Hi! It’s Ruthie here again, with issue 008 of Creative Biz News Premium!

I hope your week is going well, and you’re finding a way to create what makes your heart happy!

It was a quiet week for me last week. I mostly worked on the PLR stuff and getting things ready to put back into my shop. I’m very much out of practice at doing all the backend stuff to get a product set up, and I’m also making sure I do a complete job this time around, and not just “half-a**” it like I have done in the past.

So, my sum total of work last week was a couple of free newsletters, 2 existing packs returned to the shop (with new sales pages and graphics), and one new coloring pack started. That means I have a long way to go to get to my 100 products by the end of May.

I normally get a lot done on the weekends too, but I was away with my son and his GF on Saturday all day, and then Sunday morning I spent with them again so that my son could wash my car. And then it rained about 2 hours later! But it was still nice to spend time with them, because even though we’re only about 10 minutes apart here, we don’t actually see each other very often.

But, I digress….

Let’s talk about this format change…

Do you remember in the beginning issues of this newsletter, I said my coach had challenged me to keep it simple? I think I got away from that with the creation of these really long issues in PDF format. It’s more like creating new reports every week, and that was never really my intention. My intention was to give you actionable ways to build your own creative business, use and repurpose the content you buy and the content you create, and share how I’m building up my new site and printables/POD shop.

So…. I’m trying something new with this issue. (And as always you can let me know if you like it or not by dropping me a quick email to premium@ruthbowers.ca)

Starting with this issue, the intro for the week will be in the actual weekly email itself. The feature content and the experiment updates will be posted separately as blog posts in your members area with titles and short descriptions here. That way it reads more like a newsletter, I get to keep it simple, and you don’t have to slog through a 20- to 30-page PDF every week.

I already feel lighter and less stressed just telling you about it, so I really hope this makes it easier for you to consume the content and put it to use in your business too!

Next, on getting more organized…

I’ve never been anything like what one would call organized when it comes to running my business, so I’m trying to rectify that with the creation of my new PLR shop. One thing I’ve done that I never have before is that I’ve created a spreadsheet with all the relevant URLs for each product instead of having to go hunting each time I want something like an affiliate URL or a download page. I’m sure it’s still a work in progress, and I’m still trying to find a format I like to keep track of funnels, upsells and downsells, but what I have in this one is:

Date
Product Name
Category
Price
Sales Page URL
Checkout Page Link (from amember)
Download Page URL
Google Drive Link for product delivery
Affiliate Link

I’ve switched from hosting my downloads in Dropbox to Google Drive because I really don’t like the way that Dropbox is focusing more on collaboration than storage, especially if you’re only delivering a PDF. I haven’t been able to find a way to take away the edit option, and I don’t really like that.

That’s part of what’s taking me longer to list things, because I never did any type of organization in my old shops, and I’m building a habit of being organized. I’m also documenting everything so that eventually when I hire a VA there are already systems in place to teach them how to do all my stuff.

The other thing I’m making sure I do is use the Parent/Child function in WordPress pages to keep all the related pages together. So, what I do now is create the sales page first, and then when I’m ready to add the download page I add it as a child page so that it shows up right underneath the sales page in the index.

It’s pretty simple, but not something I’ve ever really done before. And what I realized when I started doing this is that it would be a great way to keep track in WordPress of what products you’ve used in events too. Because you could clone the sales page, rename it with the event name, add the coupon or opt-in form, and save the cloned page as a child. Then you can see in your index which products you have already submitted to events.

One of the things I want to get done this week is a regular blog post and video on this. Like I said, it’s all simple stuff, but stuff that I hadn’t thought of even after 20 years of using WordPress.

That’s about it for my exciting week last week. Here’s to a much more productive week ahead!

You'll find this week's content listed in the lessons below.

Have a great week! Create what makes your heart happy!

Ruthie’s Project Diary

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