Oh October. It’s this love-hate relationship. My Dad’s birthday would have been tomorrow…69th birthday. And my mothers birthday would have been on the 7th, the big 70.  Several other birthdays and losses in the month of October. It’s also that Breast Cancer Awareness month that I have come to have a really hard time with. I’ll spare you that rant…because we all know my feelings of the bullshit that surrounds that early detecting crap. Been kind of blue the last few days. I’m sure it has something to do with all of the above. I haven’t been moody or anything lately so I’m sure it was just a matter of time.

Anyhoo the things we love about October! it’s a BER month! Which means it’s getting colder, which makes me happy! I’m leaving for Las Vegas tomorrow for the Wedding MBA. I’m super excited about this week. I mean 3 full days of learning stuff from industry experts and meeting a bunch of people that I’ve only emailed and chatted with on FaceBook. So it’s going to be a blast. I’m hoping to come out of this with a lot of information to figure out my plan for 2018.

I start getting a little freaked out about business and then realize that I’m 2 events ahead of what I was this past year. So much can change day to day. I think that’s the hard part is that you can go months with no leads and then all of a sudden you get a bunch. It’s like it goes in waves. The other thing I have to keep remembering is not a lot of people get married around here in the winter months! But I have to try to think of things I want to offer and expand out to keep myself afloat for 12 months out of the year. The first year of the business seems like a mess. I mean learning the area, figuring everything out. I know next year will be better and each year it will improve. And I have to stay away from reading about other planners in the area. There are one or two that honestly don’t bother me and I am happy to help them as much as I can. But some, drive me up a wall. And perception is an interesting thing. I just have to remember to keep my eyes on my own mat! (yoga reference) It can be hard sometimes, but I need to just worry about what I’m doing.

I think the main thing that gets me is that everyone seems to be into doing these styled shoots. I don’t know. I mean I don’t consider myself a designer by any means. And how many styled shoots can one do in a year? And what for? I get it that it’s supposed to promote what you can do, but again, not a designer…I’m an organizer and a planner….hard to do a photoshoot of that! It just seems that people are putting so much effort into that. I start to wonder if I too need to be doing this. I mean if it’s getting them business then great, but if not….just don’t get it. So I don’t know. I feel weird asking all these companies to do yet another styled shoot around here. Seems like there are so many of them going on. I don’t know, I’ll have to investigate this a little more.

I’ve been in the throws of SEO for my site. This winter I’m focusing a lot on marketing and making sure I’m found. I also am trying to figure out exactly who I want to target. I reached out to my clients from this past year to see if I can’t get some reviews for facebook. Seems this is important. A lot of the seminars I’m going to this week are surrounding all this marketing thing and how to drive your SEO. So maybe I’ll learn a thing or two. I can totally see how you need a person to do nothing but make sure your ranking goes up in the world of Google and Bing. I’m completely amazed at the people out there that are giving workshops on this and charging so much money to do this. I had a company call me and they wanted $950 a month.  Or I can take a 6-week class for $1000. I can’t afford that right now! So I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to be smart about this. This first year was just a tester to see how things went. Now I know where I need to put my energy and effort.

It will be interesting what I learn from this week and what direction I’m going to end up taking this business. I have a lot of ideas, I just have to figure out which ones are going to work in this area!