Episode 520: 5 Ways to Bring More Money Into Your Business (Part 1 of 3) (Mindset & Self-Care)

EBT520 – 5 Ways to Bring More Money Into Your Business (Part 1 of 3)

Intro  00:01

Hey food bloggers. Thank you so much for joining me in this mindset and self-care focused episode here on Eat Blog Talk. One of the reasons I started a blog talk was to hold a space to talk about the importance of mindset and self-care. Being an entrepreneur can be a lot. If we are not taking care of ourselves, then getting actionable information about SEO Pinterest or whatever else is all moot. I will meet you back here every Wednesday to discuss various mindset and self-care topics. So you have the energy and space to tackle the rest.

Sponsor (Kara Myers)  00:37

Hey, bloggers, are you feeling overwhelmed by your blogging business and unsure where to focus your efforts to grow? Do you have trouble finding systems that work for you? I’m Kara, food blogger at sweetlysplendid.com. And full service blogging business coach, there’s so much that goes into blogging and finding what works best for you is the key to growing and making profit. I don’t believe in a one size fits all solution. It’s about what’s right for your business, not what the industry says you need. With my person first approach, I see the person not just the business, because at the end of the day, burnout won’t make you profitable. We’ll work together to pinpoint bottlenecks, make customized solutions and provide actionable steps in a one to one environment that fits in with your life and your time constraints. your blog and your success are the priority and main focus of every coaching session. My coaching program isn’t just another blog coaching system where you get a generic list of things to do. I would love to chat with you about how we could work together to grow your business for any questions or to sign up, just head over to sweetlysplendid.com/coaching to get started.

Megan Porta  01:42

Hello food bloggers Welcome to another awesome self-care and mindset focused episode of Eat Blog Talk. In this episode, we are going to talk about one part of three on the topic of money. The title of this episode is Five Ways to Bring More Money into Your Business, part one, and I will cover parts two and three in the following two episodes. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. And it’s only been in recent years that I’ve been able to say that I think it’s so important to talk about this and not shove it under the rug like I did for so much of my life. And like so many people tend to do. When you think about this, the fact that a lot of people do shove it under the rug. It’s kind of funny to think about. Because we all are most of us, I guess want more money. We want the freedom that money brings us. Yet we’re afraid to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it. It’s a topic that is off limits for so many people. So if we just stop for a second and ask ourselves, why can’t we talk about money? It’s a vital part of our lives. Why shouldn’t we be talking about this? I do like to respect when people don’t want to talk about it. Because it can be a really personal, almost touchy subject for whatever reason, it’s something that some people just hold it close to their chests, and they don’t want to go there. And that’s fine. With that said, I do believe that talking about money isn’t something that we should feel ashamed to talk about. If you personally are not ready to talk about money, that’s okay. But when you are ready, I believe you will serve yourself and you will serve others better by speaking of it more openly. 

Megan Porta  03:37

So in the summer of 2018, I found myself in a lot of completely unnecessary debt. It was one of those moments where I was like, how did this happen? It really sneaks up on me. I’ve been running my business since 2012. When I started my business, I was diligent about having a budget and staying on track, and all of those things that we should be doing with our businesses. But somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that. And I stopped using a budget for quite a few years. So when I got to that point where I realized I was in debt, I had not been following a budget, I had not been keeping track of my expenses, or my income. I was way too loosey goosey with everything. Granted, I wasn’t bringing a ton of money into my business at that point. But still, I should have been doing that. You may not know this about me. But I’m a little bit of a stubborn one. 

Megan Porta  03:37

My husband had been trying to talk to me about this for a while just that I wasn’t keeping track of anything. And that debt was piling up. I think I just kept hoping that something magical would happen and that the debt would go away. And that money would just start falling from the sky or something. So after that summer, when I had this realization, a few more months went by, I was agonizing over the entire situation. And I came to the point where I realized I just needed to change my perspective. And I needed to take action. My wake up call was when I got an email from my son’s school asking for $20 to insure his school iPad, I didn’t want to put it on a credit card. And we literally did not have that $20 in any account to put toward insurance for his iPad. At that point. We had a house we had an RV. We had a lot of things in our life that we’d worked for it. But it just seemed so weird to me that I couldn’t scrape together $20 to put toward this. I almost angrily deleted that email, and I just prayed that he would not lose his iPad, or damaged his iPad that year. Everything turned out fine. But that moment stuck with me. That is when I sat down with my husband and together we just formulated a plan. We created a really simple budget, a super easy Google Sheet to track what was coming into my business and what was going out. And we just stuck to it. That awareness of the money that was coming in and going out was a huge first step for me. 

Megan Porta  03:37

If you want to have more money in your life, I believe that you have to be aware of the money that’s coming in and the money that’s going out. That’s very clear to me now.

