I answered as directly as I could. No. Never. Not in a million years.

There were a few chuckles in the room and I followed it up with the truth.

Here’s what I meant by that.

The Loop Nobody Talks About

When you let AI tell you what’s wrong with your video, you start fixing things. Then you fix the fixes. Then you head back to record again. You spend twenty minutes fighting with the ring light before giving up and standing in front of a window. The lighting looks off so you decide to do it tomorrow at the same time of day when the sun is better.

Tomorrow comes and you realize you spilled salad dressing on your shirt so now you can’t wear the same thing. You find a different top. You re-record. The dog barks in the background on the best take. You re-record again. You finally nail it. Two minutes of pure gold. You can see the finish line. You are DONE. And then, in the last fifteen seconds of editing your video, you see the cat stroll across the frame and toss a hairball directly into the shot. The idea that started as yours, the one you were genuinely excited about, is now three days old and buried under a pile of outtakes, a salad-stained shirt, and you’re thinking about sending the cat to the glue factory.

What Actually Happens to the Idea

I’ve watched women go through this cycle so many times and it always starts the same way. The idea comes in hot. There’s real energy behind it, the kind that makes you open a new document at 10pm because you don’t want to lose it. They outline it, write it, design it, tweak it, improve it, rename it, redesign it, and somewhere in the middle of all that improving, the energy quietly drains out of it.

One of two things typically happen next. First, by some miracle of no overthinking, it gets posted and then immediately forgotten about, like you needed to get it off your desk as fast as possible after spending so long on it. Or, secondly, and the more common is that it sits in a folder, perfectly polished, collecting digital dust bunnies, waiting for one more round that never comes.

The One Thing Sixteen Years Taught Me

Sixteen years of doing this has taught me one thing that overrides almost everything else and I say it to every woman I work with at some point because most of them need to hear it more than once.

Posted is better than perfect.

The women who need you are out there right now getting advice from people who are leaving them deeply disappointed. Your perfectly optimized content is sitting in a folder waiting for one more round of revisions and every day it stays there is a day someone else is filling that gap, usually not as well as you would.

Every Day It Sits There Is a Client You Didn’t Reach

If your content is sitting in a folder, your people have no idea you exist. They don’t know you can help them.

They’re not waiting for perfect. They’re waiting for YOU and while you’re tweaking the title and re-recording in better lighting, they’re handing their money and their trust to someone who posted something good enough on a Tuesday.

Choosing Your Audience Over Your Anxiety

When I said no to uploading my videos for AI critique, I wasn’t protecting my ego. I was choosing my audience over my anxiety and I want you to understand that those are two very different things. One keeps you small and busy. The other keeps you in service of the people who actually need what you know.

The loop feels productive because it has all the hallmarks of hard work. You’re busy, you’re improving things, you’re being thorough, you’re doing research. What you’re actually doing is staying safe inside the process so you never have to find out what happens when real people see it.

The perfectionism isn’t about the content anymore. It’s about avoiding the moment of exposure that comes after you hit publish.

That’s what perfectionism actually is.

It’s not high standards dressed up in discipline. It’s avoidance with really good lighting.

Post the damn thing, ok?

At this moment of writing it has: 133 reposts. 6,455 shares. A staggering 11k saves and a whole lot of new followers (4704 new followers in 24 hours) and others landing on her page because of it. This will grow.

Her name is Myrna and here’s the part that might surprise you.

She posts once a week.

One Reel. Every Thursday. That’s it!

I want to tell you exactly how that works, because it goes against almost everything you’ve been told about growing on social media, especially if you were born before 1980 and have been white-knuckling your way through content creation wondering why nothing is sticking.

The Mistake Most People Are Making

Posting regularly and still not growing? I know exactly why.

You’re creating content for people who don’t follow you yet. It feels logical. You want new people to find you, so you post for new people. Makes sense, right?

This is what I hear ALL THE TIME:

You’ve got it completely backwards.

Your current followers are the easiest path to getting new followers and I can’t tell you how many women I work with hardly think about them.

They’re so focused on finding new people that they spend hours researching current trends and tactics. They analyze what others in their niche are doing and then try to apply it to their own business, even when it doesn’t fit who they are or how they work.

Then the overwhelm kicks in. Too many options, too many opinions, too many directions to go. Decision fatigue sets in and nothing gets posted at all. Then you roll right into analysis paralysis, perfecting every pixel and every carefully chosen word in your caption.

When you finally do show up, the content is so overly perfected and so far from your natural voice that it reads as confusing - they see you but don’t HEAR you. Your followers can feel the disconnect. It comes across as cringe-y because it is. It’s not you anymore.

The accounts that grow create content for the people already there. When your followers feel seen and understood, they share your content. That’s how new people find you.

Your current followers are your secret growth hack and most people are ignoring them entirely. You need to stop performing for strangers and start talking to the people already in your room.

What Myrna Does Differently

Every Thursday Myrna posts one single organizational hack. One tip. For the people who already follow her. She’s not chasing trends or studying what other organizers are doing and trying to reverse engineer their success. She’s sharing something she genuinely loves, in her own voice, for the people who showed up because they already trust her.

Two things happen because of that.

Why It Works

The algorithm knows exactly who to put her content in front of. When you post consistently about the same topic for the same audience, Instagram (any social media platform, really) stops guessing. It knows who needs to see what you’re sharing and it starts doing the work for you. (Cool, right?).

Her authenticity comes through in every single video. Myrna isn’t performing or overthinking what her message needs to be to get new followers. She’s just being herself, sharing something she genuinely lives and breathes.

That comes across as confident and real, two things people are desperately craving right now. When your followers feel that, they share it. Those shares are what pushed her Reel to 4.4 million views in less than 24 hours. She didn’t follow a trend or borrow a hook from someone else’s page. She’s simply one woman talking to her people about something she actually cares about.

How You Can Do the Same Thing

This is exactly the kind of strategy I teach inside my community and it’s where Myrna has been pulling inspo from. She didn’t stumble onto this accidentally. She learned it, applied it consistently, and posted every Thursday without overthinking it. One tip. One reel. For the people already there.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

If you’re tired of slogging in on your own and you’re a woman born before 1980, my Community might be just the thing you need. If you want to go deeper and have a place to ask questions, get feedback, and learn this stuff properly, I’ve got a 7-day FREE trial where you can check it all out.

That's where Myrna learned it, and 4.4 million views later, I'd say it's working.

Last year, nine women packed their suitcases, kissed their families goodbye at the airport, and got on planes. I’m sure most of them felt like they might not even belong in the room. They got on the plane anyway. They flew in from Australia, the UK, the Yukon, and various parts of the US. They flew to Halifax in Atlantic Canada to retreat with me. ME. A former teacher turned coach/digital marketer who grew up in small town Nova Scotia.

Antonia’s friends thought she was joining a cult - no kidding! She came anyway and boy am I glad she did. I’m glad every one of those nine women said yes. Every single one of them trusted something they couldn’t fully explain yet. They trusted themselves enough to say yes, and they trusted me enough to get on a plane.

I stood at the venue door on the first night watching them walk in and I got really emotional. They came looking for a plan. They were completely capable of figuring it out on their own but many were tired of spending their most valuable resource, which is time, on the wrong things. They wanted someone to look them in the eye and say, this matters, that doesn’t, do this next. They left with a sisterhood they didn’t know they needed.

Every single one of them is coming back this year. I also knew I wanted to invite MORE women into this experience. I had no idea exactly how easy it was going to be to sell it.

How I Sold Out My Retreat Without a Launch Strategy

Here’s how it actually went. I built the sales page. I made one post in my Skool community letting the ladies know the retreat was open. Within days I had ten registrations. I knew I would. I’d been watching the questions roll in for months and I could feel it. I gave my community an entire month with that link before I said a word to anyone else. They deserved that first look.

Last Tuesday I sent one email to my subscribers. It was short and direct. I was honest too. I told them the retreat was already 70% sold out and that the early bird price was only good for one week. They had one week to decide if this retreat was something that might help them.

Here’s the important thing you can’t miss: I have been sending out a weekly email to everyone on my list for a long time. I built up trust through delivering content just like this. So the jump to come to NS for a retreat was easy.

That was it. I wrote a simple email. I did not post about it on social media at all. A social media follower is not likely to be ready to invest in a retreat. They want to be entertained so I knew not to waste any time trying to reach a cold audience. There was no lead magnet or funnel to find registrants. The truth about what was available and how long they had to grab it was enough.

They jumped and I now also have a waitlist of women who wished they hadn’t waited.

I didn’t manufacture urgency. It was just already true.

What Online Business Confidence Actually Looks Like in Practice

I’m not telling you this to brag. If I’m being honest, the “good girl” in me has spent a long time learning that confidence isn’t the same as arrogance. I’ve also spent a lot of time fighting the urge to not show up as sales-y or promotional, like many of you.

Re-wiring my brain to be okay with saying what I know to be true has been a journey and I’ve realized that no one else is going to do this for me.

Here’s the truth: if I want to genuinely offer my help to the women I most want to serve, I need to get uncomfortable with talking about how I help and my results. Women are attracted to service providers who know their stuff.

Knowing what you’re capable of, standing behind it without apologizing, and then watching it land exactly the way you knew it would? That’s not bragging. That’s just knowing what you have.

That belief is what sold it. It wasn’t a fancy funnel or a social media content plan or a carefully timed ad campaign. Seeing the registration notifications light up my phone that first week was something I’ll never forget.

