CHAPTER

5

Putting It out There

ONE FRIGID JANUARY EVENING IN 2012, KATY GATHRIGHT WALKED with her friend Imran Khoja on the sidewalk along the main road that runs through the New England campus of Williams College, where they were both seniors. As they walked toward Katy's dorm, shivering as the wind whipped around their necks, Imran started telling Katy about a new campus competition that he wanted to join. Students could submit their business proposals to a committee, which would then pick a winner to receive $15,000 in seed funding, along with office space and other support. The only problem was that the competition required a second teammate, and Imran wasn't sure who to ask.

“I could do it if you wanted me to, as long as I don't have to do anything major,” Katy told him.

“You're a genius!” Imran shouted. Even though Katy had thought he was hinting for her to offer her help, the thought hadn't yet crossed his mind. But now that he considered it, Katy was perfect: She already knew about his business idea, he trusted her, and they spent a lot of time together anyway. For the rest of the night, as Katy played beer pong with a friend, Imran sent her a series of text messages full of reasons why she should join his team for the competition.

Together, they submitted a business proposal for what they call Designed Good, a flash sales site in the tradition of Gilt or Zulily, but with a twist: All featured products would not only be beautiful, but they'd also be sustainably made. “The big idea was incorporating ethics and design, and doing it on a flash sales website,” says Katy. A few months later, while fleshing out the idea between class assignments and senior year festivities, they won the competition, and made plans to set up shop in Williamstown, Massachusetts, for the summer.

Katy, Imran, and a third Williams alum quickly launched the website, which allowed people to start signing up. Then, they started reaching out to brands that they thought might want to partner with them. They negotiated deals to sell the products at a big discount for a limited time to their members; the site would earn money by charging a small markup on those low prices. The first few products they planned to feature included a refillable water bottle that filtered water on the go, a company that upcycles old T-shirts into other products, like blankets and underwear, and bamboo shirts. (Upcycling refers to the process of turning old, discarded products into new and useful ones.)

Because Katy had worked as managing editor of the college paper, she created the company's blog. She posted about sustainability, what it was like to launch the start-up, and products that caught her eye. “We didn't plan it, but this whole aspect of storytelling behind the products has been huge. It differentiates us in the marketplace. I want our site to be a place you can hang out, read cool stories, and feel like you can visit every day,” she says.

In fact, her blog and related social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, are the main reason that 500 people signed up to join Designed Good within weeks of launch. “We're building community through content, so people don't just see the products but they're also interested in reading stories,” she says. She might profile a twenty-five-year-old New York City dweller who started an urban garden, or how other twenty-somethings are launching socially conscious businesses, or send a tweet to a popular fashion blogger who might be interested in exchanging guest posts. (I discovered Designed Good after Katy posted a link on the LinkedIn page of my high school, where she is an alum as well.) She's also guest-posted on other websites to help spread the word. And when new members sign up, they're immediately encouraged to invite friends, using financial incentives: Sign up ten friends, and you can pick up a twenty-dollar credit toward your next purchase. (They later changed their referral system so anyone who gets two friends to join receives free shipping.)

Blogging has helped Katy and Imran define their brand: “We want our website to embody a person—an older brother or older sister who has awesome ideas and awesome stuff that you aspire to have, and they have a bit of a socially conscious edge,” she adds. They also get valuable feedback; when a few blog posts on the upcycled underwear got a lot of buzz, they decided to feature that product in an upcoming sale. On Pinterest, Katy takes note of which products get the most repins and comments as part of her market research into which types of products will resonate most with members.

Just like Erica Sara and her race bling jewelry in the previous chapter, Katy thinks blogging helps potential customers feel that they know and trust the brand. And that helps her take her business to the very important next stage: making sales. In fact, Designed Good's social media presence is one reason why she thinks the company got such a high purchase rate on the first test run of the refillable water bottle: Out of 100 people notified about the sale, 17 people made the purchase—an exceptionally high rate for an online campaign.

