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How Weekly Budget Meetings Changed Our Financial Lives Forever

September 22, 2023

 

Running your own business means you’re thinking about money all the time, but are you thinking about the right things and do you have the right money habits?

We’re not those people who believe money is EVERYTHING and we’re just aiming to squeeze every last dollar of profit out of our businesses.

However, we do believe in using your business to fuel a spacious, calm lifestyle, and more money certainly helps alleviate stress and gives you more choices of how to spend your time.

How much money is enough?

 

There are two important money decisions we want to share with you in this article. Neither of them are groundbreaking in theory, but both of them drastically changed our financial situation by putting us more in control and shifting our mindset around money.

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Important Money Decision #1: Mandatory Weekly Budget Meetings

There was a time not too long ago when we were afraid to log in to our bank and credit card accounts. We thought if we ignored the financial truth of those accounts, mysteriously all our money problems would just sort themselves out. However, that is a tactic that simply does not work.

You HAVE to know your numbers in order to grow your numbers. Meaning, you can’t just ignore your finances and HOPE that your financial position will change.

You have to know your numbers to grow your numbers

 

When we were $100,000+ in debt a few years ago, it felt like we were climbing a money mountain that was insurmountable. But the single game-changing decision that turned the tide for us in getting out of debt was to finally commit to having weekly budget meetings where we had to actually look at our numbers.

The first weekly budget meeting sucks, then each week after gets easier

We’re not going to lie to you, that first weekly budget meeting can be like a punch to the gut. But, once we were through it, it allowed us to take back control and actually make a plan for how to pay down our debt and work toward some of our financial goals.

As we moved forward, our weekly budget meetings got less painful. Sure, more money didn’t just magically show up because we started reviewing our finances each week, but it became less uncomfortable to confront our financial reality.

During one of our early weekly budget meetings, we decided to look at paying off our debt like a game.

Every expense tracked was a new item we discovered.
Every bill we forgot about was an unexpected mini-boss we had to battle.
Every dollar of income was a shiny gold coin that could get added to our ledger.

Weekly financial meetings changed our financial lives

 

When our debt mindset shifted from shame to game, that’s when things got less stressful and when our plan became less daunting!

Further reading: We wrote an in-depth article about our full debt payoff plan and how we paid off $124,000+ in debt in under 3 years.

You might be wondering: Do we still have weekly budget meetings? And the answer is YES! Even many years later, completely debt-free, and with businesses that generate 5x the revenue, we continue to have weekly budget meetings because it keeps us in control of our money!

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Important Money Decision #2: Setting “Enough-Based” Financial Goals

“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s. “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”  Thanks for the fun movie quote, Sean Parker, but this type of thinking is what keeps people striving for goals that are unreachable OR reachable with loads of stress.

We want to make it very clear: Whatever amount of money you want to make is totally fine with us! But… We just ask that you take a hard look at your day-to-day life, your specific circumstances, and uncover a financial goal that’s suited to YOU.

We all see it everywhere, people talking about making six figs ($100,000+) and seven figs ($1m+). Again, if those numbers can be broken down and aren’t arbitrary, by all means have them as goals.

However, what we’ve found is more helpful is to set “enough-based” financial goals.

Being wealthy doesn't mean you have to make a certain amount of money

 

How much money is ENOUGH to live a good life?

Very quick story from Jason 👨🏻‍🦲:

  •  Back in the early days of my career (2009) I always said I wanted to make a million dollars. But I couldn’t tell you what that meant for my actual LIFE. What was I going to use that money for? How would it bring me more of the things I wanted? What were the expenses my business would have to earn that much revenue? I hadn’t even thought about any of the details, I just wanted to hit that arbitrary milestone. And want to know what happened? Chasing that $1m dream led to me being the unhappiest, most stressed, and most in debt I’d ever been in my life.

When we started Wandering Aimfully (WAIM), we decided to take a different approach. It would’ve been easy to say, “let’s have WAIM make $1m per year!” Instead, we learned from Jason’s mistake and asked an important question: “How much money would be ENOUGH?”

This brought us to questions like:

  • How much do we want to spend on rent each month?
  • What’s our clothing budget every year?
  • Do we want to travel? What does that specifically look like?
  • What about investing? Saving? Donating to causes?

We went through every question we could think of to created an “enough-based” financial goal. In the end, we landed on $33,000/month* (~$400k/year) as our first enough goal.

*Note: Setting an enough-based financial goal does not have be a forever goal! Your goals can always change if your life changes. Our enough number has grown since setting this initial one due to new goals of wanting to buy a home, raising kids, and putting money aside to take care of our parents. 

