Episode 78: 12 Biggest Lessons from a Decade in Online Business

Monica Froese [00:00:01]:

Welcome to the Empowered Business Podcast, where strategy meets action. I’m Monica Froese, and I’m here to help you create, sell, and scale digital products the smart way using AI and proven strategies to build a sustainable, profitable business. If you’re ready to turn your expertise into digital products that sell and eventually grow into a thriving digital shop, you’re in the right place. Each week, I break down real world tactics, unfiltered insights, and bold business moves because building a digital product business should be sustainable, scalable, and designed for long term success. Let’s ditch the fluff, leverage AI to work smarter, and turn your expertise into a thriving digital empire on your terms. Let’s get started. Hello. Hello.

Monica Froese [00:00:48]:

Hello. Welcome back to the Empowered Business Podcast. I hope you enjoyed last week’s episode with the fabulous Gemma Bonham-Carter. She joined us to talk all about how you can use AI to increase your digital product and digital course sales. She is a genius. So if you did not listen to that episode, please go back and do that. We are officially back. We will be launching new episodes of the Empowered Business Podcast every single Thursday.

Monica Froese [00:01:15]:

So I am so glad that you’re here, and I thought I would take this episode to really recap my last twelve years in online business. Twelve years, a White House visit, a multimillion dollar business, a pivot or five, and some of the hardest years of my life. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the biggest lessons I’ve learned since launching my first blog, which was redefining mom in 02/2013. Why this matters so much and why I want to share this with you is because the online business world moves fast. And if you don’t keep up, you get left behind. So here’s what you can expect out of today’s episode. There’s gonna be two parts to it. First, I wanna share my twelve year journey with you and how I built this digital empire from well, some people like to refer to as a mommy blog.

Monica Froese [00:02:01]:

But I will say, that is not my favorite way to redefining mom because I feel like it diminishes the power and especially how it changed my life. So that’s going to be part one of the episode. Part two, I’m going to be sharing with you the 12 biggest lessons I wish I knew sooner. And these lessons are for sure things that will always be true in online business. So I think you’ll learn a whole ton in this episode. So let’s jump into what my online journey has looked like. I am twelve years into this, and I’m gonna take you all the way back to the beginning years, starting in 02/2013. I call this the blog that changed everything.

Monica Froese [00:02:39]:

And, yes, I am referring to Redefining Mom. I started Redefining Mom when I was about seven months postpartum with my first daughter because I almost died in childbirth. And I ended up getting diagnosed with something called postpartum PTSD due to birth trauma. It took fifteen months for that diagnosis. And so I actually started redefining mom before I even knew why I was suffering so much. It was a really, really, really hard transition into motherhood for me. I was, at the time, in corporate America. I worked for a big Fortune 100 tech company, and I came to learn some interesting facts at the time about maternity.

Monica Froese [00:03:19]:

One of the facts that I learned was that 25% of moms in The United States go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. And I just thought that was absolutely nutty. There is no universal guaranteed maternity leave policies still twelve years later on a federal level in The United States. And that is why I started Redefining Mom. I literally started it because I was so upset about the lack of maternity leave policies. And at the time, working for a Fortune 100 company, I had what I learned was in the top 7% of benefits. And still, I think I got paid 66 and a half percent of my pay for eight weeks and then four weeks unpaid, and I had to go back to work. And I was not ready.

Monica Froese [00:04:01]:

Let alone, I didn’t even know that I was suffering from this postpartum PTSD. So all of that to say, anyone who knows me in my life will tell you, I do not shy away from giving my opinion. And so naturally, this is when blogs had just started to, I guess, become a thing online. So I was like, you know what? I’m upset about this. I’m gonna take it. I’m gonna start a blog, and I’m going to tell everyone why these policies need to change. And along the way, I shared my journey as a working mom. So at the time, it really became like a working mom vlog.

Monica Froese [00:04:29]:

Because I’m also very passionate about the fact that women have an existence outside of their children. It’s not just about when I became a mom, I didn’t cease to become a person. And there were people around me that acted like my entire existence became my child. And I’m like, no. I had my child at 27. I had goals, dreams, and ambitions, and they didn’t just go away because I had my daughter. My daughter means the world to me, but she’s a part of my life, not my entire life. And I don’t know if that’s still controversial, but back then when I started redefining mom, it kind of was.

