What 2024 Taught Me About Success

Across the board, 2024 was a tough year for many and I would say a majority of online businesses. I think it's from a lot of marketing adjustment going on that stems back to 2020, 2021, 2022, when some people were having the best business years ever because so many people were home and they had that time to do online courses and online programs. So if you felt like 2024 was your hardest and era yet, you're not alone. I just barely squeaked out making the same amount of money this year as I did in 2023. And the majority of the money I have made this year has been in the last half of the year, as opposed to spread evenly across the entire year. So I wanted to share with you what I've learned during this really difficult year and what I'm taking into 2025 that has me excited, motivated and inspired in my business again, because going into 2024, I just wasn't feeling that. So I'm going to first share the three biggest lessons I learned this year, and then I will break those lessons down into what that means I'm going to be doing in 2025 differently. The first lesson is stop over complicating things. This is going to be basically in all forms of your business. I know I'm not alone in this. I work with many clients as well that I really tried to help. Stop overcomplicating things. But this means stop overcomplicating your offers, your social media strategy, your launch funnels. Like I mentioned, I work with my clients every single day in the YouTube coaching experience, not just on their YouTube strategy, but how to help their YouTube content and their YouTube views convert into more clients and customers and sales. And one of the most reoccurring topics or things I'm telling to them is simplify this process. For example, I know a membership or a subscription service sounds amazing. Reoccurring revenue, something we all want, right? But these types of business models, subscriptions and memberships are freaking hard to maintain. Especially when you're starting to figure out, okay, if I have this membership now I want this course and I want to offer this other membership, this becomes too many offers. It starts to muddy the waters as to what they should jump into first and what is actually for them and what they should buy. And you've got to have really super clear messaging and a very solid customer journey. So your customers, your clients, your potential students know what is the first, the next and the next thing that they should be buying from you. And if it's not clear, they just get confused and they don't buy anything. For example, this year, starting in about July, I did a clean sweep of everything in my business. I completely burned down all the funnels that I had and I really simplified where my customer journey was headed to. And my customer journey is always heading to my one main offer, my YouTube coaching experience. So my YouTube coaching experience, you can join anytime you want. There's no start and end period. There's curriculum there ready for you to jump in. I will be shooting new content and refreshing the material at the end of January into February if you want to join us live. But the curriculum is there to jump in from the first day you join. And then because there's that customized approach where I am checking in on you, you're sending me audits, we're doing those one on one calls. That's how we customize your experience experience when you join. But you can buy and join at any time that you want. But I'm also attracting a cold audience to my business as well. And the way I do this is I run ads which are helping me warm my audience up from addition to my YouTube content. And I will tell you, my YouTube content does help me keep my ads a little bit cheaper because it does a great job of warming my audience. But I funnel cold audiences and into low ticket products like my video game plan, my prep system, things around $27. And these products are basically little pieces of the YouTube coaching experience pulled out for them to taste test. They get a sense of my teaching style and I really get to show them my Authority in video YouTube strategy for business owners. I then have emails going out to them as soon as they buy a low ticket offer that continues to feed them value, that continues to build that relationship. Also have a form where they can fill out that I ask them to and I will unlock a special bonus training for them that gives me their Instagram handle or their YouTube channel which allows me to reach out to them personally and start to have a conversation. So I could just reach out to them in the Instagram DMS and be like, hey, I saw you bought this. Thank you so much. Let me know if you have any questions. Adding that personal touch for a cold audience really shows that you're going above and beyond and makes you stand out. But these emails in this personal touch that I'm doing gets somebody who bought a $27 offer more likely to upsell or to jump up to my YouTube coaching experience. And this has been freaking working like gangbusters. In fact, I've been making daily sales of my low ticket offers as continue to build this warm pool of potential YouTube coaching experience clients. I've been making sales to those low ticket products every single day since around October. I've had a sale every day since October which has led me to the second biggest lesson Lear learned in 2024 is to stick with YouTube. YouTube, YouTube. It seems obvious, right? Trina, you're a YouTube strategist, of course. But I also suffer from shiny object syndrome like many of you might as well. And I also get FOMO that if I don't show up on Instagram, I'm missing out on something special. But I did a video back in October that I will link to right here sharing how I'm quitting Instagram. And spoiler alert, next week I will be having a follow up video sharing what has happened since I've quit Instagra the last three months. But I stopped spending time on Instagram. I took all the time that's spending on Instagram, put it