80: How this Digital Nomad Travels The World While Growing & Monetizing Multiple Successful Blogs

After getting an MBA and then getting licensed as a CPA, Lauren left it all behind to “start a blog.” Three years later, she now runs two successful blogs full-time, and this allows her the freedom to work whenever and from wherever she wants! In the last year, she’s been to 5 continents and 23 countries — and counting…

Lauren co-founded two blogs: Avocadu.com, a health and wellness blog about yoga and weight loss where they teach women how to lose weight through healthy dieting and exercise. She also co-founded Createandgo.com, an online business blog where they teach people how to start, grow, and monetize a blog that they can turn into a full-time career.

Katie (00:00):

Hi everyone. Thank you for tuning into the hustlenomics podcast. I’m your host Katie, and today I am so excited to be talking with Lauren McManus. She is a blogger course creator and a digital nomad living the life of her dreams. So Lauren, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Lauren (00:15):

Thanks so much for having me, Katie. I’m really excited to be here.

Katie (00:18):

Yeah. So I’m so excited to jump into everything that you’re doing, but I would love to hear more about your background. How did you get started in the blogging world and what kind of got you to the point where you are today?

Lauren (00:29):

Yeah, absolutely. So I was actually living a completely different life when I first started. I was a full time tax accountant working at a small firm in Dallas and I was climbing the corporate ladder. I was doing the nine to five thing. I had just gotten my master’s in business about a year before and I had actually just gotten licensed for my CPA exam. I had just become a certified public accountant. So yeah, I was on the fast track to the accounting career and my business partner Alex Nerney, he was a personal trainer at the time and he always knew that he wanted to do something in the online world. He never quite wanted the normal nine to five job. And you know, I thought he was kinda crazy because I was super type a personality, totally scared of that kind of creative stuff. But he started a health and fitness website because of his background in health and fitness.

Lauren (01:22):

And I had just come off of my stint of being a hardcore vegan for a couple of years. So we definitely kind of bonded over that. And it honestly just started with a little bit of helping him with WordPress here and there. I would kind of watch him try to do some design stuff and I would think, you know what, let me help you with that. And honestly, that’s kind of, it just spiraled from there. It was more, it was just the hours I spent working on this health and fitness website. It was, it was fun to learn the software and just fun to, to kind of challenge myself in that way. And yeah, it just kind of grew from there. It was like every night, all the nights and weekends were spent kind of on this, I’m on this side project of starting this blog and at one point we just decided that, you know what, we we need to spend more time on it. We really enjoyed it and we actually ended up coding our full time job before we were making a single dime from our blog just because we, we really believed in it and we wanted to spend as much time as possible. And just a couple months later we turned our first profit and kind of grew it from there. So it was pretty, pretty crazy whirlwind.

Katie (02:30):

Yeah, that is. And I would love to talk about how you guys started monetizing that, but before I would love to just chat about that, that journey from the quitting your nine to five job without having kind of like a safety net. What were some of the reactions you were getting from maybe your, your friends or family or coworkers? Were they shocked and surprised?

Lauren (02:49):

Yeah, it was absolutely terrifying to be honest. I still remember the phone call to my dad, cause my dad is, he’s, he’s a lot like me. He’s pretty type a, and he, he also worked in an office most of his life, so it was kind of afraid of that phone call and, you know, and he was just like, he was very supportive. And my parents are kind of like that, you know, he didn’t quite agree with it or understand it. But he did get to travel a lot when he was younger, before he got into his office job. And that’s kinda what I told him was like, you know, dad, I, I can’t bear to think about not traveling until I’m, you know, in my sixties or seventies, you know, like when you can really, really travel and afford to do it. And so we got that and so he understood that.

Lauren (03:34):

And and so, yeah, I did have that support. It was still difficult because your family and your friends don’t quite understand. When it comes to like blogging or kind of making money in general online, no matter what you’re doing, a lot of people are skeptical and you can tell that they support you no matter what, but they don’t quite understand it. And there’s still that kind of skepticism. It was only really like our very first or very hardcore close friends that like really believed in us. So it, it is, it is challenging and I will just tell anyone to like, you have to really believe in yourself during this and kind of just to let the rest of it go.