Katy learned a central lesson about getting word about a new product or service: Earning trust, explaining why you exist, and letting people get to know you—all parts of building a brand—are essential to making people feel comfortable enough to buy from you. And putting the word out there often means stepping outside your comfort zone.

ALMOST FAMOUS

Celebrities have learned the importance of branding as well. Supermodels, who can expect their career highs before age thirty, often try to meld their reputations into something broader than just beauty so they can parlay their fame into a second career. Heidi Klum turned herself into a fashion icon, clothing designer, and host of Project Runway. Cindy Crawford launched skin care and home furnishings lines. Karolina Kurkova works as a host for high-end celebrity events while she considers her next step, possibly a line of baby products. Even young models know they have to build their brands early; twenty-something supermodel Coca Rocha gives her peers lessons on making the most of social media. (Coca herself has around 500,000 Twitter followers and maintains an active, and popular, Tumblr account.)

The supermodel lesson applies to the rest of us, too: If our full-time jobs eventually disappear, then our personal brands can make it easier to find new employment, and quickly. Those brands are as valuable to us as a medical license is to a doctor. It's what allows us to build our own following of customers, clients, and fans, even as we move from one venture to another. (Being distinguishable from our coworkers through a personal brand—if we're known for our expertise on, say, marketing through social media—can also make our bosses more likely to keep us around. We're not quite as replaceable by the latest, more affordable recent graduate.)

It's those brands that enable us to opt out of the bidding wars that take place on popular freelancing sites, where graphic designers living in India can underbid designers in urban American cities every time, because people pay more for something they know.

Among the many side-giggers with strong personal brands that I came across, April Bowles Olin, whom we met in the previous chapter, seems to exemplify “strong branding” best. Through her blog, video posts, and product descriptions, April, who has the dark hair and enthusiastic demeanor of Rachael Ray, comes across as someone you want to have on your side: She's friendly, creative, professional, and clearly loves her role as a promoter of creative businesses—and she knows exactly what she's talking about.

While it looks like she's just being herself, April consciously built her brand over time. She started in the online world over five years ago with a wedding planning blog that focused on do-it-yourself strategies, from bridal headbands to create-your-own invitations. But after she got married, she wasn't as interested in wedding cakes or bridal veils anymore.

Eventually, she settled on a new brand for herself: Blacksburg Belle. She had already been selling her jewelry on Etsy and fielding questions from people on how to do something similar, so she decided to start writing about how to build a successful creative business. All of her blogging was on the side: Her full-time job was as a therapist, working with at-risk adolescents in New York. “I was getting so emotionally involved with families and wanted some kind of creative outlet at home,” she says. She started offering group coaching lessons through the site, and soon quit her therapy work to focus full time on her creative business. She now earns about four times her former salary as a therapist.

April's secret success formula is obvious to anyone who takes a quick glance at her site. Her unique brand, and what she has to offer you, the visitor, is immediately obvious: She can help you grow your creative business. She can teach you how to excel in marketing, even if you think you hate it.

When she started blogging at her new site, BlacksburgBelle.com, she made sure her posts offered useful information to readers—specific tips on how to grow a business. At first, she spent more time writing for other people's blogs than her own; guest-posting was the main way she got word out about her new site. As a result of email pitches she sent to other popular bloggers, she was featured on BlogcastFM.com and wrote a guest post on DesignSponge.com, which led to 300 new newsletter subscribers in one day. “I was working my butt off to get featured any place that I could,” she says. Her efforts paid off: Soon she started getting 800 page views a day, and today over 5,000 people have subscribed to her email newsletter.

