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How to Be Consistent When You’re Running an Online Business – Especially When You’re Already At Capacity

February 14, 2023

“I need to be more consistent with ____”

How would you finish that sentence?

Maybe it’s:

Writing to your email list
Pitching the podcasts that have been on your radar for quite some time
Reaching out to past clients to check in
Making offers
Posting on social media

The list just goes on, doesn’t it?

The point is, we’ve all been there.

We set the best of intentions, maybe have a good run for a while and then suddenly… we fall off the bandwagon again.

We’ve all heard the advice: “Consistency is key”, right?

But have we been told much beyond that about how we can go about it?

Well, that’s what I’m covering in this blog post today my friend.

Here’s what you can expect:

How you can reframe consistency in a way that’s meaningful to you
Determining your “Cadence of Consistency”
The 3 A’s to help you make capacity-based decisions to allow for your consistency

And I’ll also be sharing some examples of how this looks in my own business too, so you can see some of these applications.

Are you here for it?

Great, let’s go!

How You Can Reframe Consistency in a Way That’s Meaningful to You

Up until now, what has “consistency” looked and felt like to you?

Does it mean:

Showing up X times a week on Y platform with Z content?
Never wavering, regardless of new factors which change your circumstances? Or maybe…
Emulating someone else’s idea of consistency?

Oooof let’s unpack that last one a bit more, shall we?

When we look to someone further ahead than us for whichever aspect of business…

…it’s easy to think that if we did exactly what they did, maybe we can achieve the same results.

And while it’s a start, something that I invite you to do is to acknowledge their:

Access to resources (time, energy, and money)
Degrees of privilege (in relation to their race, gender expression, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, citizenship, marital status, education etc)
Experience
Skillset
Connections

Allllll of these factors have affected how their version of consistency has impacted the business they have today.

Because these factors will significantly vary from one person to the next, it’s essential to determine what consistency could look like for you.

For example:

In my own business, I started The Quiet Rebels® Podcast back in 2019, and each passing year, I experimented with a different level of consistency in terms of the episode frequency.

Up until 2020, I committed to weekly episode releases – regardless of whether they were solo or with a guest expert.

In 2021, I shifted to fortnightly (every 2 weeks) episode releases after I started feeling like I was on a hamster wheel for content week after week.

From 2022 to the present day, I’ve now shifted to an intuitive release schedule.

This is quite unheard of in the podcasting industry since we’re taught to stick to weekly episodes or multiple times a week. If we choose neither of those, then we’re invited to consider doing podcast seasons to factor in intentional breaks.

The primary reason why these episode frequencies are recommended is to boost our chances of raising our rankings in the podcast charts for our respective industries.

And while I’m not against this, this isn’t my primary goal for having a podcast.

Instead, my primary focus is to connect with my audience with intentional content and conversations.

My back end data shows me that the average person who joins my email list stays for a minimum of 6+ months, and it’s not uncommon for them to stick around for years as well.

When I ask in my Typeforms “How did you hear about me?” when I’m being invited to be a speaker for an event, or someone is sending in an application to work with me, people say:

“Been following you and your podcast for years.”

Since my business model doesn’t require a huge volume and can thrive well with:

A small but mighty loyal community
Clients who are happy to refer me to their peers, and
Collaborators excited to place me on their platforms

This type of consistency works for my business because it’s not just about how often they see me, but it’s because my work in itself helps them feel seen.

In other words, I’ve chosen quality over quantity because this aligns more with my business model which isn’t based on high volume, but great depths with a smaller community.

It’s time that we think about consistency through the lenses of intentionality and presence with our community, clients and collaborators.

What if the idea of consistency that we’ve been chasing doesn’t always have to be about frequency?

This is something you get to choose, my friend.

How could the idea of “consistency” shift for you if it meant something meaningful to you?

Think of the relationships you want to cultivate, and how much you need to honour the business model you’ve chosen.

Once you have an answer, let’s consider:

Determining Your Cadence of Consistency

Okay, now that we’ve covered how we can reframe consistency in a way that’s meaningful to you

Now lets take it a step further and see what it looks like in practice.

It’s essential as a business owner to find the sweet spot between:

What feels right for us as the human being behind the business, and
Meeting the needs for our business for it to grow (as well as be maintained)

All too often, it’s one or the other.

We can lean too far into what we want at the expense of our business goals.

Or we can lean too far into what our businesses need from us, even at the expense of ourselves in the process.

To find the sweet spot to determine your “Cadence of Consistency”, let’s break it down with the following:

Goal: What do you need to be more consistent with? (Think of what you filled the gap with in the first line of this blog post!)
Elaborate: Why does this goal matter to you and your business?
Assess the Good: Are there any previous successes as a result of being consistent with this goal?
Assess the Bad: Are there any previous pitfalls that happened while trying to be consistent with this goal?
(Optional) Recalibration?: Where might you have to change things up to increase the likelihood of a better outcome?

Need an example? I’ve got ya:

Goal: Write at least 1 blog post a month
Elaborate: Blogs are a regenerative form of visibility since they’re searchable on Google, and plus it’ll help me practice my writing skills. This is important to me because writing is my go-to modality of communication when I’m “at capacity”. That’s why I want to double down on my writing
Assess the Good: I’ve guest blogged on a mentor’s website before, plus I write quite often for my email list which have always led to direct sales for my offers. I’m also strengthening the expression my voice through the written word, and the format allows me to connect with both new and existing folks in my community
Assess the Bad: The overthinking. Maybe because it was my first time writing a blog post for my mentors, I stopped and started a lot due to the imposter complex.
(Optional) Recalibration: Being given a precise deadline provides a necessary pressure to get moving.

