How I'm Taking 6 Weeks Off My Business (without losing progress or sales!)
If you would have told me a few years ago when I was working so many hours per week, every evening, every weekend, that I would be able to take six weeks off in my business and not think about it every day and not be stressed about it and not come back to a ton of work, I would not believe you.
Honestly, even a little over a year ago, on my honeymoon, I had a hard time disconnecting and worked more than I wanted to. So, the fact that a little over a year later, here we are with 6 weeks off, I am so happy and thrilled that I've gotten to this place and also super, super grateful.
Today, I'm going to be talking about some travel and upcoming business trips that I'm taking and then how I prepped and planned my business to be able to step away for 6 weeks.
Prefer to watch or listen rather than read this article?
First, I want to give a couple disclaimers. It's not 6 weeks consecutively. I just got back from about 2 and 1/2 weeks traveling around the British Isles. It was so much fun!
And that was just a vacation, a trip to take time away with friends and family. I worked about 5 hours while I was gone, which was a huge improvement from the past. Being able to work 5 hours over a course of 2 weeks and also really disconnect (meaning I did not think about work when I wasn't working) was huge.
If you aren't familiar with me and what I do, I have kind of two different brands or businesses. So, I'm an author first and foremost, and then I have Marketing by Shelby, where I have my beautiful Creative’s Content Club membership. One of the primary things I did while I was gone was support the members in there not just because it's my obligation to, but it's my honor to. I love doing it!
A few times a week, I go into the group and answer any new questions that came in. That is the primary way that I still do need to connect in a little bit and work while I'm on vacation, but it's something that I love to do, so it doesn't bother me at all.
Clearing My Schedule
All right, so the first thing that I did was look at my schedule and see what could be removed or just changed around while I was taking this time off. Earlier this summer, I knew that I had this travel coming up and that I would be away. So I shifted down my YouTube schedule, where I was posting weekly every single Sunday, down to about two times a month. That's about half the amount of filming I was doing to give me space in my schedule to not have to film quite as often and allow me to do the travels without having to film while I'm away or bulk film a bunch of videos at once.
I then looked at the rest of my schedule to see where I could reduce any unnecessary meetings. I canceled out meetings that I didn't need, giving my some of my team members a break, and since I had already reduced that amount of posting down for YouTube, it gave me time to schedule out posts and emails.
Social Media and Email Marketing
The type of marketing that I most typically do and stay really consistent with is social media posting and email marketing. Earlier this year, I hired a marketing assistant to help me prepare and schedule social media marketing to always have consistent postings. This is something that I have managed on my own for a decade, so handing it over and allowing someone else into the process was really terrifying.
A lot of my community asks why I want to outsource this—I completely understand that. Having someone be able to schedule these posts out for me and ensure that things are still going out consistently was really, really helpful while I was away instead of having to go on social media and post.
If you don't have someone, schedule it out yourself. I recommend Meta Business Suite for posting on Instagram or Facebook. You can schedule directly in the Instagram app for reals as well. TikTok is really the only one I don't recommend scheduling posts for at the moment.
If you’d like to learn what I do for TikTok instead, check out the corresponding YouTube video or podcast linked in the buttons under the image at the top of the page!
Then I scheduled out all of my email marketing as well. I send out a weekly newsletter called Marketing Monday every single Monday, so I prescheduled out a few of those emails to cover the first two weeks I was away. So, I was able to work on a third newsletter for 30 minutes to an hour on the cruise I was on and get that scheduled out to go.
Mailerlite is my email marketing tool. They're currently running a 30% off sale and I'm an affiliate for them because I love their work and I've been using their platform for years. They don't run sales very often, so this 30% off sale is pretty good. It runs through September 23rd, so if you want to check it out, click this link: https://www.mailerlite.com/a/6m6hIJTYujG6
Paid Advertising
This is a little different for each of my brands.