Monica Froese [00:05:00]:

And so I found that I grew an audience accidentally. And I say that because I never ever ever anticipated leaving my corporate job until I got invited to meet president Obama at the White House. And when I tell people this story, they’re like, wait. What happened? So one day at work, I got this email from the White House inviting me to a working families event. And they wanted to invite me because I was a member of the press. And I’m like, what are you talking about? Like, I just have this blog that I work on the weekends occasionally. Like, I did not know what they meant. So I thought I’m like, the the White House doesn’t email people.

Monica Froese [00:05:34]:

Literally, archived the email and went to lunch with a good friend, a coworker, and happened to mention it. She goes, maybe you want to make sure that it actually was a spam email. What if it’s real? And I thought, okay. So I did some research. Turns out the White House has a switchboard, called it, said I got an email from this person. It was a real invite. So fast forward, they wanted me to fly into DC. Four Days later, they give you not a whole ton of information about the president’s schedule.

Monica Froese [00:05:59]:

I honestly didn’t even know if it was just an event in the White House or what it was. There wasn’t a whole ton of information. Well, the president did speak, and then I got invited to a six person roundtable in the West Wing Of The White House to sit down with president Obama and his senior adviser to talk about my experience as a working mom in The United States, and this changed my life. I had the attitude. I thought, when am I ever gonna be in front of the leader of the free world ever again? Right? So when he came to me and he asked me why I was there, this is how I tell a story. I would let it rip. I went after everything from student loan interest to the maternity leave policies, and he listened to me talk. He was very polite.

Monica Froese [00:06:39]:

And then after I was done, he goes, Wow, you’re a Spitfire. And then he said to me, What are you going to do about it? And I said, What? You’re the leader of the free world. What are you going to do about it? And it was just like this funny exchange with him. That was in February. And by February, I decided to quit my eleven year corporate tech marketing job. I decided that he was right. I had a platform, and I wanted to have the resources to make a difference. And I wanted to empower women.

Monica Froese [00:07:07]:

And I could not have told you what that was going to look like at the time. My ex husband at the time, he got a promotion that just happened to allow us to have that wiggle room in our budget for me to do it, but I had to replace my salary rather fast. And this is where my motto in online business comes in. If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know that my motto is I don’t do failure. And that was from the very beginning of me quitting my corporate career. It was like, this will work. I will succeed, and that has always been my mentality. So this brings us into the next era of my business.

Monica Froese [00:07:42]:

I should have themed this after Taylor Swift now that I’m thinking about it. But the next era of my business runs from 02/2016 to 02/2019, and this is where I discovered digital products. At the time, digital products were just not a thing people were talking about. At the time, I would say people knew what a digital course was, but the term digital product was not a term used very much. So what happened when I quit my corporate career? I have this working mom blog. So people in my audience were like, wait a minute. You’re the girl who talks about your right to work, that you can still be a mom and still have a career. I was like, yeah.

Monica Froese [00:08:16]:

Yeah. Absolutely. I am going to do all that, but I’m going to build my own business. And, inevitably, people wanted to know how I was going to do that. And, really, the very first step in doing that was we had to have a very solid family budget because we went from having a dual income. And even though my husband took a pay jump, we still had to be very mindful of my business expenses at the time because I was just a solopreneur at that point. And so me and my ex, we created this family budget spreadsheet, and I ended up templatizing it. And to this day, I still sell it.

Monica Froese [00:08:47]:

So it was my very first digital product that I launched for $17 under the redefining mom brand, and it’s called the family budget spreadsheet. It’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, and it really was the thing that transformed my entire business because, basically, my audience came and said, I have a need, and I had a transformation for them. Like, they had a problem. I had a solution. That’s what a digital product is. So that launched in 02/2016, and that’s when I really started to realize that I was onto something. And while bloggers back then were really quite obsessed with getting page views, particularly from Pinterest, which we’re going to talk about, I was obsessed with getting people to buy stuff from me. So while bloggers were putting their blog posts onto Pinterest, I was putting my sales pages, my funnels.

Monica Froese [00:09:35]:

I was putting converting mechanisms. I was getting them indexed onto Pinterest. And this was in the Pinterest heyday, meaning before they went public. And, basically, you could just get loads of traffic. And the thing that makes Pinterest different is that it’s a search engine. So, like, if I put something on Facebook or Instagram, the next day it’s gone pretty much. Like, it’s not gonna reappear in people’s feeds three years from now. Right? But when you go to Pinterest and it’s a search engine, you can get indexed.

