus while working. The downside is my older dog has trouble with the stairs, so she doesn’t come up and hang out with me as much - but my husband still works from his office downstairs, so she’s not lonely. :)

This September marked 3 years since I moved my business to solely Squarespace web design and I'm so grateful to you for following along.

Vacation

Cozumel. It’s such an easy vacation - a short flight from Texas directly to the island and a lovely resort we’ve been visiting since our daughter was small. My husband spends about half the days diving, and I spend ALL the days reading on the beach with occasional swims. This time we stayed for 10 days, rather than our usual 7, but I was ready to get back home after a week. It was wonderful to be away and relax, but apparently, I can only do that for a limited amount of time before I go stir crazy!

Cozumel vacation photos September 2021

Template Shop

September was all about creating the workbook and course that accompany Sway, so I didn’t offer any additional pre-sales. One of the August purchasers launched her site and did a lovely job! You can see it in the Template Showcase on the SWAY sales page. I launched on the last day of the month, so no idea how the shop is going to do with just one template. I’ll let you know if there’s any revenue next month!

I revisited three courses I took on launching a template shop and I’ll drop those below in the Learnings section.

Income Streams

This month had three income streams: 1:1 work (barely), course sales, and affiliate income.

1:1 Work

Almost none! This was a welcome break. I needed some time to step away and think about what services bring me joy and which ones I was dreading coming back to. I’m still thinking through what my 1:1 services will look like for 2022, but there will likely be some shifts.

  • The bulk of income here (which wasn’t much) came from people pre-booking hourly sessions with me for October.

  • I did small site updates for 3 past clients, maybe 3 hours worth total.

Course Sales

I offered a coupon on my course Make Money with your Blog to webinar attendees and had several people purchase after the webinar.

Affiliate Income

This month I had payouts from:

Expenses

This month I spent money on:

  • paying a local company to hook up a hardwired ethernet connection in my new home office space
  • domain renewals
  • VPN renewal, especially important because I was working over wifi while I traveled
  • a whiteboard for the new office space
  • Crowdcast one month, to host a webinar
  • Zoom one month so I could host a client call with >2 attendees
  • Flodesk one month, trying this out for email marketing before their beta pricing goes away, and to see how it compares to MailerLite

Learning

When I started thinking about creating a template shop, I knew I could learn from some amazing women who’ve figured out how to do the same in their businesses. No need to reinvent the wheel. I actually took 3 template shop courses, and found each of them valuable, before I got started on my own shop. This month, I revisited each course as they all offer a little something different and I wanted to check I was covering all my bases with my shop.

Scale with Templates

  1. Kate Scott’s Scale with Templates
    Kate reminds me of one of my favorite professors - she knows her stuff and her course is chock full of important information on everything from choosing a niche to tech options to creating a solid customer experience. Students also have access to a private Facebook group. This was the first template course I took and it laid the groundwork for how I create my templates and onboard and offboard customers.

  2. 23&9 Creative’s The Template Factory
    Chelsea is like your own personal cheerleader with encouragement in every step. She covers the basics, but also delves into the accompanying info your customers will need to be successful and really opened my eyes to ideas on where to sell my templates. In addition, she offers a Template Team Community with a great monthly speaker series.

  3. Squarestylist’s Standout Squarespace
    This is an incredibly comprehensive course on everything from client management to custom code, and the price reflects that. Since I’ve been working in Squarespace for several years, I was concerned about the value it would offer me but I’m learning a LOT. I’m including it here because it came with a bonus Sellings Squarespace Templates course and that’s the method I’m using to deliver my templates so it happens automatically.

Content Creation

Blog

I’d been getting lots of questions about Squarespace Members Areas and why I don’t personally use it, so I put all my feelings and observations in a post on Why I Use Teachable Instead of Squarespace Members Areas. I also started these behind the scenes posts, kicking off with Behind the scenes: August 2021.

Instagram @christypricewebdesign

I’m sticking with the roughly once-a-week post schedule, with more occasional stories. I’m finding freedom in not having to create additional content for Instagram at the moment and spending less time on the platform. I’ve been feeling some overwhelm with all the information coming in via social media lately and may start limiting my time on Insta and Facebook on purpose. Plus, the constant barrage of highly politicized posts is exhausting… I miss the days when my feed was all babies and puppies.

Ask Us Anything

Kerstin Martin and I teamed up again this quarter for an hour-long Ask Us Anything session. We had an amazing turnout and it’s fun to do something that is free to attend where we can share what has worked for us, without the pressure of creating a sales-y webinar with slides and follow-up emails.

Email

My monthly email went out to subscribers at the beginning of September. I used a different email marketing platform than normal, just trying out something new to see if I like the user interface and to see if I got similar open and click rates. The answer so far: yes and yes. I’m comparing MailerLite and Flodesk and considering moving everything over to Flodesk for ease of use, even though it means losing some features.

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:

The Numbers (compared to August)

Website Visitors: ~11,000 (-1,000). This is down about 7% from the same timeframe in 2020.

Email List Subscribers: 1,519 (+53). Most new subscribers sign up for my lead magnet.

Instagram Followers: 1,116 (+28). I was surprised to gain this many followers with so little posting.

YouTube Subscribers: 533 (+41). I had planned to post a video a week in 2021, but stopped in May because it did not bring me joy. Also surprised to still be gaining subscribers here with no recent videos.

The Wrap-Up

I’m grateful for the excellent guidance in the template courses I took, which made launching my own template shop so much easier. And with a great deal less stress than if I’d tried to figure it all out on my own. While I’m completely burned out from online summits with mulitple speakers, I’m still finding online courses to be incredibly valuable.

Also very happy for some time away from 1:1 client work to think about how to focus next year. By the end of 2021, I expect I’ll have completed 11 full website designs, 21 Designer for a Day®s, and about 70 Squarespace help one-hour screen shares. They each have pieces that appeal to me, so I need to decide how to divvy up the calendar for 2022.

Christy Price

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Behind the scenes: August 2021