Megan Porta  03:37

The food blogging industry, as you know, is an extremely lucrative industry. There’s a lot of money flowing in and through our businesses. I believe that’s because the majority of us operate our businesses from a place of love, service and boldness. Also a lot of us are parents or individuals seeking freedom for ourselves and or our families or partners. And that is such a noble reason to want to make money. In the process of earning this money for our own personal freedoms, whatever those might be. A lot of food bloggers also have really kind giving and generous spirits, a strong desire for freedom plus a generous nature. Plus doing things that we love to do AKA passion, plus, serving people at the highest level. All of that added together is the start of a prime equation for making a lot of money. This is a really good start. But there’s always room for bringing more cash into your business accelerating your path to those desired freedoms you yearn for, and giving back more generously to your users and to other people or organizations that you feel inspired to support. 

Megan Porta  04:59

Money is a good thing. Yes, I acknowledge that there are people who use money for bad, obviously. But for most of you listening money does, can and will bring good things into your life and into your business. Whether you are making nothing from food blogging yet, or $100,000, a month or more, I encourage you to listen to this entire series. This one is for all of us. Let’s touch on this because you’re probably like, Well, why should I listen to you? Megan Porta, who are you? You’re not a millionaire. I acknowledge this. I am not a millionaire yet. But I have had a pretty impactful journey with money over the past five or six years. And I will just give you the Cliff Notes version of that. This feels really vulnerable to share. As I touched on a little bit ago, talking about money can feel really vulnerable and a little bit scary. But I’m going to do this anyway. Just a side note, too, with my story, I am completely leaving my husband out of this. So when I talk about this journey, this is all my business. It’s all stuff that I went through. It’s all on me. Yes, our finances are combined. But the problems that I’ve had with money in the past, were on my shoulders. 

Megan Porta  09:12

In addition to creating that budget, we made some changes. So we stopped spending on unnecessary things. We put a limit on other things. And we just operated out of that awareness for a while before really making any other changes. Then one day I heard someone talking about money mindset on a podcast. I had never heard those two words lumped together before but I thought it sounded so intriguing. I felt like I could use a good dose of mindset help on the topic of money. Why not? So I think I just Googled money mindset. And I found a money mindset expert and coach named Denise Duffield Thomas. She is an author. She writes books about this topic. She has an entire course and community It focuses just on money mindset. So I read all of her books within just a few weeks, the one that really stands out to me is Get Rich, Lucky Bitch. That book was mind blowing. I heard concepts in that book talked about that I had never considered before. Another book I read during that time was you are a badass at making money by Jen Sincero. That was another mind blowing book. And I just went down that path of reading money mindset books, if you want to get my list of what I have read on this topic, go to eatblogtalk.com/books, I have all of the books divided by category, and there’s a Money and Finance section, you can look through those if you want. 

Megan Porta  10:43

So after reading some of these books, I just felt ready to freaking make some money and to stop being irresponsible, like money was just going to show up on my doorstep and ring my doorbell. So I took action. And I have worked through and I continue to work through all of the things that I’m going to talk about inside of this series. Five and a half years after I had that realization that I just needed to make changes and started taking action toward that, I can tell you some of the things that have changed in my life in the realm of money, just so you know, this stuff works. So here we go. My yearly income has increased by 810%. We paid off our RV, we’ve made huge improvements in our backyard, a dream that we have had literally since we moved into our house in 2016. We’ve paid off all credit card debt. For the past couple of years, one of our main priorities is vacation. We love quality time with our boys, we love spending time together. So we spend a lot of our money on exploring the United States. Soon, we’re planning to go beyond the United States. And this makes us so happy. We also prioritize generous living, we’re always looking for ways to give back to people, organizations, etc, that we feel aligned with. And this feels so good to be able to do this. We started investing our money so that our bank account isn’t the only savings we have. We’ve got a nice little chunk of money in savings, which feels so good. My husband has basically retired from his job. So I’m not a millionaire yet. But I feel like the richest girl in the world, not just because of everything I just mentioned. But because of the freedom, and the happiness and the love and the fun and adventures that money has allowed for me and my family. 

Megan Porta  12:35

I am not ashamed to say that I love making money. I love money. I hope this is something that you can claim for yourself too. If not, you likely will by the end of the series. In this episode here, I’m going to talk through one of the five ways to bring more money into your business. two through five will come in the next two episodes. You are a food blogger, which gives you a great head start, you already have all of those things in your favor that I mentioned a little while ago, you have the strong desire for freedom, you have a generous spirit, you enjoy serving others, and you have a passion for what you do. You’re already ahead of the game, just because you’re an awesome food blogger. So let’s keep up that momentum. The number one way to bring more money into your business is rewrite the money stories that are holding you back. 

Megan Porta  13:27

When I first read Get Rich Lucky B and you are a badass at making money. These authors talk about this concept of rewriting your money stories. And I remember thinking, what I don’t have money stories that are holding me back. That’s crazy. But once I started thinking and writing through some of my ingrained beliefs about money, I realized that those stories existed in my mind, and I didn’t even know they were there. I definitely had money stories and they were definitely holding me back. I had quite a few of them actually, a lot of mine came from childhood and from my parents, as I think a lot of us can probably say, I say this with gentleness and love. My parents provided me with a whole slew of beliefs about money that just weren’t true. And the funny thing about my situation is that my dad’s money beliefs were very different from my mom’s money beliefs. So I got the whole gamut of weird money stories stuck in my head. 

