Plan With Me: February 2022 (Online Business Owner)

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I'm taking you behind-the-scenes and showing you how I plan my month (and exactly what I'm working on!)

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Hey friends! Welcome back to my channel. 👋 In today's video, I thought I would do something a little different. We're calling this “Plan With Me” for the online business owner. I am going to take you behind the scenes of my business and just share how I am planning for this month. I personally love learning from example, so I hope that this helps you with your planning for this month as well! If you like learning from example, check out my list of all of my favorite tools that I actually use every day!

Planning for the Business Owner ❤️

I do like to plan.  It helps me so much in actually bringing projects to life and hitting my bigger goals. I like to plan things quarterly, so I've already done that and I've set out what my major projects for Quarter one are going to be. You can see that here in Asana, under my “big goals” board (which has my larger goals for the year), you can see that I've broken it down. I listed out all my projects for Q1 and what I hope to accomplish, and (if they were large enough). Then I converted them into their own standalone projects and put this all under a team, which I've titled 2022. I love using colors 🌈 and emojis 🤓. So feel free to just pepper emojis throughout your Asana… it makes it more fun and a lot brighter. I love it! 

Uplevel With Asana

Let me go through and explain what all of my current projects are. The first one is creating a brand new version of my most popular online course, which is called Uplevel With Asana. I really want this to be my core signature program and just make it as strong as I possibly can. I really want this one to be super transformative for our business owner students, so I'm gonna go in again to this program now and revamp it.

I've already been working on it for January, which was all about brainstorming and trying to figure out what this is going to look like. Now in February, I need to actually complete the outline and create all of the materials. I need to film all of the trainings, create any additional resources that we will be making such as worksheets, PDFs, and any new Asana templates that we want to add to the program. This is a pretty massive project and I'm okay with the fact that I'm going to need to go into course creation. 

Uplevel Launch

The next one is doing a new Uplevel launch. I do launches in my business, and they have been absolutely huge for us and have really made a difference in our sales. I am a huge fan of doing them, it's so great when you can host a live event. It draws attention to your offers in a way that Evergreen Funnels can't. I have done launches before for Uplevel with Asana, but I think they can be even stronger… Kind of to match the level that the course is now going to be. I want the launch experience to also be elevated. I think it will definitely be a five-day challenge still, because those are my favorite. That's what our community has said that they enjoy the most. As of now, I know that it's gonna be a five day challenge, but I want it to be super valuable. 

This will be a free event, no matter if someone comes and joins us inside Uplevel with Asana. We have to design that whole thing; we have to decide, “okay, what exactly is the topic going to be? What is something that would really get people to come and join us and sign up for this?” So that's a lot of marketing strategy.

The goal is to actually host this live in March and you might be thinking, “okay, Louise, that is like a whole lot that you have planned here”. 😳 Keep in mind that I do have a team of people that are helping me with all of this, so they are incredible and I won't be doing this all by myself. One of the coolest things that they do is to help me with brainstorming sessions. We just call them brainstorming sessions and we throw around ideas, and I feel like it speeds things up a lot. So even if you don't have a team, get some of your business owner BFFs to help you when you are bringing a new project to life, get that outside perspective. It will really, really help. 

Systems and Affiliates👩‍💻

The next one is new Uplevel systems. I want the systems around Uplevel to also match that customer experience. I feel like it's already quite good. We have a great welcome sequence where we're checking in with students. We have a Facebook group where we offer support and everyone's questions are being answered. I want to make sure that it is super strong. My team member Taylor is actually going to do that. She's going to go through it as though she is a brand new student and let us know her thoughts and how that could be improved.

On top of this, we have an affiliate program. Anyone who joins us inside Uplevel with Asana can become an affiliate, which is really, really cool. That means that if they love it, then they can talk about it with their audience and their friends. If anyone ends up joining us in Uplevel with Asana, we give them a commission! 💵 So our students love this! I love that! It's like even better than word of mouth. It's like, “okay, well you're talking about it and you love it, but then you're also earning money”. Like I love that! 

So we already have it. It is already successful, but I think we could make it even more obvious that we have it and we could give our affiliates more assets. So it's easier than ever for them to promote. For example, giving them Swipe, copy for emails, giving them graphics that they could customize, all that good stuff. 

Grow my List

Next I have “list growth”. This has been a major pain point for me as a business owner, honestly. As the business has grown and as my goals grow as well, I'm like, “okay, I need like a lot of people that are joining my list”. 

When I say list, I mean email list. This is by far my most important metric in the business. If we grow our email list, then our revenue also grows as well. It is my goal to set up an SLO Funnel or a Tripwire Funnel. Meaning, we'll build my email list and I'd like using ads because then I'm not just reliant on how organic content is performing. Sharing organic content is one of the smartest things that you can do, but also I like to balance that out with ads so I can ensure we're growing no matter what. 

