The Journey from Blogger to 7-Figure Business Owner with Gemma Bonham-Carter

Not new has been managing Facebook ads behind the scenes for some clients , getting good results , and she offers a nice fresh perspective , since she did not come up in the same ads management school that I did , and so I suffer from knowledge bias .

I'm just too close to the online course niche and the Facebook ads niche , and so the questions that we ask are different , so I'm happy to have you here , love , thanks .

She's renowned for her expertise in online courses email marketing , ai and sales funnels , and she'll help you create a profitable streamlined business that serves your life goals .

We got two episodes lined up for you with Gemma the one we're talking about now is going to be a little bit about her origin story and how she kind of transitioned from blogging and all the interesting stops along the way well , some of the interesting stops along the way to building a seven-figure business .

And then in the next episode , gemma's going to break down her successful summit model . I got to meet her over the past year .

We're in something called the Mixer Mind , which is a very cool group of folks who are coming together with the one purpose well , many , many purposes but they're coming together to collaborate with each other and grow each other's businesses . And then I learned about her AI Summit and you just got to stay tuned for that next episode .

She absolutely crushes with her Summit . We're talking great revenue , great upsell funnels , great interaction between the guest speakers and the attendees . I know because I actually bought the summit and had my EA watch it full transparency .

I needed to implement some AI things into our business and I was like this is going to be a good one , but that will be in the next episode . That episode is linked up in the show notes below . You can click down there and go over and watch it after you watch or listen to this one . Gemma , welcome to the show .

But she came in and started to work with me in my business as kind of the lead coach inside of my two main programs and she's really the only person I've ever had come in in that capacity in my business , because I hold on so tightly to my programs and to helping my students and I had , you know , a little bit of a problem with like letting go and

letting someone else come in and help offer some of that coaching and support . But I knew that I could trust her so so deeply , given that I'd known her for so long and she's been in this industry for so long .

So you know , it's been a lovely sort of co-working relationship since then and she's helped me run some launches and done some other stuff behind the scenes in my business . So she's really a bit of a yeah , she's an integral like a member of my team .

Of course , all three of us met at the Make your Mark Live event in Dallas and that was a cool time .

One is course creator school , which is for newer entrepreneurs who want to launch their first course , and then I sell a secondary program called passive project , which is kind of what you graduate into after course creator school and that's really where I mean I wish I had like a one line , succinct tagline for Passive Project .

It's really like we do all the things in that program .

I don't take my own advice of having like one core promise , because it's really for you know , course creators who are looking to grow their businesses and we teach funnels and live launches and campaigns and but we even talk about , you know , systems and backend and hiring and team and all the things that go into running , you know , a profitable kind of six

figure multi , six figure and getting to seven figure online course business . That's what we do in there . So those are my two main offers and I really try and stay aligned to those and although I have all the ideas to launch all kinds of other things , I try and stay focused .

And then we do fun stuff , like the summit that you were referencing and some events and things of that nature and sometimes I'll have little low ticket products in the mix , but really that's my business model and in the past I have done things like one on one coaching and for one year I did a bit of a mastermind , but honestly , I keep coming back to this

model , which is the online course model , which is what I love and that's what it looks like today .

But I will say as much as I think it's like I am building what I would call like a lifestyle first business , where I'm really trying to build a business that supports me hanging out with my family , traveling , having pretty strict boundaries on the workday , and that type of thing I think it's really important to also talk about .

There are seasons like there are seasons where you lean into , like deep work and hustling , and seasons when you lean out and you really put it onto autopilot and like take some time off , right , and so as much as I say , okay , I might work 20 , 25 hours a week , there are some weeks where it's much more than that and other weeks where it's much less so .

yeah .

Then back then my boyfriend we had bought a fixer upper home and I had found some other blogs talking about like their projects and the things that they were doing around their house .

I thought what a fun thing to do and I was working in nine to five and like public health you know where I thought my career was going and I really just wanted like a creative side project . So in no way was it meant to be a business , was it meant to be monetized ? Nothing of that nature . I slapped the most basic logo up on a WordPress site .

It was like lime green , polka dots it's horrible . And my first ever post . It didn't even have a photo in it and it was just like talking about how we'd moved into this new house and sort of like a personal diary .

But from there it grew and I think I can really attribute like those early days to figuring out how to create content , like that's what it was .

It became a lot of how-to articles how , I don't know , paint Chevron on your ceilings , how to like decorate an old kitchen and , like you know , make it cute for less than a hundred bucks , you know , like all these kind of tutorials , and it was . That was sort of the beginning of me understanding content marketing .

