In this episode, Jeanette and I discuss the truth about Internet Marketing, what it takes to succeed in the long run, how

what you don’t know can hurt you, and some insider tips to thriving online.

Resources mentioned

Book Printing
ShipYourBooks.com

Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt

Evernote

Contact Jeanette:
Facebook
Books by Jeanette

Bestseller Breakthrough Challenge
Send an email to Ellen@booksopendoors
Subject line: 3 Day to get on the Wait List

3 Key Points

Learning never stops and even if you love to learn you can still get learning fatigue. It may be time for a break, or time to slow down.

The person who starts the business and runs the business requires very different personalities. If you don’t have the stomach for running the business hire a manager.

Anyone who tells you they understand Internet marketing because they had a big score in less than a year, hasn’t been in the game long enough to understand it; don’t listen to them. Learn from experienced marketers who have seen the ups and downs over time and survived them.

Transcript:
Hi and welcome, I’m your host Ellen Violette and you’re listening to Episode 109 of the Books Open Doors Podcast. Today my guest is Jeanette Cates and we’re going to be talking about the truth about digital marketing, what it takes to succeed in the long run, how what you don’t know can hurt you, and some insider tips to
survive and thrive in your business as a coach or entrepreneur. Let’s do this!

Music: Welcome to the Books Open Doors Podcast. Are you a mission-driven speaker, coach, consultant, thought leader, creative entrepreneur, or author who wants more credibility, financial abundance,and wants to make a bigger impact in the world and leave a lasting legacy, and who wants to have fun doing it? Then stay tuned for today’s inspiring podcast with your host, Ellen Violette.

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[2:00] Ellen:
Okay, now let me tell you about my guest Jeanette Cates.

Jeanette has been marketing since 1993. And I first met her when she was speaking at an event, I think it was 2004, so we go way back and we’re going to talk about some of the changes and challenges of being in the game for decades. She’s actually been marketing than anybody I know.

Jeanette is a retired author who has fiftenn books on Amazon. She was online marketing for twenty-five years and has created over 100 information products. And in her retirement, Jeanette has created a virtual assistant business. In her spare time, she volunteers with the free tax service and has started creating her family legacy, both through genealogy work and digitalizing thousands of photos. So, welcome to the call, Jeanette.

Jeanette Cates:
Well, thank you. It’s good to see you, Ellen.

[2:52] Ellen:
It’s great. You were one of the first people that I actually looked up to because you were on stage and I was in the audience and I didn’t know hardly anything at that point. So, here we are all these years later, and we’ve been friends for years on Facebook, so it’s awesome. So, you and I were talking not that long ago, and we just were sharing war stories and just talking about some of the changes and some of the things that have happened over the years and talking about how some people just don’t have a clue, because they haven’t been in the game long enough, basically. And so that’s what I wanted to talk about today was really pulling back the curtain. I’d love for you to share your story, especially what’s happened. Because I know at one point you retired and I was like, “Yeah, right. She’s retiring. Let’s see how long this lasts.” Right?

[3:44] Jeanette Cates:
Hey, I held out for a while. (Laugh)

Ellen:
So, tell us what happened.

Jeanette Cates:
Well, what happens along the way, and I think one of the things that happens, particularly with online business, I started early enough that we were literally inventing the field as we went. So back when I first started, we didn’t have anything as Internet marketing or online marketing. We were hand coding all of our websites in HTML. Things were a very steep, steep learning curve for people to join.

One of the things that happens along the way though, is that all the things that they don’t tell you about creating a business and creating a business online. It sounds really easy, and it is really easy until you actually get into doing it. So, I think the first thing I always want to tell people is, “Watch out for the things they don’t tell you.”

One of the things that happens is that the learning never stops. There’s always something new. For those of us who love learning, that was one of the biggest attractions to online marketing is that there was something new coming up all the time. So with that learning curve, it’s constant. And the other thing that happens is the constant change. So with the change also comes the ongoing rapid change and what’s happened recently, for example, is that change has increased in pace. For me somewhere around 2015, 2016, it got to be more than I could handle. I was tired of constantly having to learn new things. I felt like things were moving much faster than I could handle this about the time social media came out.

