Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing Featured The Best Stuff May 5, 2019
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Facebook Changes For 2019 & What It Means For Online Business Owners

In the last several weeks, massive shockwaves have reverberated all over the online business world about the changes coming to Facebook. It’s hard to tell the real news from the fake news, but after several hours of listening, reading, and researching, it can be summarized as follows:

  1. Facebook is HUGE. So big in fact that it’s becoming something like a monopoly. And because of this, there are massive eyeballs on Facebook – and the possibility of regulation from the government.
  2. It would seem that between the privacy debacle, the user data they’ve gathered about what users enjoy most on the app, and the negative social/psychological impact of social media newsfeeds on the human brain, Facebook is continuing to evolve in order to stay relevant.

This has led to rumors like… the newsfeed disappearing, one of the key components online business owners use to advertise and send traffic to their products and services. While no such official announcement has been made about the newsfeed, there is definitely a push in directions that eerily leave out any mention of the newsfeed.

There’s always a bit of a conundrum as marketers — because it’s easy to get swept up in rumors (Remember when people abandoned their facebook pages because organic reach fell?) and it’s hard to tell what will stick and what will evolve. No one wants to invest in something that will phase out or become irrelevant, so how do you maximize your efforts without knowing the future?

Without any official notice about how advertising and marketing on Facebook newsfeed may change in the coming years, here are the things I will be focusing on as Facebook undergoes one of the biggest evolutions we’ve seen to date.

Facebook Groups

I am SO glad I didn’t follow the herd when everyone and their mother were abandoning Facebook groups. They are central to the future of Facebook, and so if you’ve been on the fence about creating a group, today is the day to start focusing on it. There have been a ton of new features added to groups in the last 12 months, and more coming — including the possibility of sponsors and ads in the groups themselves.

When you open up Facebook on your phone, you’ll see the group button dead center in the menu bar, with the option to pin and rearrange your top 10 groups.

Your group algorithm matters. That means spend time creating organic content that makes it easy for your group members to respond. Keep the auto-posting to a minimum, reward active members, and give people a reason to login to their device and CHECK the group – not just wait for it to appear in the newsfeed.

Facebook Messenger

I won’t even pretend to be an expert in bots, because I haven’t used them a ton in my marketing yet, but there are lots of rumors that it will be a pay to play feature soon. You’ll have to pay per message for broadcasts out to your subscriber list, which sucks, but we all knew it was coming to that.

On the happy side, there will be more ways to interact on messenger – like group video calls and watch parties. They are also building out lead ad templates for messenger, which signal that they are actively improving how marketers can monetize messenger.

With the release of a new desktop app, merging WhatsApp and Insta with Messenger, and completely revamping the mobile app to load quickly, Messenger is trying to overtake texting it appears. It’ll be interesting to see how marketers can deliver personalized interactions via messenger during the lead and buying process.

Facebook Stories

If you haven’t become completely addicted to IG stories on Instagram, it’s time. Facebook is putting more and more emphasis on stories, design wise in the app (bigger than ever on mobile if you’ve noticed) but also because, people like content that doesn’t stick around forever.

Stories are powerful because they have built in urgency. The content disappears. Using stories to drive people to your podcast, blog, videos, is going to become one of the key ways to drive traffic (much like we do all the time with posts), as well as creating engaging content that people come back to watch again and again. A lot of marketers are having incredible conversions using story ads, and you can expect that to continue in force.

Facebook Events

I’m interested in this focus for Facebook, because it’s one I haven’t used a ton, but it’s a key feature getting an overhaul. How might marketers use the redesigned events app to remind people of livestreams, webinars, online classes, or in person events? This is worth looking into more in depth, as Facebook signals its importance in their redesign. Events have their own newsfeed area for posting, can be used in ads, and will be part of Facebook’s continued initiative to help people connect geographically.

Facebook Watch

Even though most small business owners can’t just get a Facebook Watch show, video will continue to be critical to engagement on Facebook. Facebook Watch is a big part of Facebook’s attempt to compete with YouTube, and video content in general, outranks other types of content. However you plan to roll out video – either through stories, livestreams, or pre-recorded content, video is key.

