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Hello Reader,

I was standing next to a motley selection of air fresheners in the grocery store aisle, desperately trying to figure out which one to choose.

We had friends coming to visit and I wanted the guest bathroom to smell nicer than it currently did.

The problem was, all those air fresheners were in closed boxes and I could only guess at the scents hidden inside.

I finally chose one that sounded faintly exotic, got it home, unwrapped it …

And reeled. It wasn't an unpleasant fragrance, exactly, it was just … strong. Way too strong. And the scent soaked itself into every corner of the whole house.

I left it sitting on the bathroom sink, hoping the intensity would die down or I'd get used to it or something.

And sure enough, a couple of weeks later, I suddenly realised that the smell WAS gone. As in, completely gone.

"That's weird", I thought. "Has it run out already?"

And I went into the bathroom to check.

And guess what. The scent bottle was still almost completely full. But I couldn't smell a thing.

In fact, as I wandered around the house sniffing other things, I realised, with a rising sense of panic, that my sense of smell was completely gone.

And that's when I knew that the hacking cough and nasty bug I'd come down with a few days previously was probably not your normal kind of flu.

I'd already had my flu jab for the season. This was something else entirely.

I won't bore you with the details. All I know is that I tested negative for COVID.

And suffice to say that nearly a month later, I understand a lot better now how people with long COVID must feel (or felt during the pandemic).

And maybe that's a good thing. Going through an experience makes it so much easier to empathise instead of criticise.

And it can be like that in how we talk to or think about our clients.

It's easy to look at someone who's stuck, or slow to act, or seems to be making the "wrong" choice, and think, why don't they just... But most of the time they're doing the best they can with what they've got. Just like I was, standing in that grocery aisle guessing at scents in a sealed box.

Here's a small thing to try this week: next time a client (or a follower, or even you) seems to be dragging their feet on something obvious, get curious before you get critical. Ask what's actually going on, rather than assuming you already know.

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Back to Basics Reminder

If you're trying to build a business that pays full-time bills on part-time hours, you need to know where your traffic and leads are actually coming from. And not just guess. You need to know.

So, this week, spend ten minutes in Google Analytics (or whatever your platform gives you, Squarespace and Shopify both have their own built-in stats too).

Here's how, if you've never poked around in there before:

• Log in to your Google Analytics account and go to Reports.
• Click into Business objectives, then Generate leads.
• Find Traffic acquisition. This shows you Session source / medium, which is a fancy way of saying "where people came from before they landed on your site" (Google search, Instagram, a newsletter, direct).
• Want to know which actual page they landed on? Click the + button and add Page / screen (with query string if you want the full detail) as a second layer.

You don't need to understand every chart. Just get a rough sense of what's working, so you're building on evidence, not finger in the wind guesses.

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A Quick Time-Saving Tip

Get AI to audit your offer so you can put a part-time price tag on it (if that sounds confusing, keep reading).

Here's how you do that.

Paste your current offer descriptions and pricing into ChatGPT (or your AI tool of choice) and ask it:

Tell it to ask you as many questions as it needs to complete the task, so it digs into your actual numbers instead of guessing generic filler.

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Highlight of the Week

This week I've been having fun repurposing my podcast interviews into short form videos using VidIQ (affiliate link).

I've known for ages that short form videos are worth doing. Every time I've put them up, my YouTube watch hour stats have gone up and I've picked up more subscribers.

But for the longest time, I just could not fit the process in.

Not until I discovered that VidIQ makes the whole thing so much easier and faster. AI even helps get the videos into YouTube, so all I have to do is check them and hit “schedule”.

So if you've got a backlog of podcast episodes, interviews or long-form content sitting there, gathering digital dust, it's worth a look. You don't need to reinvent what you're saying, just find a new way to get it out there so people can benefit from it.

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And that's it for this week. Hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Trudy

P.S. And in case you're wondering, yes, two and a half weeks later, my sense of smell finally came back. I can now truly smell that air freshener again. Faint whiffs, at first, but now, strong as it is, I think I kind of like it.

P.P.S. If this week's theme of building a part-time business that pays full-time bills has you jumping up and done quietly screaming “Me! Pick me!”, Work Less Make More (affiliate link) by James Schramko is worth a look. I’ve read it a couple of times and every time I do, I pick up more ideas about what I should be focusing on in my business.

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