[5:25] One of the things I loved about having an online business is I didn’t have to be social. So, all of a sudden when we had social media, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. I was really enjoying myself quietly in my home office and now I have to be, quote, “social?” So, that made a big difference in terms of my perspective, and just the whole nature of the business changed. Price points reduced drastically. So, where we used to be able to charge maybe $497 for a product, those products were now selling for $97. So, it means that you have to sell more, faster, quicker, et cetera.

So about that time, I also went through a period of depression. It was right shortly before I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I realized that I was not looking forward to sending out an email to my list. So it was like, “Oh, I have to send an email.” Instead of looking forward to sending the email, all of a sudden it became a “have to.” And that’s usually a good warning sign that you’re not doing the right thing for yourself at that moment is when it becomes a “have to” instead of a “I can’t wait to do it.” So, I realized I sent out one email, and a year later I sent out the second email.

Ellen:
Oh, my God.

[6:39] Jeanette Cates:
And at that point, I said, “I think I’ve retired,” and created a new product. hadn’t emailed anybody I think. And so I woke up one day and I thought, “Oh, I think I’m retired.” Well then about three years later, a friend of mine who’s also in business, came to me and she said, “Jeanette, I know you say you’re retired, but I have a couple of clients that I think you can really do some good work with. I’m coaching with them, but they need some fixes to their websites and just some technical stuff that you would probably enjoy.” And sure enough, I really enjoy the technical part.

Ellen: Yes, you do.

Jeanette:
And there’ve been parts of it. Yeah. So, that’s how you get back into it. I had three or four clients, period. But what happens then is that you begin to set parameters. So recently, one of the clients asked me to do something. I went in and learned enough about it to find out that I didn’t like doing that. So, I went back to her and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t want to do that. So, you can find somebody else to do that part of the business for you, or you can find a whole new VA,” for all I care. But essentially, I get to pick and choose what I’m working on now.

So, I think that’s one of the things we have to recognize is we have different stages and different periods in our lives. Sometimes, we’re really willing and able to go full speed ahead. And other times we really need to back off and honor what our brains and our bodies are telling us.

8;08 Ellen:
That is so true. But I love what you were talking about, how in the beginning we didn’t have a roadmap, right?

Jeanette Cates:
Oh, yeah.

Ellen:
We were inventing it as we go. And so, talking about depression, I really hit a rock bottom depression in 2018. And it was because I’d been doing it all those years and it wasn’t getting better. It was still a grind and it was still just a struggle. And I started doing different things, and one of the things I did was what you just said, which was, “What do I really enjoy?” And one of the things I really enjoy is this. I enjoy talking with people and hearing their stories and all that. And so, that’s when I started my podcast.

But it was around the beginning of 2020 where I said, “I’ve got to learn more skills. This is crazy. If I’m going to keep doing this, I just don’t know enough based on what’s happening now.” And as I went through that, I remember thinking, “God. Oh, I wish I’d had this ten, fifteen years ago.” You know?

[9:10] Jeanette Cates:
Well, and I think one of the things that happens is that because they don’t tell you everything, because nobody knows everything, and they don’t know where you’re coming from, what your skills already are, then we are often retroactively figuring out things that we really needed to know, but didn’t even know we needed to know.

So as you said, when you went back and got some coaching in different areas and took some different courses on different aspects of the business that you didn’t know about, those may have been something that I knew really well but didn’t know that you didn’t know, for example.

So, it’s one of those things where we’re constantly looking. And again, that’s one of the joys of having your own business, setting your own hours, setting your own activity level, is you get to figure out what you enjoy and what you need to know more about, as soon as you know that you need to know it.

[10:00] Ellen:
Right, but sometimes the problem is you go, “Oh, well. I know this can make me money,” and then you get sucked into that. And what people don’t realize is when you do that, eventually you do reach a point, for most people, where you go like the song, “Is That All There Is?” Because that’s really not enough to keep you going.

And I remember, I was sharing that in social media that I got depressed after I made six figures and somebody was like, just shaking their head, “Well. How could that be?” It was like, “Isn’t that the dream to make six figures?” Well, when I made six figures, suddenly it was becoming rote. It was becoming boring. It was becoming repetitive. And I was like, “Oh, my God. What do I do now?” It was like, “I made the goal. Now what?” Right? And-

Jeanette Cates:
But I think… Go ahead.

Ellen:
No. And so, I started feeling like a hamster on a wheel is what happened.

[10:50] Jeanette Cates:
And I think that’s a place where a lot of people recognize that they may want to hire a business manager who takes care of a lot of that rote stuff. That’s where they’ll often hire a virtual assistant or somebody else who’s taking care of the things that have to be done over and over again so that they can go out and do the creative part. Because I think for a lot of us who start businesses, we’re really good at the starting part. We like the whole excitement of all the new things and the new things we’re learning.

Ellen:
Yep.

Jeanette Cates:
And then as soon as it becomes routine, it’s like, “Well, that’s no fun anymore. I don’t want to do that.”

Ellen:
Right.

[11:24] Jeanette Cates:
So, there’s a very different personality between the entrepreneur who starts the business and the manager who runs the business, and few of us make that transition nicely. And yet, we always are expected to. We expect it of ourselves and society expects that of us too, that we move from the entrepreneurial role to the manager role.

Ellen:
Yeah. And I didn’t know that. And by the time I just kept thinking, “Well, if I just keep grinding it out, I’ll make enough where I feel like I can do that,” not understanding that it really works in reverse. Right? It’s like when you’re starting to feel like that, you’re probably not making quite enough money and you need to do it anyway. And nobody told me that… huh?

Jeanette Cates:
We do tend to lock ourselves in. Another one of those lessons we weren’t told about ahead of time. Right?

Ellen:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, that’s really frustrating.

Jeanette Cates:
[12:18] So, I think it’d be helpful if we shared some of the other things that people didn’t tell us that were like, “Oh, my gosh. What happens?”

Ellen:
Okay.

[12:28] Jeanette Cates:
So, let me start with one that I was just jotting down some ideas. Your friends won’t be local. If you have a virtual business, you’re not having lunch with your buddies who are in the industry. You’re having lunch with maybe your friends who are local, but those aren’t the people you’re doing business with. So, business lunches per se, aren’t the same for those of us who work virtually.

Ellen:
True.

Jeanette Cates:
How about one of the discoveries you’ve …

Ellen:
Well, what do you do instead?

Jeanette Cates:
Well, I have a separate set of friends that are friends that have nothing to do with the business. Most of them don’t even know what it is that I do. So, those are friends that I’ve had locally and some… Otherwise, everybody else I know are people that I’ve met through conferences or through work, or they were a client or I was a client of theirs. And we’ve seen each other at events for the last fifteen, twenty years since we started having events. But I only know them from those events. I know them on Facebook.

So when people talk your Facebook friends, I literally know everybody I know on Facebook are all people I’ve met through the industry. So, I know all of them face to face, and yet I don’t spend a lot of time with them unless we’re at an event at which time we spend tons of time together.

[13:49] Ellen:
Isn’t it funny though? I’m sure this probably happened to you, because it’s happened to me and you’ve been doing it longer than I have, where you’ll go to an event and someone will say, “You look familiar.” And you know you have never met them in person, but they know you because they know what you look like because you’ve been friends for years on Facebook. I’ve had that happen.

Jeanette Cates:
Well that, or they’ve bought your products.

Ellen:
Right, right.

Jeanette Cates:
That’s the other thing. They bought your books or your products or something. They recognize you right away. And you saying, “Oh. Oh, good. Well, thank you. Let’s do lunch and get to know more about each other.”

[14:19] Ellen:
Or another story I think is really funny. Alex Mandossian said one time he was somewhere, he was talking. Someone came up to him and said, “Are you Alex Mandossian?” And he said, “Yes.” And he said, “How did you know?” She said, “I know your voice.”

Jeanette Cates:
Right, because in the early days we didn’t have video at all.

Ellen:
That’s right. We had teleseminars.

Jeanette Cates:
Right, that was my first course. I taught a 12-week teleseminar where I invited different guests on every week. And I was teaching people how to do Internet marketing when I’d never really done it myself. But I had all these guests on who were telling and sharing. Alex was one of them. Marlon Sanders was another, just a whole bunch of names in the industry that I had met online from buying their products. But I wasn’t really doing any marketing yet. That was my first big product.

[15:04] Ellen:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. One of my first ones was I did the virtual… Well, there were a few. First of all, I did the Virtual Ebook Expo. That’s one of the things I was known for.

Jeanette Cates:
Right.

Ellen:
And today is called a summit, but I was one of the very early people doing that. And yeah, I had great guests on. From Armand Morin and Alexandra Brown and Mari Smith, all these people. But also one of my first products was a book marketing course. I didn’t know a whole lot about book marketing at that point. And so what I did was I did the modules that I did know. And then I invited guest people to fill in the blanks on what I didn’t know. And I had Mari Smith. I had Gina Gaudio-Graves. Oh no, she was in the summit.

Craig Perrine did one of the modules. Paul Colligan did one of the modules. So yeah. That’s how you do it. But it’s different now than it was then, because there was nobody who was super experienced at the top of their game in a lot of these areas. Oops, bless you honey.

Christen (Ellen’s husband): Sorry.

Ellen:
And so what was I going to say about that? Oh, and so if people worked with me, I was the only one out there doing what I was doing. Now there are people like me and a few others who’ve been doing it for at least ten, fifteen, twenty years. And so I get really upset when I see people go to somebody who says, “Oh, I just wrote a book and I’ll teach you how to write a book.” Right? Now there’s people who know tons more.

[16:39] Like when I go and I sign up for a course, I sign up with the best people. I sign up with the people that are the experts. I sign up with the people that have the years of experience or have… Like I’m in a Facebook Ads course. And the person I’m working with, first of all, he has amazing results of his own. But he’s worked with Frank Kern. He’s worked with Ryan Deiss. It’s the people who work with the best are the people I want to work with.

And then I want people to go to people that are the best at what they do because otherwise, you get at a half-baked education. You pay for it, and then you’re frustrated, and then you don’t want to buy more stuff because you feel angry because you didn’t really get the whole scoop, and it’s really on you because you didn’t do your due diligence to find the best people. So that’s [crosstalk].

[17:22] Jeanette Cates:
So, how do you advise people on how to do that due diligence? How do they separate the wheat from the chaffe?

Ellen:
Yeah, I would say, look at their websites, look at their testimonials, look at who they’ve worked with and look at their results, either for themselves or for their clients or both. I wouldn’t even work with somebody who tells me they’ve been doing this a year or two, whatever it is. I just because even though…

One thing I want to say is, you know how sometimes people will have this amazing result right out of the gate. And then… And I see this a lot on Twitter, especially where it’s like, “Oh, just work hard for six months, and then you’ll be on easy street.” Well, I worked hard for years and I wasn’t on easy street, because, one, it depends on the business that you have. If you have a service business, a coaching business, you keep working, right? That’s first of all.

Ellen:
But exactly what you said, “Things change.” And so they think, “Okay. I did this and now I’m the cat’s meow or whatever.” But the truth is, is that guess what? It’s going to change again. And then it really comes out, what are you made of?

[18:34] Because let me tell you, 2008 when the recession hit, I lost half my business, and it was a struggle for many years after that for me. But I never gave up, I always persevered. I just kept going, that whole thing. Some people don’t. They just fold up and go away. Other people change what they’re doing. Luckily, I didn’t have to change what I was doing. I just needed to change how I was doing it. But also, in the middle years, I went through a lot of what you just said.

Ellen:
I was burned out. I was depressed. I was bored with the whole thing, and I just didn’t know what to do. I just didn’t know how to find that peace of mind for many years. It took me a really long time. I don’t know whether I’m a slow learner or whether it’s like what you were saying. There just wasn’t the information out there until there was. Like the last few years, I just see people creating amazing challenges and courses and things that are exactly what I want to learn. But for years I was looking for that, I really couldn’t find it anywhere.

[19:32] Jeanette Cates:
Well, I think sometimes you’re leading the industry in terms of what it is that you’re looking for and the industry really hasn’t developed it yet.

Ellen:
Right. It hasn’t caught up with [crosstalk].

Jeanette Cates:
But the people that you’re going to be learning from are still in the learning stages themselves.

Ellen:
Right. Right.

Jeanette Cates:
So, they haven’t gotten to a point where they’re advertising or they’re really able to lend credibility to their claims at that point. They need a little bit more experience and a few more launches and a few more success stories before they’re really capable of saying, “Yeah. I’m the one you need to be working with.”

Ellen:
Right.

Jeanette Cates:
I think that makes a big difference too.

Ellen:
Right.

Jeanette Cates:
I think the other-

Ellen:
Yeah, go ahead.

Jeanette Cates:
Go ahead.

Ellen:
No, you go.

[20:08] Jeanette Cates:
Well, I think one of the things that I’ve discovered with working with a lot of clients and that is a lot of people are not happy working at home. And right now, particularly with the pandemic and people having to isolate so much, that really has come out for a lot of people.

