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How to invest in yourself as a woman entrepreneur without the lifestyle creep
Lifestyle creep is a natural spending phenomenon that can be hard to avoid if you don’t know what it looks like. Generally, our incomes increase over time with raises, promotions, and new career opportunities. This income increase usually translates into a spending increase on material things.
An occasional splurge or increase in your spending budget is fine, but most of us could benefit by spending this money elsewhere. For example, instead of a new apartment with a better view, that extra $200 a month could pay for a relaxing vacation or certification to help you get your next job.
Re-investing in your health, career, or happiness is the best way to spend your extra cash. If you’re looking to boost business, we had some spending tips for you.
How to invest in yourself financially
Share Your Expertise
A professional blog serves a multitude of purposes. For some people, their blog is their career and they make good money from their content. Others use their blog to build their brand or increase visibility online. A website isn’t free, but it’s essential for a successful business.
A major aspect of blogging is search engine optimization (SEO). Creating content optimized for SEO means it’s designed to rank and generate traffic to your site. Increased traffic can help you convert more clients or sales. Increased traffic also allows you to monetize your blog with ads or affiliate links and build passive income.
Your blog ultimately builds your brand as an expert in your career or industry. Beyond SEO content, you should share thought leadership that proves your experiences and demonstrates your value to prospective clients.
Learn to Write For Others
In addition to your personal blog, you should create content for other sites and platforms. This helps frame you as an expert and can improve your site performance, too. Links back to your blog are a valuable tool for proving your importance to search engines and expanding your reach.
You’ll also build a network of creators and experts that can speak to your experience. As your reputation grows, your speaking opportunities may expand into workshops, video interviews, or podcast appearances. You certainly don’t have to limit yourself to written content.
These connections can pay off over time. Not only do you earn more appearances, but next time you need an endorsement or favor, there are plenty of creators willing to lend a helping hand.
Get a New Skill – Invest In Your Education
Continuing your education allows you to stay on top of industry trends and grow your career. Certifications and courses are also valuable editions to your resume and online portfolio. Some brands even require their employees to have specific certifications to work for them.
Some courses are free, while others cost money to earn your certification. Find a few opportunities in your niche and compare the perceived value, industry recognition, and cost to determine what’s right for you.
Beyond certifications, you may find that a long-term educational goal like grad school would be a huge boost to your business. You can increase your savings to help cover the cost of tuition or to offset costs while you study.
Going back to school can also offer great networking opportunities and expand your skills to offer tangential services to your clients. For example, a graphic designer may expand into web development or user experience to capitalize on the growing trend in user-first design.
Finally, industry associations are a great place to look if you’re looking to stay on top of the latest updates and connect with experts in your field. Associations offer online and in-person education, social events and workshops, and leadership opportunities as an expert or committee participant.
RELATED: Create a Powerful Action Plan for Your Online Business
Build Your Brand
Quality branding can set your business apart from the competition and improve brand awareness. Names can be hard to remember, but an iconic logo or impressive site can give you that little edge you need to convert a big client.
Branding is a specialized design practice that you may be able to do yourself but is best left to the professionals. Determine how much you can spend on your branding design and determine what you need.
Starting fresh, you’ll want a logo, style guide, website, and essential assets like a business card. If you already have a logo and site, marketing materials like pop-up signs for conventions or call-to-actions for your bottom-funnel topics are great.
If you do decide to DIY your branding, there are plenty of free and paid resources to help you get started. Sites like Canva provide free templates for your marketing materials, while great icons and stock photos from services like The Noun Project can help you polish your site.
Impressive design can definitely wow your clients, but that’s not all there is to a great brand.
Create a Consistent Image
Your email signature, LinkedIn photo, and pinned tweet all work together to speak to who you are as an individual and what you offer as a brand. Creating a consistent image can inspire confidence and your polished presence will put you a step above the rest.
Decide your key values as a business. Are you approachable, flexible, and easy to work with? Maybe you’re confident, calm, and detail-oriented. Whatever your core values, how can you showcase them in everything you do?
