Hello and welcome to The B-Side, a mastermind group for entrepreneurial women! On the first of each month, I share my business-related goals, challenges, and triumphs while inviting you to do the same! I'd love for you to join me; you can learn more about participating by clicking here.Can you believe the first quarter of 2015 is OVER?!?! Just like that. I feel like we were JUST talking about our new year's goals and now the first 3 months of the year are gone. Time truly flies when you're having fun :-). Here's how March went for me and what I have planned this month :

Last Month's Results

1. Update/Create my About & Products/Services Pages (Business Foundation). Not even close. I didn't even touch this unfortunately. Launching the digital version of my workshop pretty much took all my time (more details below). This will be a repeat goal for April because I seriously get me "Work With Me" pages done.
2. Launch my "Launch Your Life" workshop online. I failed at the first goal but at least I nailed this one! Natasha (Go and Glow Project) and I ended up promoting our Launch Your Life Masterclass (LaunchYourLifeClass.com) by holding a free webinar first. The webinar was called Idea to Income: The Art of Profiting from Your Passion and I am ASTOUNDED at how well it went. Seriously. We put a lot into it but I still didn't think it would be as well received as it was. We had just under 500 women sign up for the webinar and received wonderful feedback from everyone who participated. Because we did a good job giving everyone a ton of free value via the free webinar, a lot of women took us up on our offer for the paid Launch Your Life Masterclass. Overall, Natasha and I were really excited about the amount of sales we made on Launch Your Life, but honestly, I'm still on a high from the free webinar! It was so much fun and I'm just really, really, happy that those who participated got so much out of it. I think I'm officially in love with webinars now. :-) Expect to see more in the future!
3. Launch my new audio training course. Again, all the prep work for the Idea to Income webinar and the Launch Your Life Masterclass totally took over, so I was not able to launch this like I wanted to. I did fully outline the course though, so I'm moving this goal to April.

This Month's Business Goals

1. Update/Create my About & Products/Services Pages. I seriously just need to sit down and do this. I think I've been putting it off because people have been emailing me directly for coaching even without a "work with me" page but still...I'm sure there's even more who come to my website and assume I don't have products and services because they aren't listed anywhere! So I really need to get this together.
2. Finish and launch my new audio training course. This was supposed to be done last month but I wasn't able to because of all the time the webinar and Launch Your Life required. This month, I want to finish getting all the content together so I can make it available before the end of the month.
3. Plan out a blog training program. Running my own blog training program is something I've toyed with for a while but I think now is the time to do it. I get questions all the time about how do you start a blog, how do you get readers, and generally, how do you grow your brand online. Since building and growing a blog is something you can't really teach in a single blog post, I want to offer a training program to help new and intermediate bloggers get off to a good start. This month I want to sit down and map out what exactly I would teach and how I would teach it. (Side note: are you a blogger who would be interested in this type of training? What specifically would you want to know? Let me know if the comments...)

Current Challenges

1. Underestimating how much time launches take. I went into March believing I could launch not one, but two products AND still maintain my blog posting schedule AND make progress on all my various projects AND still have a life outside of my laptop. Um, I quickly learned that wasn't going to work. Launching products, challenges, webinars, etc take. so. much. energy. I think if I didn't have a 9-5 I could definitely pull off such an aggressive schedule but I'm learning I need to be realistic about what I'm able to do. I am just one person. But I'm also an impatient person (I want everything created and launched like, yesterday) so this is hard. I have so many ideas all. the. time. that it can be very difficult not to try and implement everything I come up with right away. So basically I need to learn how to project manage better...
2. Customer Support. This isn't too much of challenge right now, I just know it's going to grow into a bigger issue as my business grows. Last month I launched #NoExcusesMarch Self-Discipline Challenge, the Idea to Income Webinar, and the Launch Your Life Masterclass. I didn't realize then when you launch things that are very interactive, you're going to get some customer support issues - "I didn't receive the email, can you resend it?" "I can't see the webinar video," "I'm having trouble downloading the worksheets," you know, things like that. Because it's just me, it's challenging to both manage the thing I'm launching and handle all the individual tech issues or customer support questions that come in. I don't mind doing it and did a good job managing it this month, but I think in the future I'm going to need someone to help me field all those inquires so I can focus on running whatever it is I'm launching.

Current Successes/What's Working

Webinars. As I mentioned earlier, I am totally in love with webinars now. They are so FUN! More importantly, I feel like they are truly a win-win for everyone involved if you do them right. You're audience gets a ton of great content to help them with whatever topic the webinar is about and you get a lot of buzz for your brand, traffic to your site, and growth to your email list.Virtual "events". Webinars fall under this category but in general, I've seen a lot of success with running virtual "events" that get your audience involved and interacting with you. Since the beginning of this year, I've run the #NoExcuses Self-Discipline Challenge twice, hosted the Life Haul Masterclass with Myleik Teele, and now just launched the Idea to Income Webinar. All of these "events" had a lot of engagement and really grew my social media numbers, blog traffic, and email list subscribers. If you're looking for a way to quickly drive more growth to your brand, definitely get creative and come up with different virtual "events" you can get your audience involved with.

Your Turn!

Mastermind Rules

• Share your goals, challenges and successes in the comments.
• The goal of this mastermind is to support each other, so be sure to read all the comments and check out all the participating blogs and businesses! If you have something to offer, leave a comment and help each other out!
• If you are a blogger, feel free to create a post sharing your entrepreneurial goals, challenges, and successes (via the format above) on your blog and link back here. You can even grab the button and include it in your post:

B-Side Facebook Group

Be sure to join the B-Side Facebook group! Since the B-side post will come out monthly, this women-only Facebook group will serve as a "hub" for us to ask questions, share what we have going on, and generally connect with each other on a day-to-day basis. You can join right now: http://facebook.com/groups/bsidebythinkandgrowchick