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BTP58: The Benefits of Operating Your Tarot Business Online

For me, having an online Tarot business is so incredibly important and enabling. I started in the late 1990s with a free website on Yahoo. Now, we’re reaching three and a half million people a year. That just blows my mind.

Because of this online business, my family has been able to travel to Spain and different parts of the world while we’ve also run the business.

Really it’s all been possible because Biddy Tarot is an online business. Had I only focused locally, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’ve done in these last few years.

Today I want to open up your mind to the possibilities of an online business, especially as a Tarot reader.
In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • The six benefits of operating your Tarot business online
  • How to start your online Tarot business with very little money
  • How to earn money while you sleep with an online Tarot business

Additional Resources:

Podcast Transcript

Brigit: You’re listening to the Biddy Tarot Podcast, and this is Episode 58: The Benefits of Operating Your Tarot Business Online.

VOICE OVER

Welcome to the Biddy Tarot podcast, where you will learn how to connect more deeply with your intuition and live an empowered and enlightened life with the Tarot cards as your guide.

Listen as Brigit and her guests share their very best tips and strategies to help you read Tarot with confidence.

And now, here is your host Brigit Esselmont.

BENEFITS OF OPERATING YOUR TAROT BUSINESS ONLINE

Hello and welcome back to the Biddy Tarot Podcast. As always, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you here listening to this podcast and also being able to talk about my two favourite topics: Tarot and business.

I am a huge advocate of online business. It’s certainly where I’ve invested a lot of my time and energy.

It all started for me way back in the late 1990s. Yes, when the internet was just starting. I started off with a free website on Yahoo.

I was learning how to read Tarot at that time and I thought it would be cool if I just shared what I’m learning as I go. That was really the birth of Biddy Tarot.

Now fast forward to recent years and this is a half a million dollar business. We’re reaching people all around the world, so three and a half million people a year. That just blows my mind.

Because of this online business, we’ve, as a family, been able to travel to Spain and different parts of the world while we’ve also run the business.

We’ve created a global team, so we’ve got 12 people on our staff. And we’ve created multiple streams of income through this online business.

For me, having an online business is so incredibly important and enabling. It’s just enabled us to do so much, both as a business and as a family.

Really it’s all been possible because Biddy Tarot is an online business. Had I only focused on local business, I wouldn’t have been able to do what I’ve done in these last few years.

Today I want to open up your mind to the possibilities of an online business, especially as a Tarot reader. It really doesn’t matter if you just want a few extra dollars each week or you want to create a really healthy, six- or even seven-figure business. There are just so many different opportunities for you when you focus your efforts online.

Let’s get into some of the reasons why creating an online business is amazing. Of course I’m completely biased. Again, I just think having an online business is just a huge enabler of so many things. But today, I’m going to walk you through six reasons why you want to get your business online.

DEMAND

Let’s start with the first. There is a huge demand online for Tarot readings. It’s no secret that the internet is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. Over three-quarters of North Americans use the internet regularly. The average user spends 66 hours a month online and that isn’t including work time. Think about it. That is like two hours a day.

While people are online, they are spending big. In fact in 2013 alone, Americans spent 1,233 billion dollars or roughly around 4,000 dollars each online.

You might be thinking, “Okay, that’s great – 4,000 dollars, good for them, but what does that mean for us as aspiring Tarot professionals?”

Between 2007 and 2012 the psychic service industry generated 2.1 billion dollars in revenue and that’s according to industry research firm, IBISWorld. Two billion dollars. I’m not kidding.

Imagine if you could tap into just a tiny fraction of that. But the question is, “Is there a demand for online Tarot readings?” We know that there’s certainly the demand for psychic readings, but what about online Tarot readings?

Well, according to Pew Research Center, 15% of Americans have visited a psychic for advice in the past year. Also, people in the U.S. are more likely to seek psychic advice online rather than offline. This is great news for online Tarot readers because it means that people want and need your Tarot services online.

I know that as heart-centred, spiritual entrepreneurs, it’s not all about the money all of the time. It’s also about the impact that we have when we follow our true calling and serve the people who we’re here to serve.