(Can you see that my own goal of consistency is being met right now with this blog post? I know, so meta! 🤪)

From here, you can start seeing where there’s overlap between what you want to do, and how it supports your business goals.

Try thinking of your Cadence of Consistency just like a delicious pot of stew.

Start small with the “seasonings” because you can always add more to it later.

Because if you pile on too much from the start? You might have to start all over again because it was too much too soon.

(Pssst, my personal fave when it comes to stew is Korean Kimchi Jiggae~ yum! 🍲)

Your Cadence of Consistency doesn’t have to be set in stone, my friend.

Think of it more as a guidance system for your current season of business, and only shift it when you feel it no longer serves you.

Our seasons are greatly influenced by the capacity we have, and since we’re human – this can change at any given moment.

Which is why the next things I want to share with you are:

The 3 A’s to Help You Make Capacity-Based Decisions to Allow for Your Consistency

Our capacity is a big determinant of how consistent we can be, and sometimes our brains don’t always catch on with what our bodies are trying to tell us.

We’ve all pushed beyond our limits before, and sometimes it’s helped us have a breakthrough.

Reaching new heights, expanding our comfort zone, and doing more than we even thought we could do… ← that’s an amazing outcome.

But on the flip side? Pushing beyond our limits could also lead to a breakdown…

The latter is no joke, my friend.

Burnout can be pretty serious, and it can take us out of the game for a long time (I’ve been there a fair bit, as have many of my peers).

Weeks, months, even years depending on the severity of it.

That’s why it’s important for us to be conscious of our capacity.

Ever since I founded the Sustainable Visibility® Movement back in 2020, I’ve uncovered – through market research interviews, private conversations, my own lived experiences etc – that the 2 biggests reasons we fall off the bandwagon are because:

We overestimate how much capacity we have (time, energy, money)
We also underestimate how much capacity we need in order to be consistent with goal X

And it’s often the underestimation part that bites us in the a**.

Here’s how it happened to me in my own business…

In July 2019, I challenged myself to pitch to 101 Podcasters in 30 days (I’ll write about this in another blog post if you’re curious to know more) because I needed to work on authority building & visibility in my business.

I chose such a high number because I knew in the PR industry, anywhere from 3-10% is considered “normal”, so I took that as my baseline.

Little did I know that I was going to receive too many yeses, and wound up achieving a 33% booking rate.

Yes, not an open rate for my pitches, but actually getting booked as a guest expert on 30+ shows within 1 month.

On one hand, of course I was incredibly grateful to receive yeses from folks in the industry who I really looked to and who I admired for the work they did.

On the other hand…

…I honestly got worried because I wanted to make sure I did every podcast episode justice, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do that with the tight time frame I put myself into…

What I had budgeted for in terms of my capacity was recording the interviews and making space on my calendar to promote the episodes.

What I didn’t take into account was the amount of prep I had to do, such as:

Filling in all the forms
Signing the releases
Listening to both recent and relevant episodes already on the podcast to be able to feed into the conversation ← this took the longest, but it’s very necessary
Researching new angles to provide from the topic highlights I proposed
Mentally preparing myself for the interviews too

All of this took out a tonne from my capacity budget,

And it’s for this precise reason why when people tell me things like: “I’m going to aim to be on 100 podcasts this year!”

I immediately invite them to consider their capacity for everything involved in the process – not just the interview, but doing the interview justice with the preparation before, and the promotion after.

In retrospect, this whole experience has helped me know what not to do in the future when I’m making decisions which affect my consistency.

Which is what brings me to:

The 3 A’s to Help You Make Capacity-Based Decisions

For every task, project or habit you intend to integrate into your business to be more consistent with _(Insert Your Goal X Here)_, make sure you take these 3 into account:

The Anticipation (Before)
The Action (During)
The Aftermath (After)

The problem is often in the miscalculation of how much of our capacity we take up at each of the stages.

For some, the anticipation stage (hello Imposter Complex monster & overthinking tendencies!) takes up the most capacity.

For others, the aftermath stage is an afterthought and it bites them back in the a** (ever done a live launch that exhausted you, and then came to realise: “Oh sh*t, I still need to deliver the LIVE program I just sold starting from Monday!? DAMMIT I NEED A VACATION!”)

It happens.

But hopefully from today, not nearly as much as before, my friend.

When you’re thinking of adding more or trying new things on your plate, try looking at these 3 A’ and think of how much capacity will be taken as you:

Anticipate goal X
Take action on goal X
Handle the aftermath of goal X

These answers will be completely unique to you – as they should be.

You may find that you don’t have as much capacity at first…

…but just like when we’re learning anything, it’s the hardest when you’re just starting.

But once you get the momentum going? You’ll become more efficient with it and will eventually free up more capacity for other things.

Remember, being consistent is a start…

…but staying consistent is the real key.

And there we have it my friend!

Everything I have so far to help guide you around how you can be and stay consistent as an online business owner – even when you’re at capacity.

If you found this valuable and know you have some friends who need to see this, I’d be so grateful if you could forward them this blog post URL 🔗

Have thoughts to share with me after reading this? Send me a DM on Instagram here >>>

And finally~ I have a question for you:

Do you struggle with “being visible” on a consistent basis?

Regardless of the type of visibility strategy you’re working on, do you find yourself pushing it to the bottom of your priority list more than you like to admit?

If so, there may be some underlying resistance that we need to unblock first before laying any more strategies on top.

I help folks just like you to be visible in a way that feels good, and does good for their business.

Interested in learning more? Here are 2 ways we can work together: