Before 2009 I was blogging and doing intuitive readings and earning a six-figure income every year. My husband, Steve, sent me a ton of traffic through his highly popular website, www.StevePavlina.com. I wanted for nothing. Free traffic, no marketing, a service-based business where I was earning a lot of money. I was doing what I loved, helping people, and being very successful at running an online business.

In October 2009, Steve and I separated. At the time Steve was earning twice as much money as I was and we were living in a 6-bedroom, 4300 square foot home. We also owned a smaller home 6 miles away that was 4-bedrooms and 2000 square feet. Logically it seemed likely Steve would take the smaller home and I’d stay with the kids in the bigger one. But the mortgage on the bigger home was 6 times what it was on the smaller home. Based on what I was earning and the anticipated amount of child support I would probably get, I decided to move into the smaller home so I could sleep easy at night knowing I was fully covered financially.

So the kids and I moved to the smaller home and I began to rebuild my life emotionally after separating from the man I thought would be my companion for life. We didn’t separate for lack of love, it was lack of compatibility. We were both happier with each other after we separated.

So I kept going the way I had been going, doing readings and blogging, but we started to see my income take a dip. Hmm, what’s going on? Steve still had me linked on his site, and would still promote me sometimes, but not as often. I started to realize I was relying on his site to send me traffic and that it was a dangerous reliance. I knew, because we had discussed it, that eventually Steve would need to take my links off his site, and I’d need to sink or swim without him. Honestly, I was nervous about what would happen. I’d never bothered to market myself. Did I have a viable business on its own merits?

As an experiment, while we were still tied together financially, we took all my links off his site and waited three months to see what would happen. We knew this would give us a preview of what would happen when we were no longer attached on a business level.

The results of our experiment were notable and devastating. I lost 80% of my incoming traffic and 50% of my income. Ouch! Steve offered to put the links back up, but I told him not to. I knew I was going to need to figure this out eventually, and decided now was a good time.

This is where I learned the biggest lesson I’ve learned in a long time. You don’t know what you’re made of until someone removes your life jacket and you’re forced to swim or drown.

It’s fair to say I became a workaholic. I had to. I had to rebuild my income and my traffic. I wanted to be able to provide for myself and my children without Steve’s help. I didn’t want to rely on anyone, I wanted to be independent for the first time in my life. I wanted to provide my own security.

This is when my creativity started to really blossom. Up until this point all I was doing was blogging and doing readings. Now that wasn’t enough. I knew I had to step it up and start thinking of other ways to generate income using my talents, skills, abilities, and the loyal traffic I had left.

My first solution was to create a product. I spent just two weeks working on this non-stop and my first product was done. An audio program called Raising Your Vibration. I put that out for sale and it sold very well. Awesome. But still not quite back to the level I was at before the separation.

What else could I do? How about a workshop? I don’t really love public speaking but decided to partner up with the ladies in my mastermind group and we did a one-day intuition workshop. That brought in some money, but it was just a one-time thing. I needed something that would increase my income on a monthly basis.

That’s when the Professional Intuitive Training Program came into being. My first two students asked me to teach them how to do what I was doing. I knew I could teach it so I brought them out for a week and trained them both. It went amazingly well. A whole new stream of income was born. I started offering the Professional Intuitive Training to more students and discovered I love teaching! Before long, my income was back to the exact same level it was at when I separated.

I started doing more marketing by writing articles for other publications, doing interviews with other bloggers, and hooking up with The Daily Brainstorm who publishes all my blog articles to their hundreds of thousands of readers.

I did a teleseminar which is now for sale as another product. Then I compiled a bunch of my articles into an ebook by theme, The Other Side. That sold well too.

I hooked up with an amazing coach, Rich Litvin, and we started offering one day super intensive sessions to one person at a time who wanted to make an amazing transformation in their lives.

And now I’m hosting my first ever 2-day workshop, the Intuition Development Workshop.

I look back over the last two years and completely changed my business model. Whereas before 100% of my income came from readings, today the distribution is much different.

In 2010 my income by percentages looked like this:

Readings: 78%
Product Sales: 10%
Workshops and Trainings: 12%

In 2011 the percentages were:

Readings: 68%
Product Sales: 5%
Workshops, Coaching and Trainings: 27%

This is going the direction I want it to go. I’d like to get to a point where readings are not my bread and butter. I’d rather be working with large groups of people at the same time, or continue training people to become professional intuitives. It’s a more effective use of my time and energy.

So now it’s 2012. My traffic is at 70% of what it was when I was attached to Steve, but my income is back to the exact same level it was during the years I was with him. So that means I’m utilizing my traffic more effectively than I was before, and my readers are very loyal and interested in what I sell.

I worked really hard. I took no vacations. My kids saw less of me than they did when I was married. But that’s what it took to get me back to where I am now. My next goal is to find a way to increase my income while decreasing the amount of time I work so that I can take a vacation (a real one), spend more time with my kids, start a new relationship, and get to the gym regularly.

What I learned in these last two years was that I was more capable than I ever thought I was. I learned to think outside the box. I tried so many more things than I’d been doing those first three years. I marketed myself much better than I ever had. Basically, I learned to swim while I was starting to drown. And I discovered I’m a strong swimmer.

It hasn’t been easy. I’ve made a ton of sacrifices to get back on top of the mountain. But it showed me who I am, and what I had deep inside of me. Plus now I’m serving more people in a better way than I ever had before.

If you’re going through anything similar, where your business is plummeting or slipping, I urge you to reach down into the deepest parts of yourself and ask yourself these questions:

• What else can I offer my current customers?
• How else could I train so that I’m better at what I do?
• How can I reach more people and introduce them to my product or service?
• Could I partner with someone and get better results?
• Could I adjust my pricing to make more money?
• Could I bundle what I do into a product that earns me passive income?
• Could I decrease my expenses to keep more profit?
• Could I work smarter to get more out of my time?
• Could I outsource things that cost me too much time and earn me little money?