into my YouTube, put it into my funnels, and now I'm making daily sales without any Instagram strategy at all. Is my YouTube channel growing massively? Absolutely not. But is revenue being generated from my YouTube channel? That is are people watching my videos and then buying my low ticket offers every day? I actually realized this shift, this pivot, this change needed to happen based on the third lesson that I learned learned in 2024, and that's get the right help. And by help, I'm talking about a coach, a consultant, a mentor that can get your business mojo going again. The end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 for me was rough to say the least. I did go a month or two where I didn't pay myself just so I could make sure my employees were paid. I also started 2024 with three full time employees and now I'm down to just one and myself. But around June, when I was at the beach, which is always kind of like these epiphany moments for me because when I can leave my office, I can leave my normal space, my normal routine and just, I don't know, the ocean air, the sand, the vacation vibes, it's usually where I have my biggest epiphanies and my biggest kind of like jolts of ideas or inspiration. Because that's when I decided to go above and beyond what I thought I could afford and hire a coach that I had been following for years and never worked with one on one. And I thought working with them, one on one was never going to be viable because she's good, so she's expensive. But I just knew it was the next step that I had to make. And that first month I worked with her and also I was on vacation. So it was only about two weeks we had worked together. And within those 3, 2, 3 ish weeks of working with her and strategizing our first promotional effort, which was completely email, just an email promotion effort, I doubled my investment with her in the course of around two to three weeks. And this time period was in July when typically you hear, you know, no, by July, July is slow. There's not a lot of buying going on in the summer months. That's when I knew within a month, okay, right, decision made. I also started to feel inspiration again and ideas flowing just to have her back and forth. And this was all completely through Slack. So we communicate through Slack, back and forth, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, that's all she's online. In just that short amount of time, so many ideas started going and my marketing efforts and my messaging and everything just became so clear in such a short amount of time. Working with the right person. In fact, I initially had signed up to work with her for two months and I am still working with her right now and I will probably work with her through February. So that's almost nine months. And I'm able to afford her because of the marketing efforts and the feedback and the insight I have gotten from her to be able to afford that. And if you're wondering, it's Mariah. Cause I would 1000% check out her podcast, I will link it in the description box below. Because even when I listen to her podcast, her free podcast, I get ideas, I get inspiration. So definitely somebody that you should be watching. So going into 2025, make sure you're getting outside perspective or consulting or coaching from somebody who inspires you and pushes you to the edge of what you think you can do. Alright, so with all of those lessons, there's three lessons learned. What am I going to be doing differently in 2025? First of all, less expensive expenses. Now let me be clear. I am not trying to run like a empire over here. I'm personally trying to run a lifestyle business. A business where I get to do something that I love. I get to make some money off of it and make enough money to be able to go on the vacations, to be able to, you know, have some fun money to spend. I'm not the sole breadwinner here. Could I be 1000% I could be. Do I want to be where I'm at in my life right now with kids who have super busy schedules? No. So I have a number that I need to make each year which isn't very big at all. So my goal going into 2025 is have less expenses. When I have less expenses it means I have to make less money to hit the revenue that I need to. And what that means is I can take on less clients and give those clients that I do work with the really close one on one feedback that I love doing. So the first way that I'm doing that is I mentioned earlier, I am now to just one full time employee. I also had like two or three contractors that worked pretty consistently with me in 2024 that we are not working with in 2025 either. And I'm going to be incorporating which I've been wanting to do. But more important now, at least two Fridays a month I am dedicated to sitting down and reviewing my expenses just to see where I can eliminate or if something creeped up or just to really keep control on my expenses because I want to run a higher profit MAR in 2025. The second thing I'm taking into 2025 is revenue routines. Now this is not my word. This again comes from Mariah Cause and she does talk about revenue routines on her podcast. So 1000% check that out. But I've taken her idea or her system of revenue routines and tied it into my YouTube content and the results I'm getting are amazing to say the least. This is literally how I'm making sales every single day. Is this revenue routine married with my YouTube strategy? I will link to the podcast where she talks more about revenue routines, but let me share how it breaks down in my business. So I will post a video on Monday. There's a strategy. There's a revenue strategy behind that Monday video. I take that Monday video. I actually use Chat GTP to do this to speed things up. So I will take the transcript or the video game plan from that Monday video, plug it into Chat gtp, have it write me three short, valuable, more fun emails and it spits it out from Chat gtp. I mess with it more but it gets the ball rolling. So I send these emails on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Again, all