When I first connected with Lisa, I wanted to have her on my podcast immediately.  She’s the Founder of Fresh Eggs Daily, a robust 6 figure business with over half a million active fan that I was dying to know more about – and share with you!  But, as I was 7 months pregnant and taking a “hiatus” from interviewing at the time, I begged her to share some of her wisdom with the Biz Women Rock community through some informational articles.  She agreed and I couldn’t be more excited for you to learn a little more about business through her experience!  Keep a lookout for her podcast episode, which will eventually happen in 2016!

~ Katie Krimitsos

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Written by Lisa Steele

 

In less than five years, I have built my brand, Fresh Eggs Daily®, into a six-figure business (which I run by myself from our kitchen table) and the largest chicken keeping resource on the internet. I am an in-demand public speaker and published author. It wasn’t intentional, I didn’t have a set plan or goal or path, but I used my background in business (I have a degree in Business Management with a concentration and Accounting and have been licensed as a CPA and also owned a bookstore for several years), my passion for chicken keeping, and the good fortune to be riding the very popular backyard chicken keeping wave at precisely right time all to my advantage and as a result am earning a living doing something I love.

 

While it did happen for me with a bit of luck, I believe that the things I have learned from the experience can be helpful to anyone looking to build a brand, monetize a blog, or grown an online business – and spend literally nothing doing it.

 

Getting Started

 

Once you have chosen the name for your business, grab it on every social media platform there is. Even if you never intend on using a particular platform, grab it anyway – you just don’t want someone else to take it. It’s free and easy to set up accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, you name it, as well as Facebook of course. Keep the name consistent across all your social media platforms. You want instant brand recognition no matter where a reader stumbles across your page or site or feed.

 

Choose a name that is descriptive but not too narrow. Inadvertently, by choosing the name Fresh Egg Daily, I left myself open to not only focusing on chickens, but also ducks and recipes using eggs. That has enabled me to branch out a bit while still keeping my brand intact.

 

While you’re at it, buy the domain, ie, instead of your blog being www.fresheggsdaily.blogspot.com or www.fresheggsdaily.wordpress.com, spend the $10 or whatever and buy www.fresheggsdaily.com. It not only makes you look professional, it prevents someone else from buying it. I know some people will also buy other domains like .org, .farm, .net, and so on..I haven’t gone that far, but it’s certainly an option.

 

I highly suggest trademarking your name as well. It costs about $300, you can do it yourself fairly easily over at www.uspto.gov. Again, you are just protecting yourself, and preventing someone else from grabbing your name and then preventing YOU from using it.

 

Open a business checking account. It’s very important, whether you earn $100 a year or $100,000 that all your business income is accounted for correctly. You need to report every penny you earn on your blog, but you can deduct all your business expenses of course. I incorporated my business and am set up as an S Corp. I did it myself, but if you don’t feel comfortable doing it yourself, I believe a service such as LegalZoom can do it for you for a reasonable fee. You will also need to register for a sales tax number with your state if you plan on selling everything.

 

While you’re at it, design a logo that ties in your name and message as well as incorporates your ‘look’. Design and order some business cards. Both Vistaprint and Moo offer great service for a good price. You’ll want your logo and website address on them, and any other sites you plan on being active on and trying to grow. Design a logo that coordinates with your brand name and the ‘feel’ you want to convey. They’re great to have to hand out at conferences or shows, tuck into packages you mail out (if you plan on having a virtual storefront) and pass out to people you meet in your travels.

 

Design banners for each social media platform that all coordinate with each other – again for instant brand recognition. Include the links to your other platforms on each platform, and be sure your email (and yes, you should get a ‘business’ email address – even fresheggsdaily@gmail.com is fine and free!) includes your links in your signature. I have my ‘business’ email forward to my personal email so I don’t have to be constantly checking a bunch of different email addresses.

 

Building a Readership or Fanbase

 

Facebook

 

When I started my Facebook page back in January of 2011, I didn’t have any intentions of turning it into a business. I started my page merely to share cute photos of my chickens because my ‘non-chicken loving’ friends on Facebook were threatening to boycott my personal page if I shared one more chicken picture! So I started my page and started sharing my photos there, as well as offering advice and information about how I was raising my chickens. Now, I don’t believe that my page would have reached more than half a million likes over the next five years had I only shared pictures – no matter how cute they were!

 

But my page did grow, and continues to grow, because in addition to being a fifth-generation chicken keeper with a long family and personal history raising chickens, I was focusing on natural methods, which very few pages (or websites) were at that time. That made me stand out and made my page unique. Followers responded to my message and my advice, they recognized that I was authentic and knowledgeable, and they told their friends who told their friends and so on. I have never bought a single like. I don’t advertise my page or posts on Facebook. My page has grown 100% organically (pun intended!).

 

I have several friends who help me out on my page from time to time, especially when I’m traveling or otherwise unable to keep up with the posting and questions, but for the most part, I handle my page myself. I learned early on that Facebook can be a real time sucker, and you really have to limit how much time you are willing to devote to it. I am at the point now that I schedule four posts a day -8am, noon, 4pm and 8pm. I try and schedule a week at a time, usually over the weekend in the evening. That ensures the page will stay active even if I miss an entire day of being able to check in.

