Kimra: Yes. Yes I am.

Interviewer: Nice. Kimra is a personal branding and online business strategist for aspiring entrepreneurs who want more freedom. She went from raising her kids on welfare to taking her business from zero to almost one million in less than a year and then doubled that revenue by her second business birthday. Kimra, take a minute. Fill in some gaps from that end show and give us a just a little glimpse of your personal life.

Kimra: Yeah, so I kind of started on this journey as a, quote, unquote, mommy blogger so I had a vegan moms blog about, and this was in 2013, and it was going really well, kind of building a lot of traction, a lot of following and because it grew such a massive following so fast, people started asking me like, oh, how are you doing this?

Like show us how to like, be better bloggers and all this stuff and I was like, um, okay, and I started doing webinar presentations and after the first webinar I did, I ended up scrapping my entire blog and I decide to create an entirely new business where I taught people all of the knowledge that was in my head about building an online business and then it just started growing pretty rapidly at that point.

In May 2014, that’s when my website, kimraluna.com launched, which is my personal brand and I, within three months, I had already had a launch that was like $65,000 in sales. Then shortly after that I did like a Black Friday promo, made $40,000 in sales and then the most significant thing that happened was a few months after that I did a launch of my program and I ended up making $750,000 in sales.

A lot of people are like what? That’s like a massive jump and it all happened, I mean I was like that. Like I was like, in bed, and I was pregnant during this whole time too, so I was like in bed, like hugely pregnant during this launch. I was like seven months pregnant and I was laying in bed and I just couldn’t believe how many sales were rolling in. I was like, this is insane and they just kept coming.

After the baby was born I decided to, you know, take some time off so I took about three months off and spent that time really focusing on getting my story out there. So I hired a publicity coach, Selena Sue, and we started working on pitching to everywhere I possibly could. You know, podcasts like this to magazines, everywhere because I wanted to share my story so I can inspire more women, particularly moms.

Then I ended up, a year after that $750,000 launch, I ended up opening up the doors to my program again, exactly a year later because I launched on my birthday, so exactly a year later and I ended up making $1.2 million in sales. So it was pretty significant in the past two years. It kind of skyrocketed. Most of it was all built off of doing webinar presentations and utilizing Facebook ads.

So I really focused on what my strengths were. I’ve been a Facebook lover forever and I created a Facebook group called Freedom Hackers, which now has 30,000 people in the community of online business owners and, you know, it was all about just building and building and building and for some reason, I wanted to do it really fast so I went on the route with Facebook ads and webinars and it grew really quickly for me.

Interviewer: So Fire Nation, you can see pretty quickly why I brought Kimra on the show. I mean, this is not just somebody who’s walking the walk. I mean she is generating the revenue and that’s the hardest piece about what we do is actually having people vote with their wallets, take out their hard earned dollars and actually pay for something and guess what?

She’s found out what the secret is, you know, something that I’ve been pounding the drums on for four years, she’s been talking about and crushing for a number of years now. Webinars. If you are going to make sales, you’re going to do it best on live webinars, so get over whatever phobia you have and just get out there and start crushing that. Now Kimra might disagree with this but I personally consider us friends.

You know, we had a great evening together in New York City with a bunch of other entrepreneurs to include Selena Sue and then myself and Kimra. You and me and one other person, Kimra. We were out the latest of that entire group. Are you proud of that?

Kimra: Yes. Yes. Well, and the funny thing is I was out late but I’m not much of a partier. I think you partied a little harder than I did.

Interviewer: I don’t know what that means, but yeah, I was having some fun for sure. But no, we were just hanging out, having a good time, a lot of great conversations and it was actually spring forward so we look at our watches and we’re like, oh my God. It’s actually an hour later than we even thought it was and this is again –

Kimra: Yeah, we lost an hour while we were partying.

Interviewer: We lost an hour while we were partying but you know what? It was a great time and great friendships were formed during that time and now I’m glad to bring Kimra on because she has so many value bombs to drop and specifically Kimra, I would like you to maybe expound for a second. Share with my audience what you consider your biggest area of expertise is and then give us two value bombs within that area that you think Fire Nation can really benefit from.

Kimra: Yeah, so my area of expertise most people know me as is personal branding, so I help people who are growing personal brands like people who want to offer some sort of services or potentially sell digital courses or eBooks and one value bomb I can give is to always make sure that you understand your customer, like immensely understand them, like so much to the fact that you understand every single need and want and desire they have in regards to either the service or product you want to create.

I think a lot of people, they think oh, I’m just really good at this so I’m going to make a course about it and then they’re like, nobody’s buying my course. Why is this not happening? And I say well, it’s not fulfilling a real need and it has to be a strong need. There’s people that buy things that they just want and like, you know, like oh, that’s like a shiny object and looks pretty and they buy it.

But most people are going to buys something that’s going to really solve a problem and if you’re not making a product or service that’s going to really solve a problem that’s like pulling a people’s heartstrings or pulling at something inside of them, their emotions, then your product is just going to flop and it’s hard to come back from that sometimes and you are a personal brand because you release something out there and then like, one person signs up and you’re like uh, and you can be a little bit embarrassed.

So, really diving deep with a customer, interviewing them, getting on Skype calls with them. I tell people all the time, people are like, you know, how did you know like, how to create your program so that it would sell so well and I said well, I had a few clients and all of the questions that they were asking me and the struggles I saw them with, I was like, I can solve these inside of a program. So I created it off of working with people so I had to be connecting with people one on one and then doing the webinar presentations did the same thing. The comments that people were chatting about inside of the webinar presentation gave me some many light bulbs of like, wow.

These are the real things that they are struggling with. All the questions they’re asking, I need to create content that’s going to solve those problems for those people. So really number one tip, be a problem solver extraordinaire. And then number two is actually get in front of people. Being visible is what a lot of people are lacking. They’re like oh, like nobody is signing up for my program or nobody is buying my course and I’m like, yeah because you only have 50 Facebook followers, like you need to be in front of people.

You’re not in front of enough human beings and if you don’t have maybe a budget to do ads or you want to grow more organically, then it’s going to take a little bit more time, which is okay but you’ve got to be talking to people, getting in front of people. Nowadays we have Facebook groups on every single sort of topic and you can find people in there who have the struggles that you’re looking to solve and you can literally send them a Facebook message and be like hey, I saw that you are struggling with this. I would love to help you and support you.

I think sometimes people are afraid to reach out and to me social media has kind of brought down that barrier a little bit because now we’re so connected with so many people, you don’t have to go out on the street to try to find a client. You can literally log in to Facebook and find them right there. So those are my two, those are my two little knowledge bombs right there.

Interviewer: Those are knowledge bombs and Fire Nation to kind of go over those real quick, be a problem solver extraordinaire. I love that phrase Kimra and this is the reality that I’ve found is that if you are not fulfilling a strong enough need, you’ll know that because you can’t presell it. I’m a big believer in preselling a product before you’ve even created it because guess what?

If it’s a big enough need, you will be able to presell that. If you can’t, it’s probably not a big enough problem and then number two, get in front of people, build your brand, build your audience Fire Nation. Now Kimra, you are on the cutting edge. I mean you keep your finger on the pulse. You know what’s going on. Things are changing so quickly and speaking of change, what’s something that you’ve actually changed your mind about in the last six months, meaning like what’s something that you used to believe just like, you know, four, six, eight months ago, that you just don’t believe anymore?

Kimra: One thing that’s kind of shifted quite a bit is actually when it comes to the email list and it’s always been like the email list is the goal, then the king and what I have found out is my, the only reason why my email is just so engaged is because I’m mixing it with my social media. I’m mixing it with my Facebook group.

When there’s like a really awesome post that happens in my Facebook group, I email it out into my list to get the list more engaged on my social media and I’ve been doing that for a while and I had a lot of people just like go, oh, you know, I don’t need to spend time on social and things like that and I’m like but I find out when I’m not spending as much time on social, my list actually has lower open rates and then when I’m way more active on social, they’re opening my emails like crazy.

So I feel like it kind of syncs together and I think some people are still missing a little bit of that. They’re missing like; they need the action to be in both places, not exclusive the email list. They need to see your face on social media, plus it’s a more gentle touch on social media like if someone sees your Facebook ad coming across their feed and they already like you, they’re not all upset that you like sent another email to their in box.

They’re just like oh, okay cool. They have, you know, some new free thing coming up or they just did a podcast interview or whatever and you’re posting it on ad or you have a new blog post or something. It’s just right now, particularly in my industry, people are so bombarded with emails and it’s actually refreshing for people to see your face somewhere else rather than just the inbox.

Interviewer: I love that you said that because people are just pounding the table like you have to grow your email list. It’s the only thing you own. It’s your only sandbox like you can’t, you know, you don’t know what Facebook is going to do or Instagram or Snap Chat and we don’t know what they’re going to do but the reality is Fire Nation, when you hear so many people talking about the same thing, you know, like Mark Twain quotes is that “when you find yourself on the side of majority, it’s time to pause and reflect” because hey, we need to actually get out of the majority sometimes. You know, we need to be outside of that box, you know. That’s how people like Kimra and myself, you know, have been able to establish seven figure businesses but not going with the tide. By actually, you know, sometimes going against that tide.

Now Kimra, a lot of people are listening to you and they’re like a $750,000 launch, then a $1.2 million launch just a year later. I mean that’s insanity. I mean, you know I called you up and you know, I was just like oh my God, this girl’s audio’s horrible but you know, you had your fan on, your baby was screaming and you’re just like, hey to your nanny like, go talk the baby for a walk and I was just like oh, she’s taking care of business and then we get on this call and I’m just like wow, this girl like, she, she’s together.

Like she’s doing her thing, she’s living her life. She’s a mother. She’s an entrepreneur. She’s doing what she needs to do. You didn’t always have it this way. I mean we talked very briefly or actually we just mentioned from your intro about, you know, the fact that you were on welfare. Take us back to what you consider, not your worst life moment but your worst entrepreneurial moment and tell us that story Kimra.

Kimra: It kind of begins actually right when I graduated high school. I graduated high school in 2004 and I began booking concerts for a living. I started working for a venue full time as the head events coordinator and I was actually making some solid money by the time I was 19. I actually made close to a hundred thousand the year that I was 19 years old, so it was pretty significant and it was booking concerts.

I mean, because there were some concerts, I’d make like $10K in a night, so it just depended on who I booked and how well the concert went, and so I did really, really well in that industry and I was living in Idaho. I’m born and raised in Idaho and I ended up moving to California because I wanted to keep kind of pursuing this booking agent thing and I moved to California. I started traveling with a lot of punk rock bands, worked with some pretty big labels over there and then the economy tanked in 2008-2009 and people were not going to concerts.

Like it was like pulling teeth to get people to go to concerts. You could do a concert for five dollars and there wasn’t people going, like it was insane, and at the same time, I had been with husband for about two years at the time. I ended up pregnant with my first son. So I was like, okay, this seems to me like a sign I need to get out of this industry right now, you know, like it’s not going upwards and the industry has still had it rough since then and it’s been quite a long time and they’ve still been having it pretty rough.

But it was kind of the time for me to be like; okay, I need to get out of this industry. So, you know, I started looking for jobs. My husband was like looking for jobs but because the economy was so bad in California, we ended up living on welfare. We ended up moving into my in-law’s house. Luckily my in-laws were able to stay afloat during this time even though they ended up going significantly in debt because they lost multiple homes that they owned, but we were so grateful we were able to have a roof over our head during this time.

So my first son was born, we’re on welfare and I try everything I could possibly do. I was doing Etsy shops; I mean anything I could possibly do to like, make extra money I was doing because I had applied for hundreds of jobs and no one would hire me. I think eventually, yeah, I did get one job for a short amount of time at like a frozen yogurt shop making minimum wage, which of course still didn’t get me off of welfare and my husband, he didn’t have a lot of experience. He didn’t graduate college and so both of us just had a really rough time, and then finally I was like, you know what?

Like my second son was born and I’m just like, we have to do something, like I don’t want to live this life anymore, and my husband and I had already been reading business books and personal development books the entire time. I’m like who on welfare is like reading like Law of Attraction? It’s like nobody. Nobody’s reading these types of books when they’re on welfare. So we’re reading these books and we’re like we know that there is something, and I’m on Facebook and I see one of my friends say there’s some jobs for men in North Dakota.

