How I Stopped Trading Time For Money With Email Marketing (You Can Do This Too)

Joe Harris: What does the Bible teach about business? That's what we'll uncover together on the Business in his Image podcast. This show explores strategies from the Bible that will help you grow your business, strengthen your walk with Jesus, and help you reach your God given potential as an entrepreneur. The Bible is filled with practical wisdom to help you live for God while using your gifts. Let's unpack what that means for you and how you can use biblical truths to build a thriving business that honors Christ. Now it's time to dive in.

Guest: I wanted to come on here to expand on a topic that I was sharing about in my email newsletter, and that is the topic of email marketing and how to increase revenue in your business, even passively through email marketing and as service providers. I think that this is so powerful because we don't always want to be trading time for money. So if you're someone who was tired of trading time for money and you want to start exploring ways to expand your business in a way that's not going to burn you out and not take up even more of your time, then you're going to want to stick around till the end. Because I have some good tips to share with you now. I want to start by sharing with you something from the book of ecclesiastes in chapter 11. And it says, invest in many ventures. Invest in seven ventures. Yes, and eight. You do not know what disaster may come upon the land. And this Bible scripture is near and dear to me because the Lord just kept showing this to me the past couple of years. And it's really spoken to me that it's important to diversify your income. Even if you feel called to start a business within that business, you need to have multiple revenue streams coming in so that if, God forbid, something changes in the industry, in the world, you have other means of incomes in place. This is going to protect your business, it's going to protect your family so that you are not panicking if things change. As you all know, there are seasons in business. There are highs and there are lows. So the more diverse your income is within your business, the more variety of offers you have. It protects you from those highs and lows. And the book of Ecclesiastes actually has so much wisdom about business and finances, I really recommend it. It's, it's, uh, wonderful. And it's ministered to me in so many ways. So I want to expand on that a little bit more today. Okay, now let me say that growing an email list gives you options because now you have an audience to speak to social media is fine, but you want to funnel everyone that's following you on social media to your list, because your list is not going to depend on an algorithm. Social media is changing every day, and we don't own it. If, God forbid, Instagram or Facebook decided they want to shut down business, what are we going to do if our entire business is built on that platform? So. So it's good to use these platforms. I recommend them. However, we want to use those platforms to grow our own platform. Right? So grow a list. And I want to talk to you about some of the ways that that's going to help you increase your revenue. So, number one, having a list, it helps you to nurture and build trust with an audience so that they will be open to buying from you. Okay? Nurturing and building a relationship takes time, and social media is good as a starting point. However, you don't always get to consistently nurture those relationships because people take breaks from social media, but most people don't take breaks from their inbox. Okay. Um, and then also because the algorithm's constantly changing and different things that go on, people may not always see your content. People forget, people get busy. People, like I said, they take breaks from social media. But with email, you have direct access to someone's inbox, and that is a very intimate search space where you can get your message across and you can nurture and you can build trust. So how powerful is that? All right, and then, so we talked about not being dependent on social media. If you have an offer that you want to tell people about and you post it on social media, people can choose to keep scrolling and ignore. So you're competing with all these other people that are on there. But when you are in someone's inbox, yes, you are, in a sense, competing with other emails that are coming in, but it's so much more intimate, and people are less likely to ignore your message, in my opinion. So it's just such a powerful tool. And then number three, it gives you options to expand your business. So if you're a service provider, m and you want to create other offers to stop trading time for money, and you have an engaged email list, even if it's small, but you've been nurturing this list and they trust you. Now you have people that you can sell to. Right. But you didn't previously. So this gives you options. You can create digital products, you can create workshops, you can create virtual events. You can do so much. And that's just another facet of business. So that you're not, like I said, trading time for money. So it's so powerful. I started just like you, with no audience. I remember I had seven people on my email list and I was a little bit discouraged because I didn't know how I was going to grow my list. I genuinely didn't know. Most Facebook groups don't allow you to promote your offers or your opt in and things like that. So I was like, how am I going to grow my list?

Joe Harris: Right.

Guest: So I got serious about growing my list and I started finding ways and implementing certain strategies to be able to do that. And within about, I'll say roughly a year's time, close to a year, I think it was under a year though. I got over a thousand new subscribers. I'm not going to go into specifics of all my metrics, but I'll say it's over a thousand, right? But I got at least a thousand subscribers and I added an additional $9,000 in revenue passively. So this is extra on top of everything I was already doing, on top of my services, extra to my business. Okay, I wasn't trading time for money. That's something that was running passively in the background because I had this in place. And like I said, when I started, I struggled because most tactics that people teach you, they're geared towards people that already have some kind of platform. So they're teaching you these strategies. But if you don't have connections, you don't have a platform already, it's really difficult to apply some of them. So it feels kind of like a catch 22. It's like, all right, so how do I start? How do I get my first a hundred subscribers, my first 500 or even my first 50? How do I do this so that it's not just filled with friends and family? Listen, I totally understand that and that's why I created list lingo. Some of you may have heard about it. This is a step by step email marketing course that I created to teach people how to get your first 500 subscribers grow an engaged list of email subscribers that align with your values, that are interested in your offers that you can sell to. You'll get all the behind the scenes juicy tips and then you're going to learn everything you need to write emails that your subscribers are going to love. So this is not something that's going to become a full time job or feel overwhelming. It's not going to take over your schedule because I'm going to teach you how to do it in a smart way where you're showing up and being consistent, but you're spending minimal time on this. If you are interested, you can go to the virtual mama.com list lingo and you can check it out. Whether or not you want to join this course, I still want you to take some things away from this. I wanted to show you the power of email marketing and growing a list. So whether you learn it from me or someone else, just let your takeaway be this. As a business owner, you should be diversifying your income. As a business owner, you should find ways to protect yourself financially so that your family is not impacted down the line. All right, bye.

Joe Harris: Thank you for listening to the Business in His Image podcast with me, your host, Joe Harris. If this show has blessed you, please share it with a friend and subscribe

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Joe Harris: we release new episodes. My prayer is that God will help you soak up every bit of what you've heard today and help you apply it to your business so that you can see results. I'll see you next time, and may God bless you.