My three words for 2025
Allow me to share this Instagram post with you that freaked me out recently…
HOW can it be 2025? I don’t understand.
Time, as ever, completely eludes me.
But apparently it is a new year and a new dawn and a new quarter-of-a-century no less, and so we go on…
Following on from my last post where I talked about 2024 in depth, I thought I’d start by sharing a few of the major changes I made to my work life in 2024.
Changes I made in 2024
1. Restructured my packages
I mentioned in my previous post that I had a good think towards the end of the year about the packages and services I was offering and whether or not they were ‘serving’ me as best they could.
I want my web design to be my main source of income - the past few years have taught me that writing income is far too unpredictable - and so I really wanted to work out a way that meant web design provided me with enough income to live off, then any money from my books was a bonus.
I had also become quite frustrated with my two-week web design process. It was the process that was suggested as being a good option when I was training to become a web designer, but over the past five years I have become much quicker at building websites, and I found a lot of the time I didn’t need those two weeks, and there was a lot of wasted time in the process.
I also found that my clients preferred it when the website was finished quickly and didn’t want the process hanging over them or dragging on for weeks.
I had also noticed that more and more people were booking my Author Website in a Day option, and I enjoyed building these sites so much more.
So I started to think about a way that I could offer the same quick turnaround, but for people who wanted more than just the four pages that this package offered.
I came up with the idea of offering an ‘a la carte’ menu of additional extras, as well as three different tiers of Author Website in a Day, so that authors could customise packages to create their perfect website.
If the scope of the project stretches beyond one day, then that’s fine. I can just work on the site over two days.
Technically speaking, I’ve always started working on the website the week before the selected ‘design date’ - downloading all the content for the site and planning the design in my head/doing research. All the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff. The day itself is only taken up with the actual build.
I’m really pleased with this new offering which I hope offers the same depth and customisation as my old custom web design package, but with the efficiency and speed of the Author Website in a Day experience.
I’m also hoping that by doing two projects per month I’ll be able to meet my income needs whilst not getting completely burnt out in the process!
Take a look at all my offerings →
2. Refreshed my website
While I was in the middle of redesigning my packages, I had a look around my website and decided it was time for a refresh.
Now, I’m quite keen on the look and feel of my website in general, but it had been five years and I’d grown tired of the slightly insipid green. I wanted something sharper and with more contrast.
I also really wanted to redesign my logo - and got as far as doing so - but in the end I decided that the original logo still looked best!
One of the logos I experimented with!
I’ve tried to tidy things up a bit (less is more, as I always tell my clients) and I switched the heading font over to Calluna, which has an elegant, understated feel I like.
I also overhauled my homepage, creating graphics for each of my three core offerings, and streamlining it so that it was clear which service was for which kind of author. I also increased the amount of white space - I think previously my homepage looked really cluttered.
What I love most about a website is that it can continually evolve - it’s like a living, breathing project, so I am sure I’ll carry on tweaking it over the next year!
3. Explored more revenue opportunities
Finally, and this is something that I intend to focus on this year, but at the end of last year I started to think about my website as not just a marketing tool for my web design services, but also potentially a revenue-generating tool too.
I realised I was getting a lot of traffic from people who liked my blog but didn’t necessarily want to pay me for an author website.
I wondered if I was missing a trick - what else I might be able to ‘sell’ them? - hence setting up my merch store.
Moving all my invoicing across to Squarespace also meant I could log in every month and see how much revenue my website was making, from each source: my course, my 1-2-1 projects, plus the merchandise in my store.
This made me think about more possibilities for income.
Spurred on from my viral post about Harrogate, I decided to apply to become a Squarespace affiliate. I was accepted, and given my own promo code!
So if you want 10% off a Squarespace plan, then just use CHARLOTTE10 when you check out 😎
It made me realise that my blog does get a lot of traffic, so perhaps there’s even more scope for affiliate income from it. It’s something I want to look at more this year, for sure (more on this later on).
4. Prioritised my fitness / time away from my computer
And finally, in the summer I started Couch to 5k for the 392nd time.
But for the very first time, this time I actually completed it.
