When I started designing this website, I wanted it to feel like me. How many of you had also said that before diving into colours, fonts, photo shoots, and writing your about page?! One of the ways that I infused a little bit more of me in this place that I call my digi-home is by putting my actual, hand-written signature on it, and I (surprisingly) get a lot of questions on how to make a digital signature.

Read more to get step-by-step video tutorial on how to make a digital signature by using just the camera on your phone and Canva.

I'm going to do something that most other business owners don't do, and share my real income numbers from every year of my business, up to and including the time of writing this.

Why don't more business owners/coaches do this? Because, frankly, it's terrifying to think that a whole bunch of my ideal clients (i.e. you reading this right now) will see my real numbers, know that I'm not running a 6 figure nutrition practice, and immediately dismiss all the knowledge I have about running a "successful on the outside" holistic business.

Well, screw that, you need to see these numbers and the timeline so that I can show you what I was actually doing in my business, and what happened to my income because of it. There are some really good lessons hidden in these numbers, and I think you deserve to see them, even if *I* am terrified of showing them to you.

By now, you probably know how much I love a great self development book. Books that are full of life hacks, how to get your mind out of the abundance gutter, and to overall just get better.

For me, one of my major mindset hurdles that is complete BS is the following belief:

I have to be busy & stressed to make money.

100%, complete bullshit.

For me, this mindset comes from a combination of society and media (think about how many movies or online articles feature high powered executives who work 80 hours a week and try to play the big business game but it ultimately destroys their life), books like "I don't know how she does it", and my mother (sorry, Mom, I love you!). My mom kicks ass, and worked 40+ hours a week while balancing two very active kids who were in multiple sports while trying to keep her house spotless with a not overly domestic husband (sorry, Dad, I love you!). Now that I'm a mom, I have no idea how she did it without going crazy. It's easy to see where this deeply held belief of mine came from.

So when I saw the book "I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women make the Most of Their Time" by Laura Vanderkam at the bookstore, it was calling my name so damn loud that I couldn't not buy it.

Plus, after getting outside of my comfort zone (aka hiding behind my computer) and travelling across the country to meet some of my essential oil team members plus other holistic health practitioners in person, I'm developing a bigger picture view of how other people get shit done (or don't).

If you're anything like me, when someone asks me how I am, my default answer is "busy". Everyone is busy. Your kids are busy. Your parents are busy. Your damn dog is busy.

It's almost like a badge of honour. Like if you're not busy, you're lazy, and no kick-ass, take-charge woman wants to be perceived as lazy. Over your dead body, which is probably dead because you were so busy, but at least it socially acceptable right?

But guess what, here's a #truthbomb for you that's just one of the gems I've taken from Laura's book:

Over the past few months, I've been sharing some online strategies for growing your holistic health business, including why I deleted my $10,000 website, why blogging is the #1 biz building strategy you need to be doing, why you need a brand instead of a pretty logo, and 3 ways to grow your e-mail newsletter list.

It occurred to me the other day that I didn't start at the beginning! Here I am talking about some of the advanced strategies that I've been using when most of you don't even know where to start. That all changes today.

Before you can blog, before you design a pretty logo, and before you start building your e-mail newsletter list, you need a website where all those things can live!

It's like buying a new couch, new appliances, and a beautiful area rug, and not having a home to put them all in.

Your website is a digital representation of you, your business, and your holistic health practice. It's where new people who are virtually meeting you for the first time decide in under 10 seconds if they like you or not. No pressure.

How do you even go about setting up your website? You need 3 things:

When I started my business as a holistic nutritionist, there was no one doing regular blogging to build their businesses unless they were really techy. No Facebook pages or private groups. No Instagram, Periscope, or Pinterest. I'm sitting here wondering what the hell I did with all my free time!?

But there was e-mail marketing, which I wasn't doing until 2011. Even then, I wasn't doing it seriously until 2013.

I started tracking my newsletter numbers (along with all my other social media numbers) on March 18, 2013. I had 238 e-mail newsletter subscribers, 211 Facebook likes, and wasn't on Pinterest or Instagram.

