Meet Brittany Berger, who impresses the hell outta me.
Brittany is a Launch Your Signature Course® student who is one of the toughest, most badass babes we know. She launched her course within 6 weeks - working only on the weekends! She has a full time day job and a VA business and a blog - and launched her course on top of all of that!
Her story is inspiring to me because even after being diagnosed with chronic illness, she rocked her course launch and even used her limited time to her advantage.
I hope you love her story as much as I do!
I'll let Brittany take it from here:
What's a Content Unicorn?
I’m the content unicorn running BrittanyBerger.com and I help other female entrepreneurs work brighter, stand out, and grow their businesses through smarter content.
I accepted my first content marketing job in 2010, without even knowing that’s what it was called.
Since then, I’ve built and run amazing content teams at several software companies while managing two personal blogs and a freelance writing business on the side.
If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is.
If it sounds like fun, it’s because it’s that too!
So in 2016, I started teaching other crazy (and I mean crazy) ambitious women how to be more productive in their online businesses so they’ll have time for all the things they want to do, too.
I joined Launch Your Signature Course®, also in 2016, to create a premium and profitable version of the free knowledge bombs I was dropping.
ALSO also in 2016, I successfully launched my signature course! :)
A Life-Changing Wake Up Call
Before taking Mariah's Launch Your Signature Course® program, my biggest struggle was scaling my business.
I already had a day job, freelance business, and blogs, so I knew I wanted to create a course or coaching program or something, but I didn’t know what or how it was going to happen or anything.
I just knew I wanted to level up, and I reaaaally didn’t have much time to level up.
I wasn’t ready to cut out any of those other parts of my career completely, I just wanted to make room for more.
Then I fell ill with something that never went away, and 9 months later I was diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses at once.
Queue the wake-up call.
So much for not cutting back, right?
At that point, my business was barely earning money.
Freelancing and eBooks weren't enough.
The only product I had was a $15 book blogging planner on my book blog, and while it was selling consistently...it was $15.
The rest of my business was services.
I’d had to scale way, way back with my freelancing to the point that some months I only wrote one piece.
I wasn’t writing new blog posts on my business blog or reading new books to review on my hobby one.
Basically, I was barely even in business anymore, and I really didn’t like that.
Starting Over
So, once I was able to, I started over with my blog, focusing on productivity tips for other entrepreneurs and bloggers, with an e-course still in the back of my mind.
But when I say ‘back,’ I really mean the back part of the forefront of my mind.
I thought about it A LOT, especially since it seemed like the most passive and flexible way to start making money again while making accommodations for my health.
One productivity method I’d always used a lot is automation - I’d been using IFTTT and Zapier to automate systems in my day job and personal life since before I had my own business or even knew what systems were.
I just saw them as shortcuts. And I’m somehow both incredibly lazy and super ambitious, so total shortcuts like what those apps can create are really necessary for me! 💁🏻
Finding a Profitable, Much-Needed Course Idea - Right Under Your Nose
So I entered this creative entrepreneurship space, and a lot of people were talking about productivity automation, but it wasn’t actually automation.
At least not what I had learned it was.
People were talking about things like batching and scheduling as automation and thinking that’s the most productive they could get. And then getting discouraged about that.
I did some research and realized no one was talking about ways to actually cut things out of your to-do list while still getting those tasks done.
No one was talking complete shortcuts.
Lazy Girl To The Rescue
Then it felt like “lazy girl to the rescue.”
It became my mission to figure out ways to automate everything for other entrepreneurs.
We work hard, we should be able to be lazy sometimes and take shortcuts too! You just need to set up the right shortcuts.
The automation trend has grown a lot in our community and full workflow automation has become part of the productivity conversation more often, but I think my course Build Your Own VA is still the only course that has a 100% focus on workflow automation apps for entrepreneurs.
Obviously I’m TOTALLY fine with that!
The First Launch: Behind the Scenes
As excited as I was at the prospect of creating and launching a course, I was equally overwhelmed.
I put a lot of pressure on myself - I’d been creating content for so long, and this was the first time my content would be the star of the show, the actual product, instead of a supporting player in the marketing campaign.
It was THE most exciting thing I was about to do.
I wanted to do it right.
I had written outline after outline, launch plan after launch plan, and was just too insecure about any of them to follow through.
I knew I could figure it out myself after a few tries, but it got to the point where I was busy and sick and I didn’t WANT to figure it out myself for once.
So once I joined Launch Your Signature Course®, I was able to make sense of the content and ideas I already had and fit them into Mariah’s launch and product frameworks.