Katie Hornor knew from a young age that wanted to serve God. She also realized that she had a teacher’s heart, so she majored in education.

After finishing school with a degree in education and a minor in Spanish, Katie and her husband moved to Mexico as missionaries. While in Mexico she worked at a Bible college and local mission college.

But one of the most pivotal decisions in her life was deciding to home school her children. This was the moment she realized that other parents in Mexico had no resources for home schooling their children.

So, to supplement her income and help out parents who wanted to home school their children, Katie and her husband started a home school blog. Katie realized their was a massive whole in the market for home schooling in Spanish, so she filled that gap.

Her home schooling blog became so successful that bloggers started approaching her asking how she grew her business. Katie now helps teach bloggers from all over the world how to grow their blogs and businesses.

In this episode Katie talks about sharing your gifts with the world, respecting everyone even if they don’t deserve it, and defining what  success means to you.

Here are three things you can learn from Katie:

Share Your Gifts with the World

One of the things that many creatives take for granted is their ability to change the world through their art. We are so concerned with creating our art that we overlook how much of an impact our work has on everyone else.

Katie believes we should share our message with the world, and the best way to do that is by working for ourselves. “Working for yourself is so much more fun. It’s something that you offer. There’s a couple different analogies. When you have a message to gift to the world, when you have something to offer to the world, your vision and your passion come out as the answer to ‘What does the world need?” If you can answer that question, then you know where your passion lies and what it is you have to offer. The world just needs that, and you can offer it to them, and that can get you excited about it and excited enough to get up early and work on it before you go to your job or to state up late… and things like that.”

One of our biggest fears as artists and creatives is not being good enough. We think that our work isn’t good enough. We fall into the comparison trap.

Katie’s solution to that problem is focusing on our unique message. Sure, other people may do the same thing as you, but no one does it exactly like you do. Embrace that advantage.

“Working for yourself, you’re getting that message out there… I deal with a lot of bloggers who are afraid of comparison. I’m doing the same thing as somebody else. Either I don’t want to compete or I’m not doing it as well. I just tell it. You have to stop comparing. You’re going to reach people with your own unique message. Yours is different because your life is different. Your life experiences are different. Your training is different. The people who are drawn to you is different than the people who are drawn to that other person. And there’s going to be people you can reach with this message that those people would never reach. And if you don’t give that message, then those people who you were going to reach are going to go without. If you don’t bring this dish to the table, there’s somebody on the other side that’s going to go hungry because you didn’t do your part. And that is a big motivator.”

It’s up to us to share our message with other people. Our gifts can help people who are trying to succeed. All we can do is try to share our message with the world. It’s up to others to decide whether or not they want to listen to you.

“When you have that knowledge or when you have that experience that can help other people, and when you have that message that’s going to change someone else’s life, it’s your job to give it. Whether the person on the receiving end takes it or refuses it is not a reflection on you, but it’s your job to offer.”

Respect Everyone

Sometimes working with potential customers makes you want to tear your hair out. But the thing is, you should always put your best foot forward.

It’s easy to become angry or frustrated when dealing with tough customers, but as the face of your business, you need to always be your best self.

Katie believes this means doing the right thing no matter what.

“Those messages of ‘Do it right no matter what it costs you, and do it right even if someone looks down on you for it,’ and the messages of respect them because they are a person and treat them right even if they act in a way that doesn’t deserve it. All of those messages have been huge with us building our business.”

These interactions are all important because business is all about connections. It’s about connecting with your customers and potential customers too.

You don’t want to lose future business because one person was unprofessional to you. We need to treat each and every person we encounter in our business with respect because our relationships form the foundation of our businesses.

“It’s the connections that matter… and it is the people. If it wasn’t for people, there would be no business, so the relationships are huge.”

Create Your Own Definition of Success

When we start our creative journeys, we often forget to define what success means to us. We know we want to be successful, but we rarely define what success actually means.

Katie is a huge proponent of defining what success means to us. While most of us have a general idea of what success is, our definitions of success probably vary a lot. Success to you might be quitting your full-time job to work on your art, but my version of success might be traveling the world while practicing my creativity.

Before you do anything else, you should define success for yourself.

