Day 16: It's About To Begin

I explored the Freedom Partner Program today.

My account had been approved last night, but I hadn't had time to check out the partner portal yet.

I logged in, watched the introduction video which was basically just a tour of the portal and how to use it, and found my affiliate links for the different products that The Freedom Formula offers.

The 90-minute free masterclass (their lead magnet) and the Freedom Affiliate Launch (the course that I took) were the two that were of interest to me.

I then placed these links in each of the potential channels where I could attract leads — my website blog posts, my email campaign, my funnel and my Instagram bio.

In turn, I published my funnel, activated my campaign and added the link to my new Instagram account to my website.

The technical aspects of my time freedom framework were now complete.

Next, I signed up for Aweber and Hostinger's affiliate programs. The signup processes were quick and free, so I figured, why not?

(I got access to Aweber's one instantly, but I'm not sure if I'll get approved for Hostinger because they asked the size of my following on my social media where I'll promote them, and I've only just created my new Instagram account so I had to enter 0.)

I was all prepped to start putting out content on Instagram now.

I started by creating a few variations of a colour palette for my brand on Instagram.

I tried doing it manually first, but I'm not great at art or design and soon ended up googling for tools.

I landed on a site called Coolers.co, and found their palette creation tool super duper handy. It gives you up to 5 colour slots, and suggests colours which you can shuffle. When you like a colour you see in one of the slots, you can lock it in and then when you shuffle the rest of the slots, it only shows you colours that go well with the one(s) you've already locked in.

It made the task a lot easier for me than if I had chosen all the shades manually, and I figured I'd definitely be linking them as a resource somewhere in my blogs. So, naturally, I signed up to be an affiliate for them too! It only took a few seconds.

The affiliate programs I’ve signed up for so far are all low-ticket, and they’re not ones that I’m going to spend much energy in promoting.

They’re just resources that I’ve used and liked and am inevitably going to talk about online (since what I'm doing is documenting my journey). Should someone see my review of those products and decide to try them out for themselves, that’ll be a referral.

I see no harm in being part of several affiliate programs, even if they’re not making me money. In fact, I don’t expect any of the ones I signed up for today (Hostinger, Aweber or Coolers) to make me any substantial amount of money, ever.

But since I’m getting into this business, I was naturally curious to see if they had affiliate programs. It's something I’ve never checked before these last couple of weeks, and something that's going to become a habit soon. It's just part of this business model.

Next was the job of picking presets to edit my photos with. Jade said that a somewhat uniform look in all your photos helps with the brand image, so you should find a set of presets that you like and stick with them.

Adobe Lightroom seems to be the norm in this area, and there are some great free Lightroom presets out there, but it’s paid and since the mood dip around paid advertising yesterday, I was feeling a bit iffy about paying for another subscription.

I remembered that I’ve used Snapseed and that among the filters there’s a Last Edits option which applies the set of edits you made to the previous photo to your current one. This sounded similar to what a preset is, and I googled for free Snapseed presets.

I found loads, and picked a couple to begin with. I might do some more research on this and pick out a couple more before starting to post, but the process is simple and it shouldn’t take long.

Lastly, I drafted a rough plan for the next week.

I’m more on my own now, since I’ve finished all the course content and now it’s time to implement what I’ve learned.

I have to start planning things further than what modules of the course I’m going to cover the next day. I have to plan content creation and social media posting strategies. I need to plan what content I’m going to write or what footage I need to get in advance.

I need to manage my time well because I have to stay on schedule to post.

I have nothing to post right now so I need to start with creating as I’m posting. But I have to create more than I'm posting until I’m comfortably at a point where I can batch-create, and schedule posts for at least a day or two in advance.

And I have to work on learning and growing more so I have more to write about and in turn more content to create and post.

As I’ve said before (as have many others before me, I'm sure), the first step feels like the biggest. And I’m at the point that’s right before taking the first step towards establishing myself on my new Instagram account.

To end the day, here's a reminder to myself that posting something imperfect > trying to be perfect & posting nothing. So. I’m going to push myself to just. Get. Started. Tomorrow.