After a ‘run’ 😆
And I really, really enjoyed it. I hated the running bit, of course, but I loved the way it made me feel after!
Just getting away from a screen, getting some fresh air and moving my body (albeit very slowly) have been so amazing and I’m determined to keep going with some kind of running routine this year.
Unfortunately I got a bit overexcited after finishing C25K and ran my first actual 5k a few days later and absolutely knackered my knee, so I’m having a bit of a rest to help it recover, but I’m going to get back out there as soon as possible.
My three words for 2025
Last year my three words were: Stability, Efficiency and Joy. And actually, I think I did pretty well with two of them. One is still a work in progress and still on the list for this year.
Let’s start with the new ones:
Health
Health is wealth and all that.
We’ve had a rollercoaster year in our family, health-wise, and it’s given me a newfound appreciation for exactly how important health is. And how important it is to prioritise - both mental and physical.
So health is going to be the number one priority for me, which means I have to find a way to schedule it into my busy work life.
I am going to try to see it as being as important as all the other work stuff that I manage to get done, even when I’m exhausted (like writing a weekly blog post!) and not let it get pushed to the side.
I started Pilates last year, which I’ve found hard but I can feel is good for me, so I’m going to continue with that, plus some kind of cardio that gets me outside - whether that’s running or jeffing, which might be kinder to my knackered joints (look it up!), as well as my weekly weights class (that I basically only go to in order to gossip with the women in the group).
Optimism
This is a new one for me, but it feels really important, especially as my daughter is nine now and I can see she has inherited my anxious gene.
I think at my age (44) it’s very easy to get bogged down in work / life stress and lose your sense of optimism and positivity.
There are so many Very Serious Things to attend to, to deal with, the future feels more uncertain and scary than ever, and it’s easy to get trapped in a negative mindset.
So this year, I’m going to really try hard to be optimistic. To believe that things will work out (because, in my experience, the evidence proves that they always do) and to try to calm my over-anxious brain.
This time last year, when I thought I’d have to give the advance for my book back, I had a very real fear that I was going to run out of money, and I honestly didn’t know what to do.
I was in a complete panic.
But somehow, things worked out, as it usually does. I did not run out of money.
I have to trust that the work will come, and the money will come, and it will all be OK.
I have been self-employed for nearly 15 years now, and I have never run out of money yet (I should probably get this printed in huge letters and stick it up somewhere in my office for when the doubts start to creep in).
Stability
My final word is Stability. Again. Because it’s still one that I haven’t quite mastered.
Last year still had quite a bit of upheaval in it (we had tons of work done on our house, for one thing) and I did still feel like everything was constantly changing.
But I did end up earning an impressive amount from my web design and while I was still somewhat reliant on book income last year, I’m hoping that this year everything will settle down even further and I can start to cement my web design business as a sustainable source of income for me.
In a way, I’m quite pleased that I don’t have any books coming out this year, because it means I’ll be able to focus on the best bit about being an author (the writing itself), and also building my business further.
However, I DO have a new book coming out in 2026 and I’m hopeful for some foreign rights and also I can’t wait to start talking about it!!
So watch this space…
Plans for 2025
So let’s start looking forward - here are my goals / plans / whatevers for the year!
1. Get my head around affiliate marketing
I’ve been an Amazon Affiliate for donkey’s years (back in the days when I tried to become a full-time blogger!) and it’s earned me peanuts over that time - maybe enough to pay for my website hosting, but certainly nothing to write home about.
However, I know that there are people making a really decent side-hustle income from affiliates alone, and given the fact that I have really strong website traffic, I know I’m missing a trick!
So this year I really want to wrap my head around how it all works and start making the most of my blog (both this one and the ancient one I have on my author website, which still gets an INSANE amount of traffic and makes me most of my Amazon affiliate income - let’s just say if you write about controversial baby products then you’ll get a lot of desperate new mums finding your posts in the middle of the night).
As mentioned, I’ve recently become a Squarespace affiliate which means that I finally have a discount code to offer - CHARLOTTE10 for 10% off - and if you do click on the link in my footer and go through and sign up to become a Squarespace customer then I will get a few pounds in return.