“If you want to begin building your own online presence, number one you need to know what your goal is and what your definition of success is. So your goal for building an online business might be different from mine or the next guy’s, and that’ okay, but you need to know what it is or you’re not going to be able to make good decisions about how to get there and then to know what your definition of success is: How are you going to know? How are you going to evaluate if what you are doing is working? How are you going to know if you’ve reached success?”

Although your definition of success might not be making a lot of money, you still need to make money to support your creative practice. The only way to make enough money is by educating yourself on marketing. This is especially true if you are trying to do everything by yourself.

Once you know how to effectively communicate with your audience, connecting with them will become much easier, and you will have an easier time selling to them.

“You need to educate yourself well… because if your business is online, you’re competing in words a lot, and so you need to learn marketing and you need to learn copywriting. Learn how to sell, how to formulate your story, how to communicate and connect with people in a way that’s meaningful and memorable so that you can compete in the different areas that you are present in with your business.”

Shownotes

• about Katie
  • moved to Mexico around ten years ago as independent missionaries
  • find a way to stabilize income
  • wrote homeschool curriculum and started a few blogs
    • now able to teach blogging
• growing up and getting into missionary work
  • knew when she was young she wanted to serve God
  • husband’s family moved to US when he was in high school
  • worked few years at a Bible college
  • working at the local mission college
  • educate parents how to teach at home in Spanish
• learning Spanish
  • started studying in high school
  • minored in Spanish in college
    • attended Spanish Baptist church
• wanting to teach
  • having a teacher’s heart
  • majored in education
  • transition from teaching children to adults
• learning she could create a business online
  • saw the need for home school curriculum
  • realized other people needed option in Spanish
    • had an educational blog along with it
  • people started asking how to do it
  • more people are finding them
• learning to build the business
  • had a ministry website around 2006-2007
  • mostly self-taught but also went to conferences
  • felt stuck and needed a coach for her business

10:41 “It shocked me and it overwhelmed me but also it gave me the desire to get to that point where I could pay for the coaching I knew I needed. But I told my husband then,  if we ever get to the point where we know enough to teach other people, I don’t want to ever forget what that felt like, to know what you needed and not be able to afford it. So I want to be able to teach others what I’ve learned in a way that is affordable, and that doesn’t turn them off because they can’t afford it in the moment, but help them figure out who to afford it, or help them advance in some way, anyway.”

• biggest struggles before working with a coach
  • knowing what to do next
  • What can we do so that we can afford it?
  • created an ebook and got into FB group to learn more

11:44 “You can have so much … you can take in all kinds of stuff. You can read book after book after book. You can take classes, but at some point, all of that stuff is floating around in your head and you can still be so distracted. You can’t make heads or tails of it or know what it is that I need to implement next, and a coach really helps you take all that information and help you decide what should be priorities based on where you are now. They bring their own experience into it and are able to look at things and consider things, or add information you don’t have from experience yet… and that’s really the benefit of a coach. Just being able to help you figure out where to focus, what the next step is, and to hold you accountable to take those steps.”

• working at the church while also trying to build business
  • business was to create a sustainable living
  • has kept up involvement in ministry
  • created business debt free
• building the business
  • having your own product is key to success
  • first product – ebook – Loving You Long Distance
    • got the snowball rolling to create more and offer more

15:12 “I believe in having your own product. I believe that it’s key to business success. When you build on a borrowed platform, whether that’s affiliate marketing or just through social media… you’re really building on a borrowed platform that is not stable. So I think having your own product brings a lot more stability to the business.”

• response to her first ebook
  • family was a huge cheerleader
  • colleagues in blog space took her more seriously
• importance of authority

17:53 “I think you should get your own product out as soon as possible because I do think it says a lot about your authority… and you have your own inventory. You have something to sell. You’re not just depending on trying to build traffic. You’re not just trying to depend on selling someone else’s product for commissions. It gives you your own thing and it does begin to build your own authority and you have the experience. Once you’ve created your own Kindle book… Once you’ve gone through the process and done it yourself successfully, then you now have that experience to turn around and teach others how to do it. I think it does add to both the authority and experience factors.”

• recommendations for creatives

19:15 “I think people that have that kind of creativity often feel like they’re stuck when it comes to online businesses. There are so many options out there. Even such as doing a tutorial or creating an information product around what you do. A lot of people who are not as artsy as others would love to know step by step, make it easy for me, how do I do what you do? So I think that’s a great option for those people. Even if you are an artist, you can do art prints., you can sell digital print copies, or you can offer a printable digital download of your artwork or your written work, or whatever it is as a freebie or a way to get people to sign up to your list. Then you have the option to sell what is in your store.”