Monica Froese [00:10:04]:

So what I learned was, at that time, they launched their advertising platform, and I was already fairly familiar with how to run Facebook and Instagram ads. So when they launched their advertising platform, my marketing brain said, okay. I am going to leverage these low cost ads because there’s not a lot of competition, and I am going to just blow up my sales pages for my digital products and my courses. And people took notice. Bloggers around me were like, what is going on? What are these paid ads? How are you making all this money? Because I was driving essentially targeted traffic to my products. But they were like, but I’m getting all these page views. But were you converting the page views into sales? And most of them weren’t. So bloggers caught notice of this, and they came to me right before I had my daughter.

Monica Froese [00:10:53]:

I was pregnant with my second daughter in 02/2017. I gave birth to her in February. And at the February, so many of my blogging friends were begging for me to explain how to leverage Pinterest ads, but not even just how to leverage them, but how to make sales with them because they were so used to, again, sending traffic just to blog posts that maybe resulted in an email opt in. But aside from that, they weren’t really making money off of it. So in came what would change the entire trajectory of my business and it really put me on the map of being known, I would say. And I developed a course called pin practical promotions. Then I went on maternity leave. And my attitude on maternity leave was kinda funny because my first maternity leave, I was so stressed out and up against the deadline of going back to corporate with my second daughter.

Monica Froese [00:11:40]:

Now I’m six years into being a mom. I was a little wiser, and I really wanted to spend and enjoy that time with her. So I did not plan on working. I was like, okay. I’m gonna shut the doors to the course. I’ll reopen it when I come back from spending time with my baby. But my DMs were going off. People were like, how do I get in this course? I heard about it.

Monica Froese [00:11:59]:

It’s awesome. And then the CEO of Pinterest, I got invited out to Pinterest. I was twelve weeks postpartum, and that just changed everything. In the February, I started lugging a pump around the country and shipping my milk back home when I was on business trips. I started networking and going to blogging conferences and getting invited to talk places about Pinterest. It was great. And so then in 02/2019, I had developed more of that product suite. It was basically an entire PIM practical product suite, everything from organic Facebook marketing to using affiliates on Facebook, and it made millions of dollars.

Monica Froese [00:12:37]:

And then the pandemic hit. And so now we’re entering the next phase of my business, which runs from 2020 to early twenty twenty three. So now we enter the pandemic. I’m still selling Pinterest stuff, but we’re now all stuck at home. And both my ex and I worked from home. We had a full time nanny, two small kids, and we lived in a 1,200 square foot house. I recorded podcasts. I recorded videos.

Monica Froese [00:12:59]:

It was not a good working situation, and I was pretty stressed. So I said, we are going to build a house. My ex said, fabulous. Let’s do that. So in July of twenty twenty, we moved into a brand new house that was triple the size. And I, shortly after that, looked at him and said, okay. I cannot talk about Pinterest for one more day. I’m so over it.

Monica Froese [00:13:21]:

I don’t wanna answer the same questions anymore. I don’t wanna have a business that’s built on someone else’s platform because Pinterest went public in 02/2019, and they were changing so much. You know, having products that are based on someone else’s business means that every time they changed, I had to change. And it was like I didn’t have control over my business. So I looked at him and I said, I’m done. I’m closing it all down. And he kind of got a little panicky. He was like, why did we build a house for you to just blow up your biggest revenue stream? I was like, no.

Monica Froese [00:13:49]:

No. No. I got it, and I had it. I did. We quickly announced the closing. It was like a six month ramp where I announced that everything was closing down and gave people that extra support. And I announced that what we would be doing was we pivot it to a brand new brand called Empowered Business. Under Empowered Business, this is where I was going to teach people how to create, launch, and sell ongoing profitable digital products.

Monica Froese [00:14:17]:

Because when I taught Pinterest advertising, what ended up happening was a lot of people came to me to run ads for page views. And I’m like, that is not why you run ads. You do not pay for page views. Why you run ads is to convert them into a sale. So I ended up spending the majority of my time having to teach people before they could run ads, how to have a converting offer essentially, a profitable funnel. So I got so good at teaching people how to create profitable products that would convert with ads, that I decided to launch a new signature course called the Empowered Business Lab. Now the Empowered Business brand has had many iterations at this point. The very first thing we launched was actually a template membership called the Empowered Business Box.

