This strategy is something I like accidentally discovered back in 2020. It was a few months into lockdown and I was in the middle of trying to pivot.

I'd been in business for two or three years at that point, and I was an SEO person, and I was specifically an SEO person for bloggers and content creators.. But I was trying to pivot to talking about content strategy. I was kind of bored with SEO and it was a pain and I wanted to talk more about content strategy. It was more interesting to me. 

And it was a similar target audience, but I knew what they needed, but I had no idea what they thought they needed, which are two very different things. 

And knowing what they think they need or what they want is a very key piece of information to understand as a business positioning yourself and creating content to speak to them and hook them in and get them to what they need.

So not knowing that half of it was making it very difficult for me to position myself and create offers. 

I had a super duper small audience. I had 200 ish email subscribers at the time, and like one and a half thousand Instagram followers, which is a lot. But again, remember I had been SEO up to that point, and also I had engaged in growth strategies on Instagram that I had learned at the time that looking back, I'm very embarrassed to have engaged in. So it was not a very great audience, it was just a high number. 

I was also in my Instagram content creation heyday. If you look at my Instagram now, it's super dusty. So the strategies that I'm gonna be talking about are what I did at the time, so they're very Instagram heavy, just as a heads up. 

It was in the few first months of the pandemic, and I did not have this idea with any strategic intention.

I was just desperate for community and accountability because I was having trouble creating content and being productive. And so I created what I needed because that's what I've always done and clearly like it eventually became clear that I was not the only one who needed this. I hosted one or two at just like random times as an experiment, and I loved it so much that I made it a weekly thing.

And because I had direct access to people's phrasing and problems and I could delve deeper, it was really, really golden for me as a person in the middle of a pivot. It was really, really, really good information for me to be getting at that point. 

Plus it was also like I'm a verbal processor and I have a much easier time articulating my ideas when someone asks me a question as opposed to like just saying stuff out of nowhere. 

I think this is also a contributing factor to why this was my content creation heyday, is because every week I was getting direct input and prompted to say good shit. Then I was saying lots of good shit, and I was constantly being inspired to create content. So I was creating a lot of content. 

I eventually, and I don't host coworking anymore as a free strategy or a free thing. I stopped hosting, coworking after about a year and a half. And it was unrelated to it being no longer effective. I was just burned out and I needed to rework my schedule and rework my offerings and everything. So it was still a very effective strategy. It was just my life needed some restructuring. 

So it became very clear after a few weeks of hosting this regular coworking, I had new offer ideas and I was able to beta test them with my coworking people before officially launching them, which was great because this was a new positioning for me. I was pivoting. And so this helped me build up my confidence. 

It also gave me testimonials to use in the launch, and I was able to get honest feedback from these people on my new offers because they were really emotionally invested in me and my business. They wanted to give me feedback and help me. 

Eventually I launched my then signature service, which was a one-off intensive, like a kind of a VIP day that spread out over a week. And I had the best launch in the history of my business at the time. And then two months later I did it again and topped it. 

This strategy got me to making two or $3,000 a month almost every single month, which is not a mind-blowing amount of money in like the big picture of what an online business can be.

But it was a mind-blowing amount of money for me because I had been trying to reach that income level for a embarrassingly long amount of time, and I really credit that to coworking.

This is where I was at at that time and coworking was really what got me there. And besides all the business and financial wins, it was also one of the most fantastic communities I've ever been in. I became friends with these people. Wednesday was my favorite day of the week. A lot of coworking people said the same.

It was also a great networking opportunity, because I am B2B obviously, and a lot of people in my audience is also b2b. It was a great networking opportunity for me and also for them. I collaborated with a lot of those people in the future. 

It was true community.

We watched the inauguration together. I actually set up like my TV on my side table next to my desk and had the news running during coworking, which was in front of me. We happened to be in coworking when the January 6th Riots happened and we were able to distract ourselves from that with community and then the following week talk about it and be there for each other during that.

It was insane and really nice to have a community that was meeting consistently during rough times like that and also good times like that. We like celebrated each other's wins and supported each other through failed launches. It was really, really a magical group. A lot of them are still in my like biz friends group chat.