As of today (February 23, 2016), I have 3,137 e-mail newsletter subscribers, 1375 Facebook fans, 984 followers on Pinterest, and 760 on Instagram.

The only number that matters is the e-mail newsletter subscribers, for reasons which I already talked about ad nauseam in another blog post (click here to read it, plus get a free blog planner with an entire years' worth of blog post ideas!), so I won't repeat here.

In that article, I talked about why the #1 non-negotiable activity to grow your biz is blogging + the newsletters you send from those blogs, but how do you actually get people to opt-in to your newsletter list from those blog posts?

It comes down to 2 things ...

I'm a total bookworm, and have been my whole life. My idea of the best day ever includes hibernating under a warm blanket, tea in hand, some dark chocolate covered almonds, and a book that I can devour.

Somewhere along the way, I lost the want and need to read. I suspect the birth of my son was to blame, but in reality, I wasn't giving myself enough self-love in the form of alone time and sleep to even consider reading new books. Now that I've put me back on the list of my top 3 priorities (the list now goes 1) me, 2) my family, and 3) my business ... instead of the other way around), my love of reading has come back with a vengeance.

I've already talked about how reading has increased my business profits a few months ago (click here to read the article), and I'm happy to report that the more I make reading and self-development a priority, the more my income goes up. In fact, my January income was at least double what it has been on a monthly basis in 2015. Did I hustle over the end of December? Nope! I had a fantastic holidays, napped, read, snacked, and spent lots of time with my hubby and son.

Some of you may be thinking that you absolutely hate reading or truly don't have time for it, and that may very well be the case. Let me introduce you to audiobooks. Boom, life changed.

I have a member on my essential oils team who works full-time, teaches yoga and personal trains clients part-time, runs her essential oil business part-time, and has a 5-year-old and husband. She really wasn't making excuses when she said she doesn't have time to read. However, she does have a 20 minute drive to and from work, during which she's now turned her car from a total time-suck into a university on wheels thanks to audiobooks. Last month she finished 3 new books this way that have been on her list for the past year.

It's not how you do it, it's the fact that you get over your excuses and just fucking do it already.

There is one-drawback to this whole investing time in book reading, though ...

Today, I want to share something with you that I wish someone would have told me when I first started my business. Hell, I wish someone would have told me this in my first two years of business.

It took 4 years and my first business coach to teach me this HUGE, monumental lesson about business. And this lesson is ...

YOU CAN HELP ANYONE, BUT YOU CAN'T HELP EVERYONE.

Please, for the love of business gods everywhere, pin this so you can remind yourself later (hover over the picture until you see the little red P show up in the top left-hand corner, and click it). If you want extra good karma, share it with anyone else you know who is an entrepreneur. It's that important.

I remember when I first heard this lesson about picking a smaller group of people to focus on helping, or what we in the biz world call a niche or ideal client, that the objections started flying out of my brain faster than a speeding bulletproof coffee. Objections like:

- but I want to help everyone!
- but how am I going to make money?
- isn't it the stupidest idea ever to turn away business?
- my husband is already harping on me to make more money. How is this going to help?

The answer is that it's going to help everything you're doing in your business. Your marketing. Your programs. Your profit. Everything.

But how could focusing on one group of people, and excluding everyone else, possibly help you do that?

Here are 3 ways that picking a niche (and sticking to it) will help grow your business by leaps and bounds:

The very first thing that I ever did for my business, back in 2008, was to choose the name and logo. This seemed very logical, since I was in the process of registering my business with the Canadian government, and the first required information on the form was "Business name".

I named the first iteration of my business "Pure Vitality". As I remember, the reasoning behind this was that I wanted the name to indicate how I was going to help people feel alive, full of energy and life, and overall healthier. I started writing down all the words that resonated with me, and then plugged them into an online thesaurus until I came up with something that sounded good to me.

I then took that name, registered for the domain, and designed a logo by typing "Pure Vitality" into Microsoft Word, playing around with fonts until it looked pretty. Here's what it looked like: