Social Media Manager Moonlights for Mothers

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Before we get into today's story, I have a time tracking tip for you. Now more than once I have mentioned that tracking your time, keeping up with your time in some fashion, can be very helpful in identifying patterns that you may not be aware of. And this is true especially for those of us who are knowledge workers, if you work in an office, if you do any kind of creative work, if you have some autonomy in how you structure your time and you can work on different projects and such. Well, that is a huge benefit of course, but it also comes with a challenge of, how do we figure out where to assign different time? And what am I wasting time on perhaps?

And what would I like to spend more time on? I'm pretty sure that all of us want to have more time to do more of what we want. So a couple of times I have mentioned the spreadsheet tool made by Laura VanderKam. If you go to lauravanderkam.com, there's a free spreadsheet where you can track your time and keep up with your different hours and such. She also has some great books, including 168 hours and off the clock, highly recommended.

But one struggle that I have had when I've tried to do these kinds of exercises is that keeping up with all your time takes a lot of time, or at least it does for me. I did it for a couple of weeks and I was like, oh, this is really cool. I'm actually learning a fair amount, but I feel this constant like, I don't know, pull or emotional angst to like remember how I spend every 15 minutes or every 30 minutes of my time. So here's my tip. I've started something new.

Instead of trying to track all my time, I just try to track the hours I spend on creative work. And so I don't worry about everything else. I decided as long as I'm spending a good amount of time on things that are important to me and hopefully an increasing amount of time, I'm not gonna try to keep up with all the rest. So if you have felt overburdened and trying to keep up with everything, I would encourage you whether you're using a spreadsheet tool or a time tracking app or just a piece of paper perhaps, maybe consider just trying to track the time you spend on creative work or whatever else is important to you. Okay, that was, as I said, a tip before today's story.

Now this story is called Social Media Manager and Moonlights for Mothers. After a traumatic birth experience, a biologist turned social media manager takes on another new responsibility of helping expectant mothers. That story will be here in 30 seconds, right after this message from our sponsor. [Music]

For Jennifer Jenkins, her journey to becoming a postpartum doula was a bit of a surprise to everyone, including herself. After earning a degree in wildlife and conservation biology, she worked for the United States Forest Service in Louisiana.

She fully expected her life path to be full of adventures into the woods to save endangered species. Instead, she embarked on a completely different adventure after experiencing traumatic births with her first two children. Jennifer had hired a doula with her second baby and the support she received convinced her to shift her career path from working in the forests to working with expectant mothers. At least that was her dream, but how would she do it? Well, to begin, Jennifer knew that she needed training and certification.

Her first certification cost $400 along with $150 in additional books and resources. Births are complicated. They're also unique experiences, not something you can just study in a textbook. A doula in training has to gain a broad range of experience so they can have a better understanding of how to support their future clients. So before she could be fully certified, Jennifer also needed to spend a year and a half attending births in different scenarios.

She shared her doula journey with some friends and while she was working toward her certification, she actually got her first client. A couple she knew was having their second child and wanted Jennifer to be part of the birth. Since she wasn't yet fully certified, she offered her support for free, but it was still a huge milestone and gave her a boost to keep learning. Soon afterwards, she became certified and officially able to take on paid clients. She joined a local health and wellness collective and asked to be added to their website listing.

This helped her get exposure and brought in her first paying customers. To expand her network, she also attended events to meet with potential moms-to-be face-to-face. Still, it wasn't easy. Jennifer knew that just having a certification wasn't going to magically bring in clients and learning to market herself was very difficult. It's not something that comes naturally to people and it's one of the biggest obstacles doulas face.

Looking back, Jennifer says she wished she'd become more comfortable with the business side of things, especially search engine optimization and other marketing early on. She encourages others to get confident marketing their business, even take classes if necessary. Her next goal is to start working toward becoming a certified professional midwife. A midwife is medically trained and focuses on the health of the baby in the birthing process, while a doula focuses on the needs of the mother. The good news is that she's managed to build a solid side hustle through her hard work.

In the first half of 2020, her second year doing this work, Jennifer had already made $8,000. And to balance her doula work with her job as a social media manager, Jennifer is careful to budget her time each day. [Music]

So my tip for someone doing this kind of work is that if you're able to, this is kind of picking up on Jennifer's lesson as well, if you are able to invest more time upfront creating a clear pricing structure, just studying that a bit, learning about copywriting and marketing, SEO as Jennifer mentioned, but also just really crafting a pretty clear benefit driven message. I think you could really stand out because it's a crowded field. It's one in which most people don't pay a lot of attention to marketing.

And so that might help. But also I wonder if there's a way to reach expectant mothers, moms to be who are not currently considering natural births or assisted births who are not necessarily familiar with this process of what doulas do, what midwives do, et cetera. That's a much bigger market than the ones who are. And the ones who are might already have a plan. So perhaps maybe it's somewhere in the middle if you can find a way to reach expectant mothers who are curious about this, but don't know a whole lot about it, as opposed to those who are already kind of set in like I've got my path, this is not what I need.

So just a couple of thoughts there. Congratulations to Jennifer and listeners. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. What can you take from this story? Or what can you do today to get just a little bit closer to that thing you're working toward?

What is your idea? What's the next step? I hope you're working on that. And just to be clear, I'm trying to do the same thing myself because we're all on a journey. Today's show notes, all right, sidehustleschool.com/1352.

Guess what's coming up tomorrow? It's episode 1353 and I will be here. I hope you'll join me. Be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.