Monica Froese [00:15:00]:

We kept that for thirteen months. It was a lot of work to launch. They were very, I would say, meaty toolboxes that you would get every month, but people would cancel because they’d be like, this is great, but I feel like I don’t have time to implement all this wonderfulness that you’re giving us. So that was the first iteration. Then we launched the Empowered Business Lab. So this was the end of twenty twenty. We announced a founding round. We went on to drip out the content for the first three months of 2021 with I believe we had over 200 students in that founding round, and it also was our first six figure launch.

Monica Froese [00:15:32]:

We came close to 6 figure launches with Pinterest, but the Empowered Business Lab was our very first six figure launch. So then what happened was we started teaching hundreds of people, thousands of people, how to create and sell profitable digital products. And then we ran into a conundrum in early twenty twenty two. And that conundrum was, at this point, I had multiple people on payroll, pretty hefty expenses in the business, and our best launches were always in January. So we launched the Empowered Business Lab in January 22. It was probably the fourth or fifth time we’d launched it, like, in the launch model, you know, having, like, a a live event that led to selling the course, and it didn’t go as planned. It’s not that it didn’t make money, but it didn’t make enough money for what it needed to make given our expense load and our payroll and all of that. We went on a team retreat to Charleston in March of twenty twenty two, and I was very frustrated.

Monica Froese [00:16:29]:

And I kinda threw up my hands and I was like, we’re making everything more difficult. We have all of these products that we’ve created over the years. I mean, hundreds of products from spreadsheets to templates, but we had no cohesive way to sell it. Imagine, and this is a real life example of something that happened to us. We had a student come to us and say, hey, I bought this template pack of yours. It’s amazing. I wanna buy all your templates. And it was like, great.

Monica Froese [00:16:52]:

I’d have to send you to 10 different sales pages, and you’d have to check out 10 different times. That’s illogical. Once you get to a certain point of developing products, you need a centralized place for people to buy them. We need it, shop. And it just hit me out of nowhere. I’m like, we have been making it so hard for people to buy from us. And it’s not that we do not have sales funnels or sales pages. We still do.

Monica Froese [00:17:16]:

Because if I’m gonna ask you to make a $2,000 decision, for example, I’m gonna give you a very long form sales page explaining all the stuff that you’re gonna get in it. I’m not gonna send you my shot for that. If you come into my business on an opt in, I’m gonna send you a limited time offer, and that’s called a tripwire, and that requires a sales page still. But everything that we’ve created over the years and, honestly, things that we really it would have been illogical for us to create individual sales pages for, I could put in the shop. So the Empowered Shop was born, and we launched it with over a hundred products, and we had hundreds more just collecting dust in our Google Drive. So we launched the Empowered Shop, and suddenly, selling in my business became so much easier. Now we had the central place to send all of our people, and we started running regular flash sales. Essentially, now that I had a central place to send people, I could make a marketing calendar months out, and we always knew what we’d be promoting.

Monica Froese [00:18:11]:

We could launch new products so much easier because creating a shop listing is so much easier than creating a whole sales page in separate checkout for these smaller products. So the shop was met with rave reviews. Our income spiked up, and then, of course, my students were like, hey. You taught us in the Empowered Business Lab how to create digital products. Now I also have a lot of digital products. How do I do this shop? How do I move into the shop model? And it’s funny because I said, I don’t wanna teach this. Because anytime you teach something, as I learned with Pinterest, I burned out on it. And I’m like, I’m having so much fun with my shop that if I start teaching it, I was afraid I’d burn out on it and not have fun anymore.

Monica Froese [00:18:51]:

And I was really enjoying having fun. Alas, when people are knocking down your door to pay you lots of money, you have to listen sometimes. So moving into early twenty twenty three, if I had known what was in store for me, let me tell you, which I will in a second, we created the digital shop experience. And this is our signature course on how to take your digital products and digital products or really all the content that you’ve created and how to make profitable shop listings. It was an out of the park success. We got amazing testimonials, people creating 6 figure shops. It was absolutely amazing. And then we move in to the next era of my business, which is middle of twenty twenty three through the end of twenty twenty four.