Someone approachable and warm may end their emails with a “have a good one!” while calm and confident signs off with a simple “cheers.” These little changes reflected in your content and communications can be the finishing touch that unifies your image.
You want someone to be able to visit your Instagram, view your site, then email you directly and have the same genuine and consistent impression of you and your brand each time. Determine your brand image and vision, and work with integrating it into everything you do.
Hire For Your Business
You simply can’t do it all forever. Growing your business to the point that you need more hands is a testament to your hard work and a huge benefit of success. The growing pains may seem overwhelming at first, but eliminating your least favorite or weakest tasks gives you time to develop your business.
You don’t need to hire a full-time employee outright, but look at how you can streamline some of your tasks. Instead of tracking your time and creating invoices manually in a spreadsheet, look into software that can manage all of your accounting for you. Come tax time, you’ll be glad you did!
It may take time to determine the most efficient use of your money, but investing in these resources can improve your quality and work-life balance. Identify the key tasks in your business like content creation, marketing, lead generations, etc. Which of these is most important to your brand? Which of these is the most repetitive? Which do you simply love to do?
Once you have a few tasks that could be delegated to another person or program, start considering how much you want to budget for the upgrade. It’s not just a straight cost-benefit, either. If you hate packing and shipping items, then the time and health benefits of offloading that task are huge!
With a couple of prices and process opportunities identified, you can better decide which investment is right for you.
How to invest in yourself mentally
Take Care of Yourself
Your business can’t thrive if you’re struggling to keep everything moving forward. If you need a break, take it!
Investing in your business isn’t just about increased profit or growing your position in the market. Prioritizing your health and wellness is just as valuable as your bottom line, as well as benefiting it. Burnout can slow your productivity, harm your confidence, and impact your emotional and mental well-being.
When you feel your best, you have the freedom to be more creative in your product design, the confidence to be more assertive in your market, and the balance to put it all away at the end of the day and enjoy your evening.
If you’re totally burnt out, take a week or two off and enjoy a vacation — you’ve earned it! Even a staycation with friends can help you refresh and let go of work so you can return with a renewed dedication and perspective.
Of course, it’s best to manage the stress as you go. Enroll in a fitness class to distinguish between your workday and free time, which is especially important if you work from home.
You can also invest in a new hobby to flex your creative muscles and redirect your attention away from the office. An occasional spa day doesn’t hurt, either!
Whatever you need to feel better is always worth the cost.
Avoiding Lifestyle Creep
Lifestyle creep doesn’t have to overwhelm your finances. You can still celebrate your raise and prioritize your financial health at the same time. Always prioritize your savings, and ask yourself the true cost and benefit of a big purchase before you invest.
When in doubt, look to your future and try to see how you get there. Investing in your career or business is a sure way to start the path to your future success.
Author Bio – Briana Marvell
Briana is a personal finance writer from Austin, covering everything from family budgets to home-buying. When she’s not at her desk, you can find her hiking with her pup, Miko, or diving into a good book.
What a great post! I appreciate the idea of writing for others as a way to position yourself as an expert.
Great tips! Investing in ourselves is key, learn more to earn more!!
Awww, these are amazing tips! Although, i am quite guilty of “Lifestyle Creep” expenses. Especially when it’s been a crappy week and I wanna indulge myself XD
This post was so helpful! I’m about to get a pretty good raise each month and it’s so tempting to increase my spending, but this made me realize I need to be more cautious about my spending and where I spend it. I really like the idea of transferring some money to my savings when I’m tempted to buy lunch instead of eating my packed lunch. I spend way too much eating out for lunch!
I can really relate to this! I was working a six-digit salary job before I got pregnant and decided to quit and change my life around for the better. Adjusting to the difference in income as a family was definitely a learning curve. If I was more intentional with all of the money I was making at the time it would have been a much easier transition!
Awesome read. Adopt unique lifestyle with doing unique things like you want to give gift to someone, try to it be unique as he/she will remember it for long time.