Episode 05: How I Plan to Make $1 Million in 2021 on Digital Products

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You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast, I’m your host, Monica Froese, a mom of two and your secret weapon to creating a six figure digital product business. 

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I’m on a mission to help 1000 women make 100000 dollars a year. That’s right. One hundred million dollars towards financial independence for women. As an online business expert, I am teaching you everything I know right here week after week so you can join us on the journey to one hundred million dollars. Sound good. Then let’s jump in. 

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Welcome back to the Empowered Business podcast. Today, we are talking all about twenty, twenty one goals. I am five years into this crazy online business, this entrepreneurial journey, and I can say that setting goals for a whole year is really tough. Things change so much in a year, especially in the online business world. When you’re running a company that’s constantly growing and adapting to market changes, sometimes it’s really hard to know where you’ll end up at the end of the year. But this year I can feel this change in there. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s because twenty twenty was one of the craziest years I’ve ever been alive. But I can just feel that this year is going to be different. In Episode four, I told you about the major change I made in my business. In twenty twenty, I decided to retire my signature course on Pinterest advertising and launched an entirely new product suite over Empowered Business Taxco. And over there we help women build six figure digital product businesses with the goal of helping all women achieve financial independence. Making that big pivot was incredibly scary, but it already paid off with our biggest launch to date on our new program, The Empowered Business Lab, last month in January twenty twenty one, we launched this program before it was even built and we launched it as a founding program and it doubled the biggest launch I ever had on my Pinterest advertising course. So needless to say, I think I may have made a really great decision when I decided it was time to not build a business on someone else’s brand, i.e. 

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Pinterest, and decide to build a brand based on my own knowledge. And because of all the hard work that I put into pivoting and the mindset work in twenty twenty. Oh my. The mindset work, there was lots of it. I feel like the business, this business, my business is poised to have a very stable twenty twenty one, which makes setting goals that much easier. And if I had to choose a word for twenty, twenty one it would be consistency. I have to say I’ve created I guess a lot of words going into each new year and none of them ever ended up really ringing true for how the year went. I’m pretty confident that this year is going to be my year of consistency. I’ve spent the better part of my first five years as an entrepreneur, completely stressed out and offering teetering on the edge of burnout. Something snapped in me last year and I decided I no longer want it to feel that way. I am no stranger to hard work and setting lofty goals. In fact, that is what I thrive on. It’s not that I didn’t want to push myself. I just knew that there was a better way to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I went back and I was looking through all of the emails I’ve sent to my email list since twenty sixteen and there are thousands of them. 

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And one of the consistent themes was that I was just always so burned out and in the middle of those five years I had another baby too. I was pumping exclusively shout out to all my all my pumping mamas out there, and I just was running myself into the ground trying to build something and not really giving myself any grace. So that’s why I am completely dedicated to doubling down on our new product suite this year. And my number one goal for twenty twenty one is to consistently improve our launches using cold, hard data. That’s right. When I was in corporate, I definitely know that business operates on data and I love data. I am a data nerd. And yet because I was always burning the candle on both ends trying to grow this business and take on too much, I often ignored the data that was right in front of my nose because I didn’t have time to think about it. So it’s not that I didn’t know the data from

my previous launches when I had the Pinterest advertising course, it’s that I was constantly fighting to keep my head above water and what I wasn’t doing was leveraging the data that I did have to my advantage. So what exactly does this mean in terms of what my goals are for twenty twenty one? Well, my number one goal for twenty twenty one is to create a rinse and repeat launch system for the empowered business lab. 

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OK, so I was a bit ambitious last October when I thought I could launch our new signature program, The Empowered Business Lab, in January of twenty twenty one, and then turn around and launch our high end group coaching program, the Empowered Business Club, in April. So for those of you who don’t know, the Empowered Business Lab is my new signature program for validating, building, selling and amplifying your digital products using a repeatable and of course, scalable system. And I’m in the middle of the founders round right now, and it’s going so well, but it’s also a ton of content to create. We have one hundred and sixty seven students enrolled and they are on fire. Every single day, building their digital product businesses right alongside me. We did a Zune call last week where I believe like seventy eight out of one hundred sixty seven students got online. We went for two and a half hours and we talked about everything to do with digital products. It was amazing. I mean, honestly, there’s going to be some amazing digital products that come out of this program. And I’m like, so excited about them. Maybe people even will highlight a few of them on the podcast like that. B, I should actually write that down. That would be so cool to do. So look out for a future episode. OK, so now the Empowered Business Club is our next level group coaching program, and it’s an intensive experience designed to help digital product greater scale to one hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue. 