Think outside your box. Be creative. Be resourceful. Don’t give up. Adjust your course. Try new methods. Learn, study, grow. Persist. You can do it!

The Readings
Last year I tried a new way of doing readings. I put all my readings into one week so I could have 3 weeks of each month to work on other projects. This worked really well for the first half of the year. Then in August I added the 15-minute reading option, which really took off, and suddenly the demand for readings tripled. I thought the 15-minute option would cannibalize my 30-minute reading option, but it didn’t. I was getting the same number of 30-mins and twice that in 15-mins. By the end of the year I was back to doing readings every week to keep up with the demand.

This is a pace I can’t afford to continue. It leaves me no time to work on products, trainings, workshops, teleseminars, and books, which are things that benefit more than just one person at a time. So this year I’m going back to being stalwart in setting aside time for non-reading projects. I’d rather not increase the prices on readings, so the wait times are likely to be a little longer. If you’ve been thinking about getting a reading, book sooner rather than later because if the demand is the same as it’s been, there’s a price increase in our future.

Blogging
Last year I tried a new way of blogging. I spent one day a month writing four articles. That was awesome! I had articles queued up for a month and it only took me a day to do it. By the end of the year, I had lost that rhythm and started to get behind.

I prefer to blog when inspiration strikes me, but I like to have one or two articles posted each week. I’m going to try doing them in advance again and see if I can maintain that pace.

Ask Erin
In the beginning of the year I started creating a YouTube series of Ask Erin questions which was fun for me to do. People really enjoyed being able to see me instead of just read me, and it generated a lot of new traffic. But the videos were a little more work than I thought they’d be, and my camera died midway through the year. I went back to writing my Q&As and have yet to replace my camera.

At the end of 2011 I started an Ask Erin series of questions where I posted a short Q&A article every Monday through Friday. That was fun! But I couldn’t sustain that either. I’m still collecting questions, and I’ll turn some of those into articles and some into Q&A.

Professional Intuitive Trainings
Last year I had a blast training students to become professional intuitives. One request I’ve been getting all year has been to find a way to train people remotely so they don’t have to fly into Vegas to do the 4-day training.

It took me a bit of thinking, but I believe I’ve come up with a way to do the trainings remotely. This will save everyone a lot of time and money, and I can still do it in a way that feels ethical and robust to me. The part of the program that is the most important is being able to hear my students give several readings to practice clients so I can make sure they’ve learned the method successfully. In order to graduate my course and receive certification, all students must be able to demonstrate their ability to give accurate readings. Once I figured out how to do this remotely, the rest was easy. It’s going to be awesome!

If you’ve been interested in doing the training, please sign up for my newsletter as I will announce it there when it’s ready.

Products, Teleseminars, and Workshops
My goal this year is to release a product on intuition development. I’m also wanting to do some classes via teleseminar so look for those on the horizon as well. If I can get my act together, there will also be a live intuition development workshop. I’d like to write a book too.

These goals are a little more vague because I haven’t committed to them as fully as I’ve committed to creating the remote intuitive trainings and getting the readings back in line. Once I’ve succeeded with that, I’ll pick another project and run with it.

No More Forums
Steve removed our forums over at his site. If you want to discuss an article or connect with me, then right now the best way is through Facebook. Please never send me a message on Facebook. Those messages get super low priority and it can take a month or longer to get a response, if ever. Please use my contact form instead.

New Website
One big project last year was getting a new website designed and launched. I started that process in August but hit a bunch of snags. I’m back on track and we should see a new website in the first quarter of 2012. Woo hoo!

My Challenges
Besides running my own business, I’m a full time single mom as well (that comes with its own challenges!). Recently I took a look at my schedule and realized that I have just 6.5 hours per day when my kids are in school. That’s 32.5 hours per week where I can work in peace. That disturbed me a little because I’m sure I’ve got more than 32.5 hours worth of work each week. No wonder I’m running behind and getting frazzled and frustrated that I can’t get more done.

Trying to balance my work and family life has been a big challenge for me, but one I intend to work on more this year. I’m not sure if that means cutting out some of my work-time, working more on weekends and evenings, or hiring someone to help me with the kids or the errands. I’ll experiment and figure it out. But triaging my time has become super important to me.

I’m still working on some health challenges, and have been experimenting with diet a little. I’m not 100% vegan anymore, but still very vegetarian. I’m working on finding a diet that works better with my personal health situation, and am willing to continue to experiment until I find something that works for me.

Steve and I still have not filed for divorce, but we’re getting closer to working out the terms of our divorce. I expect this will happen before mid-year.

I’m devoting a fair bit of time to two of my passions: the Red Cross, and paranormal investigations. I’m taking more classes with the Red Cross so that I can begin making presentations to families to help them prepare for disasters. I may even become an instructor at some point. And I am continuing to serve as a disaster action team member at least twice a month.

And I’ve begun doing more paranormal investigations which is a hobby of mine. My team and I do not charge anything to do an investigation. If people are plagued by entities, demons, or poltergeists, I want to help. If you’re in the Vegas area, or within a 4 hour drive, and you need help, contact me.

People often ask if I’m dating or if I’m seeing someone. I’ve done some online dating, but nothing major has come of it. And I’ve spent some quality time with some gentlemen that I hold dear, but I would say officially I’m not currently dating anyone. If I can find some time to date, I’m definitely going to get on that. I’ve become very discerning, so for a man to capture my attention he has to be pretty stellar. I’d rather get it right than get it often.

Here’s to a fabulous 2012. Rest assured, the world is not going to end on the 21st.