For Marketing by Shelby, I have been running consecutive, evergreen Facebook ads for years (I think since 2022). It's one of the primary ways that I grow this business. The reason it's so different from my author business, which has been 99% grown by organic marketing, is because when I started the second business, I was also very focused on my author business and putting a lot of time and effort into that.
Since I didn't have as much time to focus on organic growth with Marketing by Shelby, I really relied on paid advertising. And I love it! It helps me consistently make sales even while I'm not working. I even started it this year for my author side of things, and it’s a really low-cost visibility option—$3 a day, $4 a day, getting consistent traffic while I’m posting less or on vacation. I'm really excited, because in October, I’m filming a masterclass on this strategy for my Creative’s Content Club.
Collaborations
A big goal of mine is collaborations, and also growing my email list. Because I am always getting visible, always marketing by running ads and other things, I get opportunities to speak, to do freebie swaps, to do summits, and more that help me grow my email list and are semi-passive. Typically, I'll do an interview. record a presentation, or submit a freebie to a freebie swap, and then all I have to do is share about it with my audience a couple times. Then my email list also grows from other people in the program, summit, or freebie swap sharing about mine as well. It helps all of us grow our email lists collectively.
This is something that I typically do maybe once every other month or every few months. But it turns out that this time of year, there are so many things going on. A lot of my peers and community and network were hosting different summits or speaking opportunities or offering bundles and things like that.
So I just happened to get a bunch of invites. I had to turn some down because I just didn't have the capacity, but I was really excited about that because, again, I could just schedule out my emails and pre-record my presentations for it. My email list has been growing while I've been away on vacation without having to do anything on my end.
I’m also speaking at a couple of summits in September, so I'm pre-recording those presentations and submitting those, and then I'm just going to schedule some emails about them. I’ll be getting new customers, new leads, checking out my presentation from other people's audiences who are in the summit.
If you’re interested in doing things like this, I would just start by talking to people that you're already connected with—whether that's online or in person in your local community—who do similar things as you and put out feelers. See if you know of anyone who you could do a freebie swap with. Maybe you do a collaboration post on Instagram or you go live together on Instagram and help each other be exposed to each other's audiences. There are so many opportunities for collaboration.
And if you can't find anyone who's hosting a summit or hosting a swap, do it yourself. Host one! Reach out to people in your community. I'm not saying that this is the easiest thing to manage, but if it’s something you want to put together, like a larger collaboration, start it yourself. Sometimes they can be hard to find, but if you can be the one who says you’ll host a romance reader online summit, for example, that could be really enticing and show you as a thought leader in your area. So, don't be afraid to kickstart things and be kind of the change-maker in your space as well.
What you can do to keep showing up
Additional Support
One other thing I want to mention is that, before my honeymoon last year, I hired an assistant for customer support because I do have a lot of students in the Marketing by Shelby side of things, and sometimes they need help with access issues or have questions before they purchase a course or jump into the membership and things like that.
So having that help, and now that they’ve been trained for over a year, really made it smooth this time around. There weren't really any issues happening that I needed to jump on and fix. It's not something that I need for the author side of my business to manage my inbox or anything like that because it's not as heavy or urgent. Whenever a customer has an issue, I really want it to be handled within 24 business hours—that's something that's really important to me. Having an assistant helps with that, but it’s also something that comes with time. I didn't have anyone helping me for the first seven-ish years, so that's only been the last few years that I've really thought about hiring people and training people and having support.
If you are interested in learning more about the club and getting my support inside, I'd love to see you there. We’re currently closed for enrollment until later this year, but if you sign up for the waitlist, you could get an offer to join sooner when a spot opens up: https://www.marketingbyshelby.com/creatives-content-club-waitlist
I hope you found this post really helpful. I'm really excited for an upcoming vlog on my YouTube channel, where I'll be taking you behind the scenes of my trip and sharing with you what I'm working on, so if you’re interested, come on over and check it out: https://www.youtube.com/@marketingbyshelby
I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. Bye!