How I Turned Failure into Success

The year was January 2021, and it was the worst month of my business life. I had just come off a high of having the best months of my life. And November and December, I was like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe we did this more than in a month. And I did in a year of teaching. And I was like, this is it. This is when things just continue to go upward for us. We're not going to have any more down months. We're not going to have any dips in revenue. It's all up from here, baby. And then January hit and we made 75% less than what I anticipated that we'd make. And I became a crumbly dumpster fire of a mess. For months, I carried around that shame that this somehow made me less of an entrepreneur, that the success that I had in the past was just a glitch. I. That I couldn't do it again, that, oh my gosh, what have I done? My. I work from home now doing this. My husband works from home now. I have ruined our family financially. We're going to go bankrupt. We have to sell our house. Like, I really spiraled really hard here. And for months it was like that with me just spiraling in my own thoughts. I remember really vividly there was one month where I literally was crying on the floor of the kitchen eating a tiny ticket and was looking around. I don't even know when I probably still had the candy from Halloween, but I was very sad. And I was even sadder because I was like, I can't even afford a full size Kit Kat. Now. Looking back on it, it's quite funny, but at the time it was anything but funny. And I genuinely felt like I'm gonna have to give up because clearly I'm not cut out for this. Clearly I can't do this. Clearly everybody around me knows something that I don't. And I am a failure. And not a good kind of failure. Because now I look at failure and I'm like, okay, this is a stepping stone to something else. But back then, I did not. Even though I was starting on that path, I just felt like the biggest loser, the biggest failure in the entire world. And it wasn't until I talked to my friend Nick Pavlitas of Ghostwriter School and Authority Ghostwriting and Morgan James Publishing, that I realized this is just part of the journey that most entrepreneurs experience this at some point, and this is normal. And talking to him and talking to other entrepreneurs. When I finally let the secret out that I was like, failing miserably and feeling like a total loser. When I finally cut that out and started sharing that with people, I heard from more entrepreneurs than I can count that this is just part of it, that there are ups and downs and this is a. A down period for me. And that's just. That's part of being an entrepreneur. And once I realized that this was actually literally part of it, that you have to go through these times to be able to level up, to be able to develop the grit and the resilience, to be the kind of person that can handle the higher levels. That's when everything changed for me. So now when we have a low month, I'm not like, oh, woe is me. This is awful. I'm awful. Like, spiral, spiral. Now when I look at it, I think, okay, this is just a period of time. What can I learn from this? And more importantly, what do I need to do to be able to get my numbers up without burning myself out? Because I knew how to make money, but the way that I knew how to make money was burning me out. Like, super, super burning me out. In fact, the months that I had before, they were really high. I, like, I was on the brink of losing it or not losing it, but like, on the brink of, I guess, just pure exhaustion. And it took me a while to get back to some of those months because I didn't want to. I didn't want to experience that level of exhaustion again. I didn't want to experience that level of tiredness and feeling, like all this pressure to perform and to finish these services and all of that. I didn't want to feel that anymore. And so there was this mental block for me where I was like, I don't want to make more money out loud. I'd be like, yeah, I want to make more money. But internally, my body was like, absolutely freak and moodily not. I don't want to make more money because that was stressful, and I don't want to continue to do that. And we align. People call it self sabotage. I call it self alignment. Where we. Our bodies and our minds, whether we know it or not, sometimes it's subconscious, sometimes it's not. But our bodies and our minds are like, nah, we're not doing that. And it seems like you're hitting a brick wall again and again. And really it's just your body and mind trying to align with what it is you really want. So what I wanted was a little bit more rest, a little bit more peace, like I probably would have if I had taken maybe two weeks off and then jump back into it, I probably would have been fine, but I just didn't. I hadn't experienced that before, so I didn't know. Oh, looking back, I know. And so when I'm feeling that way, I'm like, okay, time for a break. So I know you might be thinking, Brittany, why are you telling us all of this? This is an AI podcast. This has nothing to do with AI. I actually think I would have been able to get out of that rut a lot faster if I had been using AI at that point, because I wasn't. ChatGPT hadn't come out yet. And so I was just kind of experiencing all this on my own. And finally, like I said, tell other entrepreneurs and realize, oh, this is just part of it. And so if you're