[Music] welcome to the craft to Career podcast with Elizabeth Chappell or every week we
dive into how you can turn your craft into a successful career get ready to have the career you’ve always dreamed of
[Music] welcome to episode 105 of the craft to
Career podcast I am Elizabeth Chapel of Quilters candy and the host of the podcast last week I mentioned how
excited I was for this week’s episode and I really am this is one of those
guests that because of your reviews I was able to get on the podcast so this
is Molly Kaiser Molly M Kaiser she I mean I have a business crush on her
she’s just so cool and I hope that you can hear that and sense that in the podcast
and if you have not left a review yet now is a great time to pause the podcast and go and leave a review because as a
reminder your review will help me to find great guests and have them on the
podcast or have great guests find the podcast like Molly found me and reached out to me to be on the podcast because
of the reviews so thank you for your reviews and know that you are treating yourself when you leave a review because
you’re helping yourself to get better guests and speakers on the podcast so
with that said let’s jump in and introduce you to Molly
foreign thank you so much for being here today for our listeners can you introduce
yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do in the business world yeah thanks so much for having me I’ve been a
business owner for the last 16 years I dropped out of college to start my very first business which was a photography
studio and it sounds a lot easier than it was in this podcast but I’ll say over over
the next few years I grew it to a six-figure uh photography studio but I mean I started out 81 cents 50 Grand in
debt knocking on doors like really hustling um so you know if you’re in that position you can absolutely make it
happen and once I grew that studio to be pretty successful a lot of other photographers started asking me how I
did it and I started doing like coaching and workshops and things but I was already
so busy with the one business trading my time for money I’m like there has to be a better way and that’s kind of when I
started to stumble into the digital products and courses world and so I was like well I can just take all the same
information and make digital products so Started With a Blog made digital products I grew that photography
education company to two million dollars a year and after being in the photo industry for 16 years I really found
that my number one love and passion is really business and and digital products and online marketing so that’s what I do
today I help anyone to turn their skills or passion into their very own uh
profitable digital products which I love so much about this story first of all
the the passion that you have like I love that you were you know
what 81 cents or what was it they said at the beginning you know like it really had 81 since I was living with my
grandma like 50k Plus in debt I truly had nothing going for me like I I got
free vistaprints business cards and I knocked on doors and even though I didn’t want to take photos of like
cakes or cars or like those like I wanted to be a portrait photographer but
you know Beggars can’t be choosers like I just knocked on doors and said you know how much would you pay me to take photos of these cakes to put on your
website it’ll help you sell more cakes you know presenting the result that they’ll get and you know even though I didn’t get to
start out exactly where I wanted to I did end up where I wanted to so yes like
I love that attitude of I’m gonna make it work whatever that looks like and you’re out there just hustling grinding
getting the free business cards I love it and then I’m curious on the time
frame when did you start your blog uh yeah we’ll just start with that yeah my
blog was somewhere around 2013 2014 like right around that area so that was kind
of the peak I remember I think about that time I was like I should start a blog because I was seeing all these
people kill it with blogs was that that peak of the blog world I definitely think it was and like I whenever I talk
about this I often hope that it wasn’t like a false belief that I have you know that that blogs aren’t you know what
they used to be but blogs are still good today for like SEO and stuff but back then you’re right like I really felt
like there was this wave of blogging there was like RSS feeds like people made it their daily thing to like check all their blogs and I don’t feel like
that’s uh still happening today so that’s why now my focus is on YouTube yes well things definitely evolve and
shift and I feel like that’s something a mark of a good entrepreneur is being able to recognize oh things are changing
so let’s pivot a little bit here and try something different like for when I started my business Instagram was this
wave that just started and I feel like I caught that wave at a good time but there’s always going to be something you
know that you can work with and grow with so I like that about your business as well and I love okay I talked about
this in the email I love this I don’t know that I would tell my kids this yet but you dropped
out of college right and I’m seeing my success I have a college degree but I don’t use it right like so can you tell
us your decision to drop out of college tell us more about that yeah I’m very passionate about this
um I think there are definitely careers that you need to go to college for you know if you want to be a doctor or you
know uh K through 12 or college professor you know teacher things like that but you
know I I was going to school to study art and yeah you know I thought College
was going to be a lot different I thought that you know there was going to be a lot of classes on how to make money
with your art um and there weren’t any and you know I
was sitting here you know my parents did not pay for my school I had to pay for my school myself and I’m sitting here
with tens and tens of thousands of dollars in debt and I’m in like my third
or fourth year of college and I’m like how the heck am I ever gonna pay for this if they haven’t even taught me how
to make money and I remember I was sitting in one of my photography classes and she was telling us how we can hang
our artwork in Galleries and she was going on and on about how it’s like you have to apply to all these shows and
then maybe you’ll get one show and then out of that show maybe you’ll sell one piece and I’m like okay so for months of work I’m maybe
gonna make like a couple thousand dollars it just was not Computing in my head and
also I really hated I actually really hated school like anything that didn’t have to do with marketing or photography
or like the things that I liked and so it just didn’t make sense to me and nobody understood it at the time you
know my friends and family gave me a really hard time about dropping out and I mean like hashtag no regrets you know
like okay I mean obviously entrepreneurship has ups and downs but right you know I I
have no debt I paid everything off a long time ago in my 20s uh for my business and like a lot of my friends
that have traditional careers I will say there’s something wrong with that like those I I know a lot of my friends have nine to fives or they you know work from
home and they love it um but I don’t think they paid off their debt as soon as I did and a lot of
people still have uh college loans even in like their 40s so yeah something to consider well okay
I’ve never read the book I guess I probably should Rich Dad Poor Dad I think oh my gosh I read that so long ago
I think I was like 19 when I read it yeah yeah but I mean even for for me like I studied English in college and my
dad was like so what are you gonna do how are you gonna support yourself I was like uh so I added on education so I
could teach imagine with a you know a college I feel like a little bit it’s the college
institutions this is a whole other topic but they’re kind of pushing like you need to have this degree but it’s really
self-serving for them you know like yes there are some careers out there where
you need to have a degree but um for the entrepreneur and not everyone’s cut out to be an entrepreneur that’s not for
everybody um but there are many professions or even having a trade or something where
so that’s for another topic but I love it I actually wanted to share a little bit more about this oh good yes okay I
do um so yeah we like I actually just had family stay with me for the last week
and everyone was in their 60s and we had a lot of interesting conversations you know because all of
our parents we we felt like all of our parents so I’m a millennial we felt like our parents forced us to go to college
like there’s no other choice you have to go to college and I’m sure some people’s parents paid their college mine did not
but yet you know our parents when they went to college they only maybe paid a few thousand dollars
they could buy my parents first house Was Eighteen thousand dollars now in the area I’m in you can’t even
buy a house for less than half a million dollars like a decent house and I just think it’s a lot different like I think
that you know we shouldn’t always be taking advice from these older Generations because they don’t
understand what we’re going through right now with inflation and everything so you’re right this could be its own
whole podcast but if you’re not going to school for something that needs a degree like doctor teacher whatever and even
teacher wildly underpaid like definitely look up these salaries before you go there
um but trades trade school also last thing I will say is you know a lot of those careers pay a
lot of money you only need a certificate or a two-year degree and there is no one doing these you can charge astronomical
prices you know if I call someone to come fix my windows it’s like hopefully someone shows up there’s just no there’s
just not a lot of people doing it and once the Boomer generation’s gone I mean who’s gonna who’s gonna do these things
right well and I feel like a lot of these skills are a lost art you know like I grew up with my dad he knew this
is not a bash on my husband because I don’t either but like my dad could fix anything and I’m like oh we’ve got this
problem and he’s like who are we gonna call like uh good point I don’t know what to do you don’t know what to do you
know like YouTube exactly yeah and even YouTube sometimes I’m like shoot I’m gonna mix that wire up and kill myself
you know so like yeah no I have a lot of thoughts and then even for me like
getting that English education degree one I did it because I needed a job I didn’t love teaching in the Middle
School setting it was really really rough and then you’re right your salary like you’ve spent how many years and my
parents helped pay a bit but I had to pay for college and you’re earning this really and teaching
right now like anyhow so yeah that’s a whole other topic I I could go into something needs to change for sure
because we need teachers and they don’t get paid enough and yeah yeah so that’s
why we have online courses and digital products like you can be in the future without a degree yep you can help lots
of people there isn’t any red tape by the time you get all the red tape taken out it’s like maybe that isn’t even
relevant anymore you get to really do your own thing so I love it yes and well
on this topic too I do know a lot of women especially that’s my demographic
is like these women are female entrepreneurs a lot of them feel like well who am I to be doing this I don’t
have any certification I don’t have this or that here’s the deal we are results based if you can teach someone a skill
if you whatever your experience looks like it doesn’t have to be a degree like
is if you can get results for people that’s what matters and so I just think people too often write themselves off
because they’re like well I didn’t go to college for this or I’m not certified in this but your experience is enough to
give you those qualifications and so I just want to empower people that you don’t have to worry about
the traditional you know the gatekeeper of oh you can do this now because you’ve gotten this certificate type of a thing
yeah I think school traditionally like traditionally pretty much trains us I’m
trying to think of a different word but to you know follow the rules and I have always been a rule breaker
like detention I was in it like I was always a rule breaker um but traditionally it’s like you know
I don’t know maybe this is an unpopular pivot but I think school is just like priming everyone like for the workforce
you know and I think there needs to come a time if you want to be an entrepreneur to really realize that you do have the
answers like you are a really intelligent person you don’t have to be told what to do you don’t have to play
by the rules and you can make a huge difference on the world and even when I had my studio making multiple six
figures a year which put me in like the top two percent of photographers everywhere I still felt like I didn’t
have enough to share I still felt like who am I to teach others so there is
like this stigma that we need a piece of paper we need somebody to tell us we can
be a teacher I remember even in school they had us take these tests where it would tell us what career you should
be and I don’t know I think we’re just so used to that and if you want to be an entrepreneur you just really have to
lean into knowing that you do have the answers and you can absolutely do it yes
and it’s kind of I mean nothing puts gives you thick skin like putting yourself out there as an entrepreneur
because one you’ve got the own self-doubt and that like um what’s the word I’m looking for in
