✨ May Biz Forecast — Daily Practice, Asynchronous Everything & a Summer Secret 🤫
Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello, and welcome or welcome back to off the grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients or about starting a whole new business with no or minimal social media presence, which is something that I did almost 3 years ago now when I launched my podcast studio, Softer Sounds, after closing all of my social media accounts. I'm your host, Amelia Frooby. And here on this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. If you're new to the show, I wanna make sure that you know about the free leaving social media toolkit.
Amelia Hruby:It includes a 5 step plan for leaving any social platform, a list of 100 ways to share your work off social media, as well as a creative marketing ideas database that will help you plan quarterly marketing experiments for sharing your work in algorithm free ways. And if you are a long time listener, I want to express my undying gratitude for your time, your attention, for your emails that you send me when new episodes come out, for your comments on Spotify, for your ratings and reviews. I really can't express how valuable all of that feedback and support is, how much it means to me. And, you know, I just know that there are a lot of great podcasts you could be listening to out there, and I really appreciate that this is the one that you pressed play on today. And I'm super pumped for what we're gonna talk about.
Amelia Hruby:So just in case this is your 1st monthly forecast episode, while off the grid is in season, I share new episodes every Wednesday that are interviews or solo episodes about marketing strategies, about small business journeys, about what it looks like to share your work, your creative practice, your art, your writing, your services, whatever it may be without social media. And then on the 1st Friday of each month, I share these monthly forecast episodes, which are spaces for me to talk a little bit about some up and coming marketing trends that I'm seeing, to share some cool things that friends of the pod are up to, and, you know, just a little bit like shoot the shit with all of you. Because sometimes I just wanna talk about something and it doesn't need a whole 30 minute episode or 60 minute episode or a 120 minute episode. Sometimes things could just be short and sweet and fun, and that's what we do the 1st Friday of every month on Off the Grid. So today's episode is our May biz forecast.
Amelia Hruby:And in this episode, I'm gonna talk about 3 marketing trends that I am really into this month. I'm gonna share some biz care tasks that are on my radar for May and that you may want to add to your monthly to do list. And then I'm gonna give you a special preview of what is coming up on the podcast this month. And if you stick around till the end, I'm gonna tell you about something that's coming up this summer that I have not shared literally anywhere yet, unless you were, like, spying on the one zoom call where I talked to a friend about it or the dog walk I took with my partner where I explained it. So, so stick around if you wanna hear a super secret update about what is coming up for off the grid this summer.
Amelia Hruby:And for now, let's go ahead and dive in to our marketing trends for May. Okay. Marketing trends for May. I've got 3 for you this month. So let's kick it off with one from friend of the pod, Jen Carrington.
Amelia Hruby:Jen has been talking about this idea of 100 hell yes people, and I am so into it. So what does it mean? This idea of 100 hell yes people is sort of based on the idea of 1,000 true fans. And that comes from this blog post, I'll link it in the show notes, from Kevin Kelly where he talks about how you don't need millions of people in your audience to be a successful creator. He says that what you actually need is a 1,000 true fans who will spend on average a $100 a year with you.
Amelia Hruby:So if you have a 1,000 true fans spending a $100 a year, then you will make $100,000 per year from your work. That's Kevin Kelly's idea. Now I think there's a lot of merit to this. There's a lot of ways in which it feels feasible. Right?
Amelia Hruby:Like, we can get people to give us a $100. We can get a 1,000 people to subscribe to our newsletter. But, of course, the simplicity and feasibility of this gets complicated when we talk about conversion rates, when we talk about dollars spent per customer, what does that actually look like, when we talk about churn, and how many people are spending money with us 1 year and not the next. So Jen has kind of taken this idea, I believe, of the 1,000 true fans and reframed it as 100 hell yes people and talked about this in an episode of her podcast where she explains how her business has been successful by focusing on connecting with 100 hell yes people at a time. And she's very clear that this doesn't mean that your whole audience is only a 100 people.
Amelia Hruby:Right? Because there are a lot of people in the audience who are not hell yes people. There are some of you listening to this who are not, like, hell yes people for off the grid, and that's great. I'm happy you're here. You can be like a kinda sorta, I think I like it, maybe I'll get to love it person.
Amelia Hruby:You know? Or maybe you are a hell yes person and you were like, Amelia, I have purchased everything you will sell me for off the grid. I am so excited. I love this. Thank you.
