Hello, 2022!

It’s the first week of the new year and like many of you, I have been engaged in self-reflection and imagining where I would like to be a year from now.

My life has been a bit of a roller coaster these last few weeks. I went back home to New Mexico to visit my family for the Christmas holiday. As per usual, being in a drier climate really activated my season allergies… and during a global pandemic, my symptoms were virtually indistinguishable from COVID-19. After initially testing negative, then positive, then negative again, I was starting to feel like I had whiplash. Luckily, my family and I were all vaccinated and all contracted mild forms of COVID-19. The silver lining in all of this is that I got a few extra days of vacation before returning to work, which has given me some free time that I had not accounted for, and I thought, ‘why not blog about it’?

I thought I’d share with you some of my plans for the upcoming year and some of the ways I’m hoping to improve on my business.

To start, I wanted to share this handy little piechart graphic I made:

During the end of 2021, I sat down and thought about how I could use my time more efficiently in the coming year. Even as a product-based business, I wanted to focus on providing more than just cute stationary supplies.

As some of you may know, I work 9-to-5 as a Marriage and Family Therapist and will be sitting for my licensing exam early this year. My background in mental health is essential to who I am as a person and as a small business owner. I hope to bring in more of my knowledge and education into my product designs, and into my content overall.

This is where the idea of breaking down my content into categories originated. Some content and social media coaches refer to these as your “pillars”, but I needed something even more simplified. I broke down my priorities based on three concepts: Products, Value, and Prep.

Product:

Starting with the obvious, product-based content is what it says it is. This is what you’ve grown used to seeing from my business thus far. Every time I launch a new product on my store, I promote that product on my Instagram— therefore, it is product-based content. In the coming years, I hope to expand my products beyond just physical items like stickers and totes, but to also provide digital products that can be purchased and downloaded instantly. Digital products may include fonts, color palettes, PDFs/Workbooks or downloadable prints.

As you can expect, October-December are HUGE product based months for me, because the holiday season is a big time for physical purchases. During this time of year, you can expect me to be promoting new launches, attending more pop-up events and running rampantly to and from the post office, shipping out orders. Additionally, I wanted to balance out the year by including 2 other peak product-focused months: April (in anticipation of Summer) and July (in anticipation of Fall). These are other high traffic sales months and therefore you can expect to see product launches around these times.

Value:

Now let’s talk about what the heck “value-based” content means. Think of this as content that is providing something meaningful or educational to you as a viewer. Things like “behind the scenes”, “how-to’s”, or even just the keep-it-real kind of relatable small business content that I occasionally share online. Whether it’s normalizing my mistakes, or sharing what I’ve learned, value-based content has a huge place in the future of my business!

Examples of value-based content include things like my Pop Up Survival Guide, informational Reels or videos, educational posts and blogs, and hopefully one day, online workshops and courses.

The months that I selected as “value-based” months inlcude: January (focusing on New Years and self-improvement), March (#MarchMeetTheMaker), May (Mental Health Awareness), and September (Self Care month).

Prep:

As I’m sure my fellow small biz pals know, running your own business is no easy feat, therefore I purposefully planned out “prep” months, where I can focus solely on making headway on larger products, design new merchandise, or focus on social media and back-end strategies to help me grow long-term. These months are essential for me to find balance between having structure and flexibility in the work that I do.

Now I’m sure you may be asking yourself, Amanda, this piechart is pretty and all, but do all your tasks really fit so nicely into these three little boxes? The short answer is no. The reality is that each month contains some combination of all three of these things, but having a loose idea of which one to focus on more intensely is going to help me keep from feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes I may launch products during a value-based month, or do prep work during a product-based month. The point of this isn’t to confine me to only 1 role but to give myself clarity as I wade through the chaos that is running a small business. Will this be a perfect system? Likely not. But I’m going to give it a go over this next year so I can report back on my findings in next year’s blog post.

In the meantime, please feel free to share with me your goals for this next year, whether you’re a fellow artist, small business owner, or just a reader who found yourself on this happy little corner of the internet. Leave me your comments below!

May 2022 be filled with lots of creativity and caffeine for us all! ❤️