Facebook Timeline

Even though there wasn’t a focus on the timeline during the F8 conference, I will continue to think of my timeline as… my Facebook website. This means both my page and my profile. The point for me is that when people hear about me – wherever it comes from – I want to make sure my timeline is a curated delight of help, inspiration, and excellent content that highlights my brand and services.

What Matters Less

Once upon a time, it mattered how many likes were on your page. People obsessed over group size, number of friends and followers, etc. Let me say this plainly. It’s not worth your time to worry about vanity metrics. Zuckerberg clearly agrees because in a bold move over on Instagram, they’ve decided to remove how many likes are on each photo (except to the original poster).

If I were to set a theme for the next 12 months of my Facebook marketing, it would be: Meaningful engagement. Connecting with the people that clearly need/want my services, and not trying to be all things to all people.

Good content never goes out of style, and if you focus on that – you’ll be able to weather whatever changes come our way.

Let me know in the comments below…what changes you’re most looking forward to!

Create Your Laptop Life Podcast Digital Marketing The Best Stuff Feb 12, 2019
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Episode 31: The 5 Different Types of Laptop Living

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There are actually several different types of laptop lives you can live once you join the online business world.

Hey everyone, this is Julie. I hope you are doing awesome. Today I want to talk about, basically the title of my podcast. I call it Create Your Laptop Life, but, and I know I hear that a lot, or you hear laptop life, but there are actually several different types of laptop lives you can live once you join the online business world. So I kind of want to dive into those a little bit, so that you can find the one that’s going to work for you.

Alright, so let’s get started. The most typical laptop life, when you hear that word, what comes to mind is being on the beach, maybe a pina colada, laptop on your lap. So the first type of laptop life that we all associate with kind of this online business world is the digital nomad.

I have a friend, her name is Julia, she is on Instagram as Destination Nomad, and she is literally a digital nomad. She has an RV and she travels around the country and on any given day she could be in Nevada, Oklahoma, Michigan, and who knows. And she is a word press developer, so she codes word press websites and that is her job, and that is how she supports herself while she is on the road. So that is one type of laptop life.

So if you had the desire to travel full time, you want to go around the world, you want to get an RV travel the country doing some sort of online business, whether it’s service based, or info product based, allows you to completely travel around the country.

A couple of things to think about when you are doing that type of laptop life, you want to make sure you are considering your wifi situation. She said that that was probably the biggest problem when she went on the road and sold her home, was making sure she had really good wifi all the time so that she could connect with her clients and continue to build her websites. So whether you’re traveling to Bali, China, Australia, keep in mind different countries are going to have different requirements. Even in China there are some websites that you can’t access that you could access in the states.

So if you are really considering a digital nomad life, that’ll be your biggest hurdle to jump. In fact, we were on a cruise a couple of weeks ago and we were like,

what would it be like to do a cruise around the world? And we actually, there is one, it’s like 210 days or whatever and I thought, that would be amazing. It’s like $80 grand to do it for the whole year. And if you are a single person and you can just hop on a boat and travel the world, the only thing that’s a real sticky wicket there is the wifi. Okay, so that’s the first type of laptop life. There’s actually, and that’s the one that we most commonly associate with the words “Laptop life”. But that’s not actually the only one there is.

Second type of laptop life is the kind that I started out with, which is the side hustle, or the moonlight. So maybe you’re in a 9 to 5 job and you don’t really like the job and you have other passions you want to pursue, so you create a side hustle. It could be something like a blog, it could be a freelance job like writing, social media. You could also be moonlighting because you want to eventually have your own business but you know you can’t make the leap now.

I did the moonlighting thing. I started as a side hustle. So when I was married to my first husband he had the insurance, he had all the things. I was a stay at home mom and once the kids went back to school I realized, oh my gosh they’re all at school six hours a day, now I need to figure out what to do with my life. I had spent my 20’s in a complete haze of breast feeding and diapers and potty training. So now I had to make some decisions.