If you’re sitting on an offer you haven’t fully committed to, or you’re tweaking it for the fourteenth time, or you’re waiting until it feels ready, I want you to sit with this for a second.

Belief is the strategy.

When you know, without wobbling, that what you have will genuinely help someone, you stop performing and start inviting. That’s a completely different energy and people feel it.

You’ll get there too and I want to ask you something and I’d love for you to answer in the comments.

What offer are you sitting on right now that you haven’t fully committed to? The one you keep tweaking, or quietly hoping someone will ask you about, or saving for when you feel more ready?

Name it. I’m reading every single one. The first step to believing in yourself is to actually admit your dream. Let’s see what we can do to move you closer to your dream. I already believe in you. I’m living proof you can have a dream and it can come true.

xo,
K

He was a community college principal, a teacher before that, but that’s not really who he was to me. To me he was the one cooking Sunday roast dinners while my mom did other things. He was the one cheering me on from the sidelines at every activity I joined as a kid. He drove my sister and I everywhere. Gender roles were pretty thoroughly reversed in our house and nobody made a big deal about it. He just showed up, constantly, and made sure we knew we were loved. That’s the dad I always wanted to make proud.

So when I came across my old report cards recently, I opened them with this warm, nostalgic feeling. Like, yes. Let me see how good of a student I was.

Spoiler alert: I was not as studious as I remembered.

The teachers liked me. That part was true. Nobody was writing anything alarming but the recurring themes? Too talkative, a little bossy, makes careless mistakes, and the kicker: capable of so much more than she shows.

I sat with that last one for a minute. Capable of so much more than she shows. (Guess I don’t need to wonder why Imposter Syndrome shows up for me in mid life!)

I genuinely thought I was giving everything I had. I was trying so hard to make my dad proud. I cared about doing well so why did it keep coming up on my report cards?

Let’s time warp ahead 40 years. In November of 2024, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Suddenly, every single one of those report cards made complete sense.

Details escaped me even when they were right in front of my face. I would read something, or hear something, and my brain would grab the gist of it and sprint ahead. The specifics? Gone. The fine print? Skimmed. The part that said “quiz on Friday”? Completely missed because I was already three thoughts ahead of the sentence I was reading.

I was capable of so much more but I just couldn’t hold onto the details long enough to show it.

Okay. Fast forward to last week and why your audience needs to hear from you more than you think.

I ran a free workshop teaching people how to use Claude. In the lead up to it, I was getting a lot of the same question in my inbox so I decided to get ahead of it. The recurring question was, “Krista, I can’t make the workshop. Is there going to be a recording?”

Now, ladies. This is not my first rodeo. I KNOW that's always the question so I got ahead of it. Check out the registration page:

In the automated welcome email registrants received after signing up, I mentioned it.

The morning of the workshop, I sent an email where the very first sentence, in all caps, said: THE BIGGEST QUESTION I’VE BEEN GETTING THIS WEEK IS WILL THIS BE RECORDED. YES. HERE IS WHEN TO EXPECT IT.

I still got seven emails asking if there would be a recording even though it’s in the very first line, in ALL CAPS!

My first instinct was to laugh. My second instinct, the one I actually listened to, was to feel something click into place.

Those seven women weren’t being careless or ignoring me. They registered for a free workshop, probably while doing four other things, skimmed the confirmation, meant to go back and read the email more carefully, and just... didn’t get there. Life moves fast and the details slipped past her.

They were doing exactly what my third grade brain did every single day.

This is the part that applies to your business.

We post something once and assume our audience saw it. We send one email and assume it landed. We mention our offer in a caption and then wonder why nobody bought.

We’re not dealing with people who aren’t paying attention. We’re dealing with people who are paying attention to approximately nine hundred things at once, the same way most of us are, the same way I have been my entire life without fully understanding why.

Your message needs to be repeated more times than feels comfortable, more times than feels necessary. Your audience isn’t ignoring you. They’re human, they’re busy, and details escape all of us even when they’re right in front of our faces.

If seven people emailed me asking about a recording I mentioned four times, what does that tell you about the one post you put up last Tuesday about your offer?

It tells you to post it again, then post it again after that.

Repetition isn’t annoying. Repetition is how information actually gets through. The teachers who taught me the most were the ones who found ten different ways to say the same thing until it finally stuck.

I think about my dad a lot when I’m teaching marketing and sales to my audience. He spent his whole career figuring out how to reach people who needed to hear something and he never once made them feel stupid for needing to hear it twice.

That’s the standard I hold myself to. It’s also the one I’d hand to you.

If you’re using your words to build an audience, the woman who reads your post on a Tuesday while she’s got three tabs open and dinner on the stove isn’t ignoring you. She just needs to hear it again. Say it again. Say it differently. Say it until it lands.

She’s not careless. She’s just human and so are you.

xo
K

If you’re reading this and wondering how to tie your marketing and post on social media to actual clients, you might like this post:

They’re either letting the video or the graphic do all the work while the caption says something like “save this 💕” and nothing else. Or, they’re handing the whole thing to AI and posting whatever comes out, which means their content sounds exactly like everyone else’s content.

Just a heads up: neither of those approaches is going to help you get found.

Here’s what most people don’t know yet: search engines are indexing your social media posts now. Google. Bing. Yahoo. All of them.

Search engines are reading your captions the same way they read your website.

The first line of every caption you write is either working for you or it isn’t.

Let me explain what I mean.

When you search for something on Google, you get a list of results. Each result shows a title and a short description underneath it. Here’s a screenshot from one of my own:

That headline, “Need an easy reel using only one photo in under 30 seconds…” is the first line of my caption - that’s being pulled out first. That description I’ve put a box around is called a snippet. Think of it like the back cover of a book. It’s the thing that makes you decide whether to click or keep scrolling. Basically the headline is taking from your first few words in your caption and snippet is pulled from the next few words.

Google is pulling those snippets from wherever your content lives. Your website, yes. Your blog posts, sure. Your social media captions? Also yes.

So if your Reel is titled “come with me today ✨💕,” Google has absolutely no idea what it’s about. It can’t show it to anyone who might actually need it. There’s nothing to index!

If your caption opens with “The only thing you need to do on Instagram to start seeing real results? Most people miss it completely,” now Google understands the topic. It can match your content to the people who are out there searching for exactly that.

Clarity beats cleverness, every single time.

I tracked this on my own account using Google Analytics.

After 30 days of being intentional about how I opened my captions, I saw a 38% improvement in direct traffic coming from Instagram to my website.

Thirty-eight percent, from changing what I put in that first line.

The first line of your caption is your snippet. It’s the thing that tells both humans and search engines what your content is actually about. If it’s vague, cute, or missing entirely, you’re invisible in search. If it’s clear and specific and uses words people are actually typing into a search bar, you start showing up for people who are actively looking for what you do.

This doesn’t mean your captions have to be boring or keyword-stuffed. It means leading with the point instead of burying it.

Compare these two openings:

versus

The first one is mysterious. The second one is searchable. Someone sitting at their computer typing “how to get results on Instagram” is going to find the second one. The first one disappears.

Here’s where the internet is headed: your captions are becoming mini blog posts. Your videos are becoming searchable resources. Every post is part of your digital footprint, which means every post is another chance to be discovered by someone who’s never heard of you.

That’s a good thing. If you write it right.

So here’s what I want you to do today. Go back to the posts you published last week. Look at the first line of each caption. Ask yourself honestly: if someone typed that phrase into Google, would it lead them somewhere useful? Does it tell a search engine what the post is actually about?

If not, rewrite the first line. Use words people are actually searching for. Lead with the topic, not the tease.

You already know how to make the content. You just need to make it findable.

When ChatGPT first came out, I did what everyone did. I asked it to write my captions and emails and blog posts. I was amazed at how fast it was and how much it amplified my message. I told myself I was leveraging it. Through step-by-step tutorials, I showed my clients to do the same.

Then somewhere around the end of last year, I started noticing that everything I produced was starting to sound the same as everything everyone else was producing. I started seeing my own words mirrored back to me online from other creators and I started to see the patterns.

No amount of finessing, pounding on my keyboard, or admonishing ChatGPT would change it. Trust me, I tried. It was infuriating. I spent HOURS telling AI to do better and all I got was generic sounding freaking fluff!

In March, I stopped letting AI write for me.

I’d always had a policy that if clients hired me to write for them, you’d be hiring my human brain and that I only used AI for research but I’d slipped for my own business. I gave away my power and I realized that I’d been relying on it too much.

I didn’t stop using it. I kept trying to make it work and I became increasingly disillusioned with it.

I talked to my clients about it. We were all noticing the same thing: it kept giving us back a flattened version of ourselves, made to sound like everyone else because we’re all using the same shortcut! I didn’t have the answer yet but I knew I needed to figure it out.

That was where I stood for two months until my Mom’s celebration of life was coming up and I had to write her eulogy. I had to stand up in front of the people who loved her and say something true. I sat looking at an empty Google Doc for weeks unable to find the door in.

Then, I had an idea. I opened Claude.

I’m not going to walk you through what happened over the next couple of hours. What I will tell you is that *I* wrote the eulogy that day. Every single word of it was mine and I couldn’t have written it without Claude.

The way I’d been teaching people to use AI was the way I’d been using it myself. I had it backwards.

I was asking it to do the part that only we can do and skipping the part it’s actually built for.

Everything I’ve produced since then has come from this new way of working. None of what you’ve read from me has written by AI and ALL of it was helped into existence by Claude.