Further reading: If you want to read the entire story of how we hit our enough goal for WAIM in the first 3 years (with all the ups and downs along the way!) you can read that full story here.

Depending on your financial situation, $400k per year might sound like a lot or it might sound like not enough. For us, it felt like that amount would be a dream come true because that number was directly related to a lifestyle that would be a dream come true!

You’ll never know you’re satisfied unless you define exactly how big the container of your desires is.

Satisfaction is the feeling that your cup is full Pink Donut

By actually asking ourselves these enough-based financial questions and applying REAL numbers to each category, we were able to see that our business doesn’t need to make a million dollars for us to feel wealthy.

Setting our enough number helped us feel more at ease in growing our business. We had a true north to head toward and it was a way of defining a boundary line of satisfaction. There are plenty of more impressive businesses that make way more money than ours, but we look around and we have gratitude every single day for what we have because we know our goals have contributed to us living our dream lives.

If you want to read more about the idea of ENOUGH and get our specific formulas on how to calculate your Monthly Minimum Magic (MMM) number and Enough number you can read this article.

We hope you’ll apply these two simple shifts to your own personal finance approach, and we hope they bring you less stress, and yes, even more (but also ENOUGH) money!

3 Ways to Unlock Profit Potential in Your Email Marketing: The Dorito Framework

September 22, 2023

 

What the heck does a scrumptiously crunchy Dorito chip have to do with profitable email marketing and making your emails irresistible for your subscribers to open?

We want to help you turn your regular email newsletters into a profit-generating powerhouse for your online business! There are 3 game-changing strategies in our “Dorito Framework™” (not actually trademarked, obvs) that will take your email campaigns from ‘meh’ to massive ROI!

Dorito Framework for Email Marketing

 

Pink Donut

Profitable Email Marketing, A 3-Pronged Approach (You Know, Like A Dorito)

Let’s assume you ALREADY know the power of email marketing for your business.

You know that as of 2023, email marketing has an average ROI of 3600%, meaning for every dollar spent on email marketing, you receive $36 in return. Cool cool cool. That’s 👏👏👏👏👏 right there.

Now, maybe you’ve been sending a consistent email newsletter to your audience and you aren’t seeing a 3600% return? You have this suspicion that your email audience is not engaged in the way you know they need to be in order to DRIVE SALES of whatever your offer is.

If that describes you, stick around because our Dorito Framework has the 3 tactics we used to level up our email newsletters, build a deeper connection with our subscribers, and keep our readers coming back for more—just like an irresistible bag of delicious Cool Ranch Doritos. Or Nacho Cheese Doritos. Or BBQ Doritos. You get to choose your favorite Doritos flavor, no judgment from us.

What is the ONE THING you ultimately want from your email marketing?

You want it to translate to sales, right?

If you’re running a calm business, you know it’s not ALL about the money, but your time is precious so if you’re spending time on a marketing tactic, it eventually needs to translate to revenue.

And if you want people to BUY what you’re selling, ultimately these potential customers need to do two things…

  1. They need to believe that your offer is a solution to a problem they have
  2. They also need to TRUST that YOU are the right business to deliver that solution.

Trust is the name of the game here, especially if you’re running a client business or online course business.

Your customer is making an educated guess about whether to trust you based on every single interaction you’ve had with them from the moment they came into contact with your business.

Which is where your email newsletter comes in.

Email marketing is your IN to building real trust with your audience.

Someone who has given you permission to email them has raised their hand and shown interest. And that interest is stronger than just a quick tap of a follow button or a like.

They’ve essentially gone out on a limb and now this is your chance to reward that gesture of faith by showing them you have what it takes to actually improve their life.

Not JUST by sending them valuable content (aka content that is educational or entertaining or personal or time-saving)—though you should definitely do that. And not JUST by showing up consistently in their inboxes—though consistency is key and you should definitely be doing that too. But by showing them that you actually care about building a relationship with them, thus proving to them that handing over their email wasn’t a wasted effort.

And how do you do that? Doritos!

There are 3 things we try to do in every email we send, and they form a nice little triangle – but what’s better than a boring triangle? A more delicious triangle and that’s why we call it the Doritos Framework!

Here are the 3 sides of the Doritos Framework with the 3 things you want your emails to have: 1) A Trust Treasure, 2) A Reply Route, and 3) An Income Iceberg.

Use the Dorito Framework for email marketing

 

Yellow Swirl

Dorito Corner #1: How a Trust Treasure Leads To Profitable Email Marketing

Let’s start with a Trust Treasure – which is going to be some BONUS piece of additional added value beyond just the content of your email that can take your reader one step deeper.

