It's summer right now, which means that everyone is out on their boat, at the beach, the cottage, out of town, visiting friends and families, having BBQ's, drinking bevvies on a patio, and taking the kids on day trips. All these people are your clients, and they're not interested in working on much right now. There are always seasons in life and in business, and summer is the season of slowing down. Try telling that to your bank account or your credit card company.

It's not just summer either. For us holistic health practitioners, depending on your niche, there's probably at least one other time of year when business is slow.

If you're a massage therapist, chiropractor, or naturopath, the two months before everyone needs to use up their benefits is insanely busy, but the two months after that are probably slower.

If you're an essential oil advocate, the busy times are September to December and March to June. The other months of the year aren't quite as hectic.

If you're a nutritionist, it depends on your niche. If your focus on weight loss, mid-November to the end of December is probably pretty dead, and then picks up in January and February when people realize they have a food hangover. If your focus is something else, you might find that you're busy up until mid-December, and then hit a lull until March when people come out of their winter hibernation.

The point is that there are at least 2 times during the year when you have the space and time to work on your business, not just in it.

You might not be selling a whack load of programs right now, but there are still tons of things you could be doing to build your business.

I have a mainly online based business, so I have a running list of things that I could be working on at any time of the year. Website updates and changes, pics for social media, completing the online course that I just purchased, recording a new webinar, truly the list could go on forever.

You might be just starting a website and realizing that you can use it as your master marketing machine year-round. You might have several social media platforms going that you know you aren't using to their fullest.

You can totally use this down-time to make shit happen in your business and bring in new clients  for the next 6 months, but you can't just try things willy nilly.

When you look on someone's Facebook timeline, Instagram feed, Pinterest boards, or website that draws you in and makes you want to click around, what's the thing that stands out the most? Amazing photos. When you're searching high and low for a website template to use, what usually attracts you to one over the other? The amazing, colourful photos they use in the preview template (nevermind the fact that the photos aren't yours ... they're just so pretty!). You might be building your first website, re-branding an old one, or changing businesses completely, but there's one thing you're going to need: a professional photo shoot.

My first photo shoot was done by a local photographer friend in late 2011. I picked out 3 different outfits, did my hair and makeup myself (it's kind of painful to see that I was growing out a pixie cut, worse time for a photoshoot ever!), and baked some cupcakes that I was going to ice during the shoot.

Wait, what? Why would a holistic nutritionist be icing cupcakes in photos for her website?

Well, they were gluten free, soy free, vegan cupcakes with a homemade buttercream icing, and my new website was called lovewhatyoueat.ca. I was going to focus on people with food allergies (like me!), and teach them that no matter what they could eat, they should be able to love what they eat.

The idea was a good one (or so I thought), but anyone seeing those pictures would have thought I was a home baker or something. See?

So, you've done all the right things in your business. You picked a niche, branded your business, built a kick-ass website, started your email list, are blogging on the regular, and sharing your value-packed content on social media. You know that list building is the top thing you need to be doing to have regular new clients or to get ready to launch your next (maybe even your first!) online course.

You're so proud of yourself for sticking to a plan and doing all. the. things that you see other successful online peeps doing!

But when you log into your email software, your list isn't growing very fast. All you hear is proverbial crickets. What a huge letdown! So what are you doing wrong? Turns out, nothing, it's just that people need a little more incentive nowadays to opt into your email list.

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 ...