experiencing a lull right now or you do in the future, highly recommend you using chatgpt to kind of through it and see what's going on. So there's a few things for me that are going on and I'll tell you how I use ChatGPT specifically to help with it. The first thing that was going on for me was I absolutely did not want to make more money because to me, in my head, conscious subconsciously, my brain was thinking, making money is not safe. Making money wears us out, it exhausts us. And I'm like, I like a challenge and stuff like that. But it was to the point where like doesn't. It just wasn't healthy for me. And so mind kind of telling itself this story that is not safe. And so what I would do if I experienced this again, go to ChatGPT and basically say, making this much. But then the last few months I've only made X amount and I'm not really sure what's going on, but I think there might be some kind of mental block here. I'd really like your help figuring out what it is that's going on for me. Ask me any follow up questions that will help you understand what the mental block is so that I can move forward. My goal is. And then whatever it is, that's your goal. So I talked about moving forward. What does that look like specifically? Does that mean being able to get out of the rut you're in and make more money again? Does it mean to make more money again while also burning out? Like, what exactly does that look like? What exactly does that mean? So get as clear as possible when you're talking about the outcome that you want ChatGPT to help you get so you can get closer to that right from the beginning. Now the other thing that was going on was a lack of traffic. And this is, I think, another reason why using AI to kind of help you sort through this is really helpful. A lot of times people will run a launch and then the launch won't go how they want and then they're like, oh my offer stinks. And they'll just throw their offer out or they'll edit it or they're add way more stuff to it. And I am guilty of this too. So if you're sitting there being like, yeah, that's me, don't worry, like I've been there too. There's going to. Yeah. Anyway, so a lot of times people will do that. They'll throw out their offer or they'll add all this stuff. And that's not always necessary. In fact, usually what I notice about launches that don't go well is that there's two issues. Number one is a, the sales copy, the messaging, the emails are unclear. They might be clear to the person who wrote them. Often we're so close to our own businesses that sometimes it's hard to talk about our offers or talk about what we do, talk about how people in a way that's non jargony, in a way that makes sense to somebody that didn't create the offer themselves. So the first thing we can do is have ChatGPT review the sales copy, review the emails and say something like this. I want you to review my sales copy for this offer and tell me what you think this offer is about, what you think the benefits are you think will be most appealing to my audience. Then I'm going to tell you how my last launch did and I want you to analyze why it, you know, like I wanted or whatever. Same thing with the email, same thing with the social post and ask it for different ideas on angles. Um, it'd be super helpful for you. So I said there's two things. One is sales messaging. The copy just isn't clear enough. Um, the relationship coach one time and she said something about like, oh, we need that special someone. It feels like, you know, you coming out of your fingertips or something like that. And it was really a flower, this picture. But I don't know anybody that's ever been like, you know what I feel like? I feel like rainbows are coming out of my fingertips. Like that's not something that you hear. And I'm not saying from a relationship coach but from a normal human. But I mean like it Might be buying from them. Has never said, at least to my knowledge, and from what they said, has never said, I just want to feel like I'm in love, like bursting from my fingertips. Because that's not really a feeling that is easy to capture because none of us have experienced that. And so we want to look at the. We want to look at how to describe it in a way that your audience is experiencing. So, for example, they may say something like, the person that I was in love with before they walked in the room, I would get butterflies and my stomach and my mic would feel like it's twisting and turning and my heart would erase a little bit and I just got this warm feeling all over and I couldn't help but smile whenever they turned a corner and walked into the room. That's a lot more of a concrete picture of how they felt in the feeling that they might be going for again. And so that's just a small example. But you can ask ChatGPT to kind of help me in the picture. If you do that, I would say, help me paint the picture without saying words like paint the picture, imagine, because it uses those words a lot. All right, great. Now the last thing we're going to do here, the other thing that you can do here too, when you are finding a lull in your business is look at your traffic. This is the other big thing that I see people missing out on when they have a launch that they're like, oh, my launch stunk with traffic. Well, actually, let me go back. So really it's numbers. Knowing your numbers. So you want to have a good, better and best number when you're launching. A good number is like what you can reasonably expect. Even if you don't put in a ton of extra effort. You can reasonably expect, you know, a certain unit sold or a certain price point, certain sales main total. The first thing, the better number is like, all right, if I did what I normally do and I do some more like amount more, what can I expect the numbers to be? And then best, I always say that's like my I pee my pants, I'm so excited number. Like, it's a number that feels so massively like out there that I would really have to work my butt off big time to be able to get that number that's my best number. By having a good, better and best, it helps me manage my expectations. Since people have bad launches is because they didn't actually have a bad launch, they just didn't have enough traffic nor good, better and best number we have a baseline of like this is we want to hit, but then we need to know our traffic. So the other number that people miss out on is how many people need to get to my sales page being my conversion. In other words, people will take to make one sale. Like how many people do I need on my sales page in order to make one sale? So typically anywhere from 3 to 5% is going to be good during Black Friday. Higher conversion rates. So I've seen up to 12% conversion on black Friday. Reason that I really encourage people to have an offer on Black Friday. But let's say that I know that it's going to take me at 7% conversion or 10% conversion, whatever it is, it's going to take me 500 people. So you get one sale or 500 eyes on my sales page to get one sale. Um, for think of math, let's just say one person for every hundred people that are on my sales page, that'd be a 1% conversion. If you have 10 people that convert after a hundred views on your sales page, then it's 10% conversion. And so if you know your conversion rate, you know how many people it's going to take for like how many eyeballs you need on your page in order to make the sale. And then you can work backwards. So let's say, and let's just say it's a 1% conversion just for the sake of so 1% conversion. That means for every 100 people that make it to my sales page, I can expect one sale. Then I say, okay, if I want to make a hundred sales, well times a hundred, how many people do I need to get on my sales page? And so now that we have those numbers, we can go into chat GPT and say, this is how many views I need on my sales page. This is how many I had last time. Give me some ideas on ways I can get more traffic to my sales page so that I have a higher chance of conversion. Now like I said on Black Friday, I wouldn't expect it to be 1%. I'd be expect it to be much higher. The sales page copy is clear. And so I would recommend if you don't already have it, having intern sales copy into and they can review it for you. We do that in our mastermind, make copy once a week. And so I'd recommend doing that because that's one of the big two reasons that people don't have the launch that they want. Now if I did these things earlier on in January 2021, when I felt like I was a dumpster fire and that I should quit entrepreneurship. If I had done those things, then I could have really easily and objectively looked at it and said, oh, I'm not making the money I want because I don't have the traffic I want. How can I get more traffic? I can run ads, I can work with affiliates. I can do more posting on social. I can send out more emails. Like, there's a lot of the end that's just scratching the surface. But for example, those are just a few of the things that you can do to get more traffic and also, I think be able to work through what was going on for me a lot faster if I was using AI to kind of help me on a daily basis work through some things that were coming up for me as they came up. So anytime now, anytime I find myself feeling a little bit, I hesitate to use the word triggered because I don't think that's really the word I want to use. But notice a feeling coming up for me of like, you're not enough. Talking about, nobody's gonna want yourself. Like, all those kind of imposter syndrome sort of things. Or if I notice like a resistance to making money or anything like that, I go to chat GBT and I say, this is what's going on for me. Not really sure why. Can you kind of identify what's going on and help me break it down in a way that, you know, I'll be able to get past this and start reaching the goal of whatever goal I want. That's how I use AI to make sure I don't have a prolonged period of frustration and doubt and lack of confidence and lack of money ever again. So there will still be highs and lows in entrepreneurship. That's okay. It's preparing us for the next stage. It's for us to level up. It separates. What is it like, the wheat from the shaft? Something like that. Where it's basically the people that stick with it that are resilient, that have the grit, are able to continue on. The people that just. That which I was very close to not practicing that January 2021 when I felt like a dumpster fire. Ones that are going to be like, you know what? I think I need to quit. And by the way, it is okay to quit a business venture. It's okay to be like, this isn't for me anymore. That's totally fine. You do want to continue on that. Those are my recommendations. So my name is Britti Long. I'm the creator of AI200K as well as our mastermind, and I'll drop the link to both of those in the comments. See you next time.