So, some of us are just real happy in our little pods here at home. I’ve worked at home now for thirty years. Even when I had a J-O-B, I was still working at home. And so others really need a lot more contact with people. So, that makes a big difference. I think a lot of times people find themselves sinking into a depression when they’re working from home, not realizing that it’s because they are at home and they’re isolated. Others have a hard time at home with a discipline that’s required to work at home.

I started back when I even had children still in school, I literally hired a woman who was a… I had a bookkeeping and tax service at that point. And I hired a woman to do bookkeeping with me in the afternoons, but she also took care of the children when they got home from school, so that I could continue working in the quiet after they got home. They still had their after-school activities and things, but she was able to watch them and take them places that they needed to go, and maybe I was out working with a client at the time. So, it made a big difference. You have to recognize what your limitations are working at home. Just because you’re at home and you say you are at work, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually working at home.

I find, for example, that I can’t do laundry and work at home. I can do laundry or I can work at home, but I can’t do both. So it’s when I come to my office, I’m in my office, period. I’m at work. So, I’ve never tried to split it successfully. And so that’s one of the things a lot of people try to do is they try and split their attentions too far.

[21:55] Ellen:
Well, I can do laundry and work. So, it’s interesting. Yeah, that doesn’t bother me. But I think you made a good point too is a lot of times people don’t want to hire the help because they’ve somehow they think it’s going to cost them rather than seeing it as the investment that allows them to make more money. I think that’s really important.

There’s a book called We Should All Be Millionaires. And that’s one of the things that she talks about a lot, which is hire it out, hire out that stuff that… Hire a maid. Hire somebody who does the laundry. Hire someone who can run errands for you. Hire someone who can take care of the kids, because you can make a lot more money than what you’re paying. And …

Jeanette Cates:
As a virtual assistant, that’s one of the things that people hire me to do is to do the stuff that’s easy for me, but hard for them.

Ellen:
Right.

Jeanette Cates:
So that’s what you’re always looking for is what’s that magic combination of what is it that is easy for you to do when you think, “Oh. Everybody could do this.” And yet there are other parts of your business that you’re saying, “Oh, my gosh. If I have to figure out how to do one more WordPress plugin, I’m going to shoot myself.” And somebody else is saying, “Oh. I knew WordPress plugin. What fun!”

[22:59] Ellen:
Right. Speaking of fun to get back to what you said before about learning new things. God, there’s so much I want to address that we’ve been talking about. Yeah. Learning new things. It was like, it was fun. It was fun. It was fun. And then it wasn’t fun, because then it was like what you were saying, “I have to. I have to do this. I have to do that. I have to…” It got to the
point where my mind was going, “Oh, God. I have to learn another thing.” Right?

Jeanette Cates:
Right.

Ellen:
Just it became exhausting. So for me, what had to come first was saying, “Okay. I need to change my business model.” And then only do those things that support that. That was a really big change for me.

Jeanette Cates:
So, you changed your business model, which is essentially a pretty big change. Other people might just change that one item and outsource that item.

[23:45] Ellen:
Right. Yeah. Well, I’ll be outsourcing again too. I outsource some of this stuff now. But the things that I outsource are things like I have editors and I have designers and that kind of stuff, but my next one coming up is to be a new executive assistant. Now I had one for years, but I had one that sued me, and that put the kibosh on that for a while. She lost. But nonetheless, it was very stressful.

Jeanette Cates:
Time-consuming.

Ellen:
Very upsetting and time-consuming. Yeah. And I had a few other bad experiences with VA’s along the way. So I got gun shy for the last few years and I really haven’t needed it, but now I do. So, that will be coming up. But yeah, but I think that’s the other thing about that people might get confused about, right? Which is, “Oh. I’m a lifetime learner and I love this.” And then you might reach a point where you get learning fatigue, and for me that was twofold.

[24:42] One part was, I was just mad. I was angry because I had spent thousands and thousands of dollars and none of it worked anymore. That was part of the problem. And then the other thing was like I said, I just couldn’t find what I was looking for. And then finally things started to change and I got the right people, and I started to learn what I really wanted and needed to learn. So, it changed, but you were going to say something.