There’s a huge difference here and it was the missing piece I never knew I needed!

I’m teaching a free workshop on Thursday, May 28, from 6:00 to 7:30 PM ET. A recording will be available for 48 hours after the workshop.

I’m not going to teach you how to make Claude write 365 days of content in one prompt. If that’s what you’re looking for, I’m not your girl, anymore.

I’m going to teach you how to set Claude up properly, which most women coming over from ChatGPT have never done.

We’ll cover Projects, what to put in them, how to write your instructions, and how to stop wasting your usage limits pasting the same context into every chat.

Then I’m going to show you the shift I made. The one that unlocked everything since.

If you’ve been using ChatGPT for a couple of years and the outputs have been getting worse, this is for you. If you’ve moved over to Claude and you’re using it the same way you used ChatGPT, this is for you. If you’re still on ChatGPT and you can’t bring yourself to leave, this is for you.

You can get ALL the details here and get registered:

>> REGISTER HERE <<

Here are a few of my favourites:

I’m a big believer in updating brand photos regularly, mostly because I really dislike having my photo taken 🤣 and I know the only way to get better at something is to practice.

Here’s the thing I want to talk about today.

Before I created my marketing academy, I built websites. For 16 years. Every single website needs at least one headshot and the ones who really want to see their business take off usually need a lot more. Beyond the websites, I’ve had hundreds of women come through my courses, join my memberships, and DM me with questions about getting their photos taken.

The one thing that has never changed in all those years is how much women dislike getting their photos taken. It ranks somewhere between bathing suit shopping under fluorescent lights and getting a mammogram. You know I”m right!

I’ve watched it happen over and over, coached women through it before their shoots, and given them every tip I have.

It’s not because they’re vain or insecure or any of the things we like to label ourselves as. It’s something else entirely.

My first few photoshoots, I fell for the self-criticism trap too. I’d get the gallery back and see every single thing I didn’t like about myself, from the way my chin folded to the smile that felt too big to the angle that made my arm look weird. I hated almost all of them.

Then slowly, I started to understand something.

When we were young, we had 12 or 24 photos on a roll of film. The camera came out for birthdays, holidays, and the occasional Sunday at grandma’s. We couldn’t see the results for weeks or even months, so by the time we got the photos back from being developed, we’d already forgotten what we looked like in the moment they were taken.

You know what didn’t happen because of that?

We never got desensitized to seeing our own faces. We never learned that it’s okay to take 25 photos to get one good one. We never figured out our angles or built the muscle memory of how to hold our body so we like what we see when we look back.

Anyone born after the age of digital cameras and smartphones has been doing this since they were old enough to hold a phone. They’ve taken thousands of photos of themselves, so they already know which side they prefer, what their smile looks like when it’s real versus performed, and how to tilt their chin so their jaw looks the way they want it to.

We didn’t get that practice.

This is not a confidence problem. It’s a practice problem.

It gets better the same way every other skill gets better, which is by doing it.

By my fifth shoot, something had clicked. Part of it was just having done it enough times that I wasn’t bracing for the gallery to be a disaster.

The bigger shift was something I’d been doing in private, where I’d pull out my phone when no one was around, take 20 or 30 selfies of myself, study them, and delete them all so no one would ever see. I needed to know what I actually looked like, not what I thought I looked like in the mirror where my brain had been editing my reflection for forty years. I needed to know which smile I liked when I saw it from the outside, which angle I wanted to favour, and what my face did when I laughed for real.

Then I practiced and practiced.

The women who tell me I’m just photogenic? I am not photogenic. Hand to God, I have so many photos that prove that I’m NOT photogenic. How can you look at these and THINK I’m photogenic? I’ve done this a lot.

Brand photoshoot tips that actually make a difference

Here are the things I wish someone had told me before my first photoshoot. These are the ones that made the biggest difference once I actually started using them.

Practice on your phone first. Alone. Delete everything.

Ten minutes a day is enough. Take selfies, try different angles, different smiles, different tilts of your head, and notice what you like and what you don’t. Delete them all so no one ever sees them. The point isn’t the photos themselves. The point is getting used to seeing yourself on a screen so that when a professional photographer points a camera at you, your face isn’t doing that frozen thing it does when it’s startled.

Choose a photographer whose editing style actually matches your brand.

This is the one most women skip. They hire whoever a friend recommended without ever looking at the photos that photographer has taken. If your brand is moody and rich, don’t hire someone who shoots bright and airy weddings. Look at their portfolio, look at how they edit, and make sure you like the look of their finished photos, not just the vibe of their Instagram grid. (I used Meghan from Mirror Form Photography for this shoot! AND I’ll definitely book her again!)

Hire a makeup artist who understands mature skin.

I used to think this was ridiculous because I know what I like and I can do my own makeup.

Here’s something worth sitting with for a minute. When we look at our own photos and start cataloguing everything we don’t like, we’re usually comparing ourselves to women on Instagram who have a hair person, a makeup artist, a lighting setup, a photographer, and a retoucher on speed dial. Jennifer Aniston is not waking up looking like that. There is a small village involved. We’re holding our regular-Tuesday face up against a fully produced photoshoot and wondering why we don’t measure up. The comparison was never fair to begin with.

So I started hiring a makeup artist to do my makeup for my shoots and the difference in how I felt was immediate. You will too, TRUST me.

Stick to solid colours for your clothing.

Solid colours photograph beautifully and prints rarely do. Black is fine (if you’re a winter season!), though I’d encourage you to think about your brand colours too. If you don’t own anything in your brand colour, you don’t have to wear it. Buy a scarf or grab a notebook in that colour and have it in the shot, sitting on the chair behind you or lying across your lap. It pulls the whole gallery together visually without you having to wear a shade that doesn’t suit you.

Don’t forget your nails (and your cuticles).

I know this sounds small, though your hands will be in a lot of the shots. Holding a mug, typing on a laptop, writing in a notebook, holding your phone. The one time I skipped this step, I barely used any of the photos where my hands were visible. Even a clear coat is enough.

Plan your shot list before you go.

Treat it like a wedding photographer would, where you write down every shot you want before the day arrives. Headshots, working at the laptop, holding your phone, laughing, looking off-camera, with your tools and props, without them. Bring the props that actually belong to your business, whether that’s your laptop, your microphone, your sketchpad, or your essential oils. The photos feel more like you when they include the tools you actually touch every day.

Take the photos now. Don’t wait.

This is the one I want to say loudest. So many women are walking around using a photo from five years ago because they’re waiting to lose 10 or 20 pounds first. When a client meets you on Zoom or in person, the jig is up. There are so many ways a good photographer can work with you on the features you’ve grown sensitive to, so just tell them what you’re worried about. They’ll know what to do.

Here are a few more from this shoot:

If you’re a woman who has been avoiding getting brand photos done because the idea of standing in front of a camera makes you want to crawl under your desk, I see you. I get it. I’ve been you. Most of the women I work with have been you.

You don’t have to love it. I still don’t.

You do get better at it though and the photos start to look like you.

xo,
K

I also have a post I shared a few weeks ago on how to clean up the clutter of too many photos or screenshots on your phone. You can read it here:

Friday is my mother’s celebration of life. I want to stand up and honour her the way I honoured my father when he passed a year ago, by telling the people who gather who she was. I have been sitting down to write it and nothing is coming. So I thought I’d start by telling you about her.

Her name was Vera Mae. I called her Mom.

She was one of eleven children, raised in Springhill, Nova Scotia, during the war, in a house with no indoor plumbing and a basement with dirt floors. I think about that house on Grey Street a lot. I think about it because the woman who came out of it raised her own family in a home so clean you could have licked the concrete floors in our basement and tasted nothing but Pine Sol and pride. She cleaned the way some people pray. It was a joy to her. It was never a chore, never a duty but an actual joy, and I don’t think I understood that until I was much older and started to see what it meant to come from a dirt floor and build yourself a different one.

That part of her never left. A little over eight years ago she was diagnosed with dementia. Slowly, then less slowly, the woman we knew started to slip into a different version of herself. We moved her and Dad into Parkland, a private assisted living community, when living independently was no longer safe and became too much. Just over one year ago we moved her closer to my sister and me into a more secure level of care when she began to wander and get outside and, ironically, the day before my Dad passed away.

At her first care conference at the new place, the staff told us she liked to spend her days making the beds. My sister and I looked at each other and laughed out loud because of course she did! That was the most Vera thing they could have told us. The problem, they explained gently, was that she was trying to make them with the residents still in them!

I tell that story because most people lose the ones they love in pieces and the cruel trick of dementia is that it takes the wrong things first and leaves the right ones behind almost as a tease. She forgot the rules of cards. She did not forget that a bed should be made with crisp hospital corners.

She loved a good game of cards. 45s, crib, crazy 8’s with her grandchildren, whatever was on the table that night.

She and Dad played with her sisters and their husbands every Sunday while we were young. Her sister Carol and husband Allan continued to play with them weekly after they settled into Parkland, for as long as they could even when Mom could no longer follow along. They arrived every week with treats and the kind of company that doesn’t ask anything of you. They came because they loved her. They came after the rules of the game had left her and they came anyway, and that, more than almost anything, tells you who she was. People kept showing up.

She loved to dance. She and Dad square danced. They took ballroom lessons. They were of the generation that danced with many partners across an evening and she lit up on a dance floor the way some people light up at an altar. After a serious car accident where we nearly lost both of them in 1993, Dad came out of it with a head injury and neurological symptoms that made dancing harder for him. She still loved the music. She still loved to move. She didn’t stop being someone who loved to dance just because the dancing got more complicated. She found new dance partners and became more social because of her connection to a tune. I think about that too.