Birthday Sale 🥳🎉

Okay. Then I have “host birthday sale”. We did do that already. Maybe you came and joined us for that, which was super fun. That went really well, and I got to make like a little Instagram Reel with a bunch of balloons, so that was great. 🎈

Price Increases

I have down here, “promote that the price is going up for Uplevel”. So, with all of these improvements: as the value goes up, the price is going to go up as well. We haven't raised the price in a long time, so we are going to do it! Therefore, I am promoting heavily all over the place that the price is going up and that if you join now, you're going to get it at the existing price. And you're going to get access to the brand new version coming out in March. So all around, it’s good. Because we have been promoting that, that's been really good sales-wise. So, if you're ever increasing your price, then I would do that. It's definitely a marketing opportunity.

Improve Branding??

Then I have “improve branding”. We've done a little bit here, but honestly I think this was a little bit of our perfectionist business owner selves talking. We need to keep in mind as well when we're building our businesses, “Right. Like, okay, does this really need to happen? Or is this just perfectionism taking over?” Something that like, I think is a need, but really it's more of like a want. So I would say this has become less of a priority now. 

Consistency, consistency, content system -cy? 

And finally, the last one we have is “improve content system”. I really wasn't as consistent as I would like in 2021. So this is definitely a priority I'm really working on consistency. I'm sure I will share more videos here on this channel about that. January was great. We were super consistent and it felt good because I also figured out a way to just make it fun. We made it feel a lot lighter, so I do think that's important. When you're thinking of your business owner obligations, just be like, “okay, how could I approach this differently?” 

I was looking at content, um, in a really heavy way I would say. And now I'm like, “wait, it's part of the job to just be able to be creative and create content that helps people? Like wait, what?” You know, that's amazing. As my own business owner, I've approached it a little bit differently. I've also been looking at ways that I can I make this easier on myself. I am hopeful that this is going to continue. And I think it will. 🤞

Asana Categorizing

Not only do we have this list here in the “big goals” board in Asana, but then as I said, they get split out into their own projects. The course, the launch, the systems, they got their own project, but some of them (like improving the branding, the content system, and the birthday sale) we just put under our marketing and sales project that we have. 

Let me give you an example of what these look like. So under “new Uplevel course”, you can see at the top, I start things off with, “okay, what are our goals with this project?” Ultimately as a business owner, we want to bring the new program to life. We want to make the most transformative thing that we can, right? So, I’m just jotting down overall big picture goals and then some milestones, like when we want it complete. I want this entire course complete by March 1st. What is really helpful when you're doing your planning is to set some milestones and actually put a date on them. For example, if you click on these three little dots here, you'll see mark as milestone. Just click that, and it turns it into a milestone. It's cool, because it looks a bit different on the calendar as well! 📆 

Breakin' It Down!

When you are working on your projects, how can you break it down even further? For example, I have: when the outline needs to be complete. What I really need to do now is to go more in-depth and break this out even more. I would, for example, say: “okay, the modules are all decided. I'm going to film module one by this particular date”. And so on. However you can break it down for yourself, it’s going to make the project way more likely to actually be completed and feel a lot less overwhelming for you, which is fantastic!

Assigning Responsibility and DATES (so important‼️)

Not only do I have the goals, but I have who has the primary responsibility for this program and also who is going to be helping. So, let's format this properly. I'll create a primary category with my name on it, then I’ll create a secondary category with my helper’s name. Then I will take any of our date-related goals, and I'm going to move them down to “important info and dates”. As the business owner, I need to decide who is going to be responsible for these milestones. So, we have that Niamh is going to complete this task and I’ll mark this as a milestone. But, what about these other two tasks? I will assign those to myself, because really I'm the one that's going to make sure those tasks get done.

It's great that we have some individual tasks laid out, but really what I need to do now is add even more, to make sure I've covered everything. Then I need to go over to the assignee tab and decide who is actually going to complete this specific task, and also what the due date is for that task. If I don't do that, then things can very easily fall through the cracks. 🥺 

So give this a try! It doesn't matter if you don't have a team at this point. These could all be assigned to myself, but the fact that I give myself due dates is really, really helpful. I'm going to plan out specific to-dos for the course, the launch, the new Uplevel systems, the list-growth system. The price increase promotion doesn't require any to-dos. We've already marked that down and that's just something we're doing on an ongoing basis. 

Wrap Up

That is how my monthly planning goes. I hope that you loved seeing how this all works and that it's inspired you to really plan out your projects for this month and get it on the calendar. 

I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at what's going on in the world of the online business owner. If you want to learn more about how to use Asana for your planning, I do have a free workshop where I walk you through it. If you are an online or offline business owner who needs some more organization and accountability, click the link in the description below to sign up for that. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, let me know by giving it a thumb’s up. Don't forget to hit Subscribe if you're new and I'll see you real soon with another video!