Jeanette Cates:
Well, I think it’s a matter of recognizing when those things are occurring. I think one of the other things that that always brings up for me is pacing. Most of us as entrepreneurs, we enjoy starting the company. We really enjoy the learning phase. We really enjoy the setup phase and we’re used to working ten, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. We just keep going.

And what happens then is not only are we burning out in terms of our energy, but when we hit one of these road bumps where a person has failed you or a system has failed you or the whole industry changed, now you have to back off and say, “Okay. Wait a minute. I need to take a break or I need to slow down. I need to pace myself better rather than going go, go, go all the time.”

[25:56] Ellen:
Yeah, this business of hustle, of constant hustle. Yeah. I used to work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. And then I got one to eighteen hours, six days a week. And then eventually I went to… Now I’m usually in the office, like [11:00] to [6:00]. That’s it. Because the morning is taken up with personal stuff.

But if there’s something I want to do or have to do on the weekends, I’ll do it. But now I don’t. I’m not exhausted because I haven’t been working eighteen hours a day all week, you know? And sometimes, it means changing things around, like I used to do the podcast on and have it released on Monday. And I realized, “Well, crap. I’m ending up working every Sunday. Forget this.” I moved it to Tuesdays.

Jeanette Cates:
Good for you.

[26:41] Ellen:
But yeah, but sometimes it’s like, there’s so many times where I’ve learned something and when I’ve had a coach say to me, “Well, why do you think you have to do it that way, just because so and so’s doing it that way?” And I’m like, “Oh. Well, because they’re the experts. And they said that’s how to do it.” And they go, “Well, you don’t have to do it that way.” And that was huge for me, because I’m such like give me the directions and I’ll get (make it happen)… And that’s what happened with Alex. Like when I started with Teleseminar Secrets, he would say, “Do this,” and I would do it, whatever it was. I just did everything. You know?

And so by the end of that, I started making money right away and got to my six figures, because I’m very coachable. But by the same token, I can get stuck in that like, “Well, this is how it’s done.” And I have had to learn to break out of that and go, “Okay, but is that best for me?” Right? So these people say, “Oh, you got to get up at [5:30].” I won’t. No. That will never be me. Nope.

Jeanette Cates:
Yeah. Some of us were not made as morning people.

[27:39] Ellen:
No, especially writers. Writers do not tend to be morning people. At least the ones I know. But anyway, so anything else? What else can we tell people?

Jeanette Cates:
Well, I think one of the things that… It comes again from what you were just saying about you set a system in place and then you just kept doing it. But what happens is that we sabotage ourselves with unrealistic expectations. Many of us who start our own businesses were good students. We followed the rules. We played the game. We were the ideal employee. Everybody loved having us work for them. And so we expect to continue to be perfect in everything that we do. When in essence, when we’re starting a business, this is all new to us. This is one new lesson after another new lesson. And we often will say, “Well, I’m working twenty hours a day.”

One of the things that was a huge eye-opener for me is I took about a week out and I set a timer for every ten minutes, which drives you nuts every ten minutes. But I had a journal there, and every ten minutes when the timer went off, I wrote down what it was that I was working on. Well, what happened-

Ellen:
What did that do? Yeah.

Jeanette Cates:
Well, what that did is I assumed that if I went to research something, I was looking up online, “Oh, that’s a ten-minute task.”

Ellen:
Oh, yeah.

Jeanette Cates:
Well, then I find out that I was actually thirty minutes later, I was still researching that.

Ellen:
Right.

Jeanette Cates:
It was like, “Oh, wait a minute. That took a little longer than I expected.”

Ellen:
Right, right.

Jeanette Cates:
So in my mind, in my planning mind, I was saying, “Oh. Well, I can create this product in this length of time.” And in the real world, it was taking me two and three times as long.

Ellen:
Yeah. And it usually does.

[29:37] Jeanette Cates:
And yet my goal was set on that original expectation, but the reality was totally different. So, I was running myself ragged thinking, “Well, I must be doing something wrong. I just have to work faster, work longer, work harder.” So that unrealistic expectations, I think, are something that we sabotage ourselves with time after time after time.

Ellen:
Oh, I’m so glad you shared that. I’ve been using the Full Focus Planner from Michael Hyatt. And one of the things I love about it is at the top, it has what are your three things? And that’s it. And a lot of times I don’t even get to three, but it’s great because it keeps me keeping my to-do list a lot lower. And then there’s a place down below, you can put more things that you have coming up. But yeah, what you’re saying is so true. And instead of what I used to do, it’s like, “Oh, well. I’ve got to meet that deadline.” And so now I’m up half the night and I just won’t do it anymore. Now it’s, “Oh. I just have to change the finish line, because I’m not staying up all night.”

