It’s July! Which means it’s time to take a look at a summary of what happened at LH in June…

June’s focus

As with every month since the start of the pandemic, our focus was fundamentally based around supporting our community. This month we matched pairs for our virtual assistant giveaway (we bought up a bunch of virtual assistant hours and gave them away).

In theory, this sounds pretty simple, but it was actually a ton of work. Matching people based on services and time zones was pretty tricky…especially when the people involved are based everywhere from the UK to the US to India, New Zealand, Indonesia, Nigeria, and a whole bunch of other places. If we run it again in future, there are definitely ways I can make this process more streamlined and automated! Happily now we have the matches and emails and contracts issued, Paula is taking over pretty much all the rest of the giveaway from here and I’m extremely grateful for that!

June was also the month we commissioned a bunch of customers for various things, including audio versions of key Navigating SEO lessons, sets of exclusive stock photos for customers, and some Canva templates. These will be available to customers in the coming months.

We wrote a series of tweets on what we’ve done to promote diversity and inclusivity, donated to key Black Lives Matter non-profits, and opened up conversations around race in our Facebook group. We also added some “Justice,” “Unity” and “Equality” images to the Resource Library, and lots of customers used them in their social media posts.

We wrote three new blog posts for the Lyrical Host blog, including one on the best LGBT stock photo resources for Pride month (and we also released a free mini stock photo pack of rainbow rose themed photos).

At the beginning of the month we created an “under $20” page listing customer products and services to help support their businesses.

We also added some pinterest templates and a blog post ideas PDF to the customer resource library.

What could have been better

– Even though sales were strong, we didn’t hit our June income goal. This isn’t too surprising because we’ve had consistently big month-on-month increases this year, and we expected it to level out in the summer months (if not drop slightly).

– Probably the biggest downer was an increase in drama from people who aren’t – and have never been – our customers. Negative posts online, emails from people that took their customer moving to us very personally, people annoyed that we offer things for free that they charge $$$ for (and just automate, often badly). I get that they’re hitting back and making up stuff because they’re feeling a loss, but it still takes our time and energy away from helping our actual customers. It’s especially annoying when they’ve made up total lies; I can’t believe all the stories I’ve read about myself this month, or fathom why people would spend their time doing that when they could be spending time on their own business or with their family or something.

– Customers spending money on scammers who have told them they’ve improved their site when they hadn’t. I hate everything about this because telling people you like they’ve been conned is the worst. Also, we don’t want to be badmouthing other people/companies or encouraging any more drama. Sometimes it’s just unavoidable, like when people break other people’s sites and you have to fix them and explain what broke them.

What went well

+ We hit our six month income goal!

+ We surpassed our order goal (but we don’t increase it so it’s not a big stretch).

+ We had a ton of amazing posts, tweets, and conversations with the fantastic kickass people in our family.

+ Getting the VA giveaway off the ground and seeing how happy people were. It’s such a win-win because each bundle of hours we bought benefited two people, rather than one person and Jeff Bezos or something.

What’s next

I’m super cautious about planning much for July beyond what I’ve already decided on – blog posts, resources and stock photos, a couple of Covid distractions, and birthday celebrations are all we really have planned. Oh, and working on new courses and course lessons and wrapping up our business year. So…maybe a few more things than I thought! Let’s see what else July has in store too…