Monica Froese [00:19:35]:

These were the hardest and most transformational years of my life. My entire personal life came crashing down around me. We’re moving into two years removed from this, and I will tell you, I don’t know how some days I’m still here because I went through a divorce with my ex. My kids went through a major transition from that. I lost one of the most important people in my entire life, which is my stepfather. The same weekend, my husband moved out. And then I got into a fifteen month, what I will call a divorce rebound type relationship that ended up crushing me, to be honest with you. And that was basically eighteen months of my life, and it was like I could not come up for air.

Monica Froese [00:20:25]:

I struggled with plugging in to the business. I felt like I hadn’t gotten a rhythm to my life yet. Post divorce, it is so different. I went from having structured support for childcare, having a consistent schedule because my ex, he works in corporate. So we just kept this very normal, kinda nine to five life. And then suddenly, my responsibilities shifted so much. New people were added into my life. Loss came at me.

Monica Froese [00:20:51]:

I didn’t have a consistent work schedule. The days I had the girls were so much harder because I was a % on parenting, yet my business required so much out of me. It was a lot. So during these years, we really, without Haley, we probably would not be listening to this podcast right now. Haley is my right hand lady. She’s been with me since February. She can do almost everything I can do in the business. She can even talk like me in emails.

Monica Froese [00:21:18]:

And, basically, she helped replace my brain for a while. Now that was a lot on her because, you know, she wants to be my support system, but I got to the point where I couldn’t be making the big decisions I used to make. And one of the things that I find unique about me running this business is I say that I have, like, a really a dual brain. I’m very detail oriented, which makes us run very efficiently, and we have a lot of processes in place, and that’s how I teach very well. It’s why I’m a good teacher. But I also have this ability, we call it my helicopter, where I can go up for a 10,000 foot view and see the roads ahead and understand how the industry is shifting and adapt to it fairly easily. But during those eighteen months, it was like there was a fog in front of my face. I couldn’t see the road.

Monica Froese [00:22:05]:

And during that time, now I know, that’s when AI really exploded. And I was not embracing it because I couldn’t. I did not have the brainpower. So we kind of just bumped along doing what we had been doing until the numbers started telling us, oh, if we don’t shift, we’re going to be left behind. And those eighteen months were not only the most difficult months of my life, they were also very humbling. I decided at the end of 2024 and with the seeking out a lot of help in my life that 2025 was going to be different. And so I did things to put myself on a better trajectory personally, and I have decided that I am back. I am so excited to be back, and I have fully embraced AI to the point where we are pivoting almost all of our products to have an AI spin.

Monica Froese [00:22:59]:

Right now, we’re in the middle of a new founders round for the Empowered Business Lab. We’re calling it Empowered Business Lab AI, where we’re teaching you how to create, launch, and sell your digital products in such a more efficient way with the help of AI. You’re going to hear a lot more podcasts about how we’re integrating AI into our business, not only from a selling perspective of what our products are gonna be like, but also how you can use it to streamline and run your business way more efficiently. Along with that, in 2025, we are officially relaunching Redefining Mom, and I am so excited about this. I couldn’t have picked a better brand name twelve years ago than Redefining Mom. Think about all the things I just told you. I have gone through so many iterations of myself and as a mother, and that brand can just continue to grow with us. We also launched a shop with it.

Monica Froese [00:23:48]:

It’s redefiningmom.shop, and we announced our very first new product under the redefining mom brand in five years ish. And it’s called AI Mom Hacks, and it’s a series of four workshops about how AI can help make your life easier in your everyday life as a mom. So we’re really excited about that. I’ll link to all that in the show notes. So that’s what’s coming up for 2025. But now, we’re gonna get into the second part of this episode, which is 12 biggest lessons that I’ve learned from running an online business for twelve years. Are you ready? Okay. Number one, and I love telling my students this.

Monica Froese [00:24:24]:

Anyone who struggles with selling, I always say, business is simply an economic exchange. You are not in business if you are not selling. Your product offers a transformation, and in exchange, you are paid money. That’s the deal. The only free stuff that you should be giving away is what leads people to a sale. That’s called content marketing. So let me go on a mini rant about why blogging was taught wrong over the years. When blogging really took off, it was a bunch of people putting out free content, not really understanding how to monetize it.

Monica Froese [00:24:59]:

But the only time you should be putting out free content, and I will say I see this a lot on social media platforms too because that’s free content being put out, it’s content marketing. And the whole purpose of content marketing is to lead to a paid offer to make you money, period. That’s what it’s meant to do, and so many people don’t understand that. So that’s number one. Number two, if you can’t sell, you don’t have a business. It’s the reality. Business is selling. Being afraid to sell is honestly the fastest way to fail, and we don’t do failure around here.