posture syndrome but then you always will have other people especially the more success you have who are like well
who are you to say that you can do that you know so to be able to stand up and be like well actually I do have value
here and I do have a friend who she went to college and got a degree in art
and she has seen another artist who did not go to college and not and she didn’t get a degree who’s being very successful
and my college degree friend isn’t and she does rules I know I love it and she
has a little chip on her shoulder and I’m like well you know which one if you’ve you know if you have debt from
college or credit card medical whatever it’s a sunk cost like there’s no use in
in like you know crying over spilled milk or whatever a better saying is like you have to just go forward and the cool
thing is if you do want your own business like like I said you get to write the rules you potentially can make
a lot of money and it’s really fun you know because you don’t have anyone telling you what to do if if you have a
personality like mine some people like going to work and being told what to do and then you know they for sure have
their nights off they for sure have their weekends off yeah and that’s fine too well that’s funny because I’m very
much a rule follower like I’ve always wanted the teachers to like me and I you know I want to be the best in the class
and I did go to detention once because I whatever I wanted to like but that was very like whoa what you know so I feel
like if someone can be a real follower or not but having that drive and the I
don’t even know that’s a whole other topic as well that I’d love to investigate like entrepreneurs and why
why why do we do this thing you know what drives us yeah I do think you know
when I was younger I don’t think that I thought it impacted me as much as it did but now that I’m you know 35 I realize
both my parents are entrepreneurs and I think that that did have a huge impact on me whether I you know they weren’t
sitting me down and giving me business advice or anything but I think just growing up and seeing like oh if I’m
sick my dad can leave his job like leave his business and come and get me or like
if we want to go on a family vacation we can go on a family vacation or whatever that is um but yeah so I do think that that had
an impact on me in the way of me seeing like it is possible and a lot of my friends their parents were business
owners my husband’s parents are business owners so I think I was surrounded by that
um but like I said they weren’t giving me advice or anything it’s not like you need to be around those people to be successful but I do think that it made
it clear that I could do it you know what I mean because I saw other people doing it yeah
and I’m thinking as you’re saying this it’s very funny my dad was a college professor right so you’re very like very
different but I do have a very stubborn side so I wonder if there’s a bit of me that’s like no you can’t tell me I can’t
you know so I’m like I will so anyhow very very interesting but I did okay so
I was looking at your website and you have this timeline which I really love of just the progression of your business
which out of curiosity are you in New Mexico right now you mentioned yeah okay you mentioned home prices are really
high I didn’t know they were that high they’re high everywhere to be honest like even um our house that we owned in Wisconsin
before we moved it’s more like our mortgage only 500 a month
um when we left and right now because I looked it up because I’m curious to see so this is Wisconsin because everyone
keeps saying oh the Midwest is cheap it’s 1700 a month mortgage now for that
exact same house even though because you have to think of it the home price is doubled and the mortgage price the
interest rates double yeah that’s almost a 4X on and I’m seeing almost I mean I I
really like real estate so I pay attention to it I’m not like in the real estate business right it’s just
something I like to to look at but wild to me wild to me and like that’s the
other thing that gets me heated up about the generations thing because I do see a lot where these older
Generations look down on us like well oh you’re just spending too much or there’s like the Dave Ramsey like you’re buying
too many lattes thing and it’s like no right I don’t think that’s what’s happening yeah no I’m not latteing my
way into the situation yeah that’s so where in Wisconsin I grew up
in Minnesota okay yeah so um well I’m from Door County but
um we lived in my husband I lived in Eau Claire Wisconsin for 10 years oh yeah yeah and that’s only like an hour or two
from the Twin Cities yeah yeah you were in the Twin City I was in Como Park area like yeah so yeah St Paul
um well for that’s fun so okay on this timeline of your path the thing that
really stood out to me is one the amount of success that you’ve had
right that’s that stands out but okay there’s an e-book phenomenon that that happened I just can you tell us what
happened with your ebook how you found success with that I want to know everything so I can replicate this yeah
for sure so you know when I first started getting into the at my first education business so for photographers
um you know I didn’t really know what I was doing obviously I had never done it before and I just had this blog and I
built a following and people were asking for things but there’s a lot of options out there right there’s like you can create an ebook you can create a
membership you can create a course you can create a blah blah blah and I do remember one of the first things I
created was a posing guide because I saw other people in my industry doing that and it seemed easy to make and then I
made a plethora of other digital products at one point I had a hundred different digital products which would
not recommend but also okay I was going to say do you recommend that or no I would not recommend that and I will tell
you guys kind of how that changed for me but um okay so first thing is I’ll just do
the 100 digital products thing one of my mentors said you will make more money if you just focus in on one product so we
actually retired all of those products and created a new product that got our
customers like the number one result they were wanting and we went zero because we closed everything to two
million dollars in two years from just focusing on one online course
um so they were absolutely right but then let’s go back to the ebook um so I’ve learned over the years that
it’s not so much about the type of digital product create but rather the result that you’re going to get your
students so you know it might be easy to create something that will make that’ll be fun
for them or make their life you know a little bit better or whatever but what’s going to sell really well and make you a
ton of money is figuring out what’s your ideal client’s number one pain point so for me when I taught service providers