 

We have chickens and ducks, horses, two dogs and a cat. I also have gardens to tend. I also enjoy knitting, reading and baking, and while I do devote probably 8-12 hours a day to my ‘business’, I also set boundaries and generally start working at 6am when my husband leaves for work and work through the day (with plenty of breaks throughout to take our dogs out for walks, fill water buckets, do farm chores, clean, do laundry, etc.) right up until 4pm or so. I generally break for dinner, take time to hang out with my husband and the animals, etc. but then again for an hour or two in the evenings, I will sit and edit photos, answer email or catch up on Facebook while we’re watching a movie or something on tv. I try and take the weekends off as much as possible, but generally end up writing a blog post and at least scrolling through Facebook.

 

I do try and go through my timeline at least twice a day and scroll through answering questions and commenting on readers’ comments. People do like to know that there is a ‘real’ person there reading and liking what they are sharing, but with over 30,000 comments a week posted to my page, there’s no way humanly possible anyone could even begin to keep up! So I limit my time there for my own sanity as much as anything.

 

I also have my blog posts auto post to Google+ and often post Instagram photos to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously.

 

Blog

 

When I started my blog the following year, in January of 2012, again, I still had no intention of turning it into a business. I had realized, over the course of my first year on Facebook, that I was answering the same question over and over. I figured starting a blog mainly as a place to archive information was a smart idea. That way I could just share the link to whatever relevant post fans on Facebook were asking about. I thought maybe I would write about 10-20 popular topics and that would be that. Well, nearly four years later and more than 600 blog posts later, I am still going strong and have a list a mile long of topics I still want to cover! My blog gets nearly half a million page views a month and it really has made life on Facebook easier, since I can answer many fan posts with a link to a blog post.

 

Shortly after I started my blog, a friend mentioned that I could get companies to sponsor an ad and pay me money for the ad, offer promo codes to fans or products for review. So I started contacting the companies whose products I used and liked and slowly started adding some sponsors. Currently, I work with about 50 companies in various ways. I do also use Adsense ads and am a Blogher affiliate. I have an amazon store set up with some of my favorite products as well.

 

Revenue Streams

 

In order to turn your blog or brand into a full-time business, you have to work at it full-time. Part-time effort will only result in part-time income. There is no magic bullet, or secret to earning millions. It’s hard work, day after day, finding out what works for you and what doesn’t. I’m at the point where unless I absolutely love doing something or it earns me a decent amount of money, I don’t do it. I have at various times tried running blog hops (huge time commitment, artificially inflates your blog page views), contests (again a pretty big time commitment to set up and run, and fans seem to be getting tired of them) and other ‘gimmicks’, sponsored posts (usually come off awkward and forced, trying to write a blog post around a product that you’re being paid to write about, unless it’s a direct product review) but I think bottom line, providing great information, adding a bit of humor, and taking great photos is the key.

 

It’s very difficult to earn a living, no matter how good you are or how many followers you have, though, with just one income stream. So developing as many streams as you can is the key. Here is where I make my money:

 

• Sponsor Ad Revenue
• Book Royalties
• Freelance Writing
• Speaking Engagements
• Etsy Shop (I sell copies of my book, nesting box herbs, window decals, etc.)
• Sponsored Newsletters
• Amazon Affiliate Store
• Other affiliate programs (Blogher, Adsense, etc.)
• Branded products (working on currently)
• YouTube
• E-books

 

No one stream is enough to pay the bills, but when you add them all up, you can find yourself with a pretty profitable little business. I am very picky about which companies I work with and which products I promote. Bottom line, you have to earn your readers’ trust and then keep it. You need them to keep coming back to learn, be entertained, or get a coupon code, or news of a sale or something that will benefit them.

 

Keep it Personal

 

My husband is retired Navy and very conscious of security breaches, etc. As such, he tends to be pretty private about sharing personal details of our lives or photos and the like especially online. I, however, realized that I needed to put my face on my ‘brand’. Readers need to have a ‘real’ person to identify with. I realized that the blogs that I followed and seemed to identify with and enjoy the most were the ones on which the blogger had a photo of themselves right on their blog. So I got some head shots done and added one to mine. As soon as I started posting photos on Facebook of myself, and added the photo to my blog sidebar, as well as my ‘signature’ to the bottom of each blog post, my readership skyrocketed.

 

In summary, building a brand into a profitable business is hard work and does take a touch of luck/good timing, whatever you want to call it, but it can be done. As long as you are passionate and willing to work hard, it can be done. As a result of my Facebook and blog following, when I pitched the proposal for my first book (Fresh Eggs Daily: Raising Happy, Healthy Chickens…Naturally), the publisher saw how loyal my readers are and the potential for book sales. My book performed so well in the first year and a half since it came out, we collaborated on a second book due out this fall on raising ducks naturally. And hopefully a third book will be in the works soon!

 

I built my business on the cheap. My biggest expense is $90 a month to Mad Mimi for my newsletter, but I pay for that by sending out sponsored newsletters that have more than paid my annual cost. I do pay for Picmonkey Premium, Photobucket and extra Google storage, plus my annual domain renewal, and that’s about it. I use Blogger for my blog platform. It’s free and easy for someone with literally no coding experience to handle. I do all my own design and am always tweaking things. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you need to be on WordPress to be taken seriously or to make money. It’s just not true. Trust me.

 

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