Amelia Hruby:I appreciate you. The hell yes people really keep the lights on over here at softer sounds HQ. But going back to Jen's idea of a 100 hell yes people, she really explains how instead of trying to build as big an audience as possible, instead of trying to capture the attention of a 1,000 people at once. She focuses on showing up, sowing seeds, and making it easy for her hell yes people to discover her work and dive deeper at their own pace. So I really love this idea, and Jen has created a free toolkit all about it.
Amelia Hruby:It's actually like a mini course. It's got videos, it's got worksheets. It's really amazing, and I really enjoyed going through it. So I'm gonna put that in the show notes. That is our first marketing trend for May.
Amelia Hruby:This practice of growing your business in a slow, sustainable way by focusing on how to reach your 100 hell yes people at a time instead of focusing on, like, infinite growth, scaling into infinity, etcetera, etcetera. So thank you, Jen. You're gonna hear about her again in a minute when we get to our upcoming guest on the podcast. But let's move on to our second marketing trend for May, which is the devotion to dailyness. I have noticed that there is something about this month of May that daily practices have been popping up around some of my favorite people's work on the Internet.
Amelia Hruby:So Cody Cook Parrott, who is a friend of the pod, who will be a guest later this season, before season 3 is up Cody will be on the podcast. But Cody just launched a new newsletter slash book slash prayer practice called ordinary practice, which is a paid Substack newsletter where they will be sharing daily writing that at the end of a year will be compiled into a self published book. And I love daybooks, as they're often called, books where you have a practice for each day or writing for each day or a poem for each day. I love them. And so I was thrilled to see this announcement.
Amelia Hruby:I signed up immediately, and I'm really excited to see what comes of it. Probably the first person in my world to do this was my friend and business partner, Taylor Elise Morrison, who, when she launched her first podcast, it was a daily podcast. It was called b school, like, b e school, and she shared an episode every day for a year. And this was happening back in 2019, and I got to be the 1st guest on that show, and I was actually and it was actually the first show I was ever a guest on. So, you know, dailyness, daily practice, daily sharing practice has really been close to my heart, I guess, for years now.
Amelia Hruby:I'm loving seeing it pop back up. And I'll share one more example that's happening this month, which is another friend of the pod, Liz Bayan or Bayan. Sorry if I pronounced it wrong. This is what happens when we only meet people on Zoom, and we never have to pronounce our full names to each other. But Liz is hosting a daily co working group this month, the month of May only, called making things together.
Amelia Hruby:And it's meant to be 28 days of slowness, of returning to the same thing, of showing up for to reconnect to reconnect with one practice that we want to do daily just for this mom. And I love it. I went to the first ones this week, and it was such a treat to just be invited into this moment of return and this dailiness of doing one thing every day. And I think that's something that's talked about a lot in business, in productivity culture, in creative practice. Right?
Amelia Hruby:Like, everyone's talking about how to have a morning practice, how to have a daily practice, what are the things you need to do every day to be successful. But for me, I find daily practice to be really challenging. Like, it doesn't vibe with me. I don't like doing the same thing every day. My morning routine is just, like, being a gremlin until I've had enough coffee to crawl out of bed.
Amelia Hruby:Like, it's just not my thing. I always blame my Gemini Moon for my inability to cultivate a daily practice. But there is something about doing this together, doing this every afternoon right around the time that my motivation typically fails that just is feeling so good this month. I think also the fact that it's only a month. Right?
Amelia Hruby:Like, if Liz said to me, you wanna do this every day for a whole year, I'd be like, absolutely not. Please go away with your sales page. I don't want this. But just for the month of May, I'm really into it. So I will link that in the show notes if you'd like to join us.
Amelia Hruby:It's not too late to sign up. Again, that's making things together. And that's our second marketing trend, the devotion to dailiness. I am loving seeing all of these daily practices being shared, these daily sharing practices, which makes it a marketing effort. Right?
Amelia Hruby:What if your creative practice in your marketing could kinda be the same thing with this devotion to dailiness? And our third trend for this month is making everything asynchronous. So I had a moment in March where my calendar was so full that I wanted to flush my whole business down the toilet. The calls were each with amazing people, and they were great conversations. The calls themselves were not the problem.
