It’s been five months since my last post, and I’ve really stirred the pot of my fledgling business in that time. I finished Susannah Conway's business course The Inside Story last week — she teaches very successful online courses about tarot and journaling and inner child work (I highly recommend them!). Her business course was very thorough and a little intimidating, but mostly very inspiring :)
We learned that we should strengthen our connection to the community that our eventual customers will be coming from (through social media, blogging and Substack), the central importance of a mailing list, how to give potential customers a taste of our offerings through freebies, and how to create content that has heart. I have a long list of things to do now, since I wasn’t really doing any of those!
In the meantime, I’ve shelved the board game project for the moment — it wasn’t coming, and I was afraid if I kept forcing it I’d lose it altogether. And I think I’ll be taking parts of the workbook and using it for freebie offerings. So then I started working furiously on the new deck idea — the Road Sign Tarot — in the hopes of getting it launched on Kickstarter during their Witchstarter promotion in the month of October… but I just didn’t have enough time to make it work, so I backed off on the timeframe. And then I took The Inside Story course, which taught that I need to get my social media presence, website and marketing, and email list dialed in — before I work on any more content.
And so here I am! And the Universe seems to be smiling on my efforts: as an effort toward community-building, I just took an online course called The Daily Tarot Girls' Guide to Intuitive Tarot Reading, which was really great — and I won one of the class challenges to create my own tarot spread, and my prize is a one-hour mentoring session with the instructor!! So later this afternoon I’ll be absorbing the wisdom of someone who’s doing what I want to be doing (more or less), plus connecting with a member of my future community!
But in another twist, our local Parks and Rec is looking for instructors to teach classes, so I’m also considering offering a class on tarot there. My last class offering didn’t get any sign-ups :( but I’m harvesting some of the ideas from that and creating a new 4-week live class on How to Read Tarot For Yourself. Stay tuned to see if: 1) I finish the proposal and submit the application, and 2) whether Santa Rosa Parks and Rec accepts it!
So — a lot of new learning and striving happening! I’m not entirely sure about a lot of this… but I’m going to give it a shot and see how it goes.
Thus, this blog entry… my Substack account (there’s not much there yet, but you can find it here… and my upgraded social media presence, in the form of following more people on Instagram (and if you want to follow along with me there, you can find me here) and a new Facebook profile here.
Thanks for following along on this new business venture of mine — and if you have any advice, feedback, words of wisdom (or caution), or you just want to let me know you’re out there, please let me know in the comments below.