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LEARN HOW TO PUSH PAST YOUR FEARS AND TURN FAILURE INTO SUCCESS.
Did you know that the number of businesses owned by women has increased significantly in the past five decades? It’s near 50 percent of all businesses for the first time ever.
We all have them. The women we look up to who shape our future and destiny because we want what they have (in a good way). The most inspiring female entrepreneurs in the blogging world all worked their way up from the bottom to the top. These women pushed past their comfort zone and their fears to become the bad asses they were born to be.
So, in honor of Empowered Women Entrepreneurs Day on April 7, let’s look at some inspiring female entrepreneurs and some of the tips that they have for the women for other female entrepreneurs who want fantastic success and see how they do it scared to push their limits.
1. Ruth Soukup of Living Well Spending Less and Elite Blog Academy
If you haven’t heard about Ruth Soukup, let’s just say she overcame some MAJOR adversity before becoming the person we know today. Ruth will tell you herself that she had an ugly beginning. After waking up from a three-day coma that doctors said she less than a 10% chance of surviving following a suicide attempt, you would think that it was her turning point, but it wasn’t.
It all started in 1999 when s she was just 21-years old and married to a man she didn’t love while caring for her teenage adopted brother. She was also attending college full time and was an honor student. The death of the man that sexually assaulted her as a child brought back painful memories, and she just stopped caring about anything.
She would go on to attempt suicide more than once, spend some time in psychiatric facilities, and finally hit rock bottom with nothing to her name over the next several years.
Ruth eventually started going to the gym with her father and found an amazing therapist who helped her by giving her actionable steps that she could work on to get her life back. For once she thought about the future.
Ruth finished school, found a job she was great at, and had plans to start her law degree. She met her husband, and they started dating. They knew they were perfect for each other. So, he left his job to move with her to St. Louis for school. After all the hard work, she ended up hating law school and quit, but that was okay.
There were stressful times after many moves and really great times. But after becoming a mother, she would often find that she was bored, so she coped by spending money. She needed a hobby to keep her from spending more money and stressing her husband out. So, she decided to start a blog called Living Well Spending Less. The blog was a create outlet about living well while spending less.
Her blog and business grew over time, and she expanded to create Elite Blog Academy, Doing It Scared, and even introduced a great planner. Ruth is also a bestselling author. She was able to retire her husband, and now she’s the leader of her own empire. And if that’s not enough, she did a TED talk on how to conquer your fear instantly.
For anyone who wants a comprehensive step by step guide on how to start a successful blog, Elite Blog Academy is fantastic. Personally, I had so many deficiencies that I needed A LOT of help. ? ?
Ruth’s Advice
She provides some great advice to help motivate other women achieve their goals and dreams. Ruth says:
“If you don’t like how things are going, get off the path.”
“There are no mistakes, only lessons, and that all the good stuff comes through the struggle.”
Her book and podcast Do It Scared she talks about being scared her whole life. She faces the fears that most of us do even now as a successful businesswoman. We’re all scared to put ourselves out there and scared of making mistakes.
When you push past that fear and queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach, you often reap the most amazing awards and grow even more as a person. In fact, Ruth even says if you don’t feel a little bit scared, then you’re not pushing yourself enough. The best things happen to us when we gather the strength to do it scared.
Related: 101 Inspirational Quotes and Sayings on How to Deal with Failure
2. Michelle Schroeder-Gardner-Making Sense of Cents
Michelle started as a graduate from an expensive private university in May of 2010 with a considerable amount of student loan debt. Then she continued her education, getting an MBA in Finance racking up even more student loan debt.
Similar to Ruth Soukup, Michelle didn’t know that she was starting a business when she created her blog Making Sense of Cents. Her goal was to start a blog as a hobby and chronicle her personal financial story. Her student loan depth was the main reason she started her blog.
Michelle worked as a financial analyst in the financial services industry for several years when she started her blog. Over time she began to hate her job but was scared to leave a stable job to blog. That was once she realized she could make money blogging because that wasn’t her original goal.
After she made her first $100 from advertising, she became really excited about making money blogging. Eventually, she paid off her student loans and left her career in finances to blog full-time. Today she makes about $100,000 a month blogging and teaches other people how to wrangle in their finances as well as helping thousands of other people start a blog.
Today she’s a hugely successful and inspiring female entrepreneur who went from living in an RV traveling North America to living on a sailboat cruising the world full-time. Since August 2011, her blog has won numerous awards such as:
- Blog of the Year-Plutus Awards at the 2016 FinCon
- Best Personal Finance Blog for Millennials-Plutus Awards
- Blog of the Week by Zillow
- Blogger of the month for the website Ready for Zero
- Top College Blog
- Voted as the Top Finance Blog by Broadview Networks
- One of WiseBread’s Top Personal Finance Blogs
The list goes on and on.
