How Passive Income Changed by Business (And My Life)

2020. Where to begin?

Until this year, my business has been 80% custom branding/website design, and 20% has come from template sales. When Covid hit, my world was turned upsidedown. I was FLOODED with inquiries from current, past, and prospective clients, all looking to update their site or get something up and running to maintain some sort of revenue through the pandemic. I worked 12 hour days for an entire month straight. More than a few times I had to outsource/subcontract some of my work to another designer (thank you Ashley!) I also very quickly began to see a dramatic increase in template sales and passive income revenue. Before I dive into that, let’s backtrack a bit.

In February I attended the first ever Showit Design Summit. Showit’s top 15 (ish?) design partners were invited to attend a 3 day design summit in Cabo San Lucas where we talked all things business. I was meeting all of these people for the first time, but many I’ve known over the internet for years. We learned the new updates coming to Showit, chatted about our clients, our businesses, our template shops, and so much more. I left that trip with a mile long list of changes I wanted to make to my business to increase revenue through template sales and streamline the design process for my custom branding clients.

When Covid struck New York and the US barely a month later, it was a blessing in disguise. Yes I was flooded with incoming work, I was lonely, anxious, missing my friends and family. But I was also gifted such an enormous amount of time to pour into my business. The plans I made on that flight back from Mexico could finally be put into action.

I completely overhauled my website and my template shop, created new and better sales funnels and sales pages, switched my checkout cart from Shopify to Thrivecart, created a new *stellar* template, and reworked my entire social media strategy.

As summer began and stores/restaurants began to reopen, I saw a major shift in my business, as I said earlier. Inquiries for custom work slowed down, but template sales were still high. For the past two months, nearly 100% of my income has been from template sales.

This shift is new, different, and scary. But I have learned to build a business that can pivot as my clients needs change, and as the world changes. This has come again as a blessing in disguise – perhaps the biggest change of all – I have been able to take a two month vacation from work, and still maintain a more than steady stream of income. Yes, I worked my ASS off for the first three months of quarantine. But I have been able to step away from the stress, the anxiety, the overwhelm, and completely decompress (more on this can be found here). I’ve spent more time with my family, more time creating personal work, more time outdoors, way too much time eating, and fully realized that I have a close circle of friends around me that would do anything for eachother and anything to keep creating beautiful art.

I’ve created a business that works for me, and works for me while I’m sleeping. While I’m exploring. While I’m creating. And while I’m loving. It has in every way, changed my life.

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July 27, 2020

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  1. […] When you’re making steady, consistent revenue it can be life changing (read more about that here). I started selling Showit website templates about 4 years ago and it took a while to really get […]

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Hey, I’m Christina! Ten years ago, I was a wedding photographer who loved being creative but didn’t feel totally at home in my work. 

It was only when I discovered Showit, the drag-and-drop website platform that I realized I enjoyed building my website more than I liked doing anything else.

Today, we are a Showit Design Partner and 2021’s Showit Designer of the Year, with 100+ custom clients served, and thousands of templates sold to passionate creatives.

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