Katie (04:14):

Yeah, absolutely. That’s awesome. It’s so nice to hear when people have that support system, even if they’re like, I don’t know what you’re doing, but I support you. And so what were your roles with you and your business partner when you guys started this blog?

Lauren (04:28):

Yeah, they were actually pretty defined roles in that when I first started, you know, because of being that accountant type a personality, I thought that I just didn’t have a creative bone in my body. I shied away from all things writing communication with our audience, anything like that. It terrified me and I just thought, you know, Alex is the creative person. Like that’s what he does. And I do like the internal stuff. Like I would do all the WordPress stuff, kind of setting up our blog posts. You know, the different, getting different software, connected, managing all of our finances, kind of all the internal operations. And Alex was definitely like our content writer, the creative brain. But the cool thing though is that over time I began to shift roles a lot. Alex is kind of our, our forward thinker.

Lauren (05:18):

He does like our SEO and he’s always thinking about the next projects. And I still do manage our business, but I actually write almost all of our content now. And yeah, it’s been pretty cool because I, I am a lot more creative. I guess than I ever thought that I was. And I’ve learned so many new skills just from just from doing this. I mean, like I would think, you know, now like talking to someone who, who I can see would say the same objections of, Oh, I can’t write, I’m not, I’m not creative. I can’t be a blogger. Like I was that person. And I learned everything just on the job, you know? Just from experience.

Katie (05:52):

Yeah, definitely. And as we mentioned before, we kind of jumped on here. Both our audiences are, most of the time people starting out and they’re very new to this, whether it’s starting a business or starting a blog. So what were some of the things that you started to do when you first started this blog that maybe now looking back you’d maybe would do differently? Yeah,

Lauren (06:11):

I wish that I had, I guess, I mean, I, I can’t wish I was any different. Right. Cause I, that that was my personality. But I, I did, I did hide behind it for so long and because I had a business partner, I was able to kind of fall back on him and default to him to to taking care of a lot of that stuff where I know that the average person starts with themselves. I mean, they’re, they have to push themselves to wear every single hat in the business. You know, and I now, I have now worn all of the hats, but I didn’t necessarily start out wearing all the hats. I began to try more of them on over time as it, as it became comfortable. And so like, it’s, it’s so easy to just get caught up in those fears and those doubts and, and telling you’re putting yourself in this box and saying, you know, I don’t have the skills to do this.

Lauren (06:58):

I should hire it out, or I’m gonna, you know, put that last on my to do with and just procrastinate until I absolutely have to do it. You know, the best advice I can give is to just, it’s just put yourself out there and just do it. And just try, I mean the biggest reason that we found success so quickly is because we AV, we tried absolutely everything. We ran webinars that only 10 people watched. We created products that we tried to sell and no one bought. We put ourselves out there and, and definitely got kicked down a few times. But it’s all the, it’s because of all the wrong things that we did that we figured out how to do it right. So I think putting yourself out there despite all those fears and anxieties that that you have and that, that person side of you telling you that you can’t do it to just do it because most of the time you can, maybe not right the first time, but, but you’ll get it.

Katie (07:46):

Yeah, absolutely. I agree 100% and done is always better than perfect. I think everybody struggles with that. Even as somebody who’s been in business for, you know, if they, if you’ve been in business for 10 years, you’re still struggling with that. So it gets easier every day. But what were some of those first practical steps that you did? Like, if somebody’s saying, all right, I want to be a blogger, I want to start a blog. Like where do I start? Is it setting up WordPress? Is it their branding? Is it the name? What would you suggest?

Lauren (08:13):

Yeah, absolutely. I think the, I think the best place, I mean, I guess once you’ve decided on what you want to blog about, I mean, the very first thing that we tell people is to kind of like, you know, don’t do some deep soul searching about what you want to start your business on. It’s more about, you know, what do you have knowledge and experience and that you can share with people. And for us that, you know, that was health and fitness because we were living that life. You know, I was always obsessed with it and Alex actually had some certifications in it, so that was like how we got started. And I think it’s you know, I, I guess if you’re, if you’re just talking practical, I mean, yeah, the best place to get started is just to, to hop this, to just do it, to just start a hosting plan, start in WordPress.