Along the way, April continued to build a sense of trust and loyalty with her readers by sharing a mix of personal and professional stories; she emphasizes the importance of sharing your “why,” or what drives you to create your business. “People want to buy from a person, especially if it's handmade stuff or you're providing one-on-one services,” she says. The better they understand and trust you, the more likely they are to ultimately make a purchase. She finds that most of her customers who buy group coaching lessons are long-time subscribers to her email newsletter. “I already have relationships with them built up over time by providing content, so they know I'm the real deal and not going to scam them,” she says. In her newsletters, she often shares personal stories, about a conversation she had with her husband, or why she used to hate trying new foods. To get the right tone, she says she asks herself, “How would I say it to a friend?”

Now, thanks to her brand, April doesn't have to spend her days pitching potential bloggers and clients. As a result, she recently shared with her newsletter readers, “I have people contacting me daily who've found me via features, interviews, and guest posts.” She doesn't have to look for them anymore, because they're finding her.

Melissa McCreery, cofounder of the career website The Daily Muse, used a similar strategy to take her site to the million-user mark within ten months of launching. Melissa and her two cofounders, Kathryn Minshew and Alex Cavoulacos, who all worked as consultants for McKinsey & Company right out of college, quickly realized that they had a lot to learn about the workplace. “We felt like we needed guidance and the right mentors. I did have a good mentor, who helped me with how I presented myself, how to manage people for the first time, and little things I did, like how raising my voice at the end of a sentence made me come across as more junior,” she says. While she and her cofounders originally focused on young women, they soon discovered that many young men were just as interested in the career tips.

That's why she and her cofounders launched The Daily Muse, designed to help people in their early twenties. Melissa and her cofounders, now in their mid-twenties, launched the site in September 2011, with a carefully honed brand in mind.

They knew their target audience—ambitious professionals in their twenties who are trying to get ahead—and they started connecting with them by writing quality articles filled with useful advice, from how to bring your lunch to work to how to avoid burnout. The articles were so good that Forbes and Huffington Post started syndicating some of their content, which brought them more readers. Arianna Huffington even wrote a piece for The Daily Muse to kick off a series called “Lessons to My Younger Self.” (She wrote about how she wished she had gotten more sleep.)

The next step was engaging their readers so they kept coming back. Melissa and her team did that by soliciting guest articles from readers. “From there we built a community of writers who saw what we were about,” she says. Those contributors, who ballooned to over 200, write about topics they themselves struggle with, such as how to make it as a freelancer, how to negotiate a salary, and how to navigate a career transition.

“That played a big role in building our organic audience,” says Melissa. “They would come back, share their articles with their friends, and feel like they're part of our community and building it with us,” she adds. The site also became packed with an array of diverse perspectives and fresh content. “We weren't just relying on a handful of staff writers, but people from all industries and all walks of life,” says Melissa. The site's related Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts also helped attract more readers, especially for visual content such as how to pack a lunch salad inside a mason jar. (Put the dressing in first.)

About ten months after launch, The Daily Muse was garnering 300,000 unique visitors a month and growing about 30 percent a month. Melissa and her cofounders—who participated in the start-up incubator program Y Combinator, based in Mountain View, California—raised angel investor funding and are making plans to continue growing. (Angel investors give money to start-ups, often in exchange for some kind of ownership that will pay off if the start-up becomes successful.) Revenue comes primarily from the company profiles and related job listings hosted on the site; organizations ranging from Groupon to Teach for America pay a monthly subscription fee to participate. Says Melissa, “We want to be the go-to resource for professionals navigating their careers. When they're thinking of making a move, or need advice, or get promoted and want to negotiate, we want to be the resource people know they can go to.” That's the definition of the Daily Muse brand.

BRANDING 101

We all already have brands, even if we don't know it yet. If someone wants to find out about you because they're considering hiring you for a job, then they're probably going to run a web search on your name first. Whatever comes up—their impressions of you from your public presence—is your personal brand, for better or worse. The key is to make sure that the web search reveals exactly what you want it to. (Your brand, of course, extends into the offline world as well. References, coworkers, acquaintances—whatever they say about you also contributes to your brand.)