So we’re living in California and there’s jobs in North Dakota and I guess there was a big oil boom in North Dakota. So basically if you were a dude, you can get a job up there, so I was like all right, I’m going to talk to my husband and see what he thinks and I was like hey, there’s all these jobs up there. They’re really high paying jobs, like this could be our way out of this situation, and he’s like all right. Within two weeks he was up in North Dakota working and I and my two boys stayed living at my in-law’s house and my husband was in North Dakota working for six months. Finally he was like, okay, I know you’re not going to want to move to North Dakota so do you want me to come back to California? Do you want me to keep this career at FedEx and maybe move somewhere else? I was like okay, let’s move somewhere else.

So we ended up moving to Virginia, where I had no friends, no family, nothing but we were finally going to be off of welfare. Like we were able to get a used car, we were able to actually rent our own apartment and so I was like okay, we’re moving up in the world. Let’s do it. We moved to Virginia and that’s actually when I started becoming like this bored housewife, quote, unquote “bored housewife,” and that’s actually when I started my mommy blog.

So I went from being on welfare, becoming a bored housewife when we got off welfare and telling my husband I would like to use our tax return to buy an IMac. He’s like why do you want to buy an IMac? Oh so I can start a mommy blog. I didn’t even know how to use a freakin’ IMac, like I never even owned one before. Like I’m like, I don’t even know how to use this computer but I’m going to figure out how to do this blogging thing, because I followed a lot of blogs like on my phone.

Like I had the Pinterest app on my phone and I would follow all these like food blogs and mommy blogs and stuff and, you know, I was like I want to do one of these, like I can write this stuff, like I can make YouTube videos and I ended up having a YouTube channel. I had like 25,000 subscribers to my YouTube channel. I had, my Pinterest account was just blowing up. I had some of my pins on Pinterest having over 20,000, 30,000 repins.

It was, I mean it was crazy but it was all through just me sharing the stuff that I loved. I was just like, oh I want to share all this mommy stuff, you know, and pictures of the kids and I would just, I used my IPhone to make all my videos. I didn’t even edit any of them. I just like held up my phone, talked to my phone and post them on YouTube, you know and it just grew and that was so much fun for me and then that’s what led me into wanting to teach all that sort of stuff.

Interviewer: Yeah but let me get a break in here Kimra because that’s where I want to maybe challenge you a little bit because maybe you’re going to disagree. Maybe you’re going to agree with me but, you know, I hear you talk, you know, about the 20,000 repins and 25,000 subscribers on YouTube. These are all great numbers and great things. Unfortunately what I see in the entrepreneurial world is a lot of people just get stuck there or they stop there or they’re just happy with that and they never ever have any kind of a revenue generating program, which you have just crushed, you know, with your two launches and you continue to do these great things.

So how did you take just those vanity metrics, which is really all they are by the way, until you turned them into something meaningful, which is money? How do you take those vanity metrics and turn it into a real business?

Kimra: Yeah, well the one thing that I realized with my audience I had built is they weren’t buyers. They were people that liked my content and they loved what I had and they shared my content, but they weren’t necessarily people that wanted to buy from me and –

Interviewer: And a lot of people live in that world forever that way.

Kimra: Yeah, they stay in it. So what I did is I, you know, I started researching like, okay, what about if I sold online courses like do people that sell these online course, like do they really make money and like how does that work and I started really diving into podcasts like yours and I started listening to podcasts for over ten hours a day. I just listened to all of them because I was like what are these online business people doing to make money and like, what is going, like they’re doing something.

Interviewer: At least you are asking the question. I mean –

Kimra: Yes. I was like, there’s people making money. Like, I really want to make money. I want to retire my husband. I want him to be at home with me and my only goal was to make like $5,000 a month because I was like if I can make $5,000 a month, like my husband wouldn’t have to work. We could be at home. We could be chill. It would be awesome.

