Welcome to episode one of the Pay Less for Traffic podcast! Everyone loves a good origin story, and this episode will deliver the background information you’re expecting. But this episode also marks the beginning of YOUR origin story: The one where you decide to start paying less for traffic.

*trigger warning: The first 3 minutes of this episode do briefly discuss my journey as a breast cancer survivor. If this is a sensitive topic for you, please begin at the 3 minute mark instead

Episode Highlights:

• Who am I?
• Why "Pay Less for Traffic?"
• What to expect from this podcast

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Mentioned in this episode:

My 37 Favorite Places to Find Blog Ideas

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Stephanie 0:00

Welcome to Episode One of the Pay Less for Traffic podcast. You know, everyone seems to love a good origin story. And this first episode of the podcast is going to deliver in that regard. You will get all of the background information you're probably expecting. But this episode also marks the beginning of your origin story, the one where you decide to start paying less for traffic. So let's just dive in, I will give you some of that background information you're expecting. And then we're going to talk about you and what you can expect from this podcast.

Stephanie 0:36

Hey there teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:48

So first, a little bit about me. I was born and raised in Oregon, in a small town right at the edge of the Columbia River Gorge if you're familiar with that area. I lived in Idaho for about four years and now we live in eastern Montana. I am here with my husband, our three kids, and we also have two dogs and a foster dog. So a full house around here. But when I talk about my story, and my journey as a teacher, a lot of my story might seem very familiar. Teacher starts teaching, teacher gets burnt out, teacher starts doing something else. But my story, it did take a little bit of a detour to get where I am right now.

Stephanie 1:32

I worked as a special education teacher in the elementary school setting for 10 years, I absolutely loved my job. I didn't really even mind the paperwork all that much either. But as you know, balancing a demanding teaching career with motherhood, it just started to become a bit too much. And after our third child was born, it just felt like the wheels were falling off the bus and something had to give. My husband and I talked it over and I decided that I would just take a year's leave of absence just to give me time to reassess, he was going to go ahead and look into promoting with his company. And then I was just going to be a substitute teacher here and there to fill in the gaps of our family's budget.

Stephanie 2:15

And then around that time, I also started a blog just as a creative outlet during this time off from teaching. And so that was the plan. But a few months into my leave of absence, the plan just went totally out the window, because I was diagnosed with breast cancer. At that time, I was just 33 years old. We had two elementary aged kiddos and a toddler. So needless to say this was an eye opening experience when it came to my life priorities. I ended up spending the remainder of my years leave of absence receiving the full meal deal of breast cancer treatment. But it was effective. My cancer did respond well to treatment, and I have been cancer free for almost seven years now.

Stephanie 2:59

Once I received that clean bill of health, it was time for me to make some decisions about moving on with life. And I realized that the healthiest decision for me was just to step away from the classroom for the foreseeable future. But as we all know, bills still need to be paid. So I decided to kind of transition my blog from a creative outlet to an income source. I took some courses and I started figuring out how to use Pinterest to get more visitors to my website. It was working.

Stephanie 3:32

Around this same time I made a new mom friend. And she ran her own digital marketing business from home. We would talk shop every now and then especially about Pinterest, because I was really excited to tell someone about the results I was getting from Pinterest. And honestly she was one of the few people I knew who totally understood my excitement. So I like to chat with her about Pinterest. One day, she mentioned that she had a couple of clients who were wanting to use Pinterest for their marketing. And she wondered if I could just go ahead and subcontract for her. She was the face of the marketing, the buck stopped with her. She was the boss. And then I would just work behind the scenes, writing the pin descriptions creating the pins and getting them scheduled. I had no idea that you could get paid to make pins for other people and I was sold. So I worked with a very small client load for several years. I would just kind of fit in my Pinterest management services into little pockets of time that I had, because our youngest was still not in school yet. And it was enough to pay a few bills and we were just really grateful for that work.

Stephanie 4:44

Fast forward a few years and my youngest was ready to start kindergarten. I decided that it was time I either needed to take on more clients or go back to the classroom. So by this point, I had discovered the joy of working with TPT sellers and I had also expanded my services to include blogging. So I decided to do the scary thing and advertise my openings. And the rest is history. I've been supporting a full client roster of teacher business owners ever since. And I absolutely love it.

Stephanie 5:16

So you might be thinking, well, Stephanie, if you're so happy with your job, why start a podcast? And why now? And why this podcast? And I would say those are all very good questions.

Stephanie 5:29

During my time as a service provider, I've seen firsthand the pressure you're under to open your wallet for the next great solution for your business. Whether it's the latest course whose cart is opening next week, or a fancy tool that's going to streamline your workflow once and for all, I know how tempting it can be to pay for that easy button. As a blogger myself, I have felt the pull of shiny objects, promising to be the next great thing. But running a tight business budget has always been really important to me. Because a fun fact about me is that I am a former extreme couponer Yes, I was one of those ladies, I bought multiple editions of the newspaper every Sunday, I organized my coupons into a binder. I even had the stockpile of toothpaste in my basement. But even though I ditched the coupon binder a while ago, saving money will always be important to me. I think that's why I found myself getting defensive on your behalf. Because I watch all of the noise in the marketing space for teacher business owners, I have been wanting to shout from the rooftops that you don't have to throw money at your traffic problems in order to solve them. Even if that's what everyone is talking about on teachergram, or in Facebook groups, I realized that a podcast could be a good way to get that message out into the world. A podcast that shares the good news that organic marketing still works, especially blogging and pinning. So that's how pay less for traffic came to be.

Stephanie 7:02

Let's talk more about what you can expect from this podcast. I want the pay less for traffic podcast to be your safe space when it comes to marketing your business. We're going to have a weekly strategy session, every Saturday, we'll discuss ways that you can make the most of your organic marketing efforts. So some months, we'll focus mostly on blogging. Other months, we'll tackle Pinterest related topics. But no matter the month, and no matter what topic we're addressing, the last Saturday of the month will be an episode that focuses just on saving those precious dollar bills. We're going to call it the Let's Pay Less series. So what we're going to do is take a closer look at popular budget busters like Tailwind, or fancy keyword research tools, all of those things that it feels like everyone is paying for this. So maybe I should too. We'll discuss the pros and cons of these things, so that you can decide for yourself. If those tools are the best needle movers for your business. We will also be having guest episodes starting in the near future, we're going to have teacher business owners just like you join the podcast and share some of their wins with organic marketing. My hope is that this will cut down on some of the FOMO that's out there, because it feels like everyone is paying for Facebook ads, everyone is promoting their pins. So if you're not doing that, then you're just not going to get any traction at all. So these teacher business owners are going to share what is working for them. And I'm just I'm really excited about this part of the podcast as well.

Stephanie 8:39

This is not going to be a podcast where we just talk around different ideas, you know, kind of on the surface level, you need to be ready because every Saturday we're just gonna dive right into topics that are going to help you see results from blogging and Pinterest. After you listen to an episode, I hope you feel inspired to roll up your sleeves and take action in your business and not feel like you're at the mercy of algorithms and ad campaigns. Each episode is going to have a realistic and actionable tip that will help you move the needle in your business. So for this first episode, the action that you can take is to hit the subscribe button for the podcast. Because then you can make sure that you're here for our weekly strategy discussion every Saturday. I am so pumped for this podcast. I hope you are too. I'm really excited to help you pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 9:34

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher because bestie. You have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.