#051 - We are excited to celebrate the one year anniversary of Subscription Box Basics. We are grateful for all your reviews, ratings and for tuning in week after week. In this episode, Julie shares a little bit of the story of how the podcast started and her future plans for the podcast.
We are also excited to announce that Subscription Box Basics, the book, is now available in Amazon. Its a full color 30-day workbook just under 200 pages to help you get your box idea off the ground.
Summary:
Links:
Sparkle Hustle Grow
Subscription Box Bootcamp
Subscription Box Basics: A 30 Day Plan to Get Your Box Idea Off the Ground
#051 - We are excited to celebrate the one year anniversary of Subscription Box Basics. We are grateful for all your reviews, ratings and for tuning in week after week. In this episode, Julie shares a little bit of the story of how the podcast started and her future plans for the podcast.
We are also excited to announce that Subscription Box Basics, the book, is now available in Amazon. Its a full color 30-day workbook just under 200 pages to help you get your box idea off the ground.
Summary:
Links:
Sparkle Hustle Grow
Subscription Box Bootcamp
Subscription Box Basics: A 30 Day Plan to Get Your Box Idea Off the Ground
So you want to launch a subscription box and don't know where to start? Girl, you are in the right place. I'm Julie Ball, a subscription box coach and your host here at Subscription Box Basics, a podcast for new and aspiring subscription box entrepreneurs that want to avoid overwhelm. So grab a coffee, some pen and paper and let's have some fun!
Hey everybody and welcome back to Subscription Box Basics. Thanks for joining me week after week after week, I love reading the reviews and I love getting your messages about how this podcast has impacted you. And today I am so excited to celebrate that this is the one year anniversary of the podcast. I'm so excited. It has been really a pleasure. Like it has been one of my favorite projects to do.
A lot of times, you know, with our businesses, we have all these to do lists. We have all these things to check off our task list, but podcasts are one of my favorites. So I'm glad you're here for it today.
I'm going to tell you a little bit of the story of how the podcast started the launch story and I think it'll be inspiring to a lot of you because sometimes we sit in our decisions or we have analysis paralysis. And this quick story is going to give you a little bit of motivation to just do it, to just find that passion project or to just move forward with it.
But before I get into that, I want to let everyone know that Subscription Box Basics, the book, is now out and available on Amazon. Yes, go snag it over on Amazon. This is a full color workbook. It's just under 200 pages, but the idea is it's a 30-day plan to get your box idea off the ground.
If you've listened to this podcast before, you know that I tell you about the five stages of your subscription box journey, and the first stage is your idea stage. This book is going to get you through your idea stage. And by the time that you're done, you are going to have mapped out your subscription box business concept. And you're going to have clarity on whether or not this is even an idea that you plan to pursue.
Sometimes we get an idea and then when we map it out, we're like, "Man, maybe this isn't for me or maybe this isn't the right season". In any case, you will have that clarity by the time you're done with this book.
It features almost 20 of my friends and colleagues and bootcampers. So it's not just me telling you about Sparkle Hustle Grow and my journey. You are going to hear from so many other people that have been through this first. And when you read their stories, you're going to be like, "Yes, yes, yes! That resonates so much".
I think you are going to be so excited when you get this book in your hands. It is beautiful because of the full color and reason we do that is because it's inspiring. Most of the books that we get are going to be, you know, a black and white book, which fine, but this is a workbook and I want you to get deep in it. I want you to map out your business idea, get a pretty pen, spend some time, carve out some time to go through this book. If you go through just one chapter every other day, you'll have gotten through it in 30 days. And I know you can do that. So head on over to Amazon search for Subscription Box Basics and snag your copy now, also available in ebook.
And when you buy your version, whether it's the ebook or the full color paperback version, you're going to get access to a companion guide, which is going to help you get through it-the workbook even better. It's going to give you links to a lot of the resources that I talk about in the book and just make it a lot easier. So make sure that when you get your book, you go through it and then you go back to Amazon and give it a review. It would really help get this book in more hands.