Lauren (08:58):

I, I still, I do believe that buying courses is the absolute best way to get any knowledge these days. There’s so much free information online that it’s like massively overwhelming and people are giving all kinds of piecewise free information and you know, everyone’s selling their, their best information. So, and, and not only that, but there’s, there again, there’s so much information, even so much paid information that I think I would really find one or two people that are doing what you want to do successfully and just become a disciple of them, you know, absorb all their free information by their courses if you can, but use them as a role model. Because you know, if you try to follow a 10 different people trying to tell you to make money online, you’re going to get super overwhelmed and end up being pulled in a hundred different directions. There’s, there’s just, it’s just so important to just get started, start writing content that you believe in, that you believe that can help other people. But look for a couple of people doing it right, that you can get direction from on kind of how to channel that energy in what you’re doing and put those, take the right steps at the right time.

Katie (10:04):

Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any suggestions for good people that they might be able to look up and kind of follow what they’re doing?

Lauren (10:11):

Yeah, I mean, it depends on if you’re talking about blogging. Of course I do sell blogging courses but the people that I personally looked up to before, you know, before we started creating our courses Melissa Griffin is a really great one. So is Pat Flynn. They’re both kind of in the online, make money online kind of sort of through blogging and other stuff related to that. So yeah, I absolutely recommend them if you’re talking about blogging specifically.

Katie (10:37):

Okay, cool. Definitely. I now add all that to the show notes so everybody can find it if they want to.

Lauren (10:42):

Wow.

Katie (10:43):

And now the next step, of course, if you started your blog and you’re writing great content that you believe in is getting people to actually read what you’re writing, right? Because everybody’s like, well, you know, nobody’s reading this. Maybe my mom and my aunt. So how would you people get their content out there through social media or email lists? What have you found to be most successful?

Lauren (11:06):

So our absolute favorite way to drive traffic is definitely through Pinterest. Pinterest, it’s not something that a lot of people, a lot of bloggers are using it now, but it’s something that I told her like, wait, what? I thought that Pinterest was just used for when people wanted to save ideas for their wedding or their upcoming trip or this next DIY project they want to do. But Pinterest is actually an awesome source of traffic for bloggers. And one of the things that we recommend to our blogging students is to just stay focused. When you first start, there’s this pull to get on every single social media platform out there to just, you know, make sure you have it all covered right. And the biggest pull I think is to Facebook just because it’s popular, but especially Instagram these days. You know, depending on how old you are, but Instagram is probably the most popular platform right now.

Lauren (11:58):

But it’s actually pretty, pretty bad for driving traffic to blog posts. It’s super great if you want to be an influencer and you want to kind of show your audience the personal side of you. You know, for me, I post all my travel stuff on there, but I don’t really post about blogging on my Instagram. So Pinterest is different in that when you’re on the platform, it is an image based platform just like in just like Instagram. But when you click on an image, you click on an image to actually visit a website or a blog post. And that’s the intent. And that’s what people expect. Whereas it’s very hard to add links on Instagram. You can’t add them to your description. You can add clickable links to your descriptions. That’s just not really the point of Instagram. Same with YouTube, you know, the points to kind of watch videos.

Lauren (12:42):

So Pinterest is really, really awesome for specifically driving traffic to blog posts. It’s also a search engine. So I’m similar to Google, you know, people are telling you exactly what they’re searching for and you can create content based on keywords and that sort of stuff, but it’s also a lot less competitive than Google. So and it does have the image based part of it, right? So Google’s justice search a search platform, but Pinterest, you can also create great images to get your content seen as well. So there’s kind of an added you know, added level there. But it’s absolutely our favorite method for driving traffic and it’s really why we were able to get our health. And fitness blog off the ground so quickly because we had, we had so much traffic coming through that even though we weren’t making money, we were able to test out different ideas, different products. We started building an email list, we’re able to ask our email list exactly what they were interested in who they were, what kind of products they wanted, what kind of problems they were facing. It was all due to all this traffic that we had coming in. So that’s what really kind of began to be the turning point for making our blog actually successful and making money.

Katie (13:51):

Yeah, I love Pinterest. I agree it’s totally underrated. And anybody who is not on Pinterest go ahead and do it because it’s totally worth it. But just like any other, you know, social media platform going in there without a strategy, you’re just going to be confused and overwhelmed and you might end up falling flat. So what’s a good strategy to start out with? For example, if someone’s wanting to specifically drive traffic to their blog?

Lauren (14:16):

Yeah, you definitely need a strategy. And you know, I think what everyone does when they first get on any platform is they start Googling, right? They’re like, how do I get followers on Pinterest? How do I, how do I drive a ton of traffic to my blog? And the same as what I said before, you’re going to end up with a lot of piecewise information. I still do recommend regardless of whether it’s Pinterest or whether it’s Instagram. I think social media these days is very competitive and it is best to learn from experts who have proven to who saw courses and who have proven to be able to grow their audience. So I do think that either buying a or just looking up to one or two people that, that really know their stuff, like Kate all from simple pin media is a great person to follow.

Lauren (14:59):

And then also just definitely investing depending on what traffic platform you’re using. But in regards to Pinterest, I think it’s also using a great software to help you grow. So my favorite software for that is tailwind, tailwind, Tez, Pinterest scheduling and tribes and other collaboration tools. They also have analytics. You can see exactly how you’re doing. And I’ve met several members of the tailwind team. A couple of them are in wifi tribe with me as well traveling so they’re an awesome company, an awesome team, and they’re super invested in their content creators, their customers who are content creators. So just definitely investing in a course if you can. There’s also a lot of free courses out there too. But investing, you know, tailwinds I think 10 or 12 bucks a month. So a tool like that can really, really help you grow and help you just at least check and see what you’re doing to see if you’re kind of on the right track. And then it helps you figure out what you need to improve on.

Katie (15:53):

Yeah, I agree. I use tailwind as well and it just opened my eyes to how many possibilities Pinterest has to offer for people looking to drive traffic. Group boards is another thing that I’ve been getting into recently. Do you mind kind of explaining what that is for people who’ve never even heard about that?

Lauren (16:09):

Yeah, of course. Group boards are awesome. It’s one of the reasons why I think Pinterest is one of the best platforms to get started with because it is hard on any platform to get started when your competitors all have tons of followers. You definitely, I think the best thing that you can do to grow on any platform these days is to be, is to have outstanding content. Whether that’s images or whether that is written content, whatever platform that is. I think that having outstanding content will help you get to the top because no matter what, if people are engaging with your content, you’ll get seen more. But the great thing about Pinterest is that there’s some awesome collaboration tools that kind of allow you to almost share followers, share exposure before you get it. And one of those two tools is group boards. So a group boards, essentially it boards that someone else owns like as it’s on their account, but they can invite you to join it and you can actually pin on it.

Lauren (17:06):

So I have, I’m almost a couple hundred thousand followers on my health and fitness board now. So if you were to just start out in health and fitness and you maybe have 10 or 20 and I invite you to hit on my board, you basically get exposure to all of those followers that are on that are falling my board. So it’s a great way to network with other bloggers cause you can send emails to people and say, Hey, I’d love to collaborate with you. You can meet other bloggers that way. But it’s also a great way to get your content exposure. And you know, the, the idea there is it’s reciprocal. So if I was to invite someone on depend on my board, I would only do so if I think that that person saves really great content because that great content is content that my audience want to see as well.

Lauren (17:50):

And then the other tool actually that I think is almost even better these days than group boards is through tailwind. It’s tailwind tribes. So tailwind tribes works in a similar way in that on their platform you can actually share content and other people that are in your, what they call a tribe. If they, they can see that content and they can save it. So it’s kind of like if you, if you want to share a piece of content and you have to also share someone else’s. So it’s kind of a share for share, but it allows you to basically get your content in front of other people when you don’t really have the followers yet.

Katie (18:24):

That’s fantastic. Yeah. Everybody take notes on this because you’ll be so surprised how much more eyes you’re going to get on your content by just implementing a few of these amazing strategies. And so once you’ve kind of got your blog up and going and you feel comfortable about, you know, getting your content out there, obviously the next step is wanting to monetize it and wanting to make some money. So what are the first steps that you guys took to monetize your first blogger? You’re a, now you have a few, I think.

Lauren (18:51):

Yeah, we have a couple we do in order to monetize our health and fitness blog. I will definitely say, you know what we just talked about that that stuff is the most important. So the two most important things to do before you worry too much about money are definitely driving traffic to your blog. And of course having, having some content on there as well, but driving traffic to your blog and beginning to build your email list, those are the two most important things to do before you start monetizing because it’s very difficult to monetize without that. Of course, you can’t make any money if people aren’t visiting your blog anyway. The, the one big mindset that we have to kind of bust people out of when they, when they get started with us is that, you know, everyone’s so money focused and I get that because you’re doing this because you want to make money, you want to build an online business, but you have to take the right steps in the right time.

Lauren (19:40):

And you know, some people say, well, I don’t want to bother driving any traffic if I don’t have anything to sell. And that’s like the opposite mindset that you want to have because we know this because we made this mistake. We actually had our first health and fitness blog. We kind of touched up to be a failure and we scratched it, went to the drawing board and created a new one in the same, you know, health and fitness space. But what ended up happening is that we took those steps out of order. We started our blog just had like a trickle of traffic. We didn’t have too much yet. Well, we hadn’t really built an email list and we thought that we had a really great idea for a product. At the time we were marketing to young 25, you know, somethings kind of like us.

Lauren (20:23):

You know, we were living in Dallas, Texas at the time and we wanted to create, you know, these guides to kind of help people still have a social life and stay fit. And we ended up creating this men’s guide and this woman’s guide and you know, we spent a few weeks on them. We thought they were awesome. We made all these awesome images sales pages to, to market and sell them. And we put them all up on our blog and tried to sell them and nobody bought them. Actually one, one girl bought them. And it was a, it was a blow because we just thought that we had this awesome product. But the problem was that we didn’t know what we were doing, right? We had never tried to monetize a blog before, but we create a product that we thought people wanted. And we also thought that we knew our audience.

Lauren (21:06):

And the funny thing is we, our audience was not made up of the people that we thought that they were, you know, we were writing content to try to attract a certain person. But the crazy thing is that when we took the right steps the next time around with our second health and wellness blog is that we essentially had the same guides that we sold. We just repackaged them and they sold immediately because we took those right steps and those right steps. We’re taking the time to start driving traffic and build an email list because then you can figure out who you’re selling to and what they even want before you create a product. Because creating a product that no one wants isn’t going to get you anywhere no matter how fabulous that you think it is. The biggest step there to actually creating that product I’m in beginning to monetize was actually, you know, in our, in our first welcome email, it was a sentence at the bottom of this email that said, you know, Hey, I’d love to learn a little more about you, you know, for us we blogging mostly about weight loss.

Lauren (21:59):

So this question said, what’s the number one thing that you’re struggling with when it comes to losing weight? And the responses. We did get tons of responses, like personal email responses and they said, not just, Hey, I’m having, you know, I’m having trouble getting to the gym. Or like, you know, Oh, I like carbs too much. The responses that we got were actually like, Hey, I’m 45 years old. I have two children. I’ve tried five diets this year, I’m 200 pounds overweight. I mean they, they told us their stories because they wanted someone to help them. And these were the things that helped us figure out to build this target customer and figure out who our audience was and then create a product that they wanted. And, and more specifically what we ended up doing is we ended up selling affiliate products to them in those related areas first just to make sure that, you know, Hey, they are interested in weight loss, are interested in this type of product. So we sold affiliate products first while we were kind of getting ideas and creating our own product. And then once we kind of effectively sold some affiliate products, we added our, we created some email funnels and sold our own products and they sold right away because we knew so much more this second time around.

Katie (23:08):

Yes, that’s amazing advice. Market research can change the game. So I’m so, so glad you mentioned that. And that’s something that a lot of people just totally skip over in the beginning, but it makes a huge difference the second time around when you actually do it. And a lot of this amazing stuff that you’ve been talking about and all these great tools and all that stuff, a lot of it can be found on your a create and go website. Correct.

Lauren (23:30):

Yeah. Creating go.com we have all kinds of free articles and we sell blogging courses from kind of starting your blog. We, someone on Pinterest traffic. What we did was we started avocado, our health and wellness blog first. And after we took that blog to figures, we started creating go.com and that’s the first course that we created was on Pinterest. And just to kind of share our knowledge of Pinterest and how we use it to grow our business. And then we created the blogging courses and those essentially we kind of open up how we took our health and wellness blog to six figures in its first year. And it’s kind of all the strategies that we use from day one, starting, you know, avoiding all those mistakes that we’ve made along the way and teaching the strategies that did work. So that’s kind of the basis of create and go and, and how we teach content on that blog.

Katie (24:18):

Fantastic. Yet guys, go check out these courses. I know I’m going to be going through this website because there’s so much valuable information on here now I’ll link to it in the show notes. But so with all this amazing stuff that you’ve created, you’re making six figures with all these different blogs, it’s created a life that has allowed you to travel and see the world. So do you mind talking a little bit about that?

Lauren (24:38):

Yeah, absolutely. It’s another thing to talk about. I’m actually recording this from Croatia right now. It’s pretty great. It’s beautiful and beachy and yeah, I’m inside my Airbnb just, just working. But yeah, we started Alex site first found this group called the wifi tribe just about three years ago. And we went in our first international trip with them to Nicaragua. And it’s essentially a, a group of traveling entrepreneurs. Well, no, I’m sorry, not just entrepreneurs. Some people would just have remote jobs and it’s made up of people from all of the world. So I get to meet people other people that are from the United States, but I’ve met people from Lithuania and so many other countries and basically every month we go to a new location and we were, we all worked during the week. It’s kind of like Monday through Friday, get on your computer or get your work done.

Lauren (25:29):

And then the weekends we take fun trips together. And so yeah, at some are entrepreneurs like myself, some just have normal remote jobs where they can actually just work from anywhere. So people are flexible, some people aren’t. It’s really awesome. It’s really awesome community of people that like to work really hard and bounce business ideas off of each other. But then we get to go explore mountains and beaches and deserts and all kinds of fun stuff on the weekend. And yeah, I don’t, I don’t do it every single month. This is actual, this last year, I’ve now been traveling full time for a year before. I kind of did it on and off. I will say it’s a great dream to have but I, but building your business is definitely the most important thing to do first because Alex and I kind of started doing that. We started doing my fight tribe and then we would kind of have to travel for a month or two and then go back home for three more, three or four months to really focus in on growing our business. And it’s only now that we’ve had our businesses for about three years that I can kind of justify taking more time off. Cause I used to work a lot of nights and weekends as well. But it’s a great balance now that I get to be able to have this community of people to get a lot of work done during the week, but also go explore foreign countries, you know, on the weekends.

Katie (26:37):

That is so cool. That has to be, I mean that sounds like a dream come true to me. So what has been your favorite place to visit so far?

Lauren (26:45):

Oh man, that’s difficult. I have a couple, I think, you know, actually I was going to say, I guess I, yeah, I have like three, but my favorite place that like really kind of has my heart is actually Columbia. I’ve spent three months there this year and it’s the longest I’ve spent anywhere. I’m trying to learn Spanish too. So I do prefer to be in Spanish speaking countries right now and being able to understand, you know, even a little bit the language of foreign country and it, it makes it a lot different. The way that the wifi tribe travels is that we live places for a month and so you’re not just going to like touristy areas and doing the normal like vacation tourist stuff. You’re actually kind of living and trying to immerse yourself a bit in the culture and stuff in each place. So Columbia I’ve spent the most time in and it’s, it kinda feels like my second home at, at this point. There’s just so many beautiful, beautiful mountains out there and the people are so nice. So I think is probably my favorite. But, but next to definitely are Lisbon, Portugal and Cape town, South Africa. Those are both beautiful countries for very different reasons. But those are definitely my top favorites.

Katie (27:53):

That is incredible. Wow, that’s so cool. I’m definitely going to have to look into that. And so how have you balanced the travel and the time zones and are you working with clients one-on-one? How have you balanced all of that?

Lauren (28:06):

It’s definitely been a process. I don’t, thankfully, I love the flexibility of working for myself and being a blogger because I do, I do can, I can travel in any time zone that I want. And there are a lot of remote workers in wifi tribe that can’t, are prefer not to go to certain parts of the world because they can’t make it work with their call schedules and stuff. I thankfully can have as many as, as many or as few calls and stuff as I want. And I have purposely structured my business to be that way. People have asked us if we do any coaching or any one on one. And we don’t because we choose to not have that be a part of our business model. We could make a lot more money doing it. But for us, the freedom to be able to kind of create that more passive income that was important to us.