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So the club is going to be like nothing else out there. And I wouldn’t be giving either program justice if I just rushed to launch them back to back. I want it to have the club ready for the lab students to roll into. But if I’ve learned anything over the last five years, it’s that building a consistent and reliable system is more important than rushing from one thing to the next. And let me actually just say something about that. Nothing has stretched me further mindset wise and as a person than running my own business. And sometimes I found that I was chasing someone else’s dream. So there’s an amazing test out there called the Kolby A, it’s OLB and it’s one of the things along with the anagram that changed my life. So the Kolby judges you on four areas. So I’m an eight seven, three two. So I’m an eight back finder, seven follow through, three QuickStart and two Implementor. And the ones that really matter, basically what that means is that I need to know all the facts before I want to move forward. My follow through is high so I will see through projects. I’m amazing when I’m on a project plan and QuickStart means that you have like a ton of new ideas. It’s basically like throwing spaghetti at a wall. I my husband’s a QuickStart and I call this is what I say all the time. 

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So he throws templates up in the air and has one finger held up to catch one of the plates and he watches the other nine crumble to the ground. And then he looks at me like, what are you going to pick up the other nine plates? And as a fact finder, I’m like, why would you throw ten plates up into the air? Like, you should throw two at most because we want to see both of them through. And what I realized in this entrepreneurial journey was that I was learning and trying to mimic people who are quick starts and they would throw programs out there and products out there really quick. And they were fine with it being messy on the back end. And I’m not fine with it being messy. So I was really like chasing someone else’s the way they did business. And it didn’t work for me. The way I work, it didn’t work my personality. So what I came to realize was that when I want it to launch the lab in the club so close together, it’s because. Well, you know what? I’m ambitious and I want to help people. But also I was acting like a QuickStart. When I am a fact finder, I want to give my students in the lab the best experience possible before I move on to a higher level experience in the club. So for twenty twenty one, our number one company goal is to launch the lab three to four times, launch it live. 

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We do a challenge lives, which means we do three days of training content where I give nothing but value. We have a pop up Facebook group and then at the end of it we offer the next best step is to join the lab. And I want to do that three to four times for the remainder of twenty twenty one and document all of the systems and gather all of the data and conversion rates and build it out to be an automated machine that can enroll students year round. Once I’ve turned the lab into an automated system or new students can come in all year round, then it will be time for me to move on to the next thing, which will be the club. Which brings me to my second goal for twenty twenty one consistent lead generation. Notice a theme consistent. So I’ve always been a huge fan of growing my email list. After all, it is the one medium that you have control over. You own the ability to communicate with your email list, but you don’t own a social media platform like Instagram that could disappear tomorrow. Instagram could be gone tomorrow. They could shut you down. It could cease to exist as a platform. But when you have the ability to communicate with people in their email inbox, that is something you own. It’s an asset in your business. So while I can sit here and tell you very confidently that 80 to 90 percent of my revenue is a direct correlation to my email marketing efforts, I’ve never put hard numbers behind growing my email list every year. 

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I haven’t, which is crazy because that’s literally how I make money. But in twenty twenty one, that’s going to change. I have a very simple goal, twenty five thousand new leads. If two percent of those leads purchased the lab,

that would be five hundred students. The price of the lab is two thousand dollars. So five hundred times two thousand is one million dollars in revenue. Which leads me to our third goal for twenty twenty one, which is the easiest path to one million dollars in revenue. We are going to double down on one product for the entire year to hit our one million dollar revenue goal. So I’ve already said I’ve complicated the crap out of scaling this business in the past, as many online businesses do. I launched way too many new things every time we needed a cash injection. Now, the more things I launched, the more ways that my attention was split and it made it really hard to scale to those bigger numbers also. Here’s the thing. I don’t regret those decisions. I think that they were necessary for me to understand what did and didn’t work, who was my target audience, who did I resonate with? And now I have dozens of products that sell in the background every single day and give the business a nice baseline of revenue every single month. 