So I started as a freelance writer doing a side hustle. I was on all the sites, Upwork and Text Broker, and HubPages. Oh my gosh, throwback days. And I was really just trying to make enough to pay for the groceries. So for me that was a $150 a week. That’s all I cared about.

So I kind of stayed in that side hustle mode for quite a few years. Now, when we ended up getting divorced, and it’s a big long, dramatic story, I ended up needing to not just have a side hustle, I needed to have a full time job. And I was pregnant at the time and it’s hard to get a job when you’re pregnant. And I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to do it, it’s not easy. I found a temp job, but I knew that that would run out because it was temporary.

So I did my temp job by day and I moonlighted by night. And I would say that the laptop life of a moonlighter is a little different than a side hustler. So a side hustler laptop life, you know if you’re trying to make a million dollars or have these big, high-reaching goals, when you’re in the mode of a side hustler it’s really hard to get the fire under your butt to really make that kind of money. I mean, I stayed in side hustle mode from 2009-2014, it’s like 5 years. And I never really hit more than a thousand or two thousand dollars a month.

When I got divorced, I went into moonlight mode, and that was a different mode. The laptop life for moonlighting is you know, you’re up all hours, you are hustling to try to get clients, to try to build your business, get your list built, do the things that you need to do so that eventually you can take the leap.

So I would say, I would consider those two different types of laptop life’s. The moonlighting one is not designed to be forever. Eventually you want to go to the next version of a laptop life, which is fulltime laptop living.

Full time laptop living means that you are full time, bread and butter income that you use to live is happening from a computer at home or wherever you happen to be. So a lot of young, small agencies, or info product, coaches, consultants, course creators eventually go from moonlighting to their fulltime gig. That’s what I did, I did it as an agency owner. I have always preached that doing freelance service provider work first is the easiest way to make a fulltime living online because you don’t need a huge following, you don’t need a big, enormous list and every single customer that comes into your door you can charge a fair amount of money for.
So fulltime laptop life living could be you in the dining room as a mom with kids, but also running a small agency. Or it could progress to, technically I don’t know if I can call my life a laptop life anymore because I’m not using a laptop. It progresses to having an office in your home. You have gotten to that level where it’s like, alright I need to a dedicated office space. If you see my office, I have a big giant desktop. I just need, I’m about to get a second screen. You know, it’s like, it’s becoming more and more and more legit.

Of course, you can still travel, you can work from anywhere, but you really do have set office hours, you’re in your office every day. I know for me, when I finally took that plunge it was time to get childcare and I was in the office by 8 in the morning and would come out by 4, or what have you.

The idea, eventually, is for most people, they have to make a choice. And that laptop lifestyle is now you’re really fulltime running your own business and it’s thrilling and amazing. But eventually people want to work themselves out of their businesses right, and just work on their business instead of in it.

So there’s a couple of trajectories you can take once you’ve become a fulltime laptop life liver. The first one is you can just continue to work fulltime and run your agency, run your business, run your coaching practice, whatever it happens to be. The second thing you can do is continue to grow. At some point, you will begin to hire people. At some point, you may decide that you need an office space because you need that sense of place. In which case, you kind of graduate out of the laptop life, it’s a little sad, you know. But it’s cool too.

You create an office, you have employees, maybe most of those employees are remote, but if you work in house, you’ll see, a lot of you know Brandon and Kaelin Poulin in LadyBoss. They’re LadyBoss and they’re in the Clickfunnels community. They started out as laptop lifer’s with their laptop making money using their membership platform and their course creator platform. And it actually, I don’t know if you have heard them tell this story, but once they made a fair amount of money, they went and retired to Puerto Rico, and they tried that super chill laptop life, you know where they work a few hours and just live on the beach. And
they didn’t really like it.

They ended up saying, “You know what, never mind this. Let’s go back to the states. Let’s actually continue to grow the company.” Now the company has headquarters and an office. And I think last time I checked they had 50 or 60 employees, so it’s really fun.

