Behind the scenes: December 2021

Behind-the-scenes Business Blog post December 2021

Written by Cherry

Hey, I'm Cherry. The creator + photographer behind Beach Babe Stock. I'm a puppy mum to two adorable dogs + a cat and live in Thailand with my hubby. I love all things to do with business/entrepreneurship, travelling, surfing and reading.

January 14, 2022

Behind the scenes: December 2021

Earlier last year I discovered that I LOVE sitting down to read my other entrepreneurs’ behind-the-scenes blog posts. So I thought I should do my own ones as well! Check out the past posts here: Nov 2021

If you’re new here – Hey, I’m Cherry ? I’m the creative behind Beach Babe Stock. I create visual content & branding for intentional entrepreneurs like you in the hopes that it helps you take the first step to feeling less overwhelmed & have more fun creating content for your brand.

As of mid 2021, we became a small team of 2 ? Gloria helps me with all the content management and now also writes our “What’s New” blog posts.

For these Behind-The-Scenes blog posts… it’s my aim to keep track kind of “review” what went well (or didn’t) each month, as well as creating a fun post for people to enjoy reading… and I am really enjoying writing them so far too.


 

Just a quick FYI: This post may contain some affiliate links to products / services I love and recommend. So, if you click through and make a purchase I might earn a percentage.  There’s never any extra cost to you.

 


What Happened in December…

 

Lizzy’s Christmas Party:

It’s closed now, but I was a contributor in Lizzy’s Christmas Party and boy-oh-boy was it big. A few highlights/things about it & how I participated:

? It was the biggest giveaway I’ve participated in so far, and the most engaging one.

? I had something for free, and something for the paid party people as well.

⏰ The party was open for 7 days and I had so many new subscribers from it which I was very happy + excited about and was not expecting it to go so well. I had a total of 501 new email subscribers from the party in December.

228 people got one of my bundles (this was my Regular Goody Bag offer), here’s a graph of people getting their bundle throughout the month, as you can see, I had the most people signed up while the party was open (2-9th Dec).

95 people joined my Mini Membership in December. Here’s how people joined throughout the month:

? I’m a huge fan of Lizzy and everything she does. If you want to be notified about the next one… Lizzy may be doing another one next year, or you might like her party debrief where she goes breaks down all the behind-the-scenes things of creating and managing the party and giving us some insights into how it went from her side of things as well.

What I did well:

?  Picked the right offer(s) to “gift” to the Party Peeps ? Everyone who emailed/chatted with me through the party loved their free bundle, and the people who joined my Mini Membership are loving it so far too.

What I didn’t do well:

?  Spent an enormous amount of time manually creating a report in Notion that I later found out is already automated FOR me through my eCommerce platform (WooCommerce) ??‍♀️

?  The tripwire I had set up for the free bundles didn’t convert as well as I’d hoped (only 4 people signed up for it – so about 1.75% conversion).  I think the issue with this was that there wasn’t enough interest and next time, I would try offering a different product.

 

Created the En-tree-preneur quiz:

After taking Heather’s “Quiz Quickstarter” course and wanting to create my own quiz for agggeees, I was able to stop procrastinating and get my own quiz out into the world.

So far, I only added the link to it in my main menu and on my tools page. And, as I’m finishing up the writing of this post in January — I have yet to mention it to my email list, so I’ll report back on that in next months’ behind-the-scenes post.

If you want to take the quiz for yourself; here it is:Take the En-tree-preneur Quiz

 

Had a December Sale:

After deciding on having a BFCM sale last month (read more about it in last month’s behind-the-scenes post) and not really putting enough effort into promoting it, I sent out an email saying that I’d do another one in December, and asked people to click to let me know if they were interested. A few people did, so I created a Black Friday / End of Year promotion and emailed people about it.

I promoted the Black Friday / End of Year Sale from Dec 26 – Jan 1st, and asked my affiliates to join (I created swipe email copy and graphics and shared with them about a week ahead of time). I had a bunch of cash discounts as a part of the sale.

The sale went OKAY — I had high hopes for it and it didn’t go as well as I wanted it to, and that’s ok. If I do this again next year, I’m going to pre-plan it a lot longer ahead of time and ask my affiliates to participate before everyone goes off on holidays haha.