Megan Porta  14:36

Probably the biggest story that I realized I’ve been carrying around with me for my entire life was that I need to work hard to make money like work my freakin butt off to the bone. And then at the end of the day, guess what? I still don’t have money. So working hard is essential, and that leads to being poor. This one came from straight from my dad, love you, dad. He’s the sweetest, kindest man you’ll ever meet. This belief has held him back in his life for making money. And it also held me back in my life for a very long time. My dad grew up in the Great Depression, there was very little money, there was very little food. And when he had the chance to work later in his life, it was ingrained in him that money is hard to come by work hard now work hard all the time. This is of absolute supreme importance. Working hard is one of the most important things in all of life, work hard, work hard, work hard. This is what your worth is measured by. So he kept that Great Depression mindset work hard. Yes, yes, yes. But we’re still going to scrape by to get food on the table. Once I had this realization that he had very unintentionally passed the story down to me, and probably my siblings as well. I knew I had to change that belief. So I started by writing through it. This is where either therapy, journaling, or both are so powerful. So here’s what I did, I simply wrote down, money is hard to come by, I have to work hard. But even hard work doesn’t produce enough money to actually enjoy life. That was the belief and I studied those words on paper. And then I worked to debunk them, and I wrote down the opposite. Money is easy to make, I can work less and earn more and more money all the time. This is one of my personal mantras. Still, to this day, I have it right here on my monitor on a sticky note, I say it to myself every single day. When I first wrote this, I didn’t believe it at first, after all, I lived 40 ish years carrying this around. So it took some work until I actually convinced myself that it was true. 

Megan Porta  16:51

I remember doing a lot of journaling through those few sentences, I would write down things like this isn’t my belief, it’s someone else’s belief. I don’t need to carry this around with me anymore. It doesn’t serve me and it doesn’t serve the people who work for me. It doesn’t serve my family, I choose to no longer carry this false belief around with me. Money comes to me easily, Money comes to me abundantly. Money is good energy flowing through my life and flowing through my business. I work less and I earn more. When I repeated this enough, I started to see that it was actually true in my life, and truly believe it. And that’s where things start to get really magical. Some suggestions for you write out your beliefs, you’ll likely have an idea about what the main ones are, because you probably remember things that your parents said to you or that you’ve carried around with you for your life. Here are some common ones, I think that a lot of us carry around. So I’ll mention a few maybe you can relate to some of these. Money doesn’t grow on trees, rich people are gross, I am not made of money, I will never be able to earn more than X number of dollars, maybe it’s a millionaire, maybe it’s something else. I am not fill in the blank enough to be rich, maybe you perceive a rich person as being something that you’re not, and you can’t relate to it. I’m not good with money, I’ll always be poor. I live paycheck to paycheck. And it’s greedy to want money. 

Megan Porta  18:26

The greedy one is something else that I dealt with in my life, it was an underlying message in my childhood, that people who wanted money, were greedy. So I had to really work through that one as well. All of those wonderful statements and so many more are beliefs that could potentially be holding you back from making the money that you want to make and therefore achieving the freedoms that you want to achieve in your life. I recommend that you take the next week to pull out one or maybe even more of these limiting money beliefs that you have that you’ve been carrying around with you and start rewriting your stories. talk through each belief with a trusted friend or journal through it, or do both together until you have new money stories, to define your life moving forward. Based on the work you do come up with a new statement that debunks your old false one. And write it down and place it somewhere where you can see it and repeat it to yourself as much as you possibly can. So from the story that I shared with you about working hard, but at the end of the day not having any money to show for it. The statement that comes out of that for me is Money comes to me easily and abundantly. I work less and earn more. And like I mentioned earlier at first this might not be believable to you. That’s okay. And that’s normal. Once you work through the other steps in the series that we’ll talk about in the next couple of episodes, you will start believing in it and that’s where the magic is going to start happening. For now, just come up with those limiting money beliefs.Talk or write through them and create new beliefs with positive spins. Write the new beliefs down and repeat them to yourself constantly. Remember that these limiting beliefs you’ve been carrying around for probably most of your life can keep you from so much goodness if left uncovered. I will meet you back here in the next episode to talk about two more ways to bring more money into your business. Thank you so much for listening food bloggers. I will see you next week. 

Outro  20:38

Thank you so much for listening to this mindset and self-care episode here on eat blog talk. If you are a food blogger providing a service for other food bloggers, and you want to spread the word about the value that you offer. I would love to offer you a free way to do just this. Send me a 60 second audio clip to be featured in a mindset and self-care episode here on Eat Blog Talk in 2024. Go to eatblogtalk.com/audioclip to learn more.