20:19 “There are lots of ways you can harness that creativity. You can do online classes. You can advertise where you’re going to be, if you’re going to be at live events and shows and different things, you can advertise those to your list and on your site. So there’s a lot of ways that it could be done. Even as far as private tutoring, if someone wants to learn a certain technique… you could offer a coaching situation and private tutoring to learn how to do that.”

• working for yourself instead of someone else

21:18 “Working for yourself is so much more fun. It’s something that you offer. There’s a couple different analogies. When you have a message to gift to the world, when you have something to offer to the world, your vision and your passion come out as the answer to ‘What does the world need?” If you can answer that question, then you know where your passion lies and what it is you have to offer. The world just needs that, and you can offer it to them, and that can get you excited about it and excited enough to get up early and work on it before you go to your job or to state up late… and things like that.”

22:04 “Working for yourself, you’re getting that message out there… I deal with a lot of bloggers who are afraid of comparison. I’m doing the same thing as somebody else. Either I don’t want to compete or I’m not doing it as well. I just tell it. You have to stop comparing. You’re going to reach people with your own unique message. Yours is different because your life is different. Your life experiences are different. Your training is different. The people who are drawn to you is different than the people who are drawn to that other person. And there’s going to be people you can reach with this message that those people would never reach. And if you don’t give that message, then those people who you were going to reach are going to go without. If you don’t bring this dish to the table, there’s somebody on the other side that’s going to go hungry because you didn’t do your part. And that is a big motivator.”

23:01 “There are people out there who need what I have and want what I have and it’s my job to do it because, for myself as well as them. There’s people who are going to do without if I don’t do this.”

23:44 “When you have that knowledge or when you have that experience that can help other people, and when you have that message that’s going to change someone else’s life, it’s your job to give it. Whether the person on the receiving end takes it or refuses it is not a reflection on you, but it’s your job to offer.”

24:01 “So that’s what I think about having your own business and getting that message out there. That’s one of the driving factors that there’s somebody out there that needs what I have today. I need to get up and give it.”

• the impostor syndrome and getting over it

25:20 “Wherever you are in your journey, there are people coming behind you who are now where you used to be, and they need to learn from you. Just as you’re still learning from people who are further ahead. So I don’t think it’s an impostor as it is you’re in different places in your journey.”

26:03 “I think entrepreneurs second guess ourselves all the time, So yes, often I have that thought, but then I also have to remember, just like I said, I may not know it all, and I don’t claim to know it all, but I know more than some, and I know that they have the same questions that I did when I started and I now have an answer that I can give, and so that is enough to give me confidence. The courses that I put out… is not going to be for everyone, but it will serve the need for some, and that’s why I do it.”

27:00 “There’s no silly question. All of us had the same questions when we started and that’s how we learned.”

27:16 “If it weren’t for the people who had done that for me, I would not be where I am today.”

• influences
  • dad was an entrepreneur
    • learned about business and customer service from him
  • EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey
• business stories from father
  • handling people trying to take advantage of them
    • doing what’s right and treating customers with respect

29:34 “Those messages of ‘Do it right no matter what it costs you, and do it right even if someone looks down on you for it,’ and the messages of respect them because they are a person and treat them right even if they act in a way that doesn’t deserve it. All of those messages have been huge with us building our business.”

30:49 “It’s the connections that matter… and it is the people. If it wasn’t for people, there would be no business, so the relationships are huge.”

• next steps after creating first eBook
  • had home school blog for 1.5-2 years before transitioning to teaching
  • meeting people through word of mouth or people she met in real life
    • people from all niches
• splitting time
  • 17 people helping on part-time level
    • editors, writers, translators, etc.
• hiring people to work for her
  • first person was translator
  • hiring personal virtual assistant to take a load off her plate
• giving up control
  • relief from things that distracted her
  • other things like handing over email was harder to do
  • learning from Chris Ducker
  • trusting someone to work on your business
    • starting people on trial basis

37:34 “There’s things you do well and efficiently for your business and there are things you can do, but maybe you don’t love them or you’re not efficient with them, and then there’s things you can do and they frustrate you, and there’s other things you just don’t plain know how to do. If anything falls into the second, third, or fourth categories, those are some things you need to look at handing off to someone when you are able to do that because it will save you the time and frustration.”