And then , to cut a long story short , that blog grew an audience . I started to realize the potential of it . I started to work like I had ads , like display ads , so I started to get paid to have ads on my site . I started to do affiliate .

I started to get brand deals Like I remember the first time I got a couple free cans of paint and I was like , oh my God , my life is made Like I don't even have it . Oh my god , my life is made like I don't even have time . And and then from there , I also launched an Etsy shop and started selling some merch .

And it was when I got invited to speak at a blogging conference and I was invited to speak about , like , how to monetize your blog and I loved it . I loved teaching , I loved putting together the slide deck . People afterwards were asking me questions .

I even got sent some cards in the mail , like snail mail , of people thanking me for my book , and that was when I was like , oh , ding , ding , ding , like I love this so much more than I actually like putting content out on my blog and maybe I should follow up on this . And so I started with grassroots Like .

I started a free Facebook group to talk about blogging .

I would go live once a week with , like my son who's a baby at the time crawling around and I'd literally sometimes be like sitting on my kitchen floor with like my camera , like this on my phone , crawling around and I'm sitting on the floor like , hey guys , let's talk about Pinterest , let's talk about , you know , seo , let's talk about all these things .

So I was like learning those lessons early on of like how to be a good course creator . It's like narrowing it on the niche , and I taught people how to create e-commerce shops as an arm of like their blog Cause I had been doing that , I'd been selling art prints and mugs and t-shirts and all this fun stuff .

And that one was a runaway success and by like , within the first 12 months it had done over six figures in sales and I was like , Holy smokes , this is something . how can I like learn more , how to do this , keep doing this , improve on this ? And I just dove headfirst into online courses at that point .

You know , it was very much a freelancer but in public health . And then I had my son in 2016 .

And I remember saying to my husband I was like okay , if I can over the course of my mat leave year with him , if I can save up $10,000 , that would pay for part time daycare after my maternity leave and I could take that time and see if I can make this business thing work , like see if I can actually turn a real profit , get some real income coming in

the door and not have to go back to my public health job . And he was such a cheerleader for that and so I did . I say I made 10,000 bucks basically off of brand deals with my blog and like affiliate income and squirreled it away in an account and then in 2000 , I must've been around 2017 .

He went to daycare , part-time , and that was the year that I launched that launcher shop course and the rest of the history I like never went back to public health after that wow , wow , wow so I'm gonna ask you for some some lower points , because this just seems like mountaintop to mountaintop success . Oh my gosh , are you joking ?

This is like I launched my blog in 2010 and it wasn't until 2017 that I went full time . It took a hot minute . This was not a mountain top .

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Like you know , at that time I was just starting to be more on like social , like Instagram and stuff like that . I'd done a lot of podcast or not podcast , pinterest and blogging up until that time as like a legion , okay .

So I was learning all of those things and it was around that time I hired my first VA as well to kind of understand , okay , how can I do this and have someone supporting me do it and helping sort of make it all happen ? And so it was really two years of understanding marketing , online courses .

It was like a whole new thing is a whole new skill set to take on , and nothing came quickly , nothing necessarily came . It was like just trying to figure it out .

But I always had the mentality that I could figure it out and I also just had the mentality of like I'm going to , I'm going to win , like I'm going to make you know , I'm going to get there , I'm going to get to the vision that I want .

And there were times when , like early days of running ads , let me tell you too , cause you guys get it Like we had some months where , like boy , it barely broke even and I didn't have like other products or this , like you know , understanding of like kind of the longer term return on ad spend that might come when people buy your thing six months or 12

months later . And yeah , there were some months that like when I say I saved up that 10 grand for that daycare , it was in that year , like I had some months that were non-profitable .

You know , it was like every money , every dollar that got put into ads like got chewed up and I did not get it back again , kind of thing , and so there were some really like touch and go points .

But all that to be said , I think I really learned a lot during that time of kind of the digital marketing chops that you need to , like make an online course , business work .

And then we were also doing at the time like a warmup series where I had I remember I had like three video ads that would kind of create new audiences all the time on Facebook ads . That then I would show like my webinar ad too . So it was not that it was a bad strategy , it's just that I was writing all my own copy .

I was like trying to do all the . I was bootstrapping it all myself , right , and I was still figuring on that side of the coin out , still figuring out funnels , still figuring out really the positioning of this offer .

I'm no longer with that exact agency , but it was probably too big too soon , like I should have had a middle ground of either trying to run the ads myself or working with someone who is like maybe a freelance ad person , who is just maybe not quite that big of a bill in the beginning . But I had to learn quickly . Lit the fire right yeah , wow .