She loved the deer and birds. Picture Snow White as a 75 year old grandma, and you could see my mother 11 years ago. She fed apples to the deer in her yard at home, in direct defiance of what the town asked of residents who were trying to keep wildlife wild and every winter she threw kitchen scraps onto the back deck for the birds and every spring she complained, bitterly and without irony, about having to scrape and repaint the deck. She knew exactly what she was doing and she did it anyway. Every year.

This week, I have been seeing finches. I have been seeing deer.

On Tuesday I came back from visiting my dad’s grave and pulled into the underground parking of my building, in the city, and there were four deer standing on the grounds! I saw more deer on the drive home. I don’t need anyone to explain that to me.

She struggled her whole life with anxiety and depression and when I was young there were times I couldn’t get from her what I needed. I want to say that here because whatever I write for Friday will be honest too and I don’t know how to honour her by leaving out the parts that were hard.

What I know now, that I didn’t know then, is that the resilience and leadership that I have came from somewhere and most of it came from being her daughter.

I was her primary caregiver for the last fifteen years. I sat with her at more medical appointments than I can count. I also have very fond memories of her letting my sister and me skip school for little shopping adventures, the kind of small ordinary mischief a girl remembers her whole life.

She was healthy as a horse. Two of her sisters are living or lived into their 90s and we all assumed she would too. In December, one year to the day that Dad went into the hospital, she had a sudden stroke and she never really came to. We never heard a word try to escape her lips. She fought but there was nothing left. It was very hard.

That’s part of why the words won’t come this week. The other part is that I want to get it right for her and grief doesn’t sit down when you ask it to. It shows up when it shows up, in the middle of a sentence, in the parking lot, on the drive home.

I work best with a deadline. The deadline is now arriving and I am still mostly memories (and puddles).

Sunday drives to the Springhill homestead after church, stopping at Fletcher’s Restaurant for a sandwich, the hour to her parents’ house, cousins everywhere, Sunday dinner. The smell of a clean house. Her at a card table. Her on a dance floor. Her on the deck in winter, throwing scraps to the birds and dropping the phone mid sentence when she’d spot a deer, often forgetting I was still waiting. Her at her last home trying to make a bed with another resident in it.

I will find the words by Friday. I always do. But this week I wanted to write to you from inside the not finding them because that feels more honest than pretending I have already arrived somewhere I haven’t.

If you’ve ever had to stand up and speak about someone you loved with your whole life, you know what this week is.

Vera Mae. My mother. One of eleven. Lover of cards and dancing and deer and birds. Cleaner of floors. Skipper of school days with her daughters. Maker of beds, sometimes with people still in them.

I’ll see you Friday, Mom.

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I sat down last week to write a caption for social media. I was properly caffeinated and everything. It was actually a simple one and something I’ve probably written a hundred versions of over the last 16 years.

You’ll NEVER guess what I did before I typed a single word. I opened ChatGPT and Claude.

What made me feel weirdly pathetic now that I think about was that I didn’t even think about it. I’ve been showing women how to leverage AI as a thought partner or idea accelerator for years. Three years ago at Social Media Day Halifax was the first time I presented how to start using AI responsibly in your business.

Now, what you need to know is that at that time, the majority of my income was coming from actually writing the words for my clients that would help them convert more clients. As a StoryBrand Certified Marketing Guide, I was using their framework to help my clients clarify their messages so that could grow their income. I believed in the power of the human mind (I even developed a policy on how I was using generative AI in my business AND I was open to exploring how AI could make my life easier.

Back to last week: Honestly? It was muscle memory at this point.

I’d unknowingly actually developed a SOP (standard operating procedure) for my business that involved consulting ChatGPT or Claude for validation of my thought/idea before I published a damn word.

AI helped me grow my business and I have the numbers to back that up and I also have the numbers that show what happened when I stopped writing in my own voice and let the tool take over. The engagement tanked. When I went back to writing like myself (like I’m doing in this post), it comes back.

So…last week. Here’s what I did: I dropped in a prompt to both Chat and Claude, split tested which gave me better results, got the drafts back, read them over, and almost hit post on the winner.

The truth: the caption was fine. It was grammatically correct, it hit the notes I wanted to hit, it had a call to action at the end, and it sounded like a caption. But something stopped me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it initially. Then the realization hit me like a ton of bricks: It just didn’t sound like me.

I was starting to sound like every other strategist out there filled with performative pauses and list-y beats that are the definition of an AI written piece of work.

That was the moment I realized how far I’d drifted. Somewhere along the way I stopped writing my own content and started letting a tool do it for me and the tool writes for everybody which means it doesn’t really write for anybody.

So I did what any reasonable middle aged woman does when she has an a-ha realization: I called my best friend to debrief. She shared with me what she does when she’s teaching persuasive writing to her middle school students and it helped me see what was going on. It was in the conversation I realized she could actually help me solve this.

I know I’m not the only one doing this. I hear it from women in my Academy all the time. They tell me their posts aren’t landing, their engagement is flat, and they can’t figure out why, and when I ask them to send me something they wrote recently, it’s a ChatGPT draft with a few words swapped out.

So I’m running a free workshop.

Back to Basics: Writing Workshop for Women 40+

Thursday, April 29 5:00–7:00 PM ET Live + Free, with a 48-hour recording

We’re going back to the part everybody skipped.

When we learned to write as kids, we weren’t writing for an algorithm. We were writing to be understood. We were learning how to put a thought together in a way that would land with a reader, hold their attention, and get them to agree with us by the end. That’s still the skill that makes a caption work. That’s still the skill that makes an email get opened. That’s still the skill AI can’t actually do for you, because AI doesn’t know what you mean to say until you already know it yourself.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the women I talk to who are leaning hard on AI right now. They’re smart and experienced and they’ve built things in their lives and careers that required them to write plenty. Reports, college essays, proposals, PTA fund raising letters, emails, condolence cards, cover letters, the whole range. They know how to write. What they don’t know is how to feel confident writing for an audience of strangers on the internet with the goal of having those strangers hire them, which is a different skill set that you had no idea you’d ever need.

Now, if you’re ANYTHING like me or the ladies I work with, you probably did what any reasonable person would do when they’re handed a task nobody taught them. You reached for the tool that could do it for you.

The problem is that the tool (ChatGPT or Claude or whatever AI you’re using) does the task and skips the skill building and now we’re two or three years into a lot of women outsourcing the one thing that was supposed to become their actual advantage. Their own unique point of view.

The truth is that it’s one thing to have a business. It’s another to be able to write about it in a way that makes people want what you’re selling.

Now I’m a former teacher. My parents spent a lot of money sending me to university to get my education degree in the 90’s. I KNOW how to write. Heck I know how to TEACH writing (I’ve got a degree in it!). AND, I love technology so when AI became a solid tool I could teach my audience how to use to get better results, I was ALL IN.

What I’m reading and seeing online has made me curious about how I can help you feel more confident in your writing. My bestie of 40 years, Lisa Morgan, (we met in grade ten in case you’re trying to do the math) retired from teaching middle school last year. She spent her career teaching literacy and English Language Arts. I’ve asked her to partner with me (since it’s been a hot minute since I’ve been in the classroom!) and create a FREE writing workshop.

We’re calling it Back to Basics.

It’s two hours. It’s live. It’s experiential, meaning you’re writing with us in real time and not watching a slideshow. There are two of us teaching it, which means you’re going to get more hands-on guidance than you’d get from a workshop with one person trying to cover it all.

You’ll walk out of it feeling confident that you know how to craft an engaging piece of writing, without having to consult a chatbot first.

Here are the details:

Back to Basics: Writing Workshop for Women 40+
Thursday, April 29
5:00–7:00 PM ET
Live + Free, with a 48-hour recording

REGISTER HERE

You already know how to write. You just forgot that yours is the one worth reading. If you’ve been feeling the drift I was feeling last week, this is the FREE workshop to come to.

You start to record a video, stop halfway through, and watch three more tutorials “to do it better” before you even try again.

By 2pm you’re tired, not from doing these things, from trying to make decisions. Your coffee’s cold, your neck hurts from hunching over the laptop, and you haven’t posted anything. You haven’t moved anything forward, but you’ve been sitting at your desk since 9am so it feels like you should have something to show for it.

That’s what it looks like when you’re chasing tactics instead of building something.

I Want to Tell You About Myrna

Myrna is a former teacher who has always had a knack for organizing.

When it was time for her retirement from teaching, she started investigating how she might build a business around that. She knew she needed to skill up in social media and understand how to create content so she joined my Activate Her Awesome Academy.

She felt like a complete fish out of water. Some of the terms the women were using on the calls confused her and she admitted to feeling overwhelmed that she’d never understand the steps.

She didn’t disappear, though. She showed up each week, she asked for help, and within a month she had recorded and published her first reel.

Here’s the thing about Myrna: she had no visions of spending every waking minute on social media. Her Instagram was originally private, mostly family moments. She knew it was time to go public but the thought of speaking on camera was a little scary. When she sat down and thought about what she could realistically do, she landed on one reel a week. That’s it.

February 6, 2024 was the first time she shared a reel.

Starting in February, she posted one reel a week, on Thursdays. She shared one tip that could help you feel more organized at home, and she never missed.

Then in January of this year, one of her reels took off.