Okay. Enough about the book go snag it. Let's talk about the podcast. So as I mentioned, this is the one year anniversary of the podcast. So I thought it might be fun to tell you how I started it.
So about a year ago, I found myself at one of my favorite events of 2019. It was the Entrepreneur Experience with Amy Porterfield, who is one of my mentors. I've been following her for probably a good, oh my goodness, maybe six, seven years. She has a podcast called Online Marketing Made Easy. Bucket list, I'm going to be on that podcast one day. Hopefully. I am putting it out there. I write about it. I dream about it. And I pitch Amy from time to time and one of these days, I just know she's going to say yes.
So anyhow, I was at her event, it was a really, really great event. There were a lot of inspirational people on stage. A lot of her students on stage, it was in San Diego on Cornado Island, which is just an gorgeous, inspiring place to be.
I remember very specifically sitting by the pool and having tacos and cocktails by the pool in the sunshine. It was fabulous. And I actually traveled there by myself and I met up with a friend there, Amanda Gunther, and she is an amazing designer and sales page guru. You guys, if you need a Kajabi sales page design, you need to look her up, Amanda Gunther. Anyhow, she was a fabulous roommate. We had so much fun.
And during the course of that event, Amy Porterfield told us a few things that really, really resonated with us as I'm saying us as a group, because the room was packed full of ambitious driven entrepreneurs. And so one of the things that she kept telling us throughout the entire event was that you are a really big deal. And it's true you have to sometimes have people tell you you're a big deal. You know things that other people don't know. You've been through things that other people haven't been through. And that gives you a unique skillset and what are you going to do with it in your business? And to hear that affirmation throughout the entire event, you are really big deal was really inspiring. Not only was it inspiring, but it really tapped into breaking down that imposter syndrome.
So often many of us think who am I to run this business? Or who am I to put together this box? I'm not the expert. It doesn't matter. You are an expert in certain things and people want to get to know you. They want to get to know the real you, not just your brand. They want to interact with a human.
And so often we have imposter syndrome. So Amy was tackling that every single moment during the event telling us that you are a really big deal and she was giving us the mic to tell everyone else why we're a big deal. And I thought that was fabulous. But the one thing that event that really, really got me the most was she said, "Come up with one big idea, write it down and move forward with it. If anything like you don't have to walk away from this event with an entire to-do list. Just pick out one big idea. And throughout this weekend, try to think about how you're going to make baby steps toward that one big idea". And I remember very specifically writing it down. I wrote, I will start a podcast and it was the first thing that came to my mind. It came out of nowhere. I had been a guest on podcasts before, and I enjoyed that, but I hadn't really, really thought deep about this before. But for whatever reason at that moment, when she said, come up with one big idea, write it down, that's what I wrote down.
And then I took it one step further. I'm a pen and paper kind of person, but I also took it one step further and started a note. So I have an iPhone and I wrote, I will start a podcast in that note. And then throughout the weekend, I started writing down topics because I figured that was going to be one of the biggest things. One of the steps that I was going to need to take is what am I going to talk about? I know I'm going to talk about subscription box businesses, duh. You know, like that's my jam, but what specifically am I going to talk about? What topics do new and aspiring entrepreneurs, very specifically subscription box entrepreneurs need in their business. What is going to help the most people? And throughout the course of that weekend, I wrote down 40 topics.
So I had no excuses of why I couldn't come up with the concepts because I already wrote down 40 of them and I was ready to roll. So the next one I got back from that event, I did some research and tried to find a course because that's just my nature. If I don't know how to do something, I'm going to learn how to do it. And the King of podcasting, Pat Flynn has a fantastic course called Power Up Podcasting.