what do you think that’s going to be like booking more clients right so I
took a strategy that I had that booked me more clients in my studio and put that into a 13-page eBook and it wasn’t
an ebook like a book where you read it and it’s a story it was screenshots of what to do word for word
scripts on what to post you know exactly so they could just step by step do this and when they would do it they would
book a lot of Photography clients and this was only 59 to 99 my ebook so you
can imagine when someone buys an ebook for 59 bucks and they book a client for
anywhere from 300 to 3 000 they’re going to be like wow that’s a huge return
um on this investment I wonder what else Molly has for sale so one thing that’s interesting is my uh on one of my online
courses I noticed like 70 to 80 percent of the people that bought that had already bought
um my ebook and so not only did that ebook end up making 500 000 with no ads
like people got results and just told all their friends like that’s genuinely how it worked but they also were so much
uh more inclined to like buy my other stuff because I actually got them a result like a real tangible result yes
this speaks to my soul for so many reasons one the niche going all in who
was your Mentor that you mentioned well I’ve had many over the years but the one person who told me to go all in on one
thing was Russell Brunson I was in his inner circle ah were you get out of here he is like yeah how did you get in there
so I was in his inner circle 2017 and 2018 so I was in before he made like all
these tears and like had hundreds of so it was I I think I was in at the best time personally because it was yeah I
was in when it was like lady boss uh Alex hermosi like all so I got to see all these people like grow along with me
like well me along with them whatever vice versa it was so cool and it was only maybe 90 people total and then we
would split up into rooms of 25 people and I think I paid 25 Grand but now the minimum I think is like 50 Grand my
heart rate is going up with NB in the best way like we’re gonna have to bring this conversation off the podcast I need
to pick your brain I do oh wow this is I get I’m very excited all of a sudden okay
my listeners know this so okay that’s amazing um any other lessons Russell you can
share with us oh my good I mean so many honestly yeah number one for sure would be the focus because I remember I came
to him when I was so I I actually did kind of sneak into inner circle in a way because when I joined they said you had
to be making a million dollars a year and I was like yeah for sure but I was actually making a half a million dollars
at that time um but I was like I want to get it yeah yeah I feel like a little white light
um I’ll be honest they were happy to take my money so I think right exactly exactly and there was a lot of other
people in there that were just under the million dollar Mark as well but um yeah so that was my number one piece of
advice another thing he another piece of advice he gave me that was really good was I had this webinar
and it was already doing well but I I used to have Boxer like Inner Circle used to have Boxer access to Russell
which is crazy that’s amazing yeah um but I was like oh how can I make this
webinar title better or whatever and he changed it to
this um it was like the the something add-on the little add-on or something
like that that doubled my sales because I was teaching specifically Boudoir photography so instead of saying like
how to book more Boudoir clients because that would really only attract Boudoir
photographers but instead saying like um this I don’t remember the exact type was
like this certain photo shoot doubled my sales then all photographers go to the webinar and then you send you know
um educate them on why they should do Boudoir and I was like oh like that so
this is interesting because it kind of flips that niching down and actually opens it wider so that’s because I
already was at like half a million and so I don’t know I mean if he was here we
could ask him but I don’t feel you it worked real well I love that okay all
right so the ebook no ads it was Word of Mouth you were
just promoting this to your audience did you borrow other people’s audiences like so I did um so I had an email list and
so man I mean I wish I would have put more focus into this ebook to be honest with you like it’s crazy to me that it
did over half a million dollars and I really did not put that much like time into it I wish I would have you know I I
have since sold the the IP to another educator because I’m focused on this now but
um yeah because basically all I did was I would do like these little mini sales where I think it would be you know it’s
sold all the time for like 100 bucks but then I would have these little three-day window sales for fifty nine dollars
that’s pretty much all I did like to my email list and I think I had maybe a few like a handful of Affiliates like other
Educators that would promote the ebook but honestly like if I went and looked
at the data like I know for sure that it was simply people buy it
they make a lot of money with it 59 and then they’re like holy cow because every
Facebook group at the time you could search my ebook was called Model call you could search for that term in any
Facebook group and there would be like threads and threads and threads of people like talking about it um
so yeah that’s amazing okay so the ebook and then what were the other 100 opt-ins
that you had so many let me try to I could try to think as many many as I can but I had a printables so I had like a
shop um like a boutique I called it I don’t know I was all over the place I was a
creative okay people yeah we get it I mean I still haven’t creative but you know what I’m saying but uh yeah I had
like a boutique where basically I had like bundles so I would have like uh so photographers they will sell like albums
of photos so I had album templates then I had like a Business Partnership template thing where you could like
print all this out and make like a little Business Partnership bundles and go door to door and like partner with people these were all things that I was
doing in my business that were working and then I simply just templatized them um oh I had another ebook called Uh set
it and forget it and it was all about um so it wasn’t I know people think book when they think ebook but it was it was
just a PDF just like model call if but instead it taught them email marketing and it gave them scripts for automating
their booking processes um like yeah there’s so many but those are
the ones so these are these are all opt-ins that did people pay for them yeah these
so I did have freebies as well but these were all paid by 100 digital products were actually like paid digital products
okay so they were your products that you sold but they were all related to how to grow a photography business
specific I think set it and forget it was for all photographers but everything else was specific to Boudoir
specifically so like really small Niche um
but it’s like I do think if you can start out with a really small Niche it is going to be
so much easier like I already have you know seven eight years of whatever experience
in the online marketing world and I teach people courses and digital products and it is wildly harder than
when I have my smaller Niche honestly if you get a if you get a really small Niche that’s a blue ocean like I didn’t
really have maybe I had two three competitors at the time um you know I thought I thought I was the
queen of marketing I thought I was so good at it and then I get into this space and I’m like whoa like I don’t
even think I was that good like now I am because I’ve had to really up my game but back then I’m like I think I just
had a really good Niche like it’s that it really is that important honestly let’s talk about well first okay two
things remind me to come back to the blue ocean comment but um I want to kind
of like evaluate this business decision that you made so why do you think again
if we really dig deep you had 100 different products that were doing well
right like bringing value to your ideal customer it was still in a very niche market
why do you think getting rid of all of those products and just offering one
like let’s evaluate that for for me and for my listeners like why what’s the magic of that why did that work so well
yeah I remember well I’m not gonna die really into this because I want to stay focused for this podcast but I also when
I went to Russell with my 100 digital products I also had started another business in 2017 doing what I do now and I also
had um a low-carb blog selling like low carb products and stuff but when he told me
to go all in I closed those businesses and retired all my products so I just want to be clear like I was all over the
place and I said okay with a lot yeah and I and I the number one reason it works is because you only have so many
hours in a day you only have so much Focus so you know if you can imagine a pie chart in your mind right now
I can either put that pie chart 100 fully onto one product or I can split it
between 100 products or whatever the scenario is four products whatever plus I had multiple businesses plus I still
have my photo business um and yes I did have a team but I mean
that’s just still I like that you had a team yeah well something is I I really did not work that much like my team was
amazing so but um I really think that that’s what it was so basically I had all those digital
products plus I had four online courses I had um for photographers so I had a business course a marketing course a shooting
course and a was the okay business marketing shooting sales
um and so retired all those products and I thought Okay what’s if I can just focus on one product so I created a
product called Boudoir certified that was the one product that I went all in on and instead of like if you want to
learn marketing you have to buy this if you want to learn email marketing you have to buy this if you want to learn posing you have to buy this if you want
to learn pricing you have to buy this because everyone told me like oh well if you just sell people all those things
right it’s another sale it’s another sale it’s another sale it’s another sale true but also if you sell them one thing
that’s expensive that gets them the result that they want yeah it’s going to be easier to sell someone one thing than
multiple things and you know if you charge enough for it you’re going to end up making a lot more money and it’s the
one you know people aren’t going to come to your website and be really confused about what should they buy we used to have to have sales calls on our website
it would say confused about what to buy like give us a call because like there was too many products yes well and I
know because I work with you know your ideal customer um they will think if I could get to the
point where I can hire a team then I can sell all of these products and have success but it’s the other way around
like you can have a team to sell the one even more you know yeah wow I mean this
could be a whole other show but like I really truly believe you need what I do
is I do the thing and I and I make it successful and then I document it and then I hand it off and you can you can
be listening to this and be like oh if I if I buy a six-figure employee they can just do it themselves
good luck to you I have yeah yeah and it doesn’t go well it doesn’t go well no
because they need they need structure like they need to know what they’re doing no one wants to come into a job
where it’s just like have it like they have no idea what they should be doing they want to follow a
good employee will have a great process to follow and they can improve that process but there needs to be something
there for them to to do so I’m just so happy talking with
you I feel like this is a friendship that’s meant to be so hopefully we get to meet this one day awesome so okay
well let’s talk about this and I I mean the reason I’m having you here is to share about what you do so we’ll get
there so but this this all ties in so this blue ocean I’m a Russell Brunson
fan I know what you’re talking about that’s where I learned it but um and I bring this up because again a lot
of my people are in the quilting industry and so they’re like oh I’ll sell quilt patterns and I really stress
like you have to find a blue part of the ocean so can you talk to us about what
that means and what that looks like yeah so there’s this book called Blue Ocean strategy and so that’s like where
everyone kind of you know why everyone references like blue ocean so I would highly recommend reading that if you
don’t have a blue ocean in Russell’s book I think it’s expert Secrets which by the way is my favorite of his three
books he does a really good job of explaining this with bubbles so essentially he’ll have a big bubble
that’ll say like well so he says there’s three there’s three main niches health
wealth and relationships but you don’t want to just choose one of those you want to dial in more so he has these bubbles that say health wealth and
relationships so let’s look at wealth okay what’s one thing down from wealth maybe it’s you know we can use my niche
as an example like maybe it’s making money online okay that’s a niche then the next Niche down could be digital
products and courses okay but now let’s look at what I used to do um so wealth then it would be like
teaching business then it would be teaching photographers then it would be teaching Boudoir photographers so I went
like one step more with that um previous business and I do what I do