Monica Froese [00:25:30]:

And I like to tell people, some people, especially women, a lot of us are raised to be the nurturers. We’re kind of raised in a way that we should not make hard asks. But guess what? You should. Because selling isn’t icky, and here’s why it’s not icky. And this is assuming that you have genuine intentions. I’m talking to those that have genuine intentions, which I’m assuming since you’re listening, you do. Selling isn’t icky because it’s helping people with a transformation. When I approach selling in my business, I’m not like, here, pay me money, buy my stuff.

Monica Froese [00:26:00]:

It’s I have this awesome thing that can help you. I am helping you, but in order for me to help you, I have to make money. Lesson number three, there will never be a shortage of money to be made online. This is just so true. I am not a sky is falling person. There have been so many industry shifts that I’ve lived through. I can think of GDPR when that came out. I think in 02/2018, everyone thought it was gonna ruin email marketing.

Monica Froese [00:26:24]:

Text message marketing, guess what? That really never took off. And I don’t know about you, but when people text me marketing messages, I get annoyed. Email is still very much where it’s at. In 02/2021, iOS 14 came out, and everyone was saying it was gonna ruin Facebook ads forever. News for you, I still make a ton of money on Facebook ads. And now we’re entering this era of AI, and people are saying the same thing. It’s gonna replace all of us, and there’s some really dramatic opinions out there. But the reality is it’s how you use it.

Monica Froese [00:26:50]:

And I’m a really big proponent of being level headed. There are 7,000,000,000 people on this planet. There will always be money to be made online. Business is truly about adapting at the end of the day. Number four, lead generation never has an end game. Oh, I cannot say this enough. Some people think that once they grow enough or get a certain number of people on their email list that they can just stop marketing. That’s completely wrong.

Monica Froese [00:27:16]:

You need to be consistently bringing in leads to your business, and you need to be converting those leads into a sale. There’s no end game here. You will always need to be generating leads onto your email list. People will come, people will go, and you always have to be fresh. There’s no end game in sight for that. Number five, your first idea won’t be your last or even your best. I started in like I told you with maternity leave advocacy and the family budget spreadsheet. Now I teach AI powered digital product strategies.

Monica Froese [00:27:45]:

The online business world moves fast. If you’re stuck, you’re falling behind. I just witnessed that myself eighteen months, basically. I was out of commission. My brain was essentially not online. And if I had not had the resolve to figure out how to essentially plug my brain back in, this business would have ended up failing. And we don’t do failure, remember? So here we are. Six, AI isn’t replacing you, it’s making you more efficient.

Monica Froese [00:28:12]:

If you’re not using AI in 2025, you are already behind. It does not replace your knowledge and expertise, it amplifies it. And I’ve been telling my students this. We’ve been talking a lot about this. Listen. There are people out there right now that are teaching. If you go to TikTok, for example, they are teaching people to plug things into ChatGPT, copy and paste, and make a digital product. Those people are gonna fail.

Monica Froese [00:28:35]:

That is not a sustainable way to run a business. If I could go to chat g b t and get that information that you just put in your product, I’m not gonna buy your product. The reason people want to buy our products is because we infuse our own experiences and knowledge of that topic into the product. For example, right now, we’re creating a divorce planner for Redefining Mom. I hate to break it to you, but AI never got divorced. AI never experienced the emotions that go into it. AI doesn’t know what it’s like to sit your child down and have to tell them that they’re going to be rotating between houses. It’s devastating.

Monica Froese [00:29:08]:

And AI does not have feelings. And so there will always, always be a need for human connection. But how you create your products now with the help of AI can be more efficient as long as you keep that in mind. Okay. Number seven, networking is everything. Just because your business is online, doesn’t mean you can hide. I’m sorry to tell you, but one of the things when I got out of corporate was, I can just stop taking all those calls. I had so many calls in corporate.

Monica Froese [00:29:38]:

I was like, I just wanted to work, and it was always back to back calls or going to stupid happy hours or traveling to meet all these people, and it was exhausting. And I thought, this is great. I’m just gonna get to work behind a computer and make money. No. That is not the way it works. One of the biggest reasons I have succeeded is because I put myself in the right rooms with the right people. If you’re trying to build a business in a vacuum, you’re making it 10 times harder than it needs to be. Business is who you’re in the room with.