So you can decide kind of where you want to go once you hit that fulltime business sort of moment in life. Lastly, there is also another type of laptop life and

it is the laptop life where you are actually a remote employee. So in this kind of life, you are not running your own business, for whatever reason. Whether you don’t want to, or you just prefer the security of a regular paycheck, or you like working on a team, you feel like you’re better as a teammate rather than CEO. But there are a lot of people that are remote employees, so they get all the benefits of the laptop life, being able to work from home, being able to travel different places and still log in, but they are employees. So I know companies, like Clickfunnels which I work for, and work in, has a lot of remote positions. I know
companies like Word Press, more and more companies are doing remote work. So for those of you guys listening, the laptop life can take on many, many forms, whether you are a freelancer in an RV traveling the country, or you are side hustling, or moonlighting, or jumping into that fulltime online business space where you have carved out a spot in your home where your business is going to take up residence. Consider that you will probably go through multiple evolutions as you grow your business.

So I just wanted to kind of put that out there. I have literally, except for the digital nomad, done all of them from side hustle, to moonlighting, to fulltime in my office, even the remote employee, I’ve done it all. So I would not change my lifestyle or the work I’ve chosen for my life in a million years. And for any of you listening who haven’t quite gotten into the lifestyle that you want yet, don’t give up. Okay, don’t give up. The world is changing and this kind of lifestyle and remote work is only going to become more and more mainstream. You are still on the front end of this revolution. So there is opportunity everywhere. Anybody who just absolutely refuses to quit will eventually get there. You may have to change your idea of what your laptop life is going to look like, or maybe what you thought your business was going to look like, but if you don’t quit, it will happen for you.

So I hope you guys have an amazing day, I appreciate you all. Talk to you soon.

Digital Marketing Jan 28, 2019
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FYRE: 8 Things I Couldn’t Stop Thinking About After Watching The Festival Scam Disaster

I just finished watching the documentary Fyre last night.

The whole thing had me on the edge of my seat.

It is familiar territory for me because I’m an Internet Marketer – and our industry is rife with shenanigans much like the ones shown in the movie (albeit it’s often more mild than the Fyre fiasco).

I keep turning over the events in my head, how it all just slid out on control, and how much arrogance we probably all have that we would “never” be caught dead in a position like this.

I know better.

I know better because I’ve found myself in positions in my earlier life that I NEVER would have guessed.

Even the strongest of thinkers can be taken down in the right circumstances. Here are a few things I took away from my Saturday night Netflix binge.

1. Positive thinking has a dark side.

How many times did the higher ups criticize the workers for not being positive enough? Where does positivity and visionary thinking turn to delusions of grandeur?

This is an issue I take with the manifestation crowd. It’s almost as if using your brain to identify a problem, mitigate risk, and think of all worst case scenarios (and plan for them), is akin to begging the universe to rain death and destruction on your family and business. It’s not.

It’s called SMART.

The maddening part is that because it’s the leader at the top saying it, most of the team went against their better judgement, their intuition, and all alarm bells…and just followed their leader, right off the cliff.

2. The ability to sell a dream should be carefully contained in a box of character.

The more I learn about marketing and sales, the more afraid I get that this super power, this magical ability to persuade should come with incredible warning labels of its danger.

The age of the Internet has given us tremendous power to reach MILLIONS of people, even without proving ourselves. We have books and courses and all manner of knowledge at our fingertips to learn how to manipulate people to do what we want.

And yet, we’re also in a world where the slow and grueling process of building character is pushed aside for quick fixes and shortcuts.

3. The illusion of the result is a slippery slope.

Where is the line between the “dream” and puffery start to slide into mismanaged expectations, false advertising, and finally an out and out scam?

As I watched the documentary, I could see where the promotional video didn’t feel like a lie to anyone at the time. After all, it was WAY before the planning really got underway. I honestly think they weren’t trying to purposely falsely advertise. They were trying to sell the dream in their head.

And then, the problems started. The need to switch islands. The lack of housing. The lack of money. I’m a pre-selling marketer like many others, but Fyre should be a front and center reminder to us that we must manage the expectations of our customer…continually.

