Episode 01: Welcome to the Empowered Business Podcast

[00:00:04] 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.

[00:00:16] 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.

[00:00:47] Welcome to the Empowered Business podcast. My name is Monica Froese, I’m a wife and mom to two girls. I’m an ex corporate girl who decided living life according to other people’s rules just wasn’t for me. So now I run a multi six figure digital product business and it’s my goal to help you do the same. I’m so excited you’re here today. In today’s episode, I want to introduce myself to you and give you a little bit of a backstory about where it came from and why I’m so passionate about teaching you about digital products and online business. I’ll also touch on what to expect from me in future episodes. A lot of programs and courses that I see in the online space center around blogging and being a service provider. Blogging is honestly just this fancy way of saying you’re a content creator and a service provider is someone who provides a service to a business like social media management. I believe that there is a better way to get started with making money online, and that’s with digital products. A digital product is an asset that you create, one that teaches your knowledge and skills. It solves a problem that your ideal customer faces. And it’s highly profitable because you can sell it over and over again without it requiring you to show up in real time and deliver the content to make it successful. A few examples of digital products include ebooks, digital courses, Trello or Azana templates, spreadsheet templates, digital planners or principles. The cost of creating a digital product is low, which means your potential profit for the time invested is pretty high.

[00:02:26] And digital products are the perfect way to share your knowledge, skills and talents with the world. They allow you to take what you’re great at and package that knowledge into a product that can help hundreds, even thousands of people. So let me tell you how digital products literally changed my life. I started as what they call a blogger back in 2013, and I was seven months postpartum at the time. I named my blog Redefining Mom, and at the time I had just finished my master’s in business and had big dreams of climbing the corporate ladder. My introduction to motherhood was literally nothing like I thought it was going to be, like I was suffering from postpartum PTSD after nearly dying during my C-section and I found myself drowning, trying to balance both a career that was taking off and a newborn at the same time. And frankly, I was kind of mad. I was mad that no one told me what I was going to be like trying to balance both a career and a baby. And I was super mad that there is no paid maternity leave in the United States. So naturally, I started a blog to share my feelings on this topic. As you’ll come to learn about me, I have a lot of opinions. And one of my favorite fun facts is that I was voted most opinionated my senior year of high school. I rarely, rarely shy away from sharing my opinion, especially when I am as passionate as I am about a topic like paid maternity leave. 

[00:04:01] For years, I barely post it much on Redefining Mom, and still I was offered some pretty cool opportunities. The first was to go on a national news show, and the second was to meet President Obama and share my experience as a working mom with him. Yeah, I know this little blog that I barely had time for got me into the West Wing to tell the president what I thought needed to change. And as you can imagine, there is a little more to the story, which I am all about sharing in a future episode. But here’s what changed. The day I left the White House, I decided it was time to change the world. I wanted to help moms achieve their career goals and show up and be the kind of mother they wanted to be. I was so sick of hearing people tell me I had to choose. No, I don’t have to choose. I’m going to do both and I’m going to do both. Well, one of the things you’ll learn about me is that I am super passionate about a women’s right to work and for her to achieve financial independence, whether she’s married or not, which means I have zero room for mom guilt in my life. In fact, I’ve banished the word mom guilt completely from my vocabulary. At this point on my blogging journey, I was only posting when I wanted to and with no real direction. When I decided to get serious about turning my blog into a revenue stream, I found myself questioning a lot of the things I was being told about growing a successful blog. 

[00:05:31] The two main ways that bloggers monetize their websites back then in 2013, 14 and 15, and even now was through display ads and sponsored posts. Display ads never made sense to me. I kept thinking, why would I work so hard to get someone to my website just to send them away? So display ads are when you go to someone’s website and you get those pop ups on the bottom of the page or maybe in the sidebar, and they’re an ad for a Hilton credit card or something related to what you’ve searched online. But those ads send you away from the website that you came to. And not only did I not want to run display ads because I couldn’t understand why I would take all of this effort to get someone to my site and then send them away, I knew for sure that I did not want to do sponsored post because it made me feel like I was just answering to another boss and on someone else’s deadlines. So a sponsored post is when a brand like, let’s say, Dove Body Wash approaches you and says, hey, I want to get in front of your audience. Can I pay you for a sponsored Instagram post or a sponsored blog post? But that made me have to be on their deadline, and I didn’t want to do that. In fact, that’s why I never want it to be a service provider either. 

[00:06:53] I didn’t want to work on someone else’s timeline or gross someone else’s business. I wanted to grow my own. And one day I’ll tell you all about the fight I had with my husband. When I quit corporate and refused to take on contracts, I told him I was going to grow my own brand and I was not going to waste time building someone else’s. So that’s when I discovered digital products. I was itching to start making a real income and replace my corporate salary. And the concept of digital products just made sense to me. My corporate background was in marketing. I used to run very large marketing campaigns for big brands like Microsoft and HP. I understood that if I wanted to succeed online, that I had to be very concerned with my profit margins and the return on investment with anything I decided to focus on. Digital products were the answer to what I was looking for. I could create something once and sell it over and over again, except what the heck was I going to create and sell into who? And that is exactly the story that I’m going to share with you in next week’s episode. I am going to tell you about the spreadsheet I used to manage our family finances and how I turn that into a six figure digital product with a super small email list. I have created dozens of digital products over the last five years. In each one of them has taught me something new about selling digital products online. 

[00:08:26] My goal for this podcast is to inspire you to create and sell your own digital products online by selling which are already good at. I’ll be taking you behind the scenes and show you exactly what has and hasn’t worked for me with. Tangible strategies in action will take ways that you can take and use in your own business. I’ll also bring on my students, online business friends and other experts to share their knowledge with you too. Now, before I leave you for today, I wanted to share something that is super important to me in this online business world. I don’t believe there is only one way to do anything in online business just because I didn’t want to run my business as a traditional blogger or service provider doesn’t mean that you can’t. What I’ve learned over the years is that there are certain mentors who will resonate with you. You’ll hear them talk about how they run their business and think that’s me. That’s what I want to be doing. Find the one or two people who run their business the way you want to run yours. I hope that this will be me. But if it’s not, that is cool too, because I only want the best for you and your family. Since this is my very first episode, I would be honored if you took the time to subscribe. This will tell the podcasting gods that you’re interested in hearing more from me and help others to find me as well. I can’t wait to help you explode your business path. 

[00:09:51] Six figures with digital products. Don’t forget to tune in to hear all about how I turned our family budget spreadsheet into a six figure digital product. I’ll talk to you soon.

[00:10:03] I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the Empowered Business podcast. Be sure to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I read each and every one in love hearing from you. As always, you can find all of the links and information mentioned in this episode at monicafroese.com/podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in.