Now she’s got over 40K followers and her engagement is through the roof, organically. She’s getting invites to influencer events, is almost ready to launch her first digital product, and is never exhausted from chasing tactics and trends for views.

She Didn’t Find a Hack

Myrna didn’t blow up because she found a hack or studied the algorithm or followed a trending audio strategy. She got clear on what she could do, got support when she got stuck, and stayed consistent.

When Myrna joined the Academy, she didn’t come for a dashboard full of courses. She came because she wanted access to a community of women her age and a mentor who could help her find answers. She logged in expecting another maze, another place to get lost, and instead she found clear sections, simple paths, and actual humans talking like humans. She asked where to go to publish a reel and got a full step-by-step tutorial that made her feel like a pro.

Nobody made her feel behind or rushed her. She asked where to start and got a clear answer that actually made sense.

What It Actually Feels Like

I know what it feels like to sit at your desk all day doing all the things and still feel like nothing is moving. I also know that feeling has almost nothing to do with how smart you are or how hard you’re working, because the women who join the Academy are smart women who follow instructions and do the work. They just are tired of doing it alone with a dashboard full of videos and that quiet nagging feeling that they must be missing something.

The women inside the Academy will tell you the thing that surprised them most wasn’t the courses or the content library, even though that stuff is massive.

It was that they asked a question and somebody actually answered it, sometimes with a full video walkthrough made just for them. One woman said it’s like having a business coach, tech support, and a cheerleader all in one. Another one moved to a city of 1.5 million people at 52 and knew no one, and she said the women in this group are the one thing she can count on seeing every week. A member who’d only been inside for two weeks said she couldn’t believe the genuine support from women in the same age group, that it felt like being on a team, and that the personal attention she’d already gotten was the biggest surprise of all.

That’s what changes when you stop trying to figure it out alone. You get a place where someone breaks everything down into bite-sized chunks so you can understand from the ground up, where questions get answered with patience and clarity, and where the women around you are rooting for you because they’re building right alongside you.

Myrna didn’t need a hack or a trend. She needed a place to land and someone to help her take the next step, and that’s exactly what she got.

If you've been sitting at your desk wondering why nothing's clicking, it might not be a strategy problem. It might be that you're trying to do it alone. The Academy is where women like you + Myrna can figure out your next step, with real support and without the noise. You can try it free for 7 days and see how different it feels.

If you're not quite ready for that, start with my free assessment: Why Isn't Your Content Getting Clients? Six quick questions that show you what's actually disconnected between your social media and your revenue.

If you’d like to connect with Myrna - you can follow her on Instagram or check out her website.

Do you have any idea how many people are paying attention to you but pretend they’re not?

It happens to me all the time. I’ll be at the mall or the grocery store and run into someone I know, and they’ll stop me to tell me how much they loved something I posted last week. Five minutes of genuine praise, right there in the cereal aisle. They remembered details. They connected with it.

Then the truth sinks in. They never liked it or commented. Nothing publicly, not a thing.

I think about that every single time one of my clients tell me they feel like nobody is watching, because the reality is, you are inspiring more people who pretend not to follow you than you will ever know.

You just don’t get to see it. You don’t get the notification or the like. You get the grocery store conversation weeks or months later, if you’re lucky.

Which means consistency matters more than you think it does. You don’t know when someone is going to finally reach out. You don’t know what post is going to be the one that makes them pick up the phone. You just have to keep going and trust that the work is landing somewhere, even when the numbers say otherwise. This is one of the biggest reasons I never focus on teaching social media insights. They’re only reliable when you layer them with your website analytics

Listen, Here’s What Happened to Me

I want to tell you something that genuinely caught me off guard, because it’s the perfect example of exactly this.

In the last few weeks, no fewer than five women have reached out to me out of nowhere. Women I had no idea were still in my world. Some of them have been on my list since 2009. They’ve been with me through the pivots. They’re still opening my emails. They’ve been watching what I’ve been building, quietly, from a distance, and they reached out to tell me that watching my trajectory has been, and I’m going to use the word one of them used, f#*king amazing.

They’re not reaching out just to say nice things, either. They want to hire me. They’re at the same place I was years ago and they want help doing what I’ve done.

I had absolutely no idea any of them were still around.

So let me back up, because the context matters here.

When I first started my business, I thought I was going to be coaching full time and for a while that made sense. I had limited hours. I was happily married. My husband was a successful entrepreneur and I didn’t need to bring in significant income. My coaching business was then a passion project. I was helping people and I was in a position where that was genuinely enough.

Then I left my 25-year marriage. I also left the bank account that came with it. My mom had been diagnosed with dementia. My dad had significant physical health issues that were getting harder to manage. I was their primary caregiver. I left with nothing, and when you leave with nothing and you are completely on your own and people are depending on you, your whole relationship with your business changes.

It was basically sh*t or get off the pot time. I needed to figure this out for real.

The business I’d been building quietly for years had to actually work now.

Not as a passion project but as a retirement plan. It needed to be the thing that was going to let me take care of my daughter and my parents if I needed to.

Sixteen years later, what I do looks nothing like what I thought I was going to be doing. I went from coaching, to building my own website because I needed clients, to other women seeing it and asking me to build theirs, to spending years as a web designer and developer, to pivoting into personal brand and marketing strategy, to eventually building the Academy. It didn’t happen in a straight line, and for a lot of that time I genuinely wasn’t sure anyone was paying attention.

Turns out they were. They just never said anything.

Now they’re coming and knocking on my door, asking if I can help.

The Part I Need You to Really Hear

I think about this a lot when I hear from women who feel like they’re posting into a void. Like nothing is landing. Like nobody sees what they’re building.

People don’t follow you on Monday and invest in your program by Friday.

Someone finds you, watches for a while, files you away, then when they’re finally ready, they remember you.

The runway is so much longer than it feels when you’re in it. Despite the fact there are 20 and 30-something’s over on Instagram making you believe the opposite.

Some of the seeds you’re planting right now won’t come up for months or years. That is not a sign that it isn’t working. That’s just how marketing works.

So don’t you dare stop. Take this as your sign to finally get consistent with your marketing.

The right people are watching, they’re just not ready yet. When they are, they’re going to want exactly what you’ve built. Keep building it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I talked to a woman last week who told me she had a full course library, three email sequences started, a content calendar she found on Pinterest, and fourteen browser tabs open and she STILL didn’t know what to do next.

I wasn’t surprised because I hear some version of this almost every week.

She hadn’t been sitting around doing nothing. She’d been doing a LOT. She had more strategies saved than most people will ever look at, but none of them were clicking because she didn’t actually know which part of her business was the problem so she just kept stacking them. Another freebie, another framework, another “this might be the one” moment that fizzled out by Wednesday.

I see this pattern so often and it always comes back to the same thing. When everything feels like it could be the answer, nothing feels like the answer and adding another strategy to the pile isn’t going to fix that.

So I built something to help you figure out which part is actually broken (cue the confetti 🎉).

I created a short quiz. Six simple questions about your business. It takes less than two minutes (one if you have ADHD!) and at the end you’ll see exactly where the disconnect is between your content and your revenue.

Incidentally, this isn’t some vague personality result where you find out you’re a “Creative Unicorn” or whatever. You know me: I’ll give you a real answer you can actually do something with.

TAKE THE QUIZ HERE

Once you get your results, there’s a free ten minute training waiting for you that walks through how to fix what the quiz reveals. I recorded it specifically for women who are doing the work but not seeing the results and I break it down slow enough for you to follow.

You don’t need more tabs open, honestly. You need to know which one actually matters.

I can’t wait to hear what you think.

I’ve been helping women build online businesses for 16 years. Specifically women over 40 who came to this later in life and are trying to figure it out without a playbook that was written for them.

In those 16 years, I’ve watched the same things trip women up, over and over again. These are smart, hardworking women who are doing everything they’re supposed to be doing.

The problem is that nobody told them how this actually works.

I didn’t have anyone tell me either. I figured it out the expensive way. Years of doing the wrong things in the wrong order and wondering why nothing was clicking.

So this is the post that I wish someone had published for me when I was starting out.

Five things about doing business online that nobody tells you but will change the way you spend your time, your energy, and your money.

1. Most women are building backwards.

Nobody told you about the logo, the website, the brand colors, the Canva graphics? All of that comes later.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the pretty things and assume that you need a logo and a cohesive brand before you open the doors to your business. I know you want to make a splash and wow everyone from the get go. But if there is one single mistake that I see time and time again, it’s that women invest in a full brand identity before they even launch their business idea. BTW, I’ve never not once, ever hired anyone because of their logo.

When I first launched my own business, I was CONVINCED it was my beautiful butterfly logo that was going to compel people to hire me as their coach.

I mean, how could it not? The HOURS I spent agonizing over colors and style and I honestly believed it was going to be the Logo that was going to convince them.

But the worst part for me wasn’t the actual butterfly logo. It was that I built that logo for ME, not for my audience. I didn’t even have one yet.

So there’s the first mistake. If you don’t know WHO is going to buy your thing, it’s impossible to create a brand that will attract them.

Then there’s the second mistake, and this one cost me even more time.

By the time I was bringing in real revenue to my business, it wasn’t even a coaching business anymore. But my logo was built for a coaching business. I built what I thought was expected of me by looking at the offers and businesses of my peers. And that cookie cutter offer I created? It was likely a cookie cutter template that THAT coach also took inspiration from one of HER peers. That was the beginning of my undoing.