Like I didn’t even have these massive goals or anything and which cracks me up now because I’m like wow, I was really dreaming real small there wasn’t I? But you know, I was just like there has to be a way to make money so I started, you know, doing more research and like, okay there’s people that are kind of like coaches and they work one on one with people and then there’s people that sell all these digital courses and I was like oh, I think I’ll go the digital courses route. I ended up having clients anyway because people just wanted to work with me so they were like practically beg, like I never even did like, you know, the discovery calls to people. People just wanted to work with me. They’re like sending me messages. I want to hire you. Okay.

So I just worked with people and it was all because I just started sharing. I started giving lots of value to people and helping people as much as I could. I had no clue it was going to grow so fast. I was like I’m just going to help people, help people, help people and just keep on doing that until there’s people that want to buy from me and that’s what ended up happening.

Interviewer: So Fire Nation, I really hope that you’re seeing that Kimra, she wasn’t just going to sit back and let those vanity metrics like rule her life. She was saying I’m going to get out there and learn from those people who are making money, who are generating revenue.

So, you know, I’m sure she saw like Pat Flynn’s income reports and maybe even like, you know, back in 2012 when we started publishing our income reports and she’s like okay, now I’m like seeing how people are actually doing this and making money, how can I apply this to my skill set, to my audience and again, that’s always going to be with talking to your audience. Asking them what are you struggling with.

Listening to their pain points, challenges, struggles and then providing them solutions in the forms of products, services, communities. Now Kimra you have been doing nothing but dropping value bombs throughout this entire interview and Fire Nation, don’t go anywhere because after the lightening rounds we’re going do just that. We’re going to take a quick minute first to thank our sponsors. Kimra, are you prepared for the lightening rounds?

Kimra: I most certainly hope so.

Interviewer: What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?

Kimra: Nothing actually. I’ve been entrepreneurial since I was a little kid so it kind of just took a while to find the thing, the quote, unquote thing that I was best at and once I discovered what my strength was, I just went straight for it, so nothing held me back I don’t think.

Interviewer: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Kimra: Take the free money and this was given to me by my film teacher in high school and he’s like if somebody’s giving, offering something for free, take it but actually utilize it, like use it and I think the reason why I was able to learn so much from like, you know, podcasts that I listened to or like free webinars that I watched, I didn’t have money to buy a lot of online courses.

I didn’t have a business coach before I started. Like I didn’t have the money to do that. We were just paying bills. I listened to the free stuff and I applied every single freakin’ thing I could possibly apply and that’s how I was able to have results.

Interviewer: What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?

Kimra: Not giving a shit what anybody thinks about me. Period.

Interviewer: What is an Internet resource, like Evernotes, that you just love and can share with Fire Nation?

Kimra: Oh my gosh, Evernote’s my favorite one but I would say number two would be Slack. I’m kind of obsessed with Slack. I have a team of 13 people now so it really, really helps when it comes to the communication back and forth with each other. You know we have like a channel where we post like all of our links for particular like shows or things that I’m doing and it’s just, it’s amazing if you’re a person that doesn’t want to be in your email inbox all day so use Slack.

Interviewer: If you could recommend just one book, what would it be and why?

Kimra: The Desire Map by Danielle LaPorte. That book really changed my entire outlook on my life and where I was going and it actually is what helped me make the decision to leave my mommy blog and start my current business because it’s all about going towards the things that you want to feel and when I discovered like, oh, I really want to feel this particular way but my mommy blog isn’t making me feel that way. It’s time to move on, and so I really recommend the book The Desire Map.

Interviewer: Kimra let’s end today on fire with a parting piece of guidance, a best way that we can connect with and then we’ll say goodbye.

Kimra: So the best way to connect with me is my brand spanking new website called freedomhackers.com and there you can find amazing freebies to help you grow your online business.

Interviewer: And that parting piece of guidance.

Kimra: Focus on your strengths and just be yourself. It doesn’t matter what anybody around you is saying. It really just matters on you following your heard and focusing on what you really care about and focus on serving others.

Interviewer: You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You’ve been hanging out with KL and JLD today so keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. Just type Kimra in the search bar. Her show notes page will pop up with everything that we’ve been talking about today, best show notes in the biz. Time stamps, links galore and Kimra, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that we salute you and we’ll catch you on the flipside.