Lauren (28:50):

We didn’t want to have to be chained to calendars and things like that. And you know, that might change over time. We’re thinking about creating our own podcast. You know, as we grow we might, we might change those things, but up to this point we’ve structured our business that way that it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be that way. So I do sell courses and I have support groups for those courses and I communicate in those. And I’ve, we’ve actually just been building out our team this year to be able to take on some of these tasks in order to free up our time so we don’t kind of have to be chained to our computers as much. You know, in the morning I get to all kinds of work done because nobody in the States is awake by, the problem is my team is starting to wake up when I’m just getting off the computer in the evening.

Lauren (29:30):

So it has made it hard to collaborate with my team, especially Alex on certain projects that we have. We’re kind of a couple of big projects going on right now, so it can definitely be difficult. And not only that, but you know, I’m in Croatia and it is kind of a touristy area in split and there’s all these people on vacation and going to the beach every day. And so it’s very, very tempting when you’re traveling to go out and do the fun stuff into what all the distractions take you. Especially it’s hard with the language barriers and trying to find new gyms and you know, new grocery stores and all that stuff. It’s taken me a while to like really get the rhythm of it. And now that I’ve traveled so much, I’m, it’s a, it is a lot easier for me, but that’s where I, I do think that the best advice I can give anyone is to try to put your business first and don’t try. I, I meet a lot of people in wifi tribe that are trying to grow their businesses and it’s very difficult for them because it’s expensive to travel. And B, there’s just so many distractions. So try to get as much of a foundation for your online business or whatever you’re doing first and then because then you’ll have a little bit more time to really enjoy the countries that you’re, and you don’t want to have to be chained to your computer the entire time you’re at, you’re traveling.

Katie (30:43):

Right. Absolutely. I totally agree. And we can all follow everything that you’re doing and your travels on your Instagram, right?

Lauren (30:49):

Yeah, absolutely. My, my Instagram and I’m tagging my, if I try all the time, so if anybody wants to check them out as well. A couple of my really good friends started it. So yeah, I’m always posting and my story is about, you know, where I’m at and everything.

Katie (31:02):

Fantastic. And I know you’ve mentioned tons of great resources and things that people can look up, but just to kind of close things out, is there anything else that you would recommend, whether it’s courses, podcasts, books, anything that you found helpful that our listeners might be able to look up and find helpful themselves?

Lauren (31:18):

Yeah, for sure. You know, I’m on a podcast right now, but I got to say I’m not the biggest podcast listener. It’s just not really my jam. Although if anybody wants to learn Spanish, I am totally on the Duolingo lingo podcast these days. They’re my favorites. But as far as, as far as business goes a book that was really important to me, it’s a book called the slight edge and one of the few books that besides Harry Potter that I’ve read multiple times, and it’s just about, it’s about, you know, like you could, making big decisions in your life often feels kind of daunting. Whether it’s starting an online business, whether it’s starting a new weight loss program, if you have 40 pounds to lose, this book is kind of about making small changes that end up kind of snowballing into really big life changes.

Lauren (32:02):

And yeah, it’s just one of those books that like you read it and you start making changes, you know, but then it’s like life happens and you, you fall off the wagon. And so it’s, it’s a really great book to help you just kind of stay motivated. And then another, another podcast actually that I do recommend my dear friend Natalie bacon, she has a podcast called design your dream life and it’s all about time management and money and leadership and happiness. She kind of ties all these different things into kind of being your best self and being successful no matter what. So especially when you’re getting started, like the kind of stuff that she talks about, like that’s the kind of stuff that, that you want in your life that helps you keep moving. So definitely highly recommend that. Fantastic. And I would love if you could share how everyone can find you online.

Lauren (32:47):

Yeah, of course. I’m creating go.com is our website. We are also have a YouTube channel as well. Those are probably the best places to get us. We don’t really use Instagram a whole lot. We more use it for personal again, so I have my Instagram if you want to follow any of my travels. But yeah, create and go.com is definitely the best place to find us. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lauren, for coming on today and talking to me all the way from Croatia. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you again. Yeah, thanks so much, Katie. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.