Going over there it's like still learning , still grinding it out , still like picking up the skill set that like could be six figures for one position alone like yeah , for graphic design just for marketing , or like just for this , and I'm still picking up , like those eight hats that it takes to run successful .

I just knew I had this vision of what I wanted to create and I just knew that that was what I wanted to ultimately do .

But for anybody who's listening , who's really at the beginning stages of entrepreneurship , like a more solid plan would be to offer one-on-one services first , you know , and to like definitely have a baseline retainer of some services and and be experimenting with the coursing on the side , and eventually what can happen is you can increase your income from like courses ,

masterminds , learning stuff , like what , digital products , whatever that looks like and decrease on the services side . But that's a balance , yeah .

And your marketing through feedback like absolutely we value that stage of one-on-one , so either providing a service or doing like coaching or providing a service , right , yeah , wow , yeah , I remember when in your bio , when it says like renown for expertise in online courses , email marketing , ai and sales funnels , I'm like that's a lot you know how do do all of

it .

I feel like the last several guests that we've had have mentioned something about having mentors and the importance of that , and so if you are listening and you're still considering having a business mentor , I feel like every person that we've talked to , every book that I've read , is like the sooner you can get the mentor and someone to help you and just give

you kind of like that bird's eye perspective of your business or what you should be focusing on , because we all have those blind spots , right . And so how was that for you ? You or how did you find that person or people to to help ?

Mentorship can look in a cup , like like a couple of different things I'll talk about that in a second but what it really does , and it did for me , was accelerate like the learning curve and the learning time , like basically be able to jump over something that might've taken me six months to learn on my own .

I could learn it in sort of a six week container by learning from someone who had been there before , who'd done all of the trial and error , and I could shorten that time . So that was really the um , the way I was sort of looking at it . It took me a while , though , to make my first investment , I remember .

So I think , when I talk about mentorship , I think it can look in a few different ways . I think it can look like a one-on-one coach . I think it can also look like to your point , reading some books , like you can see those authors as mentors in different ways .

It could mean taking a course right , and that very first time I made an investment into like an education a piece of education for my business , which was my blog back at the time was a course about Pinterest and it was by someone named Melissa Griffin , who was amazing back in the day . She's no longer in this world .

She actually owns , like a bookstore , slash coffee shop in Portugal . Now like cool life , but she was .

You know I was making not much at the time .

This is a side hustle , you know I knew it was a big investment for me , but I took that program and within , yeah , within a month , I had gone through every single video , done every worksheet , implemented everything she taught and I think I doubled like my traffic the next month using Pinterest and then went huge .

After that I was getting at the height of my blog . I was getting around I think it was around like 110,000 views per month .

So , all that being said , when I did that with Melissa Griffin , like when I did that program , and I then saw the return that I got from , like learning from someone who'd done it before , that really changed the game for me in terms of thinking about mentorship .

And so I think from then on , I'm pretty much always either like in a program I haven't done that many , I've never done like a giant mastermind or anything like that . I've done a couple of larger or higher ticket group coaching programs , but I'm always wanting to , yeah , learn the next thing , and sometimes that can mean a you know , $97 mini program .

But if it's going to shortcut things for me , I'm all about it .

And I'm also curious if you hired locally or overseas or what that looks like yeah , great question .

. But back in , whenever it was 2018 , 2019 , I was finding that I was getting too bogged down actually with my inbox and that was for me , the like sticking point of like okay , I can't actually spend . I have very limited work hours .

I can't spend an hour in the inbox because I'll never get ahead on , like , the things that are actually going to move the needle for me and my business . And so my first VA hire was specifically to take the inbox over , like I didn't want to look at it at all anymore .

She could just forward to like a private email that I would have anything I actually needed to see and I . So that was really what I hired for . And it was very part-time , with the idea that as the business grows , maybe you can grow with me , kind of thing . Like stick around and let's see what we can make happen .

And I posted it on my personal Facebook page as well as in a few other places . But on my personal Facebook page there was someone obviously in my network who knew someone who had just been laid off , actually , and she tagged her and was like oh , you know , maybe this would be of interest to you .

And so that person her name's Samantha she reached out to me and explained that like she's pretty good with tech and she's freelancing and maybe this could be a good fit . And so I actually did little interviews at a local coffee shop with her and a couple of other people and the minute she and I met I was like yep , perfect , like the .

We met , like we had a vibe match right away and she started working for me like the following week and she's still with me to this day . Her , her role has changed . Like she eventually was like okay , I don't want to do the inbox anymore either .

She now does some different things for me in my business , including like sort of like project management type stuff , still part time . And what's cool is like I so I have three people basically on my team Chelsea Wallace , who we talked about earlier , samantha and someone else named Kelsey , and all three are just really smart women . Two of the three have kids .

All wanted part-time gigs and I am not someone who has like Monday meeting every week or we're like talking on Slack 24 seven . I am very chill .

So in turn , like the way I run , my team is very chill and I think that's why they've stayed is because it's a really relaxed environment where they know their deliverables and , yeah , we're just kind of easygoing and so I've been able to have really great retention from that perspective and grow my team as it's needed to over the years .

But that's about as big as I'll ever get , like three people super part time . I don't want more than that .

And then I have Chelsea who does the coaching inside of my communities with me , and then I have Samantha still , and what she does is like an example would be she helped actually with the summit that we ran this summer , kind of like helping to project manage that she . We put out a magazine every month for our passive project community .

She puts that magazine together . She preps like the emails that need to go out to that community . That coaching calls that type of thing Okay .

But before we get there , in bringing in seven figure revenue as you scaled up to this , what makes the most of the revenue from those two offers , or are they pretty equally balanced ?

It's usually like a three part series , and I usually do like what works , what didn't work , and there's like a giant revenue recap and stuff and , interestingly , those two offers are often similar . And then things like the summit will usually like that was a big player in 2023 when we did it for the first time , and I expect it will be this year as well .

In terms of like . When I look at the pie chart at the end of the year , it's always interesting to me , though , cause I'll , I'll , I'll , you know , go down the rabbit hole like putting up some low ticket offers or doing a workshop or things like that that ended up taking me more time than I ever planned for them to take .

And then I look at my pie chart at the end of the year and I'm like Gemma , like why , why did you let yourself get distracted with these like little things ? If only you'd done like another launch of kind of your signature offer , you know , you know , stayed focused . Those are .

I feel like I learned that lesson every single year , but yeah , just can't help yourself . Can't help myself . And actually one of the things that was interesting was like yourself , and actually one of the things that was interesting was like I always had some one-on-one clients and after 2022 I realized , in fact , like what a small piece of the pie it was .

And so that in 2023 I tried kind of like a mastermind where we just had 10 people in it and I thought , okay , instead of doing one-on-one , I'll do like just a small group but charge like my one-on-one type rate . But even that ended up being , you know , on the more like on the smaller side compared to the programs and it took up a lot .

I loved the people in that in that 10 , I've loved every one-on-one person I've actually I've ever coached , but it takes up so much of my brain space . I think about their businesses all the time and I had to , in 2024 , decide like I'm not going to do that this year . Okay , yeah , interesting , and to like go back to your France question .

That was one of the things that I did during that time in France was like no one on one stuff , no mastermind , Like I really was like how can I be in France and have the fewest calls on the calendar ? No one on one stuff , no team meetings . I said no to every podcast interview .

You know , like I really didn't do much in the way of like visibility , and did that have an effect on my business ? Probably like . Probably , revenue will probably be a little down this year compared to 2023 because of because of that , but am I so glad that I did it ?

It was sunny like 97% of the time . There were no complaints on my end .

and like it was pretty dreamy .

They still have summers and Christmas and whatever , but the rest of the year it's six weeks on , two weeks off , all year round . They still have summers and Christmas and whatever , but the rest of the year it's six weeks on , two weeks off . So for those two week holidays we went all over the place .

We went to Italy , switzerland , malta , paris , brussels , like we just tried to really go all around .

I said that I just assumed that this was behind the scenes .

Sorry , in France , in Aix-en-Provence , you both were working from your home mainly , or were you enjoying the cafe to cafe life ?

The only difference was , like you in french cafes it's not like they really want you to come with your laptop like you're meant to be there and like enjoy the ambience and your coffee right so , but luckily there was enough of like a student and expat community in Aix-en-Provence that there were a few that were totally into the like working at a cafe vibe , and

we had one in particular that we loved the people , they loved us and it worked out really well so Nice Goals .

That is Gemma , and you can go down to the link in the show notes below . And there's two things , listener please . And you can go down to the link in the show notes below . And there's two things , listener please , before you click over to the next episode . One is you can get in touch with Gemma .

Two is we didn't discuss it on this one , but we will on the next one she has a freebie that I forgot to mention , but it is her 100K launch email swipes . If you're like me and you struggle with the written word , then you definitely better get over to that link in the show notes below and download those email swipes and up your launch revenue .

Until the next time we see you or you hear from us or I guess it's you see or hear from us , take care and be blessed and we'll see you in the next one .