Here’s what I usually see: in the first year after you launch your business, you’ve had some time to build an audience and understand the parts of your offers that feel good AND the ones that don’t. It’s more common than not to be ready for a complete realignment of your offers and your branding because of your newfound confidence in helping the people you helped.

So save your time, sanity AND money and don’t invest in a big branding package until you’ve built the audience and the revenue to support it.

2. Social media is not where clients hire you.

It’s where people find you. That’s the whole job. But most women are spending their entire week there, convinced that more content equals more revenue, when really they’re trying to sell to strangers who’ve never met them.

Think about the last time you handed over thousands of dollars because you read one social media post. You didn’t. If your buying decisions are anything like mine, even if it’s $97, I’m probably visiting the full sales page (that’s NOT on social media) about 4 times, I’m vetting their testimonials, I’m asking my friends what they know.

Now, if your offer is more than $97, consider how much extra time people will need to make the right decision. Your runway is longer than your social media post.

I spent an entire month building out content pillars and a color coded content calendar. I was posting like I was my own social media manager. Consistent. Strategic. Showing up every single day. And still not getting leads.

It took me way too long to figure out what was wrong.

I was confusing marketing with sales. They are not the same thing.

Marketing is getting known. It’s building relationships. It’s the reason someone follows you, pays attention, and starts to trust you. That’s what social media is for.

But I wasn’t doing that. I was jumping straight into sales and trying to get people to commit on a platform that was meant for scrolling and entertainment after they JUST found me for the first time.

Sales don’t happen inside your marketing. The one exception is paid ads, and those exist for one reason only: to meet and convert cold customers. That’s a completely different strategy than showing up on your feed every day hoping the right person sees your post and buys.

3. Your followers aren’t even seeing your content.

Only about 20% of your followers see any given post. With email, 100% of the people on your list will get it. They have to do something with that notification. Open it. Delete it. Either way, you landed in their inbox. That’s your shot. If your content is good, they will open it and you’ve just increased your chances that they may become a client.

But if you’re only showing up in short form, a lot of people who want to hear from you aren’t hearing from you. And you’re wondering why it feels like you’re shouting into a void.

Let me tell you about Black Friday in 2024. I had crazy sales. I blitzed the heck out of my social media for 5 days with different deals each day and I made so much more money than I ever had previously. I was thrilled. I thought social media finally clicked for me.

But when I looked at the stats on where those sales actually came from? It wasn’t from new followers or random people seeing my social media posts. The revenue came from my list of email subscribers who I nurtured with a weekly email for MONTHS before I hit them with a promotion.

Those people didn’t buy it because of a Black Friday post. They bought because they’d been reading my emails, getting to know how I think, and building trust with me over time. The Black Friday deal just gave them a reason to say yes.

Social media brought some of those people to me originally. But email is what kept them close enough to buy

4. Busy rooms aren’t the same as productive rooms.

You can spend an entire Saturday updating your bio, rewriting captions, finessing your latest freebie in Canva, and feel like you absolutely crushed it and none of it brought you one step closer to a new client. That’s not building a business. That’s rearranging the furniture in a house nobody’s been invited into because while you’re inside perfecting the throw pillows, there’s no one outside knocking on the door. You skipped the part where you go out and meet people and give them a reason to come over.

I know because I’ve done all of it.

I’ve spent two hours picking the right font for a carousel. I’ve rewritten my bio for the fourth time in a month. I’ve watched another Instagram Reels tutorial thinking this is the one that’s going to change everything. I’ve spent a whole afternoon choosing between two almost identical shades of my brand color. I’ve Googled “best time to post on Instagram” more times than I want to admit. I’ve posted a reel and then checked the views every 15 minutes for the rest of the day.

And I’ve scrolled through what other women in my niche were posting and convinced myself I needed to do what she was doing. So I’d buy another course on hashtags. Redo my highlight covers. Redo my link in bio page. Watch a 45 minute training on the algorithm. Create a content calendar I’d abandon by Wednesday.

Every single one of those things felt like work. None of them were the work that actually brought in clients.

5. You’re trying to close where people are browsing.

If your sales process feels awkward or pushy, it’s usually because you’re making it happen too early and if you’ve read this far, you can probably see the pattern. Building a brand before you have an audience. Posting like a social media manager and wondering why nobody’s buying. Spending entire Saturdays on work that felt productive but didn’t move anything forward. Underneath all of it is the same thing. You’re skipping steps and you know exactly what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that.

You’ve gotten that DM. The one from that guy who somehow found your profile and knows EXACTLY what to say to place doubt in your mind. He’s read your bio. He’s seen your content. And within three messages he’s telling you what’s wrong with your business and how he can fix it. You haven’t asked for his help. You don’t know him. But he’s already pitching you like you’re a done deal.

That feeling you get in your gut when you read that message? That’s what it feels like when you skip the relationship and go straight to the sale. And if your audience is anything like you, they feel it too.

The difference between bro marketing and what actually works for women like us is time.

It’s showing up consistently. It’s giving people enough room to get to know you, trust you, and decide on their own terms that you’re the person they want to learn from.

Not because you pressured them but instead because they were ready.

None of this is complicated once you see it. But when you’re in it, when you’re posting every day and tweaking your brand colors and wondering why nobody’s buying, it feels like YOU’RE the problem.

You’re not. You just didn’t have the information. Now you do.

If any of this felt like I was describing your last six months, just know that I was actually describing my first few years. Every single one of these mistakes has my name on it. The difference is I made them so you don’t have to spend as long figuring it out as I did.

I have a confession. I’ve been hoarding photos like someone who keeps every grocery receipt “just in case” and I finally did something about it.

Not in some big dramatic purge where I spent a Saturday afternoon Marie Kondo-ing my phone. I don’t have that kind of attention span and honestly neither do you. I found something way less painful.

The Real Problem Isn’t the Photos

Before I get to the fix, let me tell you what I found when I actually opened my camera roll with the intent to deal with it. Instead of doing my usual thing where I open it, feel a wave of dread, and immediately close it like I accidentally opened someone else’s diary.

• Screenshots of things I was “definitely going to circle back to.” I was not. They went off to die in a digital graveyard!

• The same selfie taken eleven to fifteen times because batch content creation turns me into someone who can’t commit.

• Photos of my fur babies that are 90% blur and 10% cute.

• Sunsets. SO many freaking sunsets. ALL of them felt urgent at the time. None of them have been looked at since.

• Mystery photos with zero context. I clearly saved them for a reason and that reason is gone forever.

Sound familiar? Yeah.

A Shortcut That Took Me 2 Minutes and Actually Stuck

So here’s what I’m doing now. There’s an iOS shortcut, you set it up one time, and then you run it daily. It takes about two minutes. What it does is pull up every photo taken on today’s date across all previous years.

So instead of opening my camera roll and seeing thousands of images staring back at me like a to-do list I’ll never finish, I see a small handful from one calendar date. Maybe 20. Maybe 40. That’s it.

I scroll through, delete what I don’t need, keep what I actually care about, and close the app.

My ADHD brain is fully on board with this because it’s small enough to not feel like a project. That’s the whole reason it works.

Why It Doesn’t Feel Like a Chore

This isn’t a system where you have to block off an afternoon and “get organized.” You’re not tackling the whole camera roll. You’re not reorganizing anything. You’re just maintaining it in tiny little passes and that’s what makes it actually doable instead of something you keep putting off until your next flight with no wifi. Which, let’s be honest, you’re not doing on that flight either 😂

I Made a Quick Video Showing You How

I walked through exactly how to set the shortcut up and how I use it every day. Three minutes. If your camera roll has slowly turned into a digital junk drawer you pretend doesn’t exist, this is the video.

Linda has been working on her business for months. She has a lot to show for it.

She’s got an Instagram account where she spends hours every week thinking about or making Reels. She’s learning about hooks and captions. She knows what b-roll is now and she’s not entirely sure what to do with it but she has a lot of it. She’s been hearing everyone talk about how much they love Canva so she’s in there wandering around and wondering WTH she’s supposed to love.

She’s also got a lead magnet she’s been perfecting for six weeks. It’s almost ready. She just needs to fix the spacing on page three.

She has subscriptions to about twenty things. She’s not totally sure what half of them do but canceling feels risky.

There’s a course in her inbox she bought on Friday because the woman selling it made a lot of sense and the price was going up at midnight. That’s the fourth one this year (it’s only March). She’s going to get to it. She just needs to finish her lead magnet first. Or maybe master Canva. But then there are the b-roll and hooks she’s got to get back to.

Her captions get rewritten until she can’t see straight because posting something wrong feels like walking out of the house with her skirt tucked into her tights. In front of everyone.

Her email list has nine people on it. Five of them are her.

She has made exactly zero dollars.

Linda is not struggling in her business because she lacks ability.

Linda is the ONLY person her entire family calls when something needs to get done. She’s got ability in spades. She’s got aging parents who need more than they’re willing to ask for and less than they’re willing to accept. She’s got kids who are technically adults now but still call her first.

She handles all of it. The parents, the almost-adults, the invisible logistics of an entire family’s life and she does it while being on fire from the inside out approximately six times a day.

Linda is capable of absolutely anything when someone explains how the pieces connect. The problem is that no one has done that yet.

Most people teaching business grew up online. They learned it by doing it before they ever had to explain it, which means when they teach, they skip steps that feel obvious to them, use shorthand that makes sense at age 24, and assume context you were never given. They hand you a dashboard and call it education. Linda’s been handed tools built by people her kids’ age who learned all of this by immersion. They teach it in sixty second videos that skip straight to step four.