The easiest way to do that is by creating a website or blog that explains who you are and what you offer the world. Even a simple site with just a bio, photo, and links to past work can work. When you write the bio, describe yourself the way you want the world to see you: If you want to be a writer and speaker, then describe yourself as one, even if you've only done a couple of gigs so far. To some degree, simply calling yourself a speaker, or a coach, makes you one, because potential customers can now see you in that light and consider working with you. Then, you can link to that page through your existing social media accounts, such as Facebook, and when anyone mentions you online, they can link to this page, as well. With enough incoming links, this main page will be the one that pops up first after web searches. (If you have a common name, or share a name with someone who is more famous, then you'll have to work a little harder to get your web page noticed.)

This website should tell people who you are, and what you can do for them. Perhaps it's dishing out career advice, or telling them how they can pay off debt. Maybe you will be their gardening guru, or go-to vegan cupcake source. Whatever your specialty, this site should clearly answer the question: What makes you different?

While you don't have to spend much money on it, the site should look clean, professional, and appealing. For less than $100, you can hire a freelance graphic designer to create a custom header. To find one, ask your favorite bloggers for recommendations, or pose the question to Twitter or Facebook friends. You should also consider buying the URL for your name or business so you don't have the cumbersome “wordpress.com” or “blogspot.com” words in your online address. As for web hosting, you can stick with a free service such as wordpress.com and redirect the page to your URL, or you can pay a monthly fee to upgrade to a hosting service.

From there, building a brand requires a similar etiquette dance to dating: Just as on a first date, constant self-promotion is a major turn-off. Interaction, and asking about other people, is a plus. Dale Carnegie, the self-improvement guru, had it right when he urged people to act interested in others, to never offer public criticism, and to smile. I'm always surprised when someone uploads a photo of themselves scowling as their Facebook or Twitter image. It doesn't make me want to follow them. An updated version of Carnegie's classic book, How to Win Friends & Influence People, spells out how his advice applies to social media. If you want to criticize someone, he says, do so offline, in private. Public Twitter or Facebook spats are usually embarrassing for everyone involved. Some bloggers use it as a strategy for stirring up controversy, but it can easily backfire. Responding to other people's comments online should more closely resemble cocktail party chatter than a bar fight. People who are only talking to themselves over Twitter start to look a bit like wallflowers, or, even worse, like narcissists. As for your photo, Carnegie's book points to research that shows that people who smile in their Facebook photos tend to have more friends.

While you're ramping up your audience, an email newsletter can help, too. Sites such as MailChimp.com or ConstantContact.com make it easy to create good-looking newsletters for little or no money. Once you have people's email addresses, then you have more control over when you reach them. If you're launching a new product or service, you can let your email newsletter subscribers know first, and even offer them a discount or free bonus for their loyalty. As April Bowles Olin puts it, “It's super important to have a way of reaching people that's all yours.” She also needed her newsletter as a backup when her Twitter account went down during one of her program launches.

When I was first launching what would become my popular USNews.com blog, Alpha Consumer, in 2007, I learned quickly that people responded most enthusiastically when I shared my own personal stories with money: why I found buying a car so stressful, how my parents taught me about money, and my irksome interactions with the customer service arm of my health insurance company. Those posts garnered the most comments, and my readership really exploded when I started hosting contests and trading guest posts with popular money bloggers. Other reporters and television producers looking for a money expert to feature started stumbling onto my site through web searches and asking me to appear in their articles or on their shows, which led to more links and a higher profile for my blog (and for me).

As April found, linking to other sites and having them link back to you can quickly spread word about your blog, and as long as your content entices, those readers will often stick around. (This is also where having influential friends comes in handy. If you already know a few popular bloggers from networking events, Twitter, or leaving comments on their blog, then they're far more likely to take you up on an offer for a guest post.)