Amelia Hruby:It was the amount of calls and the frequency of the calls. There were so many of them all the time. And so in March, I went through this moment where I canceled everything that didn't have to happen, everything that wasn't a paid client engagement or, like, the most exciting thing I ever wanted to do. And I really just blocked off most of my calendar for the rest of the spring. And when people inquired about doing a coffee chat, doing an interview, doing whatever it might be, I directed them to my Voxer inbox so that we could have an asynchronous conversation about it.
Amelia Hruby:And I love this. I love how open and empty my calendar has gotten, and I still have calls. You know? I'm still meeting with clients. Many of my editing packages include client calls, so I'm still doing those.
Amelia Hruby:But everything else, I have just moved into asynchronous mode. We still send voice messages or emails. The conversations are happening. They're just not taking up time on my calendar, and it has really freed up so much space for deep focus and also for, like, surprise and delight. Like, because my calendar isn't full, I can just hop on a call with someone when I want to.
Amelia Hruby:I can just run an errand at a random time of day because I'm not so stuck on Zoom. So the 3rd marketing trend that I'm really into right now is making everything asynchronous. I am doing that via Voxer and email, I guess, also and Notion, which is where I communicate with clients asynchronously, if not in Voxer or email. And it's just been really great, and I think it's a great trend for May also to carry into summer because who wants to be on a lot of calls in the summer? Like, literally no one.
Amelia Hruby:So this month, we're making things asynchronous, and that takes me into the biz care tasks on my radar for May, because this is really just one biz care task. I'm not really here to fill your to do list. I'm just here with some gentle invitations for things that you might wanna think about because they're coming up. And for me, May is the time when I start making plans for summer in my business. May is when I decide about summer vacations.
Amelia Hruby:Is the studio closing? Am I going on break? It is also when I plan on my summer schedule. Some summers, I do summer Fridays. Some summers, I take off random days of the week.
Amelia Hruby:Like, I figure all of that out in May. It is also when I think about the dreaded summer slump. So if you run an online business or you have for a while, you may be familiar with the way that sales just tend to go down, down, down in July August particularly, and they sort of start to rebound in September and then are back in full force by October. So May is kind of when I'm thinking about, okay, where's my revenue at for the year? Do I wanna try to add in one more thing this month or early June before I start to see that summer slump come up?
Amelia Hruby:Am I planning breaks in the summer during that time so I can go with that flow instead of fighting against it? You know, there are so many ways that we can prepare for a summer slump if that might happen in our business, but I'm thinking about that now in May, not in August when it's happening. And I'm like, crap. I can't pay for this because there's not enough money left in my account. You know?
Amelia Hruby:So this is just a gentle invitation to pull out a calendar, to put all of your summer dates on the calendar. What are your vacations? What are your appointments? Do you need to plan a vacation for yourself? Do you need to plan a closure for your business?
Amelia Hruby:Like, figure out all of those dates. Once you figured them out, communicate them to anyone you may need to, which may be your clients, maybe your team, maybe your partner, maybe yourself. Communicate those summer plans, and then also look at your revenue, see where you're at with money heading into summer, think about whether or not you might experience a summer slump in revenue and how you might prepare for that now, check out your sales calendar. Were you planning on selling the fanciest thing you sell in August? Is that a good time to sell it?
Amelia Hruby:You know, think about these sorts of things. Think about summer and what it does to and for all of us, and think about that in May. So that way when we get to June and it is summertime by mid to late June, you already made all the plans. That's not when you wanna be planning, that's when you wanna be outside in the sun, that's when you wanna be on the beach and the pool. Once we get to mid June, I try to be in my little backyard pool.
Amelia Hruby:It's not a real pool, it's a whole situation, but it's not a real pool. But I want to be in my little backyard pool every single day. So that's not what I wanna be figuring out. Like, oh, crap. I don't think I have enough money to make it through the end of September.
Amelia Hruby:Like, I wanna know that in May so I can plan in advance so I can maximize pool time once summer gets here. So that is our biz care task for May. Look into your summer plans, figure out the dates, do the logistical planning, look at the revenue, grid. Before I tell you my super secret news about the summer at Off the Grid. And that note about May is what's coming up on the podcast this month.