It’s hard to stay authentic throughout the process, but if we don’t….the line between a little exaggeration and false advertising…is REALLY blurry.

The scary part is we watch this and think, “Oh no, I would never…” but these kinds of disasters always start with the best intentions.

4. One bad idea can take down the whole ship.

I felt so bad for the software developers who lost everything because of this one idea gone bad. So many of them didn’t even know what was going down with the festival, but they bore the consequences of it.

Their company was gone and they were jobless.

The lesson here is that disease spreads. If a doctor tells you there is a small bit of cancer on your arm, are you going to sit back and think, “Ah well…it’s just my arm. The rest of me is okay.” No it’s not. It will eventually spread to every area of your body.

You can’t silo bad eggs and broken character. It can be difficult to deal with a problem when it’s small, because it doesn’t seem like a big deal to take a shortcut.

That little problem won’t stay little, and it has the power to take out a lot of people if left unmanaged. And the closer to the top (the more power) the idea or person has, the more responsibility you have to deal with it as soon as it starts to smell weird.

5. People show you who they are if you just look. Believe them.

My dear friend Yara says this to me all the time. I’m a chronic optimist and a quick forgiver. This means I’m prone to getting burned over and over again, because I refuse to believe what my intuition sees because… this time will be different.

I’m learning to become a master at non-verbal cues and observation of both obvious and not so obvious behavior. There were literally a million clues along the way that alerted members of the team to a lack of integrity and character in Billy. But…it was excused away over and over and over again…

…partly because of herd theory, partly because people (like me) are optimists, and partly because of pressure and manipulation at the top.

After the whole thing went down, he STILL continued to try to scam people through his email list with shortcuts.

6. Execution is everything.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Especially in marketing, fulfillment is often the thing that people forget to plan for. It’s the whole “say yes, figure it out later” idea gone way too far.

The good news if you see competitors with all their great marketing plans and ideas, but they can’t execute, you have a shot at beating them to the punch with excellent execution because…

In the end, it’s ALL that counts.

7. Sexual harassment is alive and well.

I could write an entire post just on this alone.

The scene with the dude willing to go down on another man was horrifying.

I wonder if anyone at that moment thought, “Well gosh, this is sexual harassment and prostitution I’m asking this guy to do…” or was it said in a lighthearted friendly way that made him question if this is just banter between friends or an actual business relationship with boundaries?

Most of us watching this in our comfy living rooms are outside the situation and so it’s natural to gasp in shock that someone would EVER even consider such a thing. But the fact that he was WILLING shows just what level of psychological abuse was happening between team members that it got to that point.

8. The only protection against this kind of ending is to….

Remind yourself that the the most dangerous belief that makes you vulnerable to this sort of abuse or error is the lie we all tell ourselves that this COULD never happen to anyone like us.

Business Strategy Create Your Laptop Life Podcast Digital Marketing Dec 6, 2018
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Episode 26: Stop Worrying about Bugging People

Episode 26: Stop Worrying about Bugging People

This might be one of the most silly and irrational thoughts I battle…
And it’s not just me…it’s a TON of my clients and students.
“I don’t want to email or post too much because I don’t want to bug people. It’s so annoying!” How did I finally kick this habit to the curb?

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Full Transcript:

Hey everyone. This is Julie. It has been quite a long time since I did a podcast and I apologize for that. The last month and a half of my life has been just a crazy, crazy ride and not a good ride and not a ride I really want to ride anymore. For those of you who follow me on Facebook or on my email list, you know that, this past holiday season, thanksgiving has been very difficult on my family, partially because my daughter Eliana is really struggling with a lot of anxiety and depression and so I have been open about this because I really, really want to bring awareness to mental health issues. I have struggled with depression and anxiety in my life. I know a lot of my customers and clients have struggled with it as well and I think we all just get super squirrely around mental health issues. There’s a lot of shame associated with it and I really would like to see that just all go away and I would love to see the mental health community be supported in the same way other communities are supportive with diseases and other types of more physical disorders.