Monica Froese [00:30:05]:

So put yourself in the room with the right people, people in your niche, successful people in your niche. Network. You have to network. I cannot express this enough. Number eight, the hardest years will either break you or build you. And as I just mentioned, 2023 and 2024 almost broke me. But when business gets hard, you have two choices. You adapt, pivot, and get back in the game, or you give up, which is, again, for me and for you, not an option.

Monica Froese [00:30:32]:

And I just told my membership students today, this very thing, in hindsight, if I could go back, if there was one thing I would do different, when everything started to crumble around me, I turned off my ads. So I essentially turned off our lead gen system, the thing that brought new people to me. The thing that could in the background, I turned them off. If I could go back, I never would have turned off my ads. And if I had to pick one thing in the limited capacity that I had, it would have been to keep focusing on the lead gen. Because all my systems in the business were already set up, and I had Hailey. But because I turned off the lead gen engine, that’s why things got so tough. So don’t make that mistake.

Monica Froese [00:31:12]:

If you fall in hard times like I did, just keep in mind, keeping people coming into your business and all the systems you set up over the years, make sure they’re still working for you. Okay. Number nine. More offers does not necessarily mean more money. It’s not about how many products you have, it’s about how well they’re positioned. So basically, strategy overthrowing random products at the wall. Listen, we’ve all done it. We’ve all just launched something to launch something.

Monica Froese [00:31:40]:

But the thing is, the more products you create, the more dialed in you really have to be towards the strategy and how your products fit together. So having more offers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna make more money unless you know how to position the products in your business effectively, and a shop really helps with that. Number 10. What worked last year might be useless today. Ho ho. So for us, for example, those flash sales I told you about that we started doing in 2022 with the shop, they got stale. And it’s not that flash sales don’t work, it’s how we position them changes as the economy changes, as people’s needs change. We need to come up with new angles on how to sell things.

Monica Froese [00:32:18]:

So adaptation is the only way to keep your business alive. You have to be willing to pivot. Number 11. There is no secret to online business. The formula is always the same really. One, you need a good offer. Two, you need the right audience. And three, you need a sales strategy that converts.

Monica Froese [00:32:37]:

You need something to sell. You need to collect people who want to buy it and you need to know how to convince them to buy it. That’s it. At the end of the day, all these other things that happen, Facebook ads changing, new regulations coming in. If you don’t know how to sell, you don’t have a business. It’s that simple. And number 12, if you’re waiting for the perfect time, you’ll be waiting forever. There is no perfect time.

Monica Froese [00:33:01]:

Done is better than perfect. Start now. I tell my students this all the time. This is a lesson I took away from my tech career. They’re in tech. They have this thing called MVP, which is minimum viable product. Sometimes, just to get started, you just have to put it out there and iterate on the fly, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how a lot of businesses become successful.

Monica Froese [00:33:23]:

So at the end of the day, my message is this. The only constant in business is change. And if you can master selling, lead generation, and adaptation, there will always be money to be made online. Always. So I hope you enjoyed this episode and that you learned a few things from my twelve years in online business and some of my highs and some of my lows. And I would love if you would subscribe, follow, and leave a review of the podcast. That helps us get seen in the algorithm. And since we have not been recording regularly until now, I would love to get more ears listening to the podcast.

Monica Froese [00:34:00]:

So if you could do that for us, that would be great. You can find everything I mentioned in today’s episode in the show notes. And, of course, we would love for you to tune in again next week. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in and listen today. That’s a wrap on today’s episode, but your next step starts right now. If you’re serious about selling digital products and want the AI powered tools, expert strategy, and real human support to make it happen, then you need to check out the Empowered Business Society. Inside, you’ll get AI driven trainings to create and sell digital products faster, a private community for expert feedback and real time support, exclusive access to the Monica Memo podcast. And if you go pro, you’ll get monthly marketing shortcuts, live q and a’s, and 20% off of the empowered shop perpetually.

Monica Froese [00:34:48]:

Because smart business owners sell smarter, they don’t work harder. And the best part, you can get started for as little as $9. The best business growth happens when AI and real humans work together. Ready to make your next move? Join us inside of the Empowered Business Society. You can check us out at empoweredbusiness.co/society. See you in the next episode.