Your site also has to make it clear what makes you stand out from the thousands of other blogs out there—do you offer entrepreneurial tips for creative types, like April? Or help empower consumers, like my Alpha Consumer blog? Or help connect people to socially conscious, beautiful products, like Katy and Imran's Designed Good site?

Because our media world is so fractured—newspaper readerships are dropping, and people depend on multiple smaller sites instead of one catchall news source—building up a fan base through a website or blog can give you as much power, or more, to ultimately sell your products and services than even a positive review in a big newspaper or magazine. Making people care about you, and convincing them that you can help them, is the key to finding lasting (and paying) customers.

If you're really struggling with marketing yourself and, like me, feel like it's your weak spot, then there is another option: You can hire professional help. You can pay someone to Tweet for you, set up a marketing campaign, or even send pitches. The problem is that professional publicity help can cost more than a five-star trip to Italy. One author told me that she spent about $7,000 a month for nine months to promote her book, for a total of $63,000. That's clearly not even an option for most of us, and even if it were, spending that much doesn't guarantee media hits, or sales. But the even more important reason to learn how to do the marketing yourself is that it's an invaluable skill, one that can continue to help you in both your full-time job and future side-careers. (And if you do hire professionals, they will likely want to make use of any personal connections you have developed on your own anyway.)

Still, it can make sense to invest in a few upgrades: a professional website design, an e-book on social media marketing, or a group coaching course like the kind April offers. Part of being a good marketer means getting help when you really need it.

THE ART OF THE PITCH

For certain, highly specific enterprises—if you're targeting, say, pregnant women who are vegans, or lawyers who also run marathons, where there might only be a handful in your area—then targeted pitching, combined with word-of-mouth marketing, is often the way to go. It's the main strategy Peter Davis, now in his early twenties, chose to spread word about his new community-building website, CommonPlace (ourcommonplace.com).

Peter, a recent college graduate who sounds and acts more like a college professor, launched his site while he was still in school. In a scene reminiscent of The Social Network, he and his roommate were sitting at lunch talking about applying to summer internships at the end of their freshman year at Harvard. They started talking about how useful it would be if there was one centralized website that listed everything that was available in each city. “That idea expanded past college kids looking for internships. We thought, ‘Why don't local places have a place where you can share and connect?’” Peter recalls.

That conversation led to CommonPlace, a website that offers towns a centralized website for community members to talk to each other, buy and sell things, and announce events. It's that middle piece—the buying and selling—that Peter and his cofounders plan to turn into a moneymaking enterprise, by charging a small fee for such exchanges. (The site, including Peter's modest salary and those of his cofounders and employees, is currently funded by angel investors.)

Instead of waiting for towns to hear about the site and request a customized version, Peter and his team actively reach out to towns they consider good matches for part of the early launch. “We just pick towns and go in…. We don't want to wait for the mayor to call us,” says Peter. Once they choose a town to target, he sends a handful of community organizers who spend six weeks handing out flyers, working with community groups to spread the word, and signing up local teens, dubbed “junior civic heroes,” to interview leaders in town and post those interviews to the site. The organizers also start up a Facebook page and Twitter site to help promote the new website, and contact local media for potential coverage. As the company reaches more towns, Peter plans on doing more outreach over the phone and web, to make it possible to ramp up more quickly.

While Peter and his team currently pick towns based on proximity or other connections they have—one of the first towns was Peter's own hometown, Falls Church, Virginia—they also sometimes respond to requests they receive on their website. The strategy has already shown results: CommonPlace is currently in a dozen towns and has over 10,000 users, and the company is constantly reaching out to new towns. Peter has big plans: “We want to be in all 18,000 towns in America.”

Lucinda Lyon-Vaiden, who practices traditional Chinese acupuncture and therapeutic massage in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., also adopted a highly specific, targeted strategy when she first started taking on clients. Instead of advertising to the general public, she told her friends and coworkers about her new practice. For the first ten years of her business, she worked as a meeting planner during the day and met patients between 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.—and found all of her clients through word of mouth.