Naturally, Linda does what any capable, intelligent woman does when she’s overwhelmed and under-supported.

She opens Instagram. She checks her insights (she has no clue what she’s actually looking at but she wills the numbers to make sense) and replies to any comments. She opens Canva and begins the search to identify the last version of her lead magnet and she changes the colors and fonts again. She swaps out a picture. Pastes in new content that has wrecks her formatting so she concludes she’ll fix it tomorrow. She feels productive. She goes to bed tired.

And somewhere in the back of her mind, the thought creeps in, “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”

Linda. I need you to hear me. You are not the problem. Here’s what nobody told you.

There are two important jobs in your business. Marketing and sales. They are not the same thing and you have probably been doing one of them almost exclusively for months assuming it’s what will bring you the results you want.

Marketing is how people find you and start to trust you. It’s your social media. Your videos. Your captions. Your Canva graphics. Your lead magnet. Your bio. All the things you are very busy doing. Marketing says “I exist and here’s what I’m about.”

Here’s what EVERYONE forgot to tell you about marketing: It is a long game and it does not pay your bills. Marketing is about building relationships and funneling the right people to the front door of your business where the sales happen.

You’re out here watching webinars and YouTube trying to deduce how to write the RIGHT caption that leads to a client or purchase. I hate to be the one to break it to you but captions aren’t your problem. Social media is where you help people learn about what you do. You nurture them by showing them how you help. Just because someone hit follow, doesn’t mean they laid out the red carpet for a full frontal sales attack. They clicked a button.

I have a theory about why this happens. It happens because we have hundreds (if not thousands) of creators telling us, “All you need to do is create something in Canva once and sell it on Instagram and make 10K in passive income, easily!”

Now, I’m not saying that they’re lying. Well….maybe I am. BECAUSE they grew up immersed in the online world, they likely already have in place the things that make this possible (a sales system, an audience of thousands, the ability to show up on video and promote their offer without feeling sales-y or overly promotional, and the ability to automate the delivery of the offer among others).

You see how listening to someone who doesn’t know how to operate a rotary phone might not be the person you need to tune into?

Sales is what actually closes the client or brings in the $$.

It’s the systems you have in place to take them FROM social media or your longer form content and lead them to the place where they can get the offer. It’s someone’s landing on a website page and the place they’ll go when they are ready to take the next step: book the call, buy the offer, or learn more. Sales are the systems and strategy you have in place that says “Here’s what I have, here’s what it costs, here’s how to get it, and here’s how to get started.”

If you’re anything like Linda, you’ve been spending time marketing (with a bit of branding) but you don’t know how to connect that to selling.

Yes, you need to understand hooks and captions and Canva. It’s not wrong information. It’s just incomplete. You’re spending too much time on the wrong things assuming they’ll bring in the clients.

Here’s a simple way to sort it out.

Marketing is posting a Reel, writing a caption, building a lead magnet, showing up on Instagram, starting a podcast, writing a SubStack.

Sales are the systems you’ve got to make sales or onboard new clients. They may be sending a weekly email (to MORE than 9 subscribers) with an actual offer in it, inviting people to book a discovery call, putting a buy button in multiple places where people can find it, or telling someone plainly what you sell and what it costs.

Here’s a great list of things that make you FEEL productive but won’t actually bring your clients or close sales:

• Rewriting the same caption six times because the first five didn’t feel quite right.

• Filming three hours of b-roll for a Reel that will be on someone’s screen for eight seconds.

• Researching hooks like there’s a secret sentence somewhere on the internet that unlocks clients.

• Rearranging Canva templates instead of finishing the thing you’re actually trying to sell.

• Tweaking fonts and colors on a lead magnet that no one has even been invited to download yet.

• Learning a new content strategy every two weeks because someone else swears it’s “the one that works.”

• Organizing content ideas in three different apps so you don’t lose them… while still not posting them.

• Checking Instagram insights even though you don’t actually know what numbers matter yet.

• Watching tutorials about how to grow on Instagram instead of learning what you need in place to sell.

• Waiting until the website is finished before letting anyone buy from you.

• Auditing your Instagram to get more followers

If Linda DM’ed me right now and said “Ok I get it, what do I do first?”, I’d tell her to start with her offer.

Get clear on what you’re selling and who it’s for. Then figure out where those people are and how to reach them. Then build the content that brings them closer. Then build an email list that keeps them there. Then make sure your website is optimized to help your audience get the information they need to buy your thing. Then you can develop a logo and your branding but only after you have an aligned audience, offer, and system to sell it.

Most people build it backwards. They’re posting on Instagram before they feel confident in what they’re selling. They are picking out logos and colors before they have an offer OR an audience.

They’ve got the curtains picked out before they’ve laid the foundation.

That thought that crept in before Linda went to sleep? That’s not a sign she’s not cut out for this. That’s what happens when capable people are handed incomplete information and told to figure out the rest.

If you see a little Linda in you, it’s ok. Nobody gave her (or, you) the order of operations. Stop assuming that just because you’ve got Canva and a ring light and a course about hooks, you’ve got a business education.

The pieces connect. I promise they do and if you want someone your age who doesn’t skip steps to walk you through them in the right order, starting with the foundation, this is the place to do that.

I’m so glad you’re here.

You’ve been posting consistently. You’re showing up. You’re doing everything the marketing gurus told you to do. Video, carousels, adding keywords, being relatable, building trust. And you’re still not getting clients, customers, or leads from social media.

So you think: I need to post more. I need better content. I need it to look better or be more cohesive. I need to figure out the algorithm.

The algorithm is not your problem.

I’m going to walk you through the four real reasons your content isn’t converting, and none of them have anything to do with how often you post or understanding the algorithm.

Quick context on why I can say this.

My name is Krista Smith and I’m the CEO and founder of Activate Her Awesome, a marketing agency that supports Gen X and Boomer women. I’ve sold over 4,000 digital courses, I support 200+ members inside my communities, and I specialize in helping women who didn’t grow up with tech build real businesses. I have a degree in education, a credential in coaching, and I spent five years as a StoryBrand Certified Marketing Guide.

In the last 16 years of doing this, I’ve seen women just like you make these same mistakes over and over again. I want to save you a bunch of time and energy so you can get results faster.

I’ve watched women with tiny audiences or posting once a week sign clients consistently and I’ve watched women with thousands of followers who post every day hear crickets.

The difference is never the platform. It is always what is happening underneath the content.

Before I walk you through the four specific things, I want you to stop for a second and take this in.

If your content isn’t converting, it is not because you are bad at social media. It is not because the algorithm is against you. It is almost always because something underneath your content is slightly misaligned, slightly unclear, or slightly hesitant. And those small misalignments compound.

So instead of asking, “What should I post next?” I want you asking, “What might be leaking underneath what I’m posting?”

Because that is the real work. And that is what we’re about to fix.

Problem one: Confidence and Clarity in Your Offer

Most women treat content like a volume problem. If I just post enough, eventually someone will buy. But content is not a lottery. It’s a communication system. And if the foundation underneath it is shaky, no amount of posting will fix it.

When you’re not fully confident in what you’re selling, your audience can feel it. Humans are wired to detect uncertainty. Your dream customer is perceptive. She can smell fake a mile away. Her spide-y sense is tuned into BS. And she’s been burned before. She’s not going to hand over her credit card to someone who sounds like they’re still figuring it out.

The first place to check is whether you actually have a clear offer or just a general idea of what you do. There’s a big difference.

A clear offer answers four questions without hesitation:

1. Who is it for?

2. What do you offer?

3. Why is it structured the way it is — the length, the price, the format?

4. And how can they buy?

If you stumble on any of those four, your content will reflect that. It won’t be obvious to you, but it’ll show up as vague language. Vague doesn’t convert. Not because people don’t like you, but because they can’t see themselves in it.

The fix: Before you write another post, make sure your offer is written out and answers those four questions in plain language. Not marketing jargon. Plain language. If you can’t do that, that’s your starting point.

Problem two: Pricing Confidence

This one is uncomfortable, but it’s important. How did you pick your price?

If the answer is “I looked at what other people charge” or “I didn’t want to seem expensive” or honestly, “I just guessed,” then your pricing is working against your content.

When you’re not fully behind your price, you subconsciously soften everything. Your call to action gets quieter. Your language gets hedgier. You stop leading and you start apologizing.

Apologetic content doesn’t convert. It might get likes. It might get “this is so me” in the comments. But it doesn’t create buyers.

Pricing confidence doesn’t come from charging more for the sake of it. It comes from understanding the value of what you deliver and being able to stand behind it. That’s an internal shift first. The price tag is just the result.

The fix: Ask yourself — if someone paid me this amount and got the result I say I deliver, would that be a genuinely good deal for them? If your honest answer is yes, own it fully. If you’re not sure, that’s the work to do.

Problem three: A Clear Buyer Path

Let’s say your offer is clear and you’re confident in your price. There’s still one more thing that trips people up: there’s no defined path for how someone actually becomes your client.

Great content with no clear next step is just inspiration. And inspiration doesn’t pay your rent.

Your audience needs three things. A defined next step (one action, not five options). A reason to move now, not eventually. And a structured bridge (whether that’s a discovery call, a free webinar or challenge, a lead magnet, or an application) something that catches them when they’re warm.

If every post ends with “DM me if you’re interested” and that’s the whole system, that’s not a buyer path. That’s just a wish.

The fix: Map out the actual steps someone takes from seeing your content to becoming a paying client. Write it down. If there are gaps or it depends on them finding you at exactly the right moment, fix the gaps first, then create content that drives to that path.

Problem four: Stand Out

This last one is the most overlooked, especially for women who learned business by watching other people’s businesses online. I call it the compare and despair void.

If you’re making decisions about your offers, your pricing, your content strategy based on what looks good from other websites or your industry peers, you’re building on someone else’s foundation. And it probably wasn’t designed for your business model. You also have no idea if that’s actually working for those people.

In my first ten years in business, I built a lot of websites. One of the first questions I always asked was, “Is there a website you love? One you’d like yours to feel like?”

So many women would send me a link and say, “I structured my offers based on this.”

What I couldn’t tell them, because of confidentiality: in more than a few cases, the very business they were modeling themselves after was also my client. And that client was working with me to revamp everything because their website and offers weren’t working either.

So they were building decisions off something that looked successful on the outside, but behind the scenes, wasn’t working.

The fix: Stop borrowing blueprints. Start building your own.

Before you change your pricing, your packages, your website layout, ask yourself better questions.

• Does this make sense for me and my business model?

• Does it match how I deliver results?

• Does it support the kind of clients I actually want?

• What are you selling?

• How long does it take to get someone a result?

• How much access do they need to you?

• How many clients can you realistically support well?

• What does revenue need to look like for this to be sustainable?

That’s the math. Then you build the pricing and structure around that.

When you copy someone else’s offer stack, you’re copying the surface. Not the strategy underneath it or their costs or capacity or goals.

You don’t need a prettier version of someone else’s business. You need alignment between your expertise, your capacity, your pricing, and your path. That’s when content converts.

The Recap

If your content isn’t converting, check these four things before you touch your posting schedule:

1. Offer clarity and confidence. Can you confidently explain what you do, the outcome and why it’s built the way it is in plain language?

2. Pricing confidence. Are you fully behind your number, or is hesitation leaking into your messaging?

3. A clear buyer path. Does someone who’s ready to buy actually have a defined road to get there?

4. Stand out. Are you making decisions based on how you need your business to actually work, or based on what you see other people doing online?

Fix these four things and your existing content will work harder. Add new content on top of a solid foundation and it’ll compound.

If this hit a little too close to home and you’re realizing the issue isn’t your content but the foundation underneath it, then keep reading. I can help.

I want you to imagine it’s 1986.

My mother is downstairs in our 1970’s 3-bedroom bungalow dusting around the TV cabinet while I’m in high school and in the middle of her perfectly normal stay-at-home-mom afternoon, the VCR suddenly springs to life.

If you had a VCR in the late 80’s, you’ll remember the aggressive powering up and internal shuffling of tape like it’s preparing for a takeoff. It genuinely sounded like a small aircraft starting its engine in the living room.

She screamed because as far as she knew she was alone in the house, calmly cleaning away, when the VCR roared to life as if it had been activated by a ghost with a very specific viewing schedule.

What she didn’t know was that I had programmed it that morning to record General Hospital (my favorite soap opera) while I was in class. I didn’t mention that small operational detail. In my defense, I wasn’t considering the noise it would make AND that she’d be standing next to it when it started. I was only thinking about Robert Scorpio and Sean Donely and Frisco Jones. IFYKYK.

So while I was sitting in math with Mr. Elliott, feeling hopeful my experiment would be successful, my mother was downstairs experiencing what felt like the opening scene of a science fiction film.

When I got home, she dramatized the afternoon at the supper table telling us the VCR had turned itself on. Between hysterical giggles, I informed her happily that it had not.

It had done exactly what I told it to do. She was rattled and a little freaked out that I could do that. I was delighted. I think my Dad was secretly amazed and cheering me on but not saying anything because he could see how upset my Mom was.

That was the beginning of my love affair with technology. There was no going back.

I became a teacher after high school. I left teaching to work part time while my daughter was young. I quickly discovered I wasn’t meant to stay at home OR work for my then husband. I got certified as a professional coach. I started my first business and realized I needed a website (so I figured that out too by searching around on the internet) and then all my coaching colleagues needed websites and they came knocking.

I realized I liked tech WAY more than I liked listening to women cry so I skilled up as a graphic and web designer. Opened my first online support school with a gal in Colorado where we taught women all over the world how to code. Closed that in 2018. Left my 25 year marriage in the fall of 2019 with nothing. I rebuilt my life and pivoted my business. DURING a global pandemic. Got StoryBrand Certified. Soared to 100K years. Pivoted into digital courses. It’s funny what you’ll do when you’re a single mother.

Fast forward 40 years.

In the past two years, I’ve sold over 4000 digital courses and had over 350 women join my memberships. And I made enough money to pay cash for my BMW in 2024. All on my own.

I’m not saying this to impress you.

I’m saying it because there is a straight line from programming a VCR in 1986 to pressing publish on a digital course in 2024 and watching Stripe notifications come in.

It’s the same brain and the same refusal to be intimidated by a machine when many women of my generation still add two spaces after a period because we learned to type on typewriters, not screens (you need to stop with the two spaces, by the way but that’s for another post).

Somewhere along the way I stopped just liking tech and started understanding business.

Offers. Messaging. Sales pages. Buyer psychology. The sequence that has to happen before someone takes out their credit card. The difference between visibility and revenue. The difference between marketing and sales.

AND, because I have a background in education, I’ve learned that I’m really good at breaking things down into practical steps that even those of us who have trouble updating our iPhones can follow with ease.

Women over 50 are building businesses at record rates and most of them have more experience in their pinky finger than the twenty-something online bro yelling about funnels on YouTube.

You need to understand what you’re building and why it works.

So I’m here on Substack because I want to talk to more of you.

Not in captions or 60 second reels or fighting an algorithm.

On this platform, I am looking forward to sharing with you:

• tech that actually makes you independent instead of dependent

• mindset tips that matches the stage of life you’re in now, not the one you were in twenty years ago

• strategy that is broken down so that you’ll not only understand the how - but also the psychology behind it

I call it the “How Can This Be Easy” approach and it isn’t about pretending business is effortless.

It’s about looking at what you’ve built and asking whether you made it harder than it needs to be. It’s about sequence, alignment, and understanding how the pieces fit before you try to scale them.

That’s what I’m known for: seeing the gap, breaking it down, simplifying it, and empowering you to feel confident and capable of executing it on your own, all without ever making you feel stupid in the process.

If you’re building something real, and you’re serious about revenue, and you’re willing to look at the structure instead of blaming the surface, you’ll probably like it here.

And if you remember the sound of a VCR powering up like a jet engine in your living room, then we already speak the same language.

Welcome!

If you've got a couple of contractors, are thinking about hiring, or already have a team but feel like you're still doing everything... this one's for you.

What We Cover: ✅ Why hiring random help won't solve your problem ✅ The difference between coaching and consulting and why both matter ✅ What a real people strategy looks like in a small business ✅ How org charts help even if your team is just you and a VA ✅ What the LPC Accelerator is and who it's for ✅ How to hand things off without losing control

Curious if this is what you need? Lindsay is offering free 30-minute calls so you can talk it out and see what makes sense for where you are. No pressure. Just clarity.

Resources + Links Mentioned:

• Learn more about the LPC Accelerator → https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKzd8SgoRyOAgCfKxxd1VbJJmlXJqljZZEThOkxMGV0/edit?tab=t.0

• Book your FREE 30 minute call: https://api.leadconnectorhq.com/widget/bookings/lindsaywhite

• Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-white-high-voltage/

• Visit High Voltage Leadership → https://www.highvoltageleadership.ca/

In this episode, I'm breaking down exactly how to show up for the women in your life who are chasing a dream on Instagram. Whether you get what they do or not, these small actions go a long way.

This episode is short, simple, and made to be shared.

What You'll Learn: ✅ Why your likes, comments, and shares actually matter (and how they help) ✅ What the Instagram algorithm notices and what it doesn't ✅ How to support your friend's business without needing to buy a thing ✅ The easy actions you can take in under 15 seconds that make a real difference ✅ Why saving a post helps more than you think (and no one has to know you did it)

Want to Pay It Forward? 📲 Share this episode with your own friends 💬 Use it to start a convo about how we support each other online 💛 Be that person who shows up — even in the small ways

Let's Connect: Instagram → @activateherawesome Website → activateherawesome.com

If you're a business owner yourself: Use this episode as your unofficial hype tool. Send it to your crew. Let them know how much every like, comment, and share really helps.

In this episode, we walk through exactly what changed — and how you can do the same.

What We Cover: ✅ Why follower count wasn't the problem, her messaging was ✅ The simple strategy she used to find and attract her ideal clients ✅ How she cleaned up her audience (and her algorithm) after boosting gone wrong ✅ The power of getting crystal clear on your niche (hint: it gave her audience hope) ✅ Why your bio matters more than your dog or wine preferences ✅ What you need to fix in your Facebook profile if you ever post in groups

If you've been stuck at the same follower count for months, this one will light a fire under you. No fluff. Just what works.

Resources + Links Mentioned:

• 🎁 Christi's free training: How to Make Your Facebook Profile Work for Your VA Business → https://christibalfour.kit.com/fbprofile

• Christi's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/virtualprosociety/

• The VA Whisperer GPT --> https://virtualprosociety.com/vawhisperer

• The Virtual Pro Society Waitlist --> https://virtualprosociety.com/vps-waitlist