 

Some Random Site + Email Updates:

Added these cute little forms to the bottom of my blog posts and set them up so that they show a couple of different ones based on the blog post category. ???

In emails, I updated some of the automated ones I already had in place with new links to my tools page and these behind-the-scenes blog posts to create more visibility for them both.

 

Blog posts:

 

Email list numbers:

1170 email subscribers – 488 more people than last month (almost all of that growth was due to Lizzy’s Christmas Party)

 

Growth + learning this month:

 

Tech I used this month:

  • WooCommerce – to process payments & deliver products on my site.
  • Divi – my website builder… Divi makes life sooo easy ?.
  • Notion – for organising everythingggggg.
  • Tally – for collecting member feedback and product reviews and my quiz!
  • MailerLite – the email marketing platform that I use to send emails out.
  • Whats App – Gloria and I communicate almost mainly on WhatsApp.
  • Google Workspace – to host my business hub things.
  • Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom – to edit all the new members images each month.
  • Canva – creating members’ templates as well as all our own graphics and things.
  • Loom – I use loom to make SOP videos, and also send some short video messages/support things to members, I love it!
  • NameCheap – for all my domains/SSLs and hosting.
  • Tidio – for the chat support box in the bottom right-hand corner on my site.

 

Income Streams:

  1. The Mini Membership
  2. Trial Membership
  3. Monthly (no longer open) and Quarterly Members
  4. Bundles
  5. Affiliate Income

Affiliate income breakdown:

  1. Email Marketing Membership (EMM)
  2. Lizzy’s Christmas Party – Premium Goody Bag
  3. Credit To Your Business
  4. That (Black) Friday Feeling

*for the sake of transparency — the above are affiliate earnings I qualified (and most likely actively promoted) for this month, not what is paid out this month. ?

Regular life things + updates:

Emotionally, December was a big rollercoaster month of highs and lows to be honest…  We had to play a bit of a waiting game with our house construction, and I struggled with missing my family a lot over the holiday period. Christmas morning we did a hike/walk along this gorgeous scenic route near us in Khao Lak (see pics below) and loved it.

I also dipped my toes back into social media — I stopped using all social media platforms back on the 11th October and had planned a week of offline time… and then at the week mark, I decided to turn it into 30 days… and the (you guessed it) and the 30-day mark I still felt great about no social, so kept doing with it… and finally, on the 20th Dec I logged back on Facebook… basically with the sole purpose to go into Lizzy’s “Team EBG” client-only group and participate a bit. I might write a whole blog post about this.

Somehow it’s always the simple things that you end up loving the most, we went for a couple of surfs (the waves in general, were almost non-existent through Nov-Dec this year)? + dog walks ?, and had our Christmas tree lit up every night. ?

photo collage of things that happened in December, surfing, christmas morning walk, our house progress.

 

Reading:

From last month’s BTS post, I mentioned that I was chasing 30 books … I did it. Read exactly 30 books in 2021. In December I read:

  • The Midnight Library (Matt Haig) – could NOT put this down… it was awesome, riveting. Dark at first & slowly working its way towards being positive & inspiring.
  • The Heart Principle (Helen Hoang) – long-time lover of Helen’s books. This was her 3rd and apparently hardest to write in this series. Was not disappointed by this one & definitely recommend it if you love a light romantic read.

 

Watching:

Free Guy (Netflix) – loved this movie & their positive take on ai being a “good guy” & a positive force as apposed to the usual terminator plans-to-dominate-the-world-and-kill-all-humans take.

Overall

I loved the results from being a part of Lizzy’s Christmas Party earlier in the month & kind of hit a mid-month slump that was filled with lots of reading and thoroughly enjoying The Midnight Library… however I did come to the realisation that I want to shake things up a bit in 2022 (you’ll be able to read more about this in January’s behind-the-scenes post) and try a couple of new things. I hope you enjoyed reading this post, as I’ve really enjoyed writing & re-living it!

Behind-the-scenes Business Blog post December 2021

 

If you enjoyed this BTS post and would love to get notified the next time I write one, you can sign up here:

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