• outsourcing tips
  • services that help you create application and direct people to it for virtual assistants
  • also services where you outsource certain tasks
    • Premier Executive Media
• creating a blog
  • learn about starting your own website
  • WordPress 101 – education for beginners
  • analogy to a house
    • need hosting – property
    • domain – address
    • website – house
  • if you aren’t a techie, hire someone or learn to do it yourself
  • trade off of doing it yourself vs. hiring someone
  • if you are paying someone, know what you need to get done and what needs to be updated

42:34 “As a business owner, as an entrepreneur, that’s what you need to be looking at… not only just looking at where are my creative strengths, but where are my technical and logistical strengths. Is it worth it for me to take a week of frustration and pulling my hair out to try to figure this out or is it worth it for me to pay someone for two hours and get it done?

• reaching a wider audience
  • blog, Youtube, Facebook Live
  • membership program and group coaching
    • Google Hangouts for questions
    • open phone lines and office hours
  • speaking at conferences
  • writers’ retreat
• best strategy
  • being in a lot of places
  • having a digital imprint in multiple places and being consistent
• advice for people who are starting out
  • her definition of success is making enough money to teach others

47:47 “If you want to begin building your own online presence,  number one you need to know what your goal is and what your definition of success is. So your goal for building an online business might be different from mine or the next guy’s, and that’ okay, but you need to know what it is or you’re not going to be able to make good decisions about how to get there and then to know what your definition of success is: How are you going to know? How are you going to evaluate if what you are doing is working? How are you going to know if you’ve reached success?”

48:51 “You need to educate yourself well… because if your business is online, you’re competing in words a lot, and so you need to learn marketing and you need to learn copywriting. Learn how to sell, how to formulate your story, how to communicate and connect with people in a way that’s meaningful and memorable so that you can compete in the different areas that you are present in with your business.”

• biggest highs and lows
  • biggest low – instability of income
    • being able to pay the bills
  • biggest high – opportunity to help others
  • years ago, set goal for monthly income which they met and succeeded by 20%
    • was a four year goal
    • met Pat Flynn and shared her goal
      • he said they could do it in two years
  • seeing what you can accomplish

51:48 “If you have no goals, then where does your motivation come from?”

52:01 “The people that are down on themselves because they don’t reach a goal, don’t beat yourself up over it. Look at how far you’ve come and celebrate that. Even if it’s small progress, it’s still progress moving in the right direction.”

52:36 “That’s where your staff and your evaluations come in… looking at what we’re doing and what progress we’ve made and how close are we to where we want to be and what do we need to change so we can make more progress in the next time frame?”

• plans for the future
  • expand business and ministry
  • larger membership and influence more people
  • funding ministry for home school parents and training
• favorite quote
  • “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” ― Robert H. Schuller

54:30 “A lot of us are afraid of failure but we go after the same things if we knew that we absolutely would not fail? That’s been a huge encouragement to me to reach for those big crazy goals because who’s to say if I’m going to fail or not. I just need to go for it.”

• morning routine
  • changes for different seasons
  • asks the lord for expansion
  • looking for where to reach out further each day
  • then gets going with work
• recommendations
  • Como Blog Connection – up your business game/income online
  • QBQ! The Question Behind the Question by John Miller
    • personal responsibility in life and relationships
  • People Over Profit by Dale Partridge
  • Entreleadership by Dave Ramsey
    • as business owner, you are a leader
  • Ask by Ryan Levesque
  • Copy That Sells by Ray Edwards
• creative people
  • business partner – Jen Reyneri
    • passion for creativity and life
  • Amy Porterfield – help other people learn
• definition of creativity
  • idea of the lone genius as a myth

59:47 “Creativity is designing or creating something, either from nothing or something that started as something and then ends up as something else. Creativity is being able to just see things in a different way, thinking outside the box. And I think one of the biggest ways that stimulate my own creativity is by talking with other people. The connections that I have, the ideas that I get, and being able to bounce those off of the other people that I respect listen to or work with… those types of conversations really spark my own creativity in coming up with ideas or a lot of times different people bring different ideas to the table and when you work together you can often be way in business than when you’re working on your own.”

• challenge
  • look at your business like a business
  • get into a business mindset for your creative practice

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