valuable, all insightful, but it's all pushing a particular product in that Monday video that I mentioned. Then if I have time, I will also ask Chat GTP to spit out two Instagram carousel posts so that I can post two Instagram carousels on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So I'm being active on Instagram, but I'm not doing a lot to be active on Instagram. Now the first week I implemented this system, after the full week of the video, three emails, the two Instagram posts, we made 20 sales in one week with that system. So my committed to that system 1000%. The third thing I'm taking into 2025 is nothing new. I'm really gonna stick to this one. I told Aaron, who is my only employee left to like hit me across the head if I come up with something new. Because we're staying to the system, we're refining and tweaking it. That's all we're doing in 2025. Refine and tweak, Refine and tweak. So I currently have three low ticket products that funnel people into my YouTube coaching experience. That's the video game plan, that's the prep system and CEO day. These three products all convert incredibly well on their sales page all around about 30% conversion rates. We also have bumps on these. So like when you go to the sales page and you go to check out it says would you like to also offer this as well? And that bump usually converts around 75 to 80% which is significantly above industry benchmarks. And so knowing this products work and the bumps work. Now I'm working on the back end to either offer a one time offer at around $200, which is one thing new, but we technically created here in 2024 and taking it into 2025 and working on refining and tweaking the email sequence that we sen who buy those products to get them into the YouTube coaching experience. I'm also going to be doing a brand new free workshop in January 2025. So keep a lookout on that. That is the only new thing that I will be bringing into 2025 as well. And we're going to continue to refine and improve that free training, that free workshop as well. So that means I will have four total main ways to get people into my world. And all of those four things funnel people into the YouTube coaching experience. And then in 2025 I will have one, maybe two. I haven't decided yet if I want to do one or two really big launch. And it will be a virtual summit kind of similar to what I did in this year in 2024 because it did so well. I know my audience, I know you all love this time with me, this one on one time with me in a virtual summit. And we'll take Everything that we Learned from the 2024 virtual summer conference to make 2025 even better instead of creating a brand new launch thing. And I say maybe two launches because if I'm hitting my goals in the summer of 2025 and I realize I don't need to have a launch in the fall, why do it? The fourth thing that I'm taking into 2025 is day to day. So you heard me mention a little bit about that earlier. About every other Friday I was gonna spend looking at my expenses. Will that also include specific metrics as well? While also be looking at expenses on those days, I'm also going to be dedicating time to looking at traffic to my sales pages, looking at the conversion rates from that week. If we're testing a new headline, did it increase or decrease the conversion rates? I'm going to be looking at email open rates every single week, click through rates every single week, upsell. So how many people are coming in on a low ticket offer and how many are up upping to the YouTube coaching experience and where is the disconnect happening? When is it happening? How I can improve that renewals of the YouTube coaching experience? Because we are getting a great renewal rate right now. Once people get in, they are loving it and they don't want to leave because they realize how much support that I'm providing and not just YouTube but their business as well. So these data days are basically to remind me stick with the plan, refine, tweak, test again, stop creating new things that we don't have any data on and start making the things we do have work better for you. All of that said, you know my entire marketing Strategy hinges on YouTube and it has been the biggest game changer in my business and so many of my clients businesses as well. So if you're looking to commit to YouTube in 2025 and you want to start making daily sales from your YouTube videos, to have somebody that's being completely open, honest and transparent with you on what is and isn't working in the business space right now. Join me inside the YouTube coaching experience. Like I said, I have a revenue number of what I really need to make, which means I only need to have about 70 clients for all of 2025. Once I hit that number, we're full and I will start a wait list because I also mentioned I like having this personalized one on one relationship with my clients to help them in the best possible way I can. They get my full attention, they get personalized audits, they get the calls with me as well and that's how I want to keep it. There are no plans that bring on coaches, additional coaches and me start to weave my way out. I'm in my coaching program. It is me you are getting coaching from and it will remain that way. So if that's something that you're really looking for somebody who's dedicated to your business, your YouTube strategy, go to trina little.com forward/coaching to grab a seat. Now I'm curious if you're taking any major lessons into 2025 with you and if you could share them with us in the comments. I think again, 2024 was a rough year, so any lessons learned, any insight here on this video would be super valuable. So if you're open to it, share any lessons that you've learned in the comments below. And if you want to hear the new way I'm setting goals for my business, it's a ten step process. Check the video that's on your screen right now because I go through the entire 10 steps to let you see how I set goals for 2025. Click that video and check it out now.