Prep for the Holidays Minisode Series Trailer - Stress-free Holiday Prep for Creatives!

What if you could seamlessly prepare for the holiday rush without the stress? That's where our special "Prep for the Holidays" mini-sode series comes in! Melissa is here to provide you with a straightforward, actionable game plan so that come November & December you put all your focus on selling, shipping, and customer service. Whether you're an artist gearing up for markets, a photographer offering family portraits, or a content creator maximizing Q4 traffic, this series is your ultimate checklist!

Each episode, ranging from 5 to 10 minutes, is designed to align with your holiday preparation timeline, ensuring you tackle each task at the right moment. Mark your calendars for the week of July 8th and join me as we kick off this indispensable guide to a stress-free, successful holiday season. Let's make Q4 your most profitable yet!

You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the and she Looked Up podcast. Each week, we sit down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. I'm your host, melissa Hartfield, and after leaving a 20-year career in corporate retail, I've been happily self-employed for 12 years. I'm a graphic designer, an illustrator and a multi-six-figure-a-year entrepreneur in the digital content space. This podcast is for the artists, the makers and the creatives who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Hello everyone, welcome to the and she Looked Up podcast. As always, I am your host, melissa, and today's episode is a little bit different because it's actually a teaser episode to let you know about a brand new mini-sode series that we are going to be running through the summer until the end of the year. It's called Prep for the Holidays and the idea behind it is each episode is going to dive into one specific task that we need to be working on to get ready for the busy holiday selling season. The episodes are going to be really short five to 10 minutes, 15 at the max and they're going to be aimed at artists, makers, creative service providers and content creators, because I know that for all four of those groups, q4 is a big revenue generating time of year for many of us.

Speaker 1: 1:46

For those of us who are artists and makers, we're doing markets. We're selling more on Etsy and our own websites. If you are a content service provider, or if you're a creative services provider, like a photographer or a graphic designer or a copywriter or a makeup artist, you might be doing things like family portraits. You might be doing makeup for holiday parties and big events or for portrait photographers who are doing family sessions. You might also be selling bundles of your services discounted for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. You may also be creating educational materials that you're selling, so it could be eBooks on things like posing guides or how to get your website up and running with writing initial copy. I'm just coming up with ideas on the fly here. And, of course, if you're a content creator, we know that Q4 traditionally is when we get the most traffic for the majority of you, and it is also the time of year where your ad company offers up the highest RPMs CPMs so not only are you getting more traffic, but that traffic is worth more money and that's where a lot of you generate the big part of your revenue for the year.

Speaker 1: 3:03

So what we wanted to do with this series was to make it so that, when we get into the heart of Q4 and that busy selling season, you can focus on just that selling, shipping and customer service instead of feeling like you're all over the place because you're trying to make, you're trying to order supplies, you're trying to remember where you put your packing boxes, all those things, never mind your social media marketing. That's a whole other thing. So we wanted to put together a checklist and cover each of those items on the checklist in its own individual episode. And, as I said, the episodes are going to be short five to 10 minutes long and we're going to deep dive into each task. And the key here is that the episode will air around the time where you want to be focusing on that particular task. So it's like a live checklist landing in your podcast player every single I was going to say every single week, but in some cases we might do more than one episode a week. In some cases it might be a couple of weeks before we do the next episode, just depending on where we think you should be working on that task.

Speaker 1: 4:11

You'll be able to watch these videos on YouTube. I am recording the video of them, so if you've ever been curious about my studio or my recording setup or what I look like, any of those things, you'll be able to see that all over on YouTube. But you'll also be able to listen to just the audio in your favorite podcast player app. So that is it. I'm very excited. We are hoping to debut this series the week of July 8th and subsequent episodes following after that. So I hope you'll follow along and I hope you'll find. Most importantly, I really hope you'll find this series useful. I know when I was first starting out, I was all over the place. I was not working far enough ahead, and the first holiday season was just chaotic and I felt like I was learning everything on the fly. So hopefully this will help all of you be a little more prepared and make Q4 feel a little bit easier and also make it so that when Christmas is over, you can take a bit of a break, because you're all caught up. That's it for now. Look forward to seeing all when we kick the series off very soon.

Speaker 1: 5:24

Thank you so much for joining us for the and she Looked Up Creative Hour. If you're looking for links or resources mentioned in this episode, you can find detailed show notes on our website at andshelookedupcom. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more business tips, profiles of inspiring Canadian creative women and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the show via your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. We always love to hear from you, so we'd love it if you'd leave us a review through iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Drop us a note via our website at andshelookedupcom or come say hi on Instagram at andshelookedup. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.