Anyway, this podcast today is not about that. However, I just wanted to give you a reason for my absence. The good news is that the support has been pouring in. So many of you have been super supportive of me sending me letters and emails and amazing comments on Facebook and Instagram, so I thank you so much for that. We’re also getting Ellie all the support she needs and so it’s just required me to take some time, which is why I haven’t been recording podcasts, but hopefully things are returning somewhat normal. So I wanted to talk to you today about something that really used to bother me a lot. It comes up every once in a while, but I’ve, I, I feel like I’ve really conquered it for the most part, but maybe you haven’t yet.

And it’s this idea about bugging people. Now. This might have been one of the most silly and irrational thoughts that I battled and I know it’s not just me, it’s a ton of my clients and students as well. We think a lot of email or post too much because I don’t want to bug people. It’s so annoying. Right? I remember the first time I had an epiphany about this thought. I knew logically that it was bullshit, but I couldn’t really figure out how to get rid of it, you know what I mean? And it was, I think it was on black Friday year or two ago and I knew that inboxes would be flooded with offers. I knew that the news feed would be crowded and I had this thought come around again. That was like, well, I don’t want to email my people. I don’t want to be a bother.

Now that I look back, I think I’m pretty certain it was also followed with a kind of a level of false humility sorta made me feel better. Like somehow I was better than others. I totally should’ve smacked myself. And it actually reminds me of some current marketers I’m seeing today who are ironically using these extreme marketing tactics to hate on marketers and marketing. But I digress. But after I had this thought, it hit me. I was like, me and millions of other people are going to be bothered anyway. In fact, we’re all going to be bothered every day until the end of days. So unless you plan to eliminate all technology from your life, go live in the woods with fairies and gnomes, which after the month I just had sounds like an amazing idea. We are all going to be bothered with advertising and marketing forever for ever now.

That year I never did get it together enough for a sale, but of course I did notice about 567 other offers for similar products hitting my inbox that weekend and that’s when I realized another universal truth. Not only would we be bugged forever until the end of our days, but people would continue to buy stuff whether I decided to sell my thing or not. It’s like the marketplace I went to in Kenya this past summer. The merchants are there, they’re all selling similar goods and there were a lot of them and some of them were super pushy. But imagine if one shop owner said, yeah, I don’t want to bother people at the markets. I’m just going to stay home today. Number one, it would not stop all the other shop owners from setting up their tents and bothering people. And number two, it wouldn’t stop the people from coming to buy because that’s what people do.

People like to buy things. So if you truly believe that you have a product or service that your customer needs, if you know it will help them. If you have the keys to what they want. If you’re a good human who likes to sell quality products with honest marketing, then the thought of, I don’t want to bug people is not just an irrational thought, it’s a harmful one because not bugging people won’t eliminate bugging and it’s not going to eliminate people purchasing. Here’s the hardest part about it. All it’s going to do is make it more likely that your dream customer is going to waste money buying the wrong thing because you were too scared to nervous, to falsely humble, to get your stuff out there and own it. So that is my nugget for the day. I really don’t have any idea how to end this podcast smoothly except to just say stop worrying about bugging people.

Because if you look at the things that you’re procrastinating on, maybe it’s new ads, maybe it’s finishing a funnel, maybe it’s writing an email, maybe it’s writing that post you’ve been meaning to write or that podcast you’ve been meaning to record of your particular procrastination station is filled with revenue generating customer connecting activities like this. Chances are you’re worried about putting yourself out there in some way because you don’t want to be a bother and you don’t want to be annoying, and so when your procrastination list is filled with those kinds of activities, it may be because you have this niggly irrational, harmful thought that you need to kill too. So anyway, I’m glad to be back. I’m hopeful that I’m not going to have such a long delay here on my podcast recordings. I’m going to get back in the saddle, start sharing with you all the things that are going on in my world and you know, to be honest, sometimes it’s hard to have this type of podcast when things aren’t perfect because sometimes I have come around this mountain of thinking I don’t really want to bother people with my stuff and that the irony is that the things that are uncomfortable to share often the things that speak to people and so we get all worried and we get all in our own head space and we stopped sharing when the times in which we need to share are the Times that are uncomfortable.