That's exactly how she wanted it. “I didn't want to do a big splash in the Yellow Pages because when you get referrals, it's self-selecting. It's not someone coming in off the streets who wants to negotiate the price or time. Especially if you're doing massage, you could get a lot of creeps.” Instead of creeps, she got “friends and colleagues, and then their friends, their sweethearts, their wives, bosses, and families,” she says.

Lucinda's ultra-targeted marketing strategy got her exactly the type of clients she wanted: They tend to have an interest in holistic health, and often share useful articles and research that they've read with Lucinda, too. “People tell me about everything from herbs, medicine, research studies, and food, so it's a two-way street. They keep me up on stuff,” she says.

Lucinda explains most of this to me as I lie face down on her massage table; I've been seeing her for several years to help counteract lower back pain. Her office (she rents space with a group of other health practitioners) is filled with anatomical diagrams, health textbooks, and the soothing CD of nature-inspired music. As with most of her clients, a coworker introduced me to her, and her focused, minimalist style appealed to me right away.

As soprano Renée Fleming writes in her memoir, The Inner Voice, reaching out to the potential clients or customers (or in her case, venues) that you want is the best way to take control of your career. Her manager, she says, “stressed batting instead of fielding—actually proactively deciding what I wanted to do, rather than just considering the offers as they came in.” If you want to make things happen, you have to create those opportunities for yourself. Writing a pitch forces you to ask yourself what types of opportunities you really want, who your ideal audience or customer is, and what exactly you have to offer that holds value for others.

PLANNER PROMOTION

As I had discovered from my own initial lack of sales, publicity matters—a lot. No one can buy from you if they don't know about you. And for the first month of my own Etsy shop's existence, barely anyone knew about it, which is why I made just one sale. Checking my stats and seeing no new orders was a little depressing. It felt as if I'd thrown a birthday party and no one showed up.

Getting word out isn't easy, and it's where a lot of side-giggers get stuck. Sure, some people seemed to magically acquire a massive customer base, including Amy Stringer-Mowat, who stumbled into coverage in Real Simple and other women's magazines, and Chris Furin, who had a built-in fan base from his father's deli. But most people have an experience more similar to mine—they have to work for their customers, or they don't have any at all.

As I started pitching to bloggers, I focused on reaching out to personal finance and parenting sites, offering guest posts or giveaways of my planners. I sent emails to a dozen popular baby blogs, explaining my baby planner and how it would help soon-to-be moms navigate those overwhelming nine months. Over time, I learned to become more efficient. The popular design blog that I'd previously had no contact with? Probably not going to respond to my email. The mommy blogger who lives in my neighborhood? Definitely a better shot. And as for the personal finance blogger that I had previously featured in my own blog, that was almost a sure thing.

Still, sometimes I didn't hear back, and on a couple occasions, I got a flat-out rejection or simple note saying that they don't do guest posts or that my baby planner looks too similar to a product they sold themselves. I quickly deleted the offending emails, tried to forget they ever existed, and moved on to the next pitch. A few kind bloggers said they liked what I created, and offered to help me promote it. One popular mommy blogger linked to my Etsy shop on her Facebook page, which brought me a couple hundred views. A personal finance site reviewed my Money Planner and hosted a giveaway; another invited me to write a guest post. As word got out, a few bloggers wrote to me to ask if they could feature my planner and host a giveaway. Despite the Etsy forum warning about giving away too many freebies, I always said yes. Even bloggers who didn't feature my planners often wrote nice notes back, which helped me build a broader network.

I quickly realized that I had the most success with editors of personal finance websites that I had already worked with. After explaining my new project to them in a way that got at my goal of giving people creative tools to get on top of their money, they often wrote back and said they would be happy to feature my planners. My biggest traffic days—and sales days—came after the women's finance site DailyWorth.com featured my planners and baby blog LilSugar.com highlighted my Baby Planner. Close behind were blog posts on TheCreativeMama.com, a blog for moms, and several personal finance sites. Because these websites had such large followings, they continued to direct traffic to my Etsy shop even months after the original feature. They also led to write-ups on smaller blogs and websites. I'd discovered the snowball effect of free advertising.