now because I freaking love it like I will battle my competitors I will do whatever I have to do I will work harder
to be successful in this harder Niche because I love it so also you know don’t be afraid to go with a niche that you
love but keep in mind that it will be significantly harder if you don’t Niche
down so um yeah I niched all the way super far down and it was a lot easier for real
yeah well and I mean if you’re going into create a product where there’s already a
hundred people or a hundred thousand people that are selling that product it’s very very hard to stand out from
the crowd you know I would also say too that you know look into I know not
everyone wants to be an influencer but there is a lot to be said about having a personal brand so you know if not only
did I have that small Niche but I also had a personal brand like people knew my husband they knew my dog they knew what
my house looked like they knew all these things about me and so it almost made competition irrelevant because if people
connected with me and liked me then they’re going to buy my thing so that’s especially I think important when you
are not super Niche down because like for me there’s tons of people that teach digital products and courses but the
people who like me and they like my story and they feel um connected to me then they will purchase for me oh that’s huge
especially um I’m talking with some of my students right now about Instagram and some of them are like I don’t understand
Instagram stories what is the relevance of that that nurture this right here like that personal brand that’s where
you get to let people see behind the scenes and like get to know your family get to know what you’re baking for
dinner or whatever you know and that kind of a thing like every single day when I post those I’m like no one cares
but it’s like no they do care I promise you they care they are people you follow online like there’s this guy I’ve been
following online forever okay like I don’t even know why like he teaches like males male fitness it’s just like he’s a
good marketer though so I find his content really interesting and it’s like I could take a quiz that I would know everything about this person’s life and
like I find it interesting and it’s like what right I don’t know um yeah I think you know we like connecting with other people and
learning about their lives and things like that absolutely well and I think I always talk about Sarah Blakely she’s
another one that I’m always talking about the owner of Spanx I love her I feel like she’s my best buddy because
she shares she’s very likable I love her too yeah and she’ll share just quirky funny things and like she jokes about
her husband but obviously she still loves and respects him oh my God I’m like a disc yeah so you know what I’m talking about
yeah Jesse just love him so yeah okay I’m very curious on your website right
you go through the timeline of things that you offer you’ve clearly had a lot of success and we’ll get into what
exactly you offer now but you do say that you don’t work often you love to go outdoors and Hike how many hours a week
are you working like how are you making that happen okay yeah so that’s super great question and you know I think that
it kind of comes in waves so like sometimes I work more sometimes I work less so for example we just had a bunch
of family come and stay at our house during the week because my husband’s parents are retired and I knew that I
wasn’t going to probably get a lot of work done you know I don’t really like filming videos and things when there’s like all these people in the house
listening so what I did was I just made sure to batch a bunch of my work on a
day before they got here so the entire week they stayed here I didn’t have to work at all so we went on Hikes we
cooked together we did all these fun things and for me that’s what freedom is about it’s not about you it does kill me when people say like
I want to have an online business because I never want to work it’s like that attitude is never going to build
you a successful business I love to work um and there are days where you know
I’ll work from I don’t know 9am to 5 p.m or whatever which is a long work day for
me I don’t normally work that long but most days I would say like 10 a.m
um then I will take like an hour to break for lunch then I’ll come and work a couple more hours then I’ll go for a
hike and and that’s pretty much my day it’s pretty uh I don’t have anything on my calendar other than guest podcasts
and on Tuesdays I do one call for our course and one call for our membership
awesome okay I love this and I feel this because sometimes I do see people who
are very successful they are working so much and I’m like that’s not the life of that person yeah right and it’s burnout
like it’s not a happy place to be but also I also have some people who reach out and they’re like
I don’t want to learn this program is there a shortcut on how to make this or that I’m like ooh that I don’t think
that’s gonna work you know so there is that happy medium of like you’ve got to
work but you also want to laugh and enjoy life and live a little so okay and
batching content what stuff did you batch yeah so every week I put out a YouTube video and then I also record so I
recorded a bunch of YouTube videos and I also recorded a bunch of Instagram reels okay and what kind of content are you
sharing on your YouTube channel yeah so it actually took me some time to find like my Niche and my YouTube
channel and that was actually one of the best exercises in my opinion for just finding my niche in general because I
knew that I wanted to help people with online business but you know that’s not like super Niche
there’s a lot of things you can do with online business and so what I did was I actually researched um a lot of different online business
competitors in the space and I saw like what were their top videos what worked really well and
when I first launched this business it was called profitable courses and I was only focused on courses and I actually
found that that was actually a little bit too Niche for YouTube um and so digital products is now where
I’m at and I find that it’s a really good Niche for me and for YouTube because what’s funny is we just talked about how you need to be super Niche but
also for YouTube you actually need to be a little bit broader for example with my Boudoir education business I couldn’t
even be on YouTube because number one it was two Niche and number two when I looked at my demographics 90 of my
viewers were male and I was like yeah attracting the right people
um so I don’t know that that could be a whole other thing but yeah I batched my like my YouTube I I put out four
different content pillars right now one of the content pillars is five digital products that blank so it could be five
digital products you can do start for free or five digital products that are good for passive income or whatever um the next one is build passive income
with blank so the passive income with ebooks build password courses blah blah blah then um I have a whole pillar about
AI because that’s super popular right now and really fun to talk about and then the fourth one is Tech tutorials
um so if you’re interested in YouTube The reason I do those is they’re really really long which uh increases your
watch out your public watch hours and you need to have a lot of public watch hours to get monetized so hmm okay so
what are the different pieces of the pie of the money that you bring in how are those different revenue streams yeah so
we have two main products we have profitable courses and then we have a membership that I just launched um so I
waited until we had a lot of sales of our course until it was consistently selling and because the answer to a
product that doesn’t sell is not create another product it’s keep you know keep doing what you need to do to get that
product selling but I created a membership that’s 49 a month and the reason I did that is because
um you know everyone wants to have a course and they should it’s amazing but you need to have you know at least a
little bit of followers and to sell to with your course and so I wanted to create something
where people could go to grow their following grow their email list and also maybe start to sell like
those little little digital products like ebooks and things um and then that would have them even more prepared for my course profitable
courses so those are the two products those are two revenue streams then we have affiliate income
um yeah and I’m trying to think if they’re eventually I might do some sponsorships I’ve never done them before I’ve heard a
lot of pros and a lot of cons um sponsorship meaning what would that look like oh yeah sure so sponsorship
for like YouTube so if you do uh a YouTube video you might have a sponsor
come in like um the marketing platform that I use is called system.io and you know just to
give an example they have not approached me by the way but if they were to approach me to say hey could we would like to sponsor a one of your YouTube
videos and then you put like a little advertisement in your YouTube video as opposed to like the ads that run over
the video so what’s cool is you can now get paid from the sponsor you can get paid from the ads that run over your
YouTube video and you can get paid from the products that you sell yourself so YouTube is very very profitable
interesting okay right now it’s mostly just the products and affiliate money okay and
when you say affiliate do you mean you being an affiliate for other things or you have affiliates
no that would be you being an affiliate yeah I don’t currently have an affiliate program for my programs that is
something that I will do eventually but it’s just not you know you have to pick what you’re going to focus on right so
that for me that’s going to be like the later on thing um but yeah so I affiliate system.io my
marketing platform um and then I affiliate vidpros which is who I use it’s a monthly agency that
edits all my videos um and we affiliate a ton of other stuff but I don’t know anything that I go to
mention and I only affiliate things I already use so if I’m already using it and already mentioning it I’ll just Google whatever it’s called and then
affiliate program and then I’ll sign up for it nice okay so okay now let’s dive into the
nitty-gritty of what you offer who your potential customer is let’s start with
that sure so yeah so I just have the two products so I have profitable courses
um it’s a nine it’s a 997 dollar course right now but I actually just closed
enrollment to it I’m gonna be doubling it and I’m going to be making it a bundle so it’s going to be profitable
courses plus passive courses um because really the result people want to get is the passive course so I want
to do a better job of explaining that and then so I’m always I’m always
improving you know yeah and then my membership which is called Freedom Creator club and like I said that is 49
a month right now and it helps you to grow your audience your email list and start selling little digital products
um yeah that was the question right yeah and I’m curious your ideal customer or I guess your average customer do they
generally come in from the membership first or the course first so I just launched the membership like
two weeks ago so okay my hope um all of my customers come from my
organic social following we used to run ads um now we stopped I really want to grow up the organic more first then I
might do some retargeting ads but again this could be a whole episode about how cold traffic is a lot harder than it
used to be Facebook paid ads are too that’s what I mean paid ads exactly yeah
um so anyways I digress but um yeah so my ideal customer my goal is
basically my value ladder would be people come in through a freebie they they find me on social media they get a
freebie they join my email list and then I have like a six to nine month Auto
email sequence so it takes though do you really yeah so I have the five day welcome
sequence um Russell teaches a version of that in his.com book I teach my own
version uh to my students in my freedom Creator Club but yeah so I have like a welcome series that invites them to our
group and tells my story and gets some freebies and then after that they have 30 days of nurture emails it’s a mix of
emails I’ve written plus YouTube videos then they get a launch for Freedom Creator Club then they get another 30
days of emails then they get a launch for profitable courses so they can come in on either of those but if we had to
look at like a traditional value ladder then it would go membership and then course I am so intrigued by this email Journey
okay I feel like that’s an amazing is that typical of someone who’s very successful to have that amount of like
an email Journey that’s that long so back I don’t even think anyone’s gonna know who this is but he was really
popular back in like 2014. um Andre chaperone his name is I’m sure like
Russell or like old school people would know about him but he taught something called arm autoresponder Madness and it
was all like so I’ve been doing these long automated email sequences pretty much since I maybe like a year after I
got started um and yeah I’m a huge fan because it’s exhausting like you already have to send
out you know for me a YouTube video once a week reels every day like whatever
else you do I have a Discord group um I’m I’m getting off Facebook but um
yeah you know you already have to do all these things and then it’s like to send an email every week you got to come up
with a story you got to come up with this so when I first started I did do manual emails every week
until I had enough created then I knew I could automate it because when people come into your world
it’s like they’re never gonna get those emails so like you might as well automate it because it’s new to them and
that’s something you have to keep in mind always is people get sick of telling their story over and over and over and over
but if you want to build an audience you have to tell your story over and over and over because otherwise those people will never hear it yeah so you don’t
send out weekly emails not anymore because it’s all automated wow so
I’m so intrigued this is a whole new perspective for me so when you have a launch do you send out an email to your
email list about it like what how how are you using the email list yeah so typically I just do one live launch and
then I automate my stuff so I’m not someone who likes to do like a lot of launches I find launches to be
exhausting they are um they are yeah so yeah so I will do a live launch so I’ll
pre-write all the emails you know create everything needed for that launch and then I’ll schedule those but then once
the launch has you know if we do the launch and it’s successful then we’re going to automate it if we do the launch it’s not successful then we’re just
gonna throw that in the trash yeah for someone who is starting out and they
don’t have a large following on let’s just say Instagram or an email list and they want to offer a course
what what do you say to that yeah so there’s a lot of different ways
you can do it um the way that I did it with this business when I launched it like end of 2020
2021-ish is I created because I had to restart with my audience so
um I created a Facebook group and that’s something that I teach to my students like if you have absolutely no following
um I don’t think a Facebook group is a great solution for like a long-term platform like YouTube but I do think
it’s a great solution for getting followers very quickly so I do
recommend Facebook group but really it doesn’t really matter like choose a platform that you want to be on and
that you want to learn and I want to repeat that choose a platform not every platform a platform if you are intrigued
by Instagram do Instagram if you want YouTube do YouTube um you know but but what you need to do is
learn you know pick a platform and learn that platform and then immediately okay
not a month from now not tomorrow whatever immediately create a freebie and start moving those followers to your
email list so what I do is on YouTube in my description I have a ton of freebies that go with each pillar of content that
I describe to you guys so that way no matter what you know type of content I’m creating there’s a freebie that goes along with that content because if I
create a video about AI they’re not going to want to freebie about ebooks you know yeah
um yeah so and then with Instagram I have my freebies Lincoln bio and then you
know so basically you don’t want to wait though because personally I think social media followers followings are basically
worthless like you need to get those people onto an email list not only because then you you know
can own that you know data or whatever but also
your what I think you can Google this it’s 70 no 70 times more likely to
convert a um an email list subscriber to a customer than social media it’s crazy
I’ve made a YouTube video about it yeah okay we’ll have to check the actually send the link we’ll put the link in the
show notes for that sure so yeah just start out building your following and then my I always my advice is
get to 500 email subscribers then you can launch your course you’re going to convert one to two percent
um most likely you can convert more but typically that’s what I see so if you’re happy with getting five to ten sales
your first launch then do that if you’re not you know maybe wait a little bit longer but yeah
yeah ah I just have so many things so are you in a mastermind this is now completely selfish that I’m asking this
I am not in a mastermind right now I am eyeing a couple masterminds it’s really
hard to top the one that I was in no joke
yeah and like you know I love Russell but I don’t want to join it’s nothing I
mean if you want to join Inner Circle you should like it’s amazing um the community that he creates but I
don’t want to be in a mess around like that big like they have such big ones now it’s not the same as what I was in I
would like to find I’ve looked at like Rachel Rogers she is a cool Mastermind I haven’t found anything that I’m like
willing to part with you know 50 Grand yet yeah but exactly I will eventually
Join one also because I’m sort of at the more this business is only like a couple years old
and so you know I’m still getting to where I was so I think we did about 400
and some Revenue last year with this 400 some thousand with Revenue last year so my point is I still know the things I
need to do to grow it yeah yeah but once they get to that point where I’m like oh I don’t know that that’s I’m for sure
going to join one yeah this is so cool and so fascinating all right well this
has been amazing if our listeners want to fought to find you where should they go yeah so YouTube is great for videos but
it’s not great for connecting so if you want to follow me on Instagram it’s just Molly M Kaiser and I have the blue check
so you’ll know which profile is me because I have it a lot of people you know do the whole scam profile thing
so oh really are there a few out there that are like impersonating you I get messages all the time this person’s
impersonating I’m like I don’t have time to deal with that I got the check now yeah you know who to follow and who not
to okay yeah exactly okay and then if they want to you you have a podcast
right I do kind of have a podcast that’s okay you know and I talk about all the time
Focus so like basically when I first created this business I thought I wanted my number one platform to be a podcast so I created a podcast
but I’ve found over time like I really enjoy YouTube um so that’s why I have a podcast but
it’s not like my main focus and that’s why it’s not a consistently put out show basically perfect so YouTube is your
place that like yeah YouTube and then I repurposed to tick tock and Instagram so yeah yeah awesome
okay well this has been so cool thank you so much for being here I’ve absolutely loved it
yeah this is really fun I really enjoy talking to your amazing host so thank you so much for having me well thank you
[Music] Molly thank you so much for being here
on the crafter career podcast I absolutely loved it in fact since the recording she and I have been in touch
and continue to chat business she’s also creating a little mini course for my
Mastermind and for my crafter career course so I hope you enjoyed meeting Molly and
learning from her she is just a wealth of knowledge and a very savvy businesswoman so again Molly thank you
for being here and next Friday I will see you right back here on the crafty career podcast until then take care
[Music]