I have been recommending and using Squarespace for five years before they accepted me onto their program and in all that time I didn’t get any kickbacks at all from them, so please do be assured that my love for the platform is genuine!
I’m wondering if there’s a course on affiliate marketing that I could do, or something really similar, that really goes in-depth. I’m currently on the hunt for one of those, so watch this space!
I’d also like to investigate the prospect of using affiliates to promote my own online courses.
2. Book two websites per month
It is really hard to predict your income when you run a service-based business, as the simple fact is that I can only make money if people book me to build their websites, and that’s not really within my control.
It’s been a real feast-or-famine situation since I started. Some months I’ve been absolutely inundated with enquiries and work, while others it’s been very quiet. I would say that 2024 was my most inconsistent year yet - it started off really strong (in January I earnt more than £7000 from websites) but then in the spring things were very slow and enquiries were massively down, which I’m assuming was perhaps related to the cost of living crisis?
I don’t know, I only know that many other web designers have reported similar.
However, the autumn was super busy. Which comes with its own challenges as I don’t like being booked up too far in advance. Like I said - feast or famine!
I really want to do two web designs each month. That way, I am guaranteeing a minimum sustainable income for myself, but I’m not getting burnt out either.
I am not entirely sure how I can achieve this because of course it’s not completely within my hands, but I’m going to try my best!
3. Continue blogging
There’s not much to say about this really other than it is still by far my most powerful marketing tool.
I did lots of work last year on adding internal links - making sure that there were plenty of places for people to go once they’d finished reading a post, to help keep them on my site for longer.
Since I implemented this strategy my page views have gone up dramatically, even though my visitor numbers aren’t up by the same %.
I also changed my newsletter to weekly, and now I just send a snippet of my most recent blog post out so that people can click through to read it if they want.
That way I hope they don’t miss any of my content, but they’re also not having to wade through a great long email each month.
4. Write what I love
On the writing side, I am very hopeful for the book I finished a short draft of last year.
I loved writing it and I really believe in the premise and I even have a title which everyone I’ve told agreed is strong (this never happens, I have only chosen one of my published book titles so far!).
I want to get it into a decent shape for submission. And obviously I want to get a massive book deal for it. LOL. So fingers crossed. Let’s see!
Other than that, I want to focus on writing books I love. I have realised I hate writing under contract. I want to be free to create without fear of any external input or judgement.
As Stephen King so elegantly puts it:
5. Show up more on Instagram
I did a course all about audience growth in the summer last year and although a lot of it I already knew, there was one module on AI that I found super helpful.
The course teacher reiterated that, as AI becomes ever more present, humans are going to value real human connection even more. She advised that it’s incredibly important to create video content, that shows you as a real human being, to help build trust and a closer relationship with your readers.
While blogging is great, it doesn’t build quite the same connection.
After all, technically speaking this post could have been written by AI (it wasn’t, btw!)
I toyed with setting up a YouTube channel (she was massively advocating this) but I’ll be honest, it’s too laborious and too much work and I just don’t have time.
So I’m going to try to do some more videos on Instagram, perhaps talking about my writing process, perhaps sharing some of the things that I share in my blog posts.
Having my face on camera is massively out of my comfort zone so let’s see how I do with this, but I’m going to try my best!
You can follow me on Instagram here! →
6. Promote my new suspense book
Finally, I have my suspense book coming out in 2026 and it’s meant to be a bit of a ‘big book’ for me, so I want to do it justice by making a bit of a fuss of it!
I’m not very good at promoting my own books (this is why I have never offered book marketing advice / services even though I get many people asking me about it).
I find I can promote my web design very well but there’s something about books that’s so personal that means I find it really hard and exposing.
BUT, this book is a departure and is definitely NOT personal and I really want to do it justice, so I’m going to try my best.
More on that soon, when I’m allowed to talk about it!
Phew! As ever this is epic and probably only of interest to Future Me, but if you have read the whole thing then please do share your plans for 2025 - I love reading these kind of posts and would love to hear them! ❤️
Happy New Year!