With the publicity came the orders. During my launch month, November 2011, I sold 33 planners, earning $438.40, and picking up over 3,400 page views on my Etsy shop. Almost all of my traffic came from the Facebook links and websites that had agreed to feature my planners. Those sales continued through December; by the end of the year I had sold 65 planners and earned $864.80. Some mornings, I woke up to three or four orders that had come in when I was sleeping.

Sales continued to pick up as I responded to customer feedback. I noticed that some customers were purchasing more than one planner at once, so I created “money planner kits,” which offered discounts on multiple planners. My Complete Money Planner Kit, a package of three planners, became my top-selling item. The 2012 Money Planner came out of an idea from a customer and fellow Etsy seller, who told me that she wanted some kind of calendar that she could follow as the year progressed. I soon added more “money kits” to the mix, including the Homeowner's Complete Money Planner Kit and the New Parent's Complete Money Planner Kit. I also quickly realized that the digital PDF versions of my planners were far-outselling the spiral-bound, printed versions, so I stopped stocking those once my initial supply ran out. For customers looking for an easy reminder of their goals to post near their desks, I worked with my illustrator to create a simple one-page “money goals” planner that could be filled with specific goals, challenges, and action steps.

By the end of February, I had sold over $1,200 worth of planners. I noticed a direct correlation between the number of people viewing my shop and the amount I earned: My revenue always seemed to hover around 10 percent of the total number of page views. That meant the more publicity I did, the more I would make. Marketing is time-consuming, though, so while I tried to pitch a few websites or blogs each month, it was hard to keep up the intensity of launch month. As my marketing efforts simmered down, my sales stayed constant at around $200 a month.

As gratifying (and useful) as it was to earn that extra cash, it didn't even begin to get at the satisfaction that my Etsy shop gave me. Each sale affirmed my ability to create something of value, a skill I sometimes doubted that I had as freelancing rates plummeted during the recession and writing jobs dried up. I had a new identity; I created and sold money planners. I began daydreaming about ways I could expand and new products I could design. Perhaps I could offer coaching sessions in tandem with my planners; I could create a career transitions planner, a “working mom” planner, and maybe even an “eat better, spend less” planner. I wondered if one day I would open up a physical shop, with space for people to fill out their planners and brainstorm about their lives, next to a coffee bar and sign-up sheet for one-on-one coaching sessions. I created a new listing in my Etsy shop for a “personalized” version of my one-page money goals planner, which included talking with me about how to reach specific financial goals. After a few months, I sold my first personalized goals planner (for $60), and got to experience serving as a money coach—and I liked it.

While my Etsy shop grew, I also spent time marketing myself to potential speaking gig hosts. On my website, I added descriptions of financial workshops and talks that I give, such as “How to Be a Financial Rockstar,” along with a photo of me speaking and a list of recent speaking events. After reading Robin Fisher Roffer's branding book, Make a Name for Yourself, I more clearly defined my niche—navigating the financial milestones of adulthood—a theme I emphasized on my website. Whenever I spoke with other personal finance authors and speakers, I tried to mention my new focus on giving talks, and as a result, several of them passed on speaking requests to me. I also put the word out to magazine editors that I was looking for more freelance assignments. As a result, more requests started coming in.

Soon, I was completely overwhelmed. Between spending time with my daughter, my job, running my household, and building my side-business, I felt like I was constantly sprinting when what I really wanted was to settle in at more of a marathon pace. (Nap time only lasts so long, and the laundry—not to mention my husband—also demanded attention.) I needed more time—for myself, for my family, for my work—and I needed to figure out how to get it.