Michelle’s Advice
Michelle has a small team but loves how her business model and outsourcing allow her business to run passively for the most part. In one interview, she says, “By hiring out, I am able to focus on what I do best and what I enjoy the most.” She recommends outsourcing the tasks that allow you to improve your business and your life.
Affiliate marketing is her primary source of income from her blog, so she thinks that every blogger should harness the power of affiliate marketing as one income source for your business. It’s a great form of passive income.
3. Rosemarie Groner- The Busy Budgeter
I love Rosemarie for many reasons, and one is that we started on the same career path. She was a trooper with the Virginia State Police before she left to start a home daycare business because she really wanted to be a stay at home mom. She was a trooper for ten years, and her co-workers thought she was crazy.
Rosemarie and her husband Jon were a big hot mess. They spend way too much on groceries that they had to throw away because they let them rot in the fridge. She says that the dishes piled up in the sink so that it was challenging to cook at home and tried countless times to stop spending money. But failed every single time.
They argued about money a lot. Just when she thought she gained some traction, she felt like they took another step backward. The first year that she quit work, she had some hard deadlines to make it work, so that spurred her on to success.
Rosemarie had to frame things differently because of her personality and impulsive spending, so she created the 90 Day Budget Bootcamp. (It’s fabulous and FREE!) Together she and her husband paid off over $30,000 worth of debt by cutting their spending a whopping $23,000 per year, and then she made up her salary working from home.
Her class Hot Mess to Home Success is fantastic. My personality is much like hers, so I had some breakthroughs in the class. She created a foundation for managing your home in this course. The three main things you need to master are:
- Laundry Routing
- Dishes Routine
- Scheduling
Once you manage those three things, your life changes dramatically. She quickly changed all those bad habits that she tried to quit for 12 years. She was so excited with her results that she started her blog the Busy Budgeter (thank the lord she did).
Rosemarie found out there were a lot of people like her out in the world, 18 million readers later. They’ve been featured on Fox Business, Country Living, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Motley Fool.
Rosemarie’s Advice
In an interview for Ruth Soukup’s Do It Scared podcast, they talked about failure. Rosemarie said, “If you don’t ever take risks in life, you’re never going to get anywhere. You can either let failure break you, or you can let it build you.”
They also talked about finding a mentor to learn from. There’s a lot of information out there, and Rosemarie said, “The secret to success is not trying to research a million different opinions or a million different ways to do it. The secret is to find somebody that’s ahead of you that teaches in a way that you understand and then just to hold on tight and actually implement everything you learned.”
Related: 8 Ways to Deal with Rejection as a Writer that Will Make You Stronger
4. Jennifer Maker of JenniferMaker.com
Jennifer is a crafty mom who’s been navigating the internet and blogging for years. She’s also a bestselling travel author. Her blog Jennifer Maker where she teaches people about crafts and DIY projects, is beautiful. She’s always been known as a creator and while most of her life has been great, she’s faced many struggles.
She faced business failure and woke up stressed every day. Her life was full of anxiety several years ago. She was broke, scared, and needed to supplement her income so she could stay home with her daughter.
She had to ask herself what mattered the most to her and what she wanted to give the world. The answer was her blog and craft business. She helps people make the things that they cherish and help others live a life that they can be proud of.
She laughs about starting blogging in the dark ages of the internet (and I remember the dark ages of the internet too!) and later struggled to translate her past blogging experiences into today’s world. She founded a company called PassPorter that publishes Disney travel guides, which was a really smart idea! Like other inspiring entrepreneurs on this list, she took Elite Blog Academy and is one of the class’s great success stories.
One of my favorite things about Jennifer is that she is so willing to help others succeed. She also really helps people feel comfortable with who they are and work up the courage to put themselves out there.
She’s developed some great courses, and one of my favorites is List Love. If I had taken this course, my email marketing would be non-existent.
Jennifer’s Advice
As someone who spent the first 45+ years of her life hiding from the camera, she decided that she needed to do it scared like her mentor Ruth Soukup (do you see a pattern here?). Jennifer says that if you want to overcome your fear, you need to figure out what’s it’s based on. She learned that she’s a People Pleaser (me too!) from Ruth’s Do It Scared Fear Assessment that accompanies her Do It Scared book.
Jennifer advises that the key to overcoming your fear is to get out of your comfort zone using baby steps.
On failure, she says that her stubbornness wouldn’t let her give up, but she also kept trying the same thing over and over. But even though she failed, she had not failed herself. She got up when she fell, learned from her mistakes, and kept on going. If she ever fails again, she knows that will help her get to the next level in her personal growth.
These women provide powerful advice. If you’ve known me even for a little while, you’ll see my message is always sprinkled with how failures pave the road to success. I wrote one of my first blog posts on it.
These four women were some of the first bloggers I followed, and I’ve learned so much following in their footsteps. They all started from nothing and worked their way up in the blogging world. They’ve touched their fans with the perseverance and drive to be successful.
It’s a powerful message that shows we all started from nowhere in our journey and failed many times. But the secret to success is to never give up on yourself or your dreams.