For us, this Trust Treasure could be sending them a free un-boring coaching session to check out, which is normally behind our WAIM Unlimited program paywall, but maybe this one session is relevant to them.

For you, a Trust Treasure could be:

  • A PDF that creates action-taking on the email content
  • An in-depth video that adds more context and learning
  • A specific article that can help them level up further
  • A podcast episode that shares the journey or story
  • A link to someone else’s business that adds more value

Trust Treasure can be ANYTHING you like, the point is that you’re going above and beyond what your audience expects, and you’re rewarding them for engaging deeper with your brand.

The more Trust Treasure you offer alongside your existing email content, the more your audience will come to think of you as someone who OVER-delivers on value. That over-delivering is going to contribute greatly to how someone perceives you when they decide whether to buy your offer.

Share a trust treasure in every email you send

 

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Dorito Corner #2: Add a Reply Route to Every Email

One thing we hear all the time from folks who run email newsletters is, “I never get any replies to my emails, am I doing something wrong?” When we take a look at their email newsletters we see a very clear pattern: There isn’t a CLEAR and OBVIOUS Reply Route in the email.

If you want someone to reply to your email newsletters, you have to create and unbelievably clear and specific invitation for them to hit reply.

There are tons of ways you can position your Reply Route, but here are two examples if this article was written as an email newsletter:

  • Reply Route Example #1: Hit reply and share which of the 3 parts of the Dorito Framework you’re most excited to try in your next email newsletter
  • Reply Route Example #2: You can give them a super convenient and easy reply route by saying something like “Reply with the word DORITO (or your fave Doritos flavor) if you felt like this email was valuable to you.”

By lowering the barrier on the reply and making the call to reply visually prominent, you can still open up the two-way conversation and use that as an invitation to ask more questions, further forming trust.

Email newsletter replies are absolutely still a thing and even MORE valuable as email automation becomes a bigger part of marketing.

If you can show someone that you’re a real human and willing to take the time to reply to them, even if it’s short, your efforts are going a long way to building a bridge of trust.

Encourage your subscribers to reply to your emails to increase engagement

 

Bazzon

Dorito Corner #3: Build Your Income Iceberg

Think of your paid offer (your online course, template, etc) like an iceberg, with all this incredible value just waiting under the surface for someone to buy and get access to.

It’s your job to think of your email content like the very top bit of the iceberg bobbing ABOVE the surface.

Your email content is the free part someone can see, but it needs to be connected to your deeper offer, otherwise, you’re attracting an audience that is never going to be relevant to what you’re selling.

Your Income Iceberg is especially important in the 4 weeks or so leading up to any kind of sales launch. The lead-up to a launch is arguably the most valuable content you’ll send to get your audience ready to purchase.

If you’re opening up a course or program for a limited time, make sure the emails in the weeks leading up to that window are HIGHLY related to your offer. They should help solve the tiny problem BEFORE the big problem your paid offer solves.

Here are 8 example emails you can send to create the best Income Iceberg possible:

  • Transformation: The before and after results of your offer
  • Paint The Picture: What could someone’s future look like
  • Customer Story: Share an in-depth relatable customer story
  • Mistakes We Made: What did you do wrong and how did you fix it?
  • This Offer Is Different: What sets your product apart?
  • I Feel Your Pain: How have you overcome the pain of your customer?
  • Is This For You: The why/why not they should buy
  • Common Objections: Think of this like an FAQ

There are SO MANY more emails you could send in the lead-up to your next product launch or sale. The key is to remember to give value, even in those lead (and “cart is open”) sales emails!

Your free email content is the tip of your business iceberg

 

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The Dorito Framework Wrap-Up

Those are the 3 parts of our Dorito Framework that will take your email newsletters from good to great. Your email content itself still needs to be awesome and helpful, but those 3 tactics (Trust Treasure, a Reply Route, and an Income Iceberg) will help you create more profitable emails if you use them consistently.

We’ve been sending emails for over 10 years (!!!) and email marketing is STILL the primary channel that has led us to generate over $4,000,000 in revenue over the past decade, without relying on paid ads or social media.

In fact, one of our recent WAIM Unlimited coaching program launches was run entirely through email without any social promotion, and we generated $226,000 in sales in two weeks with an 11,000-person email list.

These 3 tactics are how we make the MOST of our email marketing strategy and we hope they help you too!

5 Ways To Differentiate Your Business and Stand Out Online

September 21, 2023

 

Every day more people are hopping on the online business bandwagon and as it gets more crowded you’re probably asking yourself: How the heck am I supposed to stand out online?

We have an answer for you! In fact, we have five ways you can think about standing out from the crowd.

It’s true the online business world feels crowded, but here’s the unique thing about running an online course business or a knowledge business: People can choose WHO they want to learn from.

Become more magnetic to your customers by differentiating yourself

 

There may be a thousand voices shouting about how to design websites, but when someone’s in the market for a web design course, they’re hunting for the one that clicks with their vibe.

They’re looking for a creator whose style aligns with their taste. That’s your in!

If you can set yourself apart from what else is out there, you can give someone a reason to choose you. And now, the million-dollar question:

Why is someone going to choose you? Your SOUCE.

That’s not a typo, we’re not talking about delicious special sauce, we’re talking about your business SOUCE.

And why “SOUCE?” Because it’s weird, it’s quirky, and it’s unforgettable. And unforgettable is exactly what we’re shooting for in this article to help you stand out online!

You have to remember that marketing isn’t about blending in. It’s about making a freaking statement. It’s about getting noticed in the chaos.

You COULD take the path of least resistance, follow the pack, and scramble to outwork your competitors, OR you can rewrite the script and play YOUR game by YOUR rules.

Differentiate your business with SOUCE!

 

Bazzoon

To Have Your Business Stand Out Online You Need S-O-U-C-E

We looooove a good acronym around Wandering Aimfully, and the weirder the better! So, let’s go ahead and break SOUCE down for you:

S stands for your Superpower (aka what are you really good at?)

EVERYONE has a superpower. There’s something you can do better than most people.

  • You might be seriously gifted at breaking down big, complicated concepts into bite-sized nuggets.
  • Or you are the most obsessively organized person you know.
  • Or maybe you just have the biggest heart for helping people and you have a knack for knowing exactly what someone else needs to hear.

Whatever it is, ask yourself HOW you can incorporate that superpower into your business and your brand.

Differentiate yourself by identifying and using your superpower

 

Next up we have O as in Own your weird.

Personality-wise, what do you think makes you quirky compared to everyone else around you?

In the real world, you might be afraid of showing people your weird. But in the online marketing world, weird is wonderful. Weird is GOLD. Weird is memorable and distinct and yes, weird will even make you money.

Here’s the question you should answer to help your business stand out: What parts of you feel like they don’t fit into the crowd? How can you play that up in your business?

We (Jason and Caroline Zook 👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲) LOVE being silly, coming up with loads of inside jokes, and laughing about poop humor, and those are the first things that attracted us to each other. We took these quirks about ourselves and made an effort to incorporate our random metaphors and weird comedy bits into our podcast and our live coaching for our Wandering Aimfully members.

We’ve built our entire brand around being UN-BORING because so many business coaches are kind of dry and take themselves way too seriously.

Fellow weirdos know when they find us that we’re the right coaches for them. We stand out online, especially in a very crowded space (online business coaching), by leaning into being weird and easily detracting anyone who needs a non-silly biz coach.

Differentiate yourself by owning your weird

 

Moving on to U, which stands for Uniquely qualified.

What is the overlap of skills or experiences in your background that is rare?

What’s that cocktail of your talents and perspective that collide to create magic?

For Example: You might be a tech-savvy designer who’s also a psychology buff. Combining aesthetics and user experience with psychological insights? That overlap is your advantage and it will set you apart from your competitors!

Differentiate yourself by showing how you're uniquely qualified to do what you do

 

Then we have C, which is Contrary to convention

In what ways do you disagree or disrupt the status quo? Think about some of the common narratives or perspectives in your field, and ask yourself which ones you have a different take on.

This is not about disagreeing just for the sake of it. It’s about looking for opportunities to zig when everybody else is zagging.

That’s how you create CONTRAST with your peers and that contrast will act like a bat signal to customers that align with your point of view.

Differentiate your business by disrupting the status quo

 

The final ingredient in your Special SOUCE comes from the E which stands for Extra mile

What’s the above-and-beyond thing you’re willing to do that others in your field aren’t? It doesn’t have to be something wild and crazy, a couple of simple things most people don’t do are:

  • Personalized customer interactions
  • A unique guarantee your business can provide
  • Unparalleled customer support and experience

For instance, we run our coaching program using a lifetime pricing model, which many people shy away from. Once you pay for our WAIM Unlimited program, you still get access PLUS you get access to ANY evergreen product or program we create in the future.

We still get email replies from our customers when we let them know their payments are done but they’ll continue to get our coaching sessions and they write back to us in actual disbelief because they’re not used to programs doing that. Even though we promised it to them, it still stands out because many online business owners don’t keep their promises (that alone is a simple differentiator!)

Differentiate by going the extra mile

 

Fuzzy Donut

If you want to stand out online, you need to showcase your Special SOUCE

When you find that one or two things that are almost UNREASONABLY great in your customers’ minds, they WILL tell people about it. In a time when it feels like you have to use social media to promote your business, word-of-mouth marketing is still king!

It’s time to embrace that Special SOUCE of yours, to dare to be different, and to reap the rewards. Stop doing things like everyone else in your niche is doing them.

A Simple Content Strategy for Creative Online Business Owners

September 20, 2023

 

Would you believe us if we told you we stopped posting daily social media content almost two years ago, and our business revenue didn’t tank… it actually grew 📈🤯?

If you’re absolutely EXHAUSTED from trying to keep up with the Instagram and TikTok algorithms, keep watching because there IS a way to eventually break free from the clutches of daily content demands. And we’re here to unveil that secret strategy.

Fighting against the advice of more 🙅‍♀️🙅‍♂️

It seems like every podcast and tutorial out there is chanting the mantra of “more, more, more” when it comes to content.

🗣️ “Post ten times a day! Establish a LinkedIn presence! Why haven’t you joined TikTok yet?”

But guess who’s singing that tune? People who have their personal camera crews following them around, documenting every moment. People with creative teams that rehash content 20 different ways a day and meticulously manage each and every platform on their behalf.

And if that’s not your reality… we’re right there with you!

Is the daily content hamster wheel a necessary part of running a successful business? OR… could there be a content strategy for solo entrepreneurs or small teams that emphasizes “enough” content on platforms you genuinely enjoy?

Well, we wanted to test that for ourselves, so we stopped posting daily social media content almost two years ago. We hopped off the algorithm train and instead, we came up with a more sustainable strategy that we call our “Content Salad Strategy 🥗,” which has allowed us to actually get MORE customers in the past two years, without posting on Instagram and without ever opening TikTok.

Be smart about your content strategy

 

There are 3 parts to our Content Salad Strategy 🥗: You have the lettuce, the toppings, and the dressing.

Are you ready for a SIMPLE yet incredibly powerful way we strategically tackle different content platforms, all while keeping your sanity intact and your revenue growing? Great, grab your business forks and let’s dig into this salad metaphor!

3D Shape

Content Salad Strategy Priority #1 is your Evergreen Content aka “Lettuce”

There are two categories of content lifespan: Evergreen and Ephemeral

Evergreen content is medium to long-form content, and it can be discovered months or even years after it’s created, like a YouTube video or a blog post like the one you’re currently reading.

Ephemeral content has a much SHORTER shelf-life, it rarely lives on more than a week or two after it’s posted, if not gone in a day, like an Instagram story, a tweet, or a TikTok video.

Evergreen vs Ephemeral Content

 

For your lettuce, you want a powerhouse primary content channel that’s all about Evergreen content, and it needs be on a platform where fresh eyes can stumble upon it.

That last bit is the real kicker because this Evergreen foundation is what will still be bringing NEW faces into your brand world, long after you’ve said goodbye to those fleeting social media posts.

We recommend publishing 8-10 blog posts for your Evergreen Foundation

These are 8-10 meaty, long-form articles that should strategically target several SEO keywords linked to your business that your audience is actively searching for.

📌 Further reading: Are you completely lost when it comes to SEO? Us too! We’ve learned a thing or two and you can read everything we know about SEO here.

Blogging is NOT dead yet!

People are still on the hunt for answers, asking Google for solutions. And guess what? They’re not stopping anytime soon. Until this behavior becomes obsolete, SEO-driven traffic is still a huge asset to your business.

We STILL get hundreds of new email subscribers a month coming from organic search to our articles, and that passive traffic is a huge part of why we don’t have to post on social media.

Stop putting off this foundational task to your content strategy! Get working on your Evergreen foundation articles (your “lettuce”) today!

Bazzoon

Content Salad Strategy Priority #2 is your Tasty Toppings aka Ongoing Content

You’ve put your lettuce on your plate, now it’s time to add consistent flavor to your salad! This is where your trust-building, ongoing NUTURE content comes into play.

An absolute non-negotiable ongoing content item is an email newsletter

It might sound unsexy, but email newsletters are still incredibly effective at driving sales, and it is the best way to capture the attention of your audience AWAY from social media platforms.

Content Strategy with Email List

 

We can directly tie $4,000,000 in business revenue to our email newsletter in the past decade! Email is not dead and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

The consistency of your email newsletter, ideally on a weekly basis, forms an incredible relationship with your audience, which is the key to great marketing.

If you’re looking to add an additional tasty topping to your content strategy, we’d recommend YouTube videos or podcast episodes. The biggest thing to remember here is that the goal is to build TRUST, deliver value, and establish your authority with your audience (ongoing!)

Fuzzy Donut

Content Salad Strategy Priority #3 is your Dressing aka Ephemeral Social Content

Does coming up with social media content ideas stress you out? Well, we have a SUPER EASY tactic to help you come up with ideas:

Take your foundation content or your nurture content and you want to repackage that into bite-sized social media posts.

Boom! Simple. This is where your YouTube Shorts clips, Instagram Reels, Tweets, or TikTok videos come into play.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Your social content should guide people BACK to your lettuce and tasty toppings

Remember, the entire goal here is to get off the hamster wheel of daily content creation on social media. By using social media content to grow your nurture channels, you end up more in control of your audience growth and less beholden to algorithms.

Quit using social media

 

You absolutely may need to use social media for 3-6 months if you’re just getting started in growing your email newsletter, YouTube subscribers, or podcast listeners.

But the endgame is to build up organic search traffic so that your audience is growing on its own, not because you’re posting something new daily.

Yellow spiral

Content Salad Strategy Wrap-Up!

The most important thing we want for you is a content strategy that works on your behalf. One that doesn’t require you to feel stressed and constantly chasing the latest trend.

An email newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, all of these content types are so much easier to maintain and build trust with your audience.

We’ve absolutely loved being off social media for the past two years while watching our business revenue grow and we want the same thing for you!

Our days are now calmer, our focus is sharper, and we can tackle the game-changers in our business without the constant hum of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc in the background.

While you may not be able to hop off the daily content treadmill TODAY, right now, you can ABSOLUTELY pave your way to a social media off-ramp.

Start your content strategy today

 

To start today, give our Content Salad Strategy 🥗 a whirl…

  1. 🥬  8-10 SEO-friendly articles as your foundation
  2. 🥕  An email newsletter (optional: a podcast or YouTube channel)
  3. ✨  Sprinkling in social content that directs traffic back to your articles and series—until your organic traffic is consistently growing your newsletter without social media

It IS possible to have a simple, sustainable, and effective content strategy and to steer clear of social media… it just takes time, intention, and patience.

3 Key Parts of Defining Your Brand and Business VIBE

September 18, 2023

 

Designing a visual brand has never been easier, but unfortunately, that’s not a guarantee that your business is going to be memorable or carry any authority with your potential customers.

There are two additional elements you need to define BEYOND your brand visuals that will supercharge your brand and make sure you attract your ideal customer.

Bazzoon

In this article, we’re going to reveal those two elements so you can make sure you have a COMPREHENSIVE brand strategy—one that attracts a small but mighty audience and lays the foundation for a business that feels 100% authentic to you.

Branding is the sum of the associations you create in the minds of your customers about your business. Here’s an example of what we hope comes to mind when you’re here at Wandering Aimfully:

  • 👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲  Wandering Aimfully is fun, intentional, we have clear business experience, we care about customers, we love cinnamon rolls (and donuts), and we don’t take life or business too seriously.

When most people think of creating a brand, they immediately think logos, colors, fonts, and maybe some little creative doodads. Those visual elements ARE very important, but a powerful brand isn’t just about how your brand looks – it’s how your brand SPEAKS and how your brand BEHAVES.

Your brand is NOT just your logo and colors, it's how your brand speaks and behaves

 

This brings us to the THREE crucial components of branding, or a little something we like to call the 3 V’s of your Brand ✨Vibe✨.

Fuzzy Donut

Defining Your Brand Using The 3 V’s of Your Brand Vibe

Creating a clear ✨Vibe✨ isn’t just something trendy. You want to create a brand vibe to help your audience clearly understand who you are and if your business is the right fit to solve their problems.

The 3 V’s of defining your brand are as follows:

  1. Your brand visuals
  2. Your brand values
  3. Your brand voice

There’s plenty of information out there about creating great brand visuals, but we’d argue that your brand values and brand voice should actually be defined FIRST, so that you can match your brand visuals to these two intangible things.

Let’s dig into your brand VALUES and brand VOICE so you can leave this article with an idea of how to make your brand more attractive to your ideal audience!

We like to think of brand VALUES as simply how your business behaves

If your business was a person, what notable qualities would they have and how would these qualities guide their decisions? For our business, Wandering Aimfully, we have several brand values but we can boil it down to these basic five qualities:

  • Curiosity
  • Intentionality
  • Transparency
  • Fun
  • Authenticity

Every decision we make in our business, from the type of content we create, to the things we decide to share, to HOW we structure things like our business accountability programs, all come back to these five words.

It’s the way our brand behaves that gives someone a clue about what we’re about and who we’re trying to attract.

While someone who encounters our brand may not be able to articulate those exact words directly, our customers have an idea of what we stand for because of the way our brand BEHAVES and how we show up online.

So now the question is… how does YOUR business behave?

🤔  What are your guiding principles?
🤔  What will your customers come to appreciate about you?

If you can define these values, you can use them as a decision filter for every choice you make in your business.

Your brand VALUES are what your brand stands for

 

Now let’s talk about the second V in defining your brand vibe: your brand VOICE.

How are you going to speak to your customers? Almost all of showing up online is based on communication. It’s website copy and social media captions, customer emails and YouTube scripts. And if you haven’t decided the tone of voice you’re going to use when you speak, you’re missing a huge opportunity to set a vibe for your brand.

  • Are you more authoritative?
  • Or more friendly?
  • Are you a little irreverent?
  • Are you funny or sarcastic or intentionally dry and academic?
  • Will you be long-winded or short and direct?

For us, in everything we do, we try to come across as friendly, educational, laid back, and a little bit silly. We rarely communicate in extremes, though we definitely let our passion come through. We intentionally try not to be condescending or even authoritative (ain’t nobody ’round here trying to be a “thought leader” or a “guru” #nothankyou). Who else shares GIFs like this…

Jason Zook and Caroline Zook of Wandering Aimfully

 

We don’t position ourselves as business experts —instead, we like speaking as a couple of friends with a decade of online business experiments, who just want to share what has worked for them.

That is all BY DESIGN, and it’s why we’ve been able to amass 1,000+ paying customers for our un-boring coaching program while only having an email list of 11,000 subscribers and barely any presence on social media.

Your brand VOICE is how your brand speaks to your customers
 

Once you know your VALUES and your tone of VOICE, then you can make sure your visuals align with those qualities.

It’s not a coincidence that one of our brand values is FUN, that our tone of voice is as a friend, and that we use whimsical stickers and emojis in our brand visuals.

We use happy saturated brand colors that are close to primary colors which give our brand that educational, approachable feel, but we also combine them with gradients, and bold, black type to make our brand feel modern and cool.

Branding can make a HUGE difference in helping you attract customers, but you have to make sure you’re not stopping short at designing a logo and picking out some colors.

Branding is more than just your visuals

 

Really decide WHO you want to be as a business, who you want to attract, and how you can have that personality come through in everything you do.

The more confident, consistent, and intentional you can be with your choices, the more your customer will pick up on the VIBE you’re trying to create. And that, friends, is what a good brand will do!

How to Build an Audience Organically That’s Small But Profitable

September 18, 2023

 

These days it may seem like everyone has built a GIGANTIC audience.

Whether it’s 100,000+ newsletter subscribers or tens of thousands of podcast downloads, and it may feel like growing your brand to that size is not only impossible but also… not something you even WANT to do.

Our main audience (our email list) continues to sit calmly at a small but mighty 11,000 subscribers, yet our business has continued to make over $400,000 for the past 3 years.

Build a Small, but Mighty Audience

 

We wholeheartedly believe it’s not the size of your audience that matters, it’s the quality of your connection to your audience and the economics of your offer that will determine how financially successful your business is.

You don’t need a huge audience, all you actually need is a small but mighty audience that’s intentionally designed to match your skills and your business goals.

Bazzon

 

How To Use Our A.L.I.G.N.E.D. Approach To Building An Audience That Will Buy From You

We have 7 questions that will help you evaluate your audience and whether they have that small but mighty quality that can fuel a profitable and calm business.

First up, you should be able to clearly define your audience for your business.

Define Your Audience Tactic

 

WHO is going to buy what you sell? Our simple formula for doing this is: “broad group PLUS narrow quality”

  1. You want to start by defining a broad group like “business owners” or “art lovers” or “web designers” or “CEOs” or “scuba instructors”
  2. Then, you want to add to that broad group a quality or adjective that describes a more narrow segment of that broad group. So that could be INTENTIONAL business owners, POP CULTURE art lovers, MINIMALIST web designers, BURNT OUT CEOs, etc

Now that you have some words to define your audience, let’s go over the 7 quick questions to double-check if this audience is perfectly aligned to become your small but mighty crowd of customers.

3D Shape

Our 7 questions to help you build an A.L.I.G.N.E.D. and powerful audience

A is for Alleviate – Can your unique skills alleviate the pain points of this group?

If the skills you have don’t match the needs of your audience, it’s going to be hard to deliver value. Let’s use “minimalist web designers” for our audience example in this ALIGNED audience exercise.

Audience Need: Designers can have a hard time keeping up with the latest design tools like Figma because they don’t want to change their existing workflows. Designers don’t like the pressure of keeping up with the latest program updates.

Your Skill: You really enjoy being on the cutting edge of design programs and your teaching approach really speaks to simplicity and efficiency.

Can your skill ALLEVIATE your audience's pain points?
 

L is for Like – Is this a group of people you like helping and interacting with?

What is the point of creating a business that serves a market of people you actually don’t want to help That’s never going to help you create a calm business.

For instance, maybe burnt-out CEOs are actually NOT that fun to be around and hard to get a hold of… let’s not make that your target audience!

Your Audience Interaction: If you love spending time on Dribbble, learning new things in Figma, and chatting with other designers about new trends, then minimalist web designers are the audience you want to serve.

Do you even LIKE the audience you're going after?
 

I is for Imagine – Can you easily imagine an individual in this group and connect to their perspective?

The easier it is for you to imagine your customer, the easier it will be to speak to them directly.

We tend to think of this person as a younger version of ourselves, trying to help them avoid the same mistakes we made honing our design aesthetic and growing our business. It’s easy for us to step into the shoes of this person because we WERE them!

Can you IMAGINE one person from your audience?
 

G is for Growing – Is this audience of people growing or shrinking in the macro sense?

Starting a radio repair business in 2023 may not be the best move; you want to make sure your audience market has long-term potential for your business.

Over the last 5 years, the number of web designers has increased by 5% YoY. Great news! For you reading this article, can you find any macro statistics or data to reinforce that your audience is growing and not declining?

Is your audience segment GROWING or shrinking?
 

N is for Niche – Is your audience niche enough that you can speak to their exact pain points and hurdles?

Do you HAVE to target a niche in order to be successful in business? No. Does it absolutely help? YES, because you can speak directly to the problems and concerns of ONE distinct segment instead of speaking in vagueries to try to be everything to everyone.

Let’s go back to the broad group exercise at the start of this article and show you how we niched down our audience…

  • When we started WAIM, our audience was described as, “intentional business owners.” This is still pretty broad and we had a hard to time standing out to people looking for business coaching.
  • We niched down and started focusing on “client-based business owners who want to transition to scalable online courses.”

Can you see the big difference between the two audience groups? One is VERY broad while one is much more targeted and speaks directly to a solution they’re looking for!

Is your audience NICHE enough?
 

E is for Enough – Does this audience have enough money to buy what you want to sell?

Money of course isn’t everything, but if financial security is your goal with your business, you want to be very strategic about serving a group that can actually afford what you’re trying to sell.

If the price range of web design courses you want to sell are from $200 to $1,000 which is roughly equal to or less than one web design project, that feels like a price point this audience would entertain.

For you, when you look at the price of your offer, does it match what your audience is already paying for similar offers?

Does your audience have ENOUGH money to afford what you sell?
 

D is for Discover – Where does this group go to discover businesses like yours?

Inevitably you’re going to need to market to this audience and attract them to your email list, podcast, etc. Knowing how and where you can connect with them is a good thing to consider upfront.

Keeping with our web designer example: If we were to teach a course on Figma or other design tools, to find that content, this audience might go to YouTube to search for free content, or a course platform like Skillshare. We also know designers hang out on sites like Dribbble, Twitter, and Reddit. This would give us 5 different marketing channels to spend time with!

Where will your audience DISCOVER you?

 

Fuzzy Donut

That’s it! Did your audience pass the A.L.I.G.N.E.D. test?

If your audience passed the ALIGNED test, you know this small but mighty segment can fuel your calm business for years to come! Remember, you don’t need 100,000 subscribers to grow a profitable business.

You just need to attract the right people who are willing to pay for the value you provide, and the best way to do that is to custom-tailor and ALIGN your business to that audience and their needs.

If your audience didn’t pass the ALIGNED test, go back through the 7 questions and spend time answering them and tweaking your outreach, marketing, copywriting, and content efforts:

  • Alleviate: Can your skills ease their pain points?
  • Like: Do you enjoy assisting and interacting with this group?
  • Imagine: Can you connect with an individual’s perspective?
  • Growing: Is this audience expanding or shrinking?
  • Niche: Can you address their specific pain points?
  • Enough: Can they afford what you offer?
  • Discover: Where do they find businesses like yours?