REACH A WORLDWIDE AUDIENCE

That brings me to the second benefit of growing your Tarot business online. That is, you can reach people worldwide.

If you were running a local store, people might travel 10 kilometres, 20 kilometres, maybe even 50 kilometres if you’re lucky to come and visit you. But depending on where you live, that might only be a very small population.

If you’re in the country, it might only be 100,000 people within your local area or maybe even five million people if you’re in a city. But imagine if you could reach nearly three billion people. That is how many people are online across the world as of this year.

Here’s the thing. When you’re online, you’re not limited to serving only the people in your local area. You have the potential to reach people from all around the world and that means having a greater impact on even more people’s lives. Who doesn’t want that, right?

Even when you’re online and you’re reaching people worldwide, it also means that you can use automated marketing tools like email marketing, so ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, Infusionsoft and so on, or even Facebook Live. These tools make it easy to connect with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all at the same time.

IT’s COST EFFECTIVE

Reason number three for why you want to get your Tarot business online is that starting a business online is almost free.

Think about if you were setting up a local shop, think about what you might need and the kind of investment that you would need to make upfront.

You might need to rent a room and depending on that rental contract, oftentimes you’re having to pay a set fee every week regardless of whether you have clients or not, so it’s this set amount going out every single week.

You might need to buy furniture or equipment. You need to make your little Tarot reading space look gorgeous, particularly since you’ve got people coming in and seeing that.

You might need to set up a way of taking payments, getting a credit card machine or a merchant account with your local bank.

You need to think about getting insurance and public liability, so, for example, if somebody hurts themselves while they’re in your office, you need to do something about that and have insurance.

You might even need staff, so if you have a store of your own you’re going to need someone to take care of that store.

Even a marketing budget – you’ll need to have printing. You might need to print fliers. You might need to get paid ads to your store and so on.

Working locally, you often need quite a lot of initial investment to get yourself set up. There’s not really much room to breathe because while you’re trying to build up your client base, you’ve still got this huge fixed cost going out where you might not be having the revenue coming in.

I find the local store set up can often put a lot of extra pressure particularly when you’re in the starting phases of your business.

Now, online? It’s not 100% free, but I tell you what, you can set up an online business close to free.

You can setup your business page on Facebook, which I don’t recommend, although it is free. What I do recommend instead is that you just simply buy a domain name, like about 15 dollars for the year, and get website hosting.

Again, you can get it for five or six dollars a month with something like Bluehost or GoDaddy. You can get a free website with a free theme and have that website up and running in a weekend.

You can get a free PayPal account so that you can start taking credit card payments. While PayPal does take quite a significant proportion of each transaction, the benefit of PayPal is that you’re not having to pay a monthly fee or a fixed fee, whereas if you approach your local bank to get a merchant account, often you have to pay quite a significant fixed fee every month. Again, when you’re just starting out, it’s a huge suck on your resources.

When you’re working online, the other advantage is that you don’t necessarily need staff because there are so many automated tools online that you can use. You can also tap into the virtual assistants who operate all around the world. Of course hiring a virtual assistant in a place like the Philippines is a lot cheaper than hiring someone locally.

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If you’ve got a good recruitment process in place, you can find some amazing people in the Philippines who have very strong English and can do a great job. They can take care of things like booking appointments, making sure that people turn up on time, dealing with customer inquiries and so on. That frees you up to focus on growing your business and doing Tarot readings, which is what it’s all about, right?

Online, it’s usually a smaller marketing budget. You can use tools like social media to start promoting your site. There really is no cost involved apart from your time.

I do always suggest getting an email provider from the get-go. It might be MailChimp to start off with or AWeber so that you can start building up an email list. That does have a minimal cost associated with it, but it is a really important part of keeping your marketing budget on the lower end when you’re collecting people’s emails.

When you’re comparing what it takes to start up an online business versus a local business, I truly believe that these start-up costs with online are much, much lower.

Of course as you start to grow your business your budget may start to get a little bit higher. I look at our budget for Biddy Tarot and it’s crazy, but I do want you to know that you can start on a very low budget, which is great because that’s the point at which you’re just starting to build up your client base and you may not necessarily have all that cash flowing in, so you don’t want the expenses flowing out too much.

FREEDOM

Reason number four – this is a favourite. When you’re online, you can live or travel anywhere. I know you’ve probably seen those speeches on the internet of like, live or work anywhere. Then someone’s lying in a hammock with their laptop or they’re sitting on a beach.

I tell you, I have done that a few times; it’s not as blissful as it looks. Everything gets a bit hot and sweaty and you know what I mean. I think more realistically though, having an online business means that your work can travel with you wherever you go and you’re not wedded to a particular place.

Think about it. If you had a local shop, then you need to turn up to that shop in order to do business or in order to make an income. When you go on holiday or travel somewhere, ultimately your business has to stop because you’re not in the area anymore.

Sure, you could hire somebody to run your business, but there may be some limitations, particularly if you’re a purely service-based business and you’re the one providing that service.

Compare it to online, if you are operating through a website and even if it’s still a service, you can be taking your laptop and your Tarot cards with you when you’re travelling. I’ve done it many times.

We’ve been in Spain twice for six months and then another time for three months. I certainly wasn’t working full time. I would be working a couple hours a day. Often, when my kids were a little bit younger, it was when they were having their sleep, so it wasn’t disruptive to our family trip at all.

But it meant that I could really work anywhere and I could work as we travel as a family, and the business could continue to grow and generate an income. I didn’t have to be in a certain location. I really could be anywhere so long as I had pretty decent internet. That’s always the thing that gets you – making sure that you do have the internet.

But here’s the other thing, you can live anywhere as well. I know a lot of people live in a developing country where the living costs are much lower and they can continue on their business, but in developed countries, so obviously charging at sort of a higher rate, but having lower living costs. That’s something to think about.

Even for us, right now we’re looking at moving to Queensland. It really doesn’t matter where we live. We can go and live in the bush, again, so long as there’s internet, because we don’t have to be near a big city or we don’t need to be near a population in order to continue our business.

EARN MONEY WHILE YOU SLEEP

Reason number five is that you can be open 24 hours/7 days a week without losing sleep. Think about if you have a local business. You can only be open during waking hours and you’ve only got limited hours. Even if you’re open five day a week for eight hours at a time, you’ve got forty hours that you can be selling to your customers.

If you’re online, you’re open 24/7. That’s a lot of hours during a week. What is that? 168 hours a week. Is that right? It could be slightly off. 154 maybe.

Anyway, basically anybody can buy from you at any time when you’re online. That’s particularly advantageous if you’re selling products because you know the old adage that you can earn money while you sleep. It’s totally true. Obviously there’s work that goes into that, but you can be earning money at any time.

Even if you’re running a service-based business online, so perhaps offering Tarot readings online, you can set your own hours.

Again, I found this really beneficial when I had young kids because it meant that I could work around their sleep times and I could also work late at night and early in the morning. I didn’t have to be thinking about what are kind of decent hours, the nine to five, which I would need to be thinking about if I had a local shop.

The other advantage with the online business, in terms of being open 24/7, is you can really set up your business in a way that takes care of sales in a very automated way.

As an example, when I first started selling e-books online – well, actually the very first time when I started selling e-books online, I wasn’t very clued into how you do all of this. I would get the order and I would individually email the PDF for that e-book to that individual customer.

It was fine when I might get one or two orders a day and it would take about 24 hours, maybe 48 hours to send it off, but when the volume started to increase quite a bit, then I definitely needed a different way of doing it.

At that point I set up with E-junkie and it took care of the whole process, so someone buys the e-book and then it gets automatically emailed to the customer and they have it straight away. Now we have a slightly different setup, but basically it all just gets taken care of.

That’s the advantage of being online. You can sell at any time of the day. If you’ve got those automatic systems set up, it takes care of itself.

Basically, that means that you can then focus on doing the work that you love to do, which is reading Tarot, talking Tarot, everything Tarot. Then all of the sales process is being taken care of in the background.

CONVENIENCE AND PRIVACY

The final reason for going online is that you can offer convenience and even privacy to your clients.

Think about in a local shop, for you to see a client you need to travel to that shop, but also the client needs to travel to the shop. Great, if they’re five minutes away, that’s not too bothersome, but what if they’re like an hour away.

They might not even be bothered to come in if it’s a whole hour’s drive. If it is an hour and they’re willing to come in, it may be much more difficult for them to schedule that time.

Also, if you think about it online, if you’re doing a Skype reading, all you’ve got to do is turn on your laptop. You don’t have any inconvenience. The client doesn’t have any inconvenience. It’s super, super easy.

If you’re doing an email Tarot reading, there’s also the added benefit of privacy, so the client doesn’t have to show their face. If it’s important to them to be anonymous in some way, then they can easily have that reading without you seeing them.

I just think it’s so much easier as a customer to be able to get something online. It’s on demand. It’s I’ll get it when I want it versus I have to match up my schedule with somebody else’s schedule and we both need to be available at the same time. It’s just so much easier when it’s online.

There you have it. Those are the six reasons why I believe starting your Tarot business online is the way to go. Let’s just do a quick recap.

  1. There is a huge demand online for Tarot readers.
  2. You can reach so many more people when you’re online. Nearly three billion people are on the internet and that is just huge, just to be able to reach so many people and to have such an impact with so many people is really important.
  3. Starting a business online can be almost free versus having to invest a lot of capital if you’re setting up a local shop or even renting a local room.
  4. You can live or travel anywhere. You are location independent when you’re online. You can take those longer family holidays if you can negotiate just a little bit of working time as you go.
  5. You can be open 24/7 without having to lose sleep, which is great because that means you can make sales at any time.
  6. You can offer that convenience to your clients. They don’t have to travel to come and see you.

There you have it. If you’ve been thinking about setting up your Tarot business or maybe you’ve already set yourself up, but in a more local setting, then I hope that today’s episode has got you thinking about the benefits of growing your business online.

It’s really a great way to grow your business and do it in a way that honours you and your family and your personal commitments.

Again, for us as a family, having this online business has changed so much. It means I’m at home with the family. I can see them throughout the day. I can see them in the evenings and we have that absolute freedom and flexibility to travel and live anywhere. I’m incredibly grateful for what we have created.

GROW YOUR TAROT BUSINESS ONLINE

If you’re considering creating your Tarot business online, then I’ve got some really great news for you. Our signature business program, Grow Your Tarot Business Online, is now open for enrolments.

In this program, you’re going to discover how to create a thriving Tarot business online that is both financially and spiritually rewarding. Because, again, as heart-centred, spiritual entrepreneurs we know it’s not just about the money, but it’s also about aligning with our soul’s purpose.

Ultimately, I want to help you be able to the work that you are intended to do and I also want you to do really well on a financial perspective.

I think often times we get this balance a little bit wrong. We can maybe move forward on the spiritual side, but we don’t move forward on the financials or we move forward on financials, but we lose our soul connection as well.

This program, the Grow Your Tarot Business Online program, is about giving you the skills to set up a business online and reach the audience that you’re meant to reach, increase your revenue and ultimately your profits, but at the same time be doing the work that you are called to do and to do it in a way that serves you, your family, your community in so many different ways.

In this program I’m going to be showing you how to align with your vision, attract your dream clients, connect with your network, market your business authentically, expand your offerings, and build a sustainable future.

If you’re interested in this program, please check it out. Go to BiddyTarot.com/business. And as I mentioned, we are now open for enrolments.

We have just an amazing group who have already been through this program, who have already seen results and it would just be wonderful to be able to welcome you into this program as well and support you on this journey.

It’s really one of my soul’s calling to show, I guess, healers and spiritual people about how to create that spiritual and financial success, particularly as it comes to business online.

All right, that is it for today. I am so glad you are here and listening and I really do hope that I’ve inspired you to consider growing your business online – definitely the way to go.

I will be chatting with you again very, very soon. For now, have a great week and we’ll connect again next week. Bye for now.

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