Amelia Hruby:So I love to share in these forecast episodes what you can expect to see in your pod feed in the weeks ahead. The thing you're gonna see next week is a solo episode on the provocative question, are lead magnets dead? I'm a big fan of lead magnets, but there's been a lot of talk about how they're not effective, how they're kinda skeevy, how they might be problematic, floating around the Internet recently, and I wanna talk about it. So that will be our solo episode of the month. It is coming out next Wednesday.
Amelia Hruby:And then for the rest of the month, we have some really great conversations happening. I will have Jen Carrington on the podcast to talk about how she's grown her business, some of her marketing and sales tactics for running a business with a chronic illness. It's such a good conversation. I can't wait for you to hear it. I will also have friend of the pod, Chelsea Tams, on the show in May to talk about how to grow your business through generosity and collaboration, and we share more about a recent collaboration that we've done.
Amelia Hruby:You might have heard some of her ads on the podcast this spring. We are launching a very cool little bit of merch that you'll be able to hear about in the and I had a long conversation with my dear, dear friend, Kunming Zhu, who is an artist and a web designer and has been one of my best friends since high school. And we talked about our different approaches to creative business. I think of myself as a business owner with a creative side, and Kenning will talk a little bit about kind of being an artist first and then folding business into that. We talk about what it's like to approach business through our human design because I'm a generator.
Amelia Hruby:Kenning's a projector. Kenning nicely calls me out on some business advice that I gave her that she didn't think was very projector friendly. So, you know, all of that's going to come up at the end of the month in one of my favorite episodes I've ever recorded because it's just so fun to talk to your IRL friends about everything, and I'm super excited to share it with you. So that's what's coming up on off the grid this month. Arlee Magnets dead and special guests, Jen Carrington, Chelsea Tams, and Kinning Zoo.
Amelia Hruby:It's gonna be such a good month. And then June, oh my gosh, y'all. June is gonna be even more exciting. Obviously, I'm just geeking out about it already, but I'm not gonna tell you about that till our June biz forecast. And instead, I'm gonna tell you about what's gonna happen on off the grid this summer.
Amelia Hruby:So season 3 of the show is running from January through June of 2024. The last Wednesday of June will be our last regular episode until the show comes back sometime in September, is what I'm currently planning for season 4. But I will be sharing weekly episodes throughout the summer. They're gonna be minisodes. They're gonna be solo episodes.
Amelia Hruby:They're gonna be light and fun and a little more like this, but probably on a single topic instead of bringing so much in. I'm gonna be sharing those through what is going to be the off the grid clubhouse, which I will be hosting as a paid podcast on Substack. So that's all I'm gonna share for now because I don't totally know all the other details, but I promise that if you join the Clubhouse, if you become a paid subscriber over the summer, you will be able to hear about why I decided to get on Substack after all of the reservations I've shared about it in the past. You will hear way more about so many business things that, again, I just wanna talk about, but maybe are not like full feed ready. I'm gonna talk more about money.
Amelia Hruby:I'm gonna talk more about my personal relationship to my business, some of my personal rituals in business. I have so many ideas for this off the grid clubhouse space, and I'm super excited to launch it in June. So the clubhouse is not open yet. You can't sign up. I'm just telling you it's coming.
Amelia Hruby:I'm hoping you're gonna be excited, And then it will launch at the end of June when season 3 ends here on the main feed. And if you subscribe, you'll get weekly episodes for the rest of the summer. And then when we come back from season 4, that will shift a little bit, but there will still be lots of great exclusive episodes for Clubhouse members. So, yeah, I'm really excited about this and really excited for May, and I think that's it for this episode. So thank you so much for tuning in to Off the Grid.
Amelia Hruby:If you haven't heard this week's full episode, heal your relationship with money with Rachel Duncan, you gotta go back and listen, my friend. It's such a good one. And then you can wait in anxious anticipation of next week's episode on the question, are lead magnets done? I'm so happy to be in your earbuds, your AirPods, your air EarPod AirBuds, whatever they are. I'm so grateful that you're here, and until next time, I will see you off the grid and on the interweb.
Amelia Hruby:Thanks for listening to off the grid. Don't forget to grab your free leaving social media toolkit@offthegrid.fun/toolkit. This podcast is a softer sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Caitlin Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by Natalier Studio. I'm your host, Emilia Frooby, and until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the interweb.
Amelia Hruby:Let's go off the grid. Okay. Let's go off the grid. Okay. I know that you really wanna put your phone away.
Amelia Hruby:Yeah. Let's go off the grid.
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