Creating a Simple Online Business: How To Go From Complex to Clear

Oct 11

laptop on cozy surface with coffee and plant

In the world of online business, it can be tempting to jump on all the marketing methods and the latest popular software that you see (seemingly) successful online entrepreneurs using.

Whether you’re just starting your business, or you’ve been your own boss for years, it’s easy to wake up one day and realize you’ve created an overly complicated mess of offers, funnels, and systems to run your online business. Worse yet, you might be paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars per month (or more) to pay for all the software and apps to “make it all work”.

Just because everyone else is doing it that way, doesn’t mean you have to.

I’ve been through several pivots over my many years in business — from all digital marketing, to Pinterest marketing, to intentional living and productivity — plus all the branding changes and many offers that go along with that.

And what I’ve realized is I consistently made choices (money, tools, etc) based on where I wanted my business to BE, not where it WAS.

Here’s what I mean by that…

It’s easy to pay for unnecessary tools and software based on where you want your business to be — even though you don’t actually need those features now. Sure, the idea of being able to tag, segment, and automate your entire email audience of 50k subscribers based on exactly where they are in your customer journey sounds like a dream come true (and it’s what people with 50k subscribers tell you to do)…but you don’t have 50k subscribers and your audience of a few thousand just needs to know what you offer and receive valuable info from you for now.

And yes, there are times when it can be appropriate to “punch above your weight”, like investing in the right coach or mastermind to be around another level of business owners.

But the everyday gears and levers of how you run your business? That process needs to be for your business NOW.

Or maybe you’ve decided to take a step back from your business (like I have), and you’re still paying for the tools you needed when your business was spun up and creating more cash flow. Re-evaluating what you’re using in your business to simplify and save money is always a good idea.

The Shift To Simple

Since discovering I am dealing with mold toxicity, Lyme illness, and a variety of major gut issues, I decided to make my business completely evergreen from a marketing and offers perspective. I needed to take a step back from 1-to-1 coaching, content calendars, and social media in general. Knowing I’d be also taking a step back from most of my income, I needed to simplify my expenses and tools to stay profitable.

If you need to simplify your business and cut back on unnecessary expenses, I hope this article helps you plan and take action on creating a streamlined and clear business that works better for you.

Top 5 Actions I Took To Take My Online Business from Over Complicated and Draining to Simple and Evergreen

01. Evaluate What’s Working (Or Not)

When I set out to create my action plan to put my business on evergreen, the first thing I did was evaluate what needed to stay and go. The first place I did that was my offers and products. I had several products that were connected to specific platforms (i.e. Pinterest and ClickUp) that would have required updating to keep current. Those were taken down.

My previous weekly newsletter was a strategy to create a “newsletter as product funnel” that was all the buzz for the last couple of years. After looking at my results, the newsletter did not generate enough income through sponsors or affiliates to justify the huge expense in time, effort, and email service provider cost. I made a huge shift with this piece that I’ll go over in detail later on in this article.

I also knew that for health reasons, I didn’t have the energy to take on 1-to-1 coaching clients or team consulting. I put those offers on a waitlist status and will evaluate in the future what I’m willing to take on.

I selected a few key partners — like Simply Pintastic, Focus Sessions, and Magic Marketing App — to refer my audience to for core areas that I knew my people were interested in.

02. Sourcing Evergreen Tools

Next, I took a look at all my monthly and yearly software/tools/apps expenses. I already had a spreadsheet that detailed all my business expenses, the costs, and when they are charged — which made it super simple to go through and determine what I could eliminate or find another tool that was cheaper.

If you’re not already tracking all your subscription expenses for your business, I highly recommend you take a few hours and do so.

My criteria for evaluating tools/apps:

Do I still need this?
If I do, can I find a similar tool for cheaper?

My tool switches and substitutions:

ClickUp → Notion
ConvertKit → Squarespace Email

Tools I eliminated:

Adobe subscription
Video hosting
All social media scheduling apps other than Tailwind
Zapier

Best Lifetime Price Tool:

Thrivecart is my all-in-one shopping cart and course platform solution. The lifetime price makes it unbeatable.

03. Simple Branding

I cannot resist a pretty font or gorgeous color palette, and my constant branding changes over the years prove it. 😆

When I sat down to think about (and collect Pins on) how I wanted my evergreen branding to look and feel, I kept coming back to 2 words:

Calming & Luxurious

I decided to use a serif font for the first time ever for my headlines and simplified my color palette to variations of a gorgeous blue with lots of neutrals.

Pro Tip: I went to ChatGPT to ask what color palette would attract my ideal audience of professional women who want to live more intentionally.

04. Email Marketing

I want to start this section by stating that I believe ConvertKit is one of the best email service providers out there. The tools and resources it provides creators and online entrepreneurs are well thought-out and you get a lot of bang for your buck. There was nothing about ConvertKit that wasn’t working for me — other than having way more tools and capabilities than I actually needed and paying for them.

So I decided to do what I never thought I’d do again…and switch email service providers (read that horror story here).

After doing some research, and knowing I wanted my business to be as simple as possible, I decided on using Squarespace for email.

It checks the boxes of being super affordable, having the features I absolutely needed like sequences and automations, and integrating seamlessly with my website (I’m on Squarespace already as my website platform).

Before I switched everything over, I did 2 important things:

I sent out a cold subscriber sequence to identify and unsubscribe anyone who was no longer interested in my content.
I downloaded every tagged segment of subscribers so I’d know who was who if I ever needed to reference that information.

Then I set up a super calm and intentional welcome sequence for new subscribers.

Now, instead of sending out a weekly email full of tips and articles, I send out an email — Intentional Insights — about once per month with updates on life, business, and being more purposeful.

It feels so much better to me and I’ve gotten lots of feedback on how soothing and lovely it is to read (which was the whole point).

Finally, I was left with one final piece in determining how to completely unravel the yarn ball of my 8+ year business to make it evergreen.

05. 12-Week Year Planning

I sat outside on our deck on one of our last warm summer days with a notebook as wrote down everything that needed to happen for my business to be considered “done” and hands-off. This included little tasks like “change all my social media profile pics to be the same”, to big, multi-week tasks like “update all blogs”. Knowing I didn’t have enough time and energy to knock this out like a big weekend website update with no sleep and too much coffee, I broke the project into sections and timelines.

Then I used the method outlined in The 12-Week Year to map the project into my calendar. If I’m able to stay on track, my business will be completely evergreen (other than my Intentional Insights newsletter and any blogs I choose to write) and updated by the first week of December. Just the thought of it makes me take a deep, satisfied, breath.

After that point, anything I choose to do (or not do) with my business is my choice, free from the burden of timelines or made-up have-tos.

Embracing Simplicity as a Mindset

Lastly, the ongoing skill I’m building with creating (or re-creating) my business to be clear, simple, and evergreen is to embrace simplicity as a mindset.

When I started using Squarespace for email, I realized it did have some limitations I wasn’t used to — namely that I was limited in how many emails I could send each month and you need Zapier to integrate Squarespace with almost any 3rd party software.

My first reaction was to 1) panic that I wouldn’t be able to send out emails 2x a month (which was my original plan), 2) upgrade my subscription to be able to send more emails, and 3) sign up for Zapier again, which is an expense I had previously eliminated.

I was able to pause, take a breath, and ask myself WHY I needed to do any of those things.

The answer was, I didn’t.

If my newsletter is only sent 1x per month, then it’s going to be super intentional (I mean, it’s in the name) and the best of my thoughts over the last few weeks.

If Squarespace doesn’t integrate with fancy 3rd party tools, that ok, I can just do without.

The essence of embracing simplicity is constantly questioning and optimizing processes, eliminating unnecessary complexity, and focusing on what truly matters.

Conclusion

Life happens fast, and we’ve all experienced times in our lives when we had less energy, motivation, or physical capability to keep up with the demands of running a business online. My own experience with this over the last year or so led me to completely unravel and simplify the business I have spent over 8 years building.

Here are the Top 5 Actions I Took To Take My Online Business from Over Complicated and Draining to Simple and Evergreen: