Calendar Tutorial and the Time conundrum

Happy Monday! It’s raining today (good news as the west coast of N. America deals with multiple wildfires) and I also have the day off so there is nothing distracting me from working at my computer today. Let’s jump in…

In this issue:

• Niche Ideas: Self Care Calendars

• New Tutorial: One and Done Calendar Template

• The time vs. money conundrum and evolving business landscape

Video Tutorials

New on YouTube: Set up this one calendar template in Affinity Publisher and you will be able to generate new calendars in about 15 minutes foreverafter (give or take—depends on how many edits you make each time).

In real time, the process to set this up and generate the first calendar in this video took 44 minutes, including me explaining everything.

What you will learn:

• Using the table tool for calendars

• Easy auto-numbering

• Adjusting the position of numbers in the cells

• Using two masters on a single page, allowing you to swap the design easily

• Creating one set of templates on masters that you can use perpetually

• Edit an element from a master on a single page

Stay tuned, I have another calendar related project tutorial that I am putting the finishing edits on this week.

And, if you have been on the fence about Affinity and might want to try their new extended trial I have a Publisher Quick Start video coming soon as well.

You make also like

Di and Simone Heuser are having a storewide sale (affiliate link, I may earn a commission if you make a purchase) to celebrate Di’s 60th birthday. Save 60% with code BIRTHDAY60 through July 30 (note, they are in S. Africa so take the time difference into account).

No matter what you sell, once you have a customer’s attention (i.e. the click) your product description is where you aim to convert to a sale. Ingram’s blog post on how to write a great book description can be applied to both printables and books. The post includes tips, as well as a framework.

Random Musings: Time vs. Money conundrum

If you have been with me a while you know that at the end of 2023, prompted by a health scare that made me realize I needed more balance in life, I closed sales to my courses on my own site and decided to try going all free in the hopes of ad revenue eventually replacing those earnings.

I still haven’t cracked the watch hour threshold on Youtube for ad revenue, and in terms of the blog, well Google updates have killed a lot of people’s traffic. Which is to say I occasionally second guess that decision.

This week I watched a webinar about a new system/tool suite that promises to accelerate children’s book creation, POD and printable creation, and marketing with the help of specialized AI tools.

The people involved were people I have followed and learned a lot from over the years. The person at the head was some big marketing guy and so unfortunately the webinar itself was high on hype and low on demonstrating the actual tools.

I got to the end of nearly two hours thinking this looks like it could be useful only to learn the training and 6 months access to the AI suite was over 2.5k with tax, or 3 monthly payments of 1k. Yikes.

I was disappointed. I understand we are running businesses but based on their statement that after 6 months there would be a recurring fee of $29/month to access the tools that means that the training component was over 2k by itself.

Programs like this feel like “the rich get richer.”

Because when building an online business we either invest time or money. When we can’t afford to invest, we are stuck with using our time. When you work full-time, that is something a lot of us are short on.

Which means this tool I was so excited about is something those of us in the short on time camp could really use.

I would absolutely pay a premium monthly subscription with the hopes it would eventually pay for itself as I released products made from it, but an upfront investment like this puts it out of the reach of many people who could most benefit. One of my core business principles is I do not invest personal money in business expenses, only money earned in my business.

It doesn’t matter though. I am a DIY girl. If anything it:

• cemented my resolve to continue to share tutorials publicly on Youtube instead of creating courses (that calendar tutorial is practically a course in itself) so that I can help more people.

• made me determined to figure out workflows to use AI as a tool to get things done faster. Once I have figured some things out, I’ll share. I have already made a list of tools and prompts to play around with.

Someone in a newsletter this week mentioned the band Fugazi and it immediately endeared me to that person. Staunchly independent, Fugazi insisted for years on $5 tickets to their shows, all ages, and self-releasing their albums. They have been my inspiration for years and the timing of being reminded of them while contemplating this program was perfect.

We all deserve to earn from the work we do as creators, but what Fugazi taught me is you can stick to your values and you can earn a living without compromising.

I believe all the knowledge we need to build successful businesses is out there already. Course creators help put the pieces into one package, but across the internet one person’s paid course is another person’s freebie and vice versa.

As an aside, it will be interesting to see how Perplexity Pages puts a dent into the course ecosystem. I think in time this could impact small courses (on a single topic) and short non-fiction books in particular.

No doubt the ways we can earn online is evolving, and I believe information/content based models will be impacted by AI more than other online business models. So, I will continue to stick to aiming for ad and affiliate revenue for now. As a consumer I am growing tired of all the online courses for everything, and I always like to treat people the way I want to be treated. So, onwards and upwards with the free experiment.

Until next time,

Catherine

P.S. If you would like to support my efforts you can support me in a few ways:

• share my Youtube channel or individual videos

• subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already (please do NOT watch a bunch of videos to artificially boost my watch time though, but do feel free to watch videos as a normal user).

• recommend this newsletter to others, you can share this subscription link