Jeanette Cates:
Right.

Ellen:
Yeah.

[30:35] Jeanette Cates:
So, what is it that we could say to people that would help them through those difficult times? Because you and I both have shared different times that we’ve had difficulty in our business or personal life, something else, other challenges going on.

Ellen: Yeah.

Jeanette: How is it that people can make those adjustments but still keep going?

30;56 Ellen:
Well, I think we’ve shared some of them. Some of it’s like changing your hours, lower your expectations. Another thing that we didn’t talk about yet is taking breaks. I never used to even go outside. Now it’s like, I make a point, especially if the sun’s out, to get out of here. We take walks and today I sat in the sun for twenty minutes. I try to do that as much as I can.

Make sure I’m drinking enough water. Make sure I’m getting enough sleep. Make sure I’m having some fun. For years, I didn’t have any fun. Like right now as we’re recording this, we just came through Christmas, and my husband and I spent two days doing a movie marathon. We just sat and watched movies and hung out together.

Jeanette Cates:
Nice.

Ellen:
There was a time I wouldn’t have done that. Because I would’ve said, “Oh. I got to get an offer out,” because it’s whatever. And I was like, “No. I’m just going to change the times and whatever, and I’m doing this.” And I think it’s really important because for a long time I didn’t do that. And then I resented that I wasn’t doing it. Right?

31;58 Nobody’s telling me I can or can’t, but there was that whole, like what you said, the perfectionism. We’re good students. And so I should. I should keep working. I should keep making money. I should, should, should. I used to should myself to death, you know? And so, it’s really learning that your business is not your life I think. It’s like, no matter how much you love your business, no matter how much you want your business to succeed, it’s really not healthy to only do your business. And I…

Jeanette Cates:
I agree.

Ellen:
Yeah.

32;30 Jeanette Cates:
Yeah. It’s having that balance in our lives. And I think maybe people are a little bit more attuned to that now that we’ve had the period of unbalanced in society and in lives. And thinking that this job or this business was going to keep going exactly as it has. And there’s been a few rocky periods in there where people said, “Wait a minute. Maybe I made the wrong assumptions here, and I need to go back and reexamine it.” I think-

Ellen:
I think also it’s also just being in touch with yourself is so important. And if you’re staring at a screen all the time, you can’t do that. You know? Because you talked about like loving working at home. God, the last job I had was in the 1970s. Okay?

And then I got in the music business. I worked at home. And then we did real estate. We lived in the houses and flipped them, and then I did this. I’ve worked at home since 1979. So, that was not an issue. But with COVID, what happened is I still miss hanging out with people. I do have good friends, and actually what’s cool is all my best friends I met online now. But I do make a point to stay in touch with them. Every so often we get on zoom and just have a virtual coffee.

Jeanette Cates:
Right.

33;49 Ellen:
But I do that. And I think like I said, it’s important to just check the boxes in all the different areas of your life and make sure that you’re getting something. And it’s not balanced like every day is going to be all those things or every week or whatever. And yeah, sometimes you want to get an offer out or sometimes, you need to, but just overall to look for that balance, I think is important. And I think unfortunately too many of us don’t. Then we get sick, and then we do it. So if we can stop people from doing it that way, it’s a good thing. Right?

Jeanette Cates:
Absolutely. We’ve been there, done that. We don’t want other people to have to repeat the same problems, which I think is the reason we got together today to talk about these things.

[34:34] Ellen:
Right. Exactly. Okay. So, any final tips?

Jeanette Cates:
No, I think one of the things is just to reach out. Find people who are the role models that you want to model your business and your business life after. I think it’s important to have those people that you’re following, listening to their wisdom, their podcast, any other ways that they’re communicating with you. So, find people who you admire, not just for their business, but for their balance.

Ellen:
And something I will say about that, which goes back to something I said earlier, don’t assume that your business is going to look exactly like theirs. Right? It’s like one of the big lessons for me in the last two years has been, “Oh, I like that, that that person’s doing, but I would never do that. Oh, but there’s a piece over here with this person that I like and that person.” And then it starts to gel into what I want my business to look like. So, you may find someone whose business model is exactly what you want, but if you don’t, just be aware that you may have to tweak it for your own.