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Those passive digital products are not going to be my focus this year is a matter of fact. My focus is helping other people develop their passive digital products. I’m putting all of my time as the CEO into one program with the goal to get so good at launching and the launch numbers and the processes. Hello consistency that the only thing we need to finally hit the elusive one million dollar mark is one program, one program being the empowered business lab. And here’s a fun side note. Did you know that only two percent of women owned businesses ever reach one million dollars in revenue? Yeah, and I’m talking one million dollars in revenue in a year. That’s really sad, isn’t it? It’s so sad. And it sounds like a glass ceiling that I am ready to plow my way through. And if for no other reason, it’s to show my daughters that anything is possible, I built this company from scratch with nothing but an idea and frankly, being pissed off about the lack of maternity leave in the United States. And look where I am today. I tell my daughters this all the time. I’m coming for you glass ceiling. And I’m confident that we’re going to do it. And honestly, even if we don’t hit a million dollars in twenty, twenty one, it won’t be for lack of trying. And I’ll be happy regardless, because I will have spent my year helping other women build their dreams. 

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And I can’t think of anything that would be more fulfilling other than my kids and my family and my husband. So, of course, going along with the theme of the year, my fourth goal is to be consistent with free content creation. So I’ve grown my business by focusing the majority of my efforts on what I call behind the paywall content, meaning that I’ve put my time into creating amazing content that people pay for. That’s basically like my Pinterest advertising course was a beast. When it came to the content that went into it, it was super thorough and detailed, which meant that’s where all of my time and attention went. And I didn’t have the time or the resources to spend too much on creating consistent free content for nurturing my community. But one way around this was with my emails. So I’ve already said how important email marketing has been to the growth of my business. So I would put all of my energy into nurturing people already on my email list with heart to heart emails, I cultivated a really awesome community by being real and consistent every single week. I’ve actually thought about potentially reading some of those emails on this podcast because I’ve had some really deep emails throughout the years and sometimes I read them and I’m like, wow, I can’t believe I was bold enough to say that, you know, maybe we’ll have like a series of heart to heart emails. 

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OK, but here’s the thing. Without free consistent content. When I stopped regularly blogging in twenty eighteen, it made it harder to bring in consistent new leads because I wasn’t putting enough forward facing content where people didn’t have to pay me first out there. So my new mode for putting out free content is now this podcast. This podcast has been three years in the making and it’s pretty amazing that we’re finally here. So each Thursday I’ll drop a new episode and then share it to my email list and across social channels. And I’ll finally have one place someone can go to learn from me for free and connect with me in a way that’s just never been possible before. So my goal for twenty twenty one is to stay consistent with putting out a podcast episode every single week. And if you go and get on my email list, which you can go and do that over at Monica Fros dot com forward slash tool box. That’s one way to get on it, then perhaps you’ll also be included in future heart to heart emails. I like to send my email list. OK, so last but not least, I have a bonus goal. I was going to stop at four, but I do have a bonus goal or goal number five, which is to start growing a diverse team. So here’s the thing. If we’re going to be a million dollar business, then my team is going to have to grow. 

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And I mentioned in the last episode that I had to let go one of my two full time employees last year. And it was incredibly hard, but it was the right thing to do. I don’t want the fear of making a bad decision once to stop me from making a better decision. Now I have a bigger mission than to just make a nice paycheck for my family. I want to impact the lives of many, many women and help them realize financial independence. I need help to do that and I want to grow a diverse team and pay them well. Not only will we be helping women start and grow their own digital product businesses, but we will also be employing more women and paying them barely, which is a win win for everyone. I’m honestly just so excited for twenty, twenty one and I truly think it’s going to be an amazing year. So I would like to hear what your goals for twenty twenty one are. So why don’t you go ahead and either dump me on Instagram or tag me. My handle is at redefining mom and tell me what are your goals for twenty twenty one. Maybe we could hold each other accountable. And if you’re interested in joining us in the empowered business lab to grow your own digital product business, you can head on over to Empowered Business Dacko and get on the wait list. We’ll be launching again in mid April of twenty twenty one.

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Also, I would be so honored if you’d subscribe to the unpowered business podcast. In that way you don’t miss any future episodes and you’ll be telling the podcasting gods that this is a good show to listen to. So I’d love if you do that. Hey, even better if you leave us a review. All right. Until next week. I’ll talk to you later. 

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Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of the Empowered Business podcast. If you’re ready to get started creating digital products and take your business to the next level, download my free digital product toolbox, head to Monica Froese, dotcom or slash toolbox to grab it. As always, you can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at monicafroese.com/podcast for you. See you right here again next week.