So hope you have a great day. I appreciate you all. Thanks for sticking with me. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’re ready to create growth scale your online business, you can go to https://www.createyourlaptoplife.com/podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.

Business Strategy Digital Marketing Nov 6, 2018
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3 Tips for Parents Who Work From Home

3 Tips for Parents Who Work From Home

When you become a parent, figuring out how to successfully work from home is a feat many strive for.

There are many benefits to working from home, such as…

  • Participating in school or outside activities.
  • Getting to spend quality time with your kids throughout the day, and not just during the bedtime routine.
  • Witnessing and celebrating their milestones.

But there are also challenges with that luxury. Things like…

  • Not having boundaries for work hours.
  • Figuring out how to handle interruptions during live calls or presentations.
  • Making time for daily chores around the house.

In this lifestyle episode, I dive into why I decided to pursue a laptop life and the top 3 tips I recommend to parents working from home.

 

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Video Transcript:

So he is one of the reasons that I actually embarked on the laptop life. He’s got two modes. He’s got either ignore us or completely steal the camera.

When I had my side gig and I got divorced, what really propelled me into this “I need to make this laptop life work for me” was my pregnancy with William.

I had a very difficult time finding a job while pregnant. And I also knew that once he was born I would want to nurse him and I just knew that being home was necessary if I want it to be the kind of mom I wanted to be.

All of that said, it’s actually really hard to be a mom and an entrepreneur at the same time.

And I feel like there are a lot of struggles and this goes for dads too, not just moms. Moms and Dads, but the people who choose to stay home and work from home, you get so many benefits. But there’s also worlds of distraction and it’s hard.

It takes a while for your family to adjust. I remember when William was born and Alex, my husband was taking care of him during the day. It was hard for Alex and William to adjust to the fact that just because I was three feet away didn’t mean that I could just be interrupted at any time.

And so a lot of advice I’ve given out to moms and dads over the years who are starting their laptop life and it is to make sure that even if you do work in the living room or in the dining room, you have a dedicated space where it’s, “I can’t be disturbed.”

You just don’t want your clients and your customers to feel like your brain is only half there and you need to be able to concentrate.

And so as much as we want to enjoy this lifestyle of, “oh, we’re just sitting here on the laptop while the kids all play on the floor,” we all know that that’s not reality. Right?

And so the first thing I did was make sure I had a dedicated space. And then the second thing, and this goes really well for toddlers, parents of toddlers, if you keep just a few toys that they don’t get, I mean you can see there’s like toys all over my living room right now, but those few toys that they don’t get unless they’re at your desk or in your office, if there are ever times when you have to just deal with them.

I remember Alex got stuck somewhere and I was on a Webinar, I was on a meeting and William just had to be right there with me.

Pull open that drawer and take out those secret toys because parents, you guys know that kids find new toys interesting.

That was another thing that I did that worked really, really well. Eventually, I needed help and now I have a nanny.

My husband doesn’t work full time anymore. Once you get to the point where you’re really scaling a business that’s multi-six and seven figures, you really need to think about hiring out those things that may feel luxurious at first.

I remember when I hired my nanny and I asked her to also do some cooking and I hired a housekeeper, I thought, “well, I can do this stuff.”

But at the end of the day, if I’m spending time in my business, the time out of my business, I want to spend focused on my kids and my spouse, and so all of those other activities are distracting me from that quality time that I can have.

So if you’re a mom or a dad and you are trying to live your laptop life, that’s exactly what I was doing before my business blew up and that’s what I’m still doing today.

I’ve created a community of people who are living their laptop life. It’s called Create Your Laptop Life and it’s a community and weekly coaching with me where you can ask any question about your online business.

There’s tons of training and I invite you to check that out. I give people a $1 trial for two weeks. Come check it out.

There’s almost a thousand members, other moms, and dads, entrepreneurs like you living their laptop life in the midst of the chaos, and I would love for you to be a part of it.

As always, if you have any questions at all, just leave them in the comments below or you can check out more at Juliechenell.com. I’ll talk to you guys soon.

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