Jeanette:
Excellent. Yeah.

[35:37] Ellen:
Okay. So, you are amazing when it comes to tech. There’s no doubt about that. Jeanette is my go-to person when all else fails, and you have written a lot of books. So, how do people find you, your books, everything?

Jeanette: ,
Probably Facebook is the easiest place you can reach out and message me there. Or my books are over at booksbyjeanette.com. So, that’s the easiest way to get to all my books at one time.

Ellen:
Okay.

Jeanette Cates:
And I have a website, but I don’t pay attention to it anymore. So, I have several websites actually, selling another 100 or 200 or 300.

[36:22] Ellen:
Well, before actually, I should ask you this before we go. I will ask you one more thing. How did you write so many books? How are you so prolific?

Jeanette:
One of the things that I think is that my background is instructional design. So, I’ve taught people how to teach. So, when I learn something, my first instinct is to turn around and teach it. So, most of my books are based on my personal experience.

When I talked about how to sell more books with a podcast or with teleseminars at that time, it was based on my experience. When I talked about how to market your book, it’s based on my experience on what worked for me on getting one bestseller after another. So, each of my books is based on my experience. And what I find is that for me, I’m able to sit down once the ideas are gelled. So, I’m working all the time just jotting down notes in miscellaneous places. I keep every note for example.

Ellen:
Uh-oh, I tell people never to do that. Yeah.

37: 25 Jeanette Cates:
Well, in Evernote I have a different page for every idea section.

Ellen:
Okay.

Jeanette:
So, I’ll record my ideas into Evernote, and then just keep gathering them. And then all of a sudden, one morning I’ll wake up and say, “Oh. I’m ready to write that book.” And then it takes me about a week to write a book. I’m pretty much incommunicado during that week. And I’ll sit down and write for seven days straight, and then it’s ready.

Ellen: I love that.

Jeanette: All my research is done ahead of time. So, I know all my keywords. I have my description written ahead of time. I have all my chapter outlines done ahead of time. All of that is done before I ever start writing.

[37:57] Ellen:
I love that. And that’s exactly what I do in the Challenge. I teach people, Bestseller Breakthrough Challenge, to do that.

So anyone who wants to get their bestseller outline done using my step-by-step easy-to-follow system, send an email to ellen@booksopendoors.com and I’ll put you on the waitlist for access as soon we are ready to run it again, in the next month.

Yeah. You and I are so on the same page about that. I am such an evangelist about doing the marketing research first and writing the book in a short amount of time. Because of exact… Well, you didn’t say this, but I’m going to say it. I’m working with a client right now and it’s like, he had to go away for a week and then he comes back, and then it takes us a half-hour to figure out where we were.

Jeanette:
Oh, right.

[38:44] Ellen:
Right? So, that’s why the 3- Day Best Seller, which is what I teach is teaching you a structure for doing it in three days. Jeanette’s doing it in seven days. You can use it however you want, but it’s a structure that works, if you want to do it in a time frame that is fast and easiest because of what she just said, “You’ve got it all together and you’re ready to go.” So, we are so on the same page about that.

Jeanette Cates:
Perfect.

[39:12]Ellen:
Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much. This has been so much fun. And as I said, for anybody who wants to get into the challenge, send an email to ellen@booksoopendoors.com Subject line “3day” Be sure to put in “3 Day”
so I’ll know what it’s for.

You can also get the free Rockstar Authors Toolkit on the website. That’s booksopendoors.com, booksopendoors.com. And that is the checklist for writing your book, the checklist for creating your bestseller title, the checklist for 21 Simple Strategies to Jumpstart your Book Marketing Online and the Kindle planner, which is what Jeanette was just talking about, getting your keywords, your categories, all that good stuff.

And be sure to join me next week when my guest will be Megan Huber and we’re going to be talking about how to go from hustling to that seven figures.

So, that’s it for today.

‘Til next time

Bye-bye.

Music: You’ve been listening to the Books Open Doors podcast, with your host, Ellen Violette. If you’d like to connect with other mission-driven speakers, coaches, consultants, thought leaders, founders, creative entrepreneurs, and authors who are changing the world one book at a time, join us in the Books Open Doors community at facebook.com/groups/booksopendoors. Let’s rock your business with books.

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