Some days ago, I was crying my soul out.
Aaron (my son) is having a cold, Tara is sick, April had some issues with her back(she could barely move without crying) and she is on some strong meds, Aaron can barely breath through the nose and during the night it sounds like we have a pump in the room.
He woke up and started crying, 2 am in the morning, we tried all our "weapons", nothing worked, so instead of being both me and Tara awake, we tagged, I got my ways she has her ways of calming him.
2 hours later, it worked, he fell asleep.
But I was there holding him in my arms and thinking...
I am not having a job as a backup, I only run my business, I tried changing the avatar I talk to and all my sales went down except my community, I need to be able to help my family financially.
Doubt was settling in, I can barely do this fatherhood thing, it takes me 2 hours to make him sleep.
If i'm not sleeping I'm not able to grow and push my business forwards...
I reduced my workouts specifically to do more on the business side to grow it, but that also comes with anxiety.
2 months of doing this avatar change and it feels like things that I built so far are collapsing.
Almost every single coach I had advised me to change my niche because of different reasons, don't target beginners anymore.
Do YouTube, only focus on organic, promote and be salesy in every piece of content so you get more money in.
Don't do ads because it will just eat your money.
I was starting to fell ashamed just for the idea of thinking to run ads because I fatigued my audience by taking advices from gurus.
All these thoughts at 2 am, kid crying, doubt, so I decided to join the kid and cry together.
Have't done this since ages and it was the best cry ever.
Once he fell asleep I managed to take a step back and think more clearly.
The things I did up until I started talking to another avatar worked
Had people that paid 3000$ for my coaching program to work together 1 to 1.
Digital product sales were going good.
December was a month with 6000$+ from digital products.
So last week, I turned to ads.
I'm not an ads person, i just decided to do ads the way I understand them and did some trainings.
4 days and 20$ per day ads and 1725$ kicked in.
This is one of the campaigns for every 1$ spent I made 6.77$.
Same campaign had days with 11.30$ Return.
I don't care what others say, what worked for them, I shouldn't be ashamed to do everything I can in order to win right?
And in the end, I started by being a photographer, and artist, damn it.
So I need to learn all these stuff, and funnels, systems, scaling and all the nasty odd terminology that I might not even get.
I finished a univeristy of psychology not business or something related.
But I started to learn it and I now like to play with all these.
Where am I going with this you might ask?
You are an artist just like me, you just want to create art, to take the photos, and be able to make a living from it, I wanted the same shit.
But I needed to pay coaches and gurus big amounts of money to learn that, moreover none of them artists at soul that could understand another artist.
Because there was nothing like this when I started.
I have been running a community since last year.
We artists, join there 2 times per week, and I help the people inside the community to monetise their skills.
Jendrik is one of my buddies in the community(yes buddies, we're all the same, I don't do guru shit, and if you come to me and want to monetise but you have no clue through what, I won't push you into doing stuff you don't want)
This guy said he wants firstly to try and monetise the skills he has by working with clients, said and done, we crafted an offer, came up with some ideas how to get a small portfolio and then went to work.
There's another mate in the community that I helped with launching his first digital product, first days, 3 sales, also opened a print shop and did sales in the first week as well there.
You see, there's not a one size fits all, but from one artist to another, I know what you're going through.