Now, if you're considering starting your own podcast, DM me, I will give you my link for Pat Flynn's Power Up Podcasting. I devoured that course, which I typically devour all of his content very quickly because it's that good. But I devoured it in just a couple of days. I'm super type A, so I move quickly. That's just my nature, but I devoured it in a couple of days and immediately started working on my intro, which is that front end kind of audio piece that you hear it introduces what the podcast is, gives it a little bit of personality based off of the low nineties pop music that I put in the background.
And that was very intentional because there is a very specific audience that I'm trying to attract. And if you're listening to this right now, you're probably a part of that target audience. And so it's my hope that the words that I said and the music that I have attracted you to this podcast, if anything, it makes you laugh a little bit, or maybe you just fast forward through it. I don't know. Anyhow, I immediately started working on my intro, sent it out for some feedback to my team and a couple of friends and I got to it.
I don't have a fancy mic half the time I'm recording with my Apple headphones, the ones that come with some of the Apple products. Sometimes I am using my little desktop microphone. It is an Audio Technica. I can put links to that stuff in the show notes, but I really don't have a ton of fancy equipment. But you don't really need anything that fancy just to start, I use garage band to record it. And then I follow the steps from Pat's course to kind of fine tune it. And we posted on Buzzsprout, which maybe that's where you find it. Buzzsprout helps us just have a home base for it. But of course you can find the episodes on any of the major podcast players.
So how do I plan out the topics? Well, I look at topics one to two months out and I try to plan them out. That's probably one of the easier parts of podcasting is for me, at least planning the topics out. So I want to cover things that are seasonally sensitive. I want to talk about things that I'm going through right now. So for quick example of that, we are launching at Sparkle Hustle Grow, we are launching our new partner program, which is very similar to an affiliate program. And so I am in the midst of that right now, and I'm documenting things. So in the hopes that in say 30 days from now, after we have some good data and some good experience to share, I can share that with you guys and let you know about my experience.
I love to just pull back the curtain and just share with you the good stuff. But also when I crash and burn because not every program that we launch or every initiative that we try is successful and that's okay, we're going to have failures along the way, but I'm hopeful that I can share that stuff with you and save you some tears and save you some headaches.
So back to the podcast, I plan my topics one to two months out, and then I try to batch record a few at a time. And that just makes it easier. That way I can say maybe if I batch three in one day or three in one week, then I can relax for a couple of weeks and I can start working on other things. It's just a good way to plan your business. No matter what you're talking about. If you're talking about email marketing, if you're talking about social media marketing, if you're talking about any kind of planning, I highly recommend that you batch things it's just efficient. That's all there is to it. It's efficient. So that's how I plan out the podcast. It is so much fun.
I have big plans to interview tons of my bootcampers. I want you to hear the launch stories from people who were in your shoes just a few months ago, or just a year ago, so that you can hear from them the good stuff and the bad stuff and how they got through it because I think that kind of thing is going to be really, really inspirational for you.
I have a lot of other topics that I want to cover things that we are testing right now. We're testing OptinMonster on our website. So it's got like pop-up boxes, it's got notification bars, exit intent. So again, we are testing out our new partner program. All these things I want to talk about in the future, but I want to know what you want to hear about what topics. Head over to Instagram. And you can find me @subscriptionboxbootcamp. That's the handle. It's a newer Instagram. We were running things through the Sparkle Hustle Grow handle, but we are kind of dividing the two businesses because they really are different. And I want to cover more things over on Instagram.
I'm working on some videos, strategies. It's going to be so much fun. I hope you follow us along. Head over to Instagram and then find me at Subscription Box Bootcamp, and then DM me, I'll respond. DM me, what are your questions that you're stuck on right now? Or what topics would you like me to cover in future podcast episodes? So I look forward to connecting with you there.
Thank you guys for listening to all these episodes for the support over the past year, when it comes to rating, reviewing, subscribing. And if you haven't done that stuff, please do it. It's super helpful. And it keeps me going and it gets this content in front of more people.
I know this was a short one. Thanks for listening. Thanks for always being there for me and make sure you go over to Amazon snag the new Subscription Box Basics book. And tell me what you think and I'll see you in the next episode.