The full moon is a powerful time for connecting with yourself, raising your vibration and powering up the magic behind your desires

Here’s a full moon card spread you can do as part of your ritual, using an oracle or tarot deck, or mix it up if you like.

Shuffle the cards, as usual, and ask these questions as you draw the cards:

1 /

What has manifested since the new moon?

The current moon cycle has already begun to bring about situations or changes in your mindset to allow for further growth and opportunity during the remainder of the cycle and beyond. Understand how your desires are already in motion. 

2 /

What truth needs to be illuminated and no longer hidden?

It can be hard to see or face what is truly going on within or around us, but shining a light on the shadow is the most powerful way of understanding yourself and elevating your energy and healing. Be brave and look at what is trying to come out from the dark.

3 /

How can I release what is no longer serving me in order to move forward?

Understanding what is blocking us, or how our perspective needs to change, is such an important step in being able to move forward into our true potential. By consciously choosing to release those old stories that get in our way, we can create a healthy new mindset.

4 /

What opportunity is getting ready to emerge?

The opportunities that are truly meant for us often come in unexpected ways. We become so distracted in our daily quest towards our desires and goals, that we forget that the ultimate magic and power behind our true potential is working for us in divine ways.

5 /

Message from the universe for this full moon.

Bring this message into your month by finding ways to include it in your daily practices. You could add it on your altar, set yourself some reminders to repeat your affirmation, create a piece of art including the words, or light a candle while reflecting on your affirmation.

Go deeper and find gentle ways of further unlocking parts of your spirit, your inner sage. The Inner Star Oracle helps you in trusting that inner wisdom, serving as a tool to receive guidance from spirit and to help you on the path of healing your connection to your self.

A unique oracle deck + guidebook featuring sacred symbols and affirmations offering a reminder of our inner wisdom, imagination and intuition.

Find out more about the Inner Star Oracle card deck.

I hope you enjoy creating your own full moon spread and card reading. You can share this spread on your Instagram or pin them on your Pinterest inspiration boards! You can find me on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

SHARE WITH OTHERS

The post Full Moon Oracle Card Spread appeared first on The Darling Tree.

When creating powerful change in your life, your thought patterns are one of the most important elements to bring your awareness to. Those long-held beliefs about ourselves, the people around us and the world we live in. Once you truly learn to harness the power of positivity, it has a wonderful effect on your life.

Using daily affirmations as a guiding tool to repeat positive statements to yourself, as though they are already true, begins to challenge your past beliefs and begins to create new possibilities, ideas and behaviour.

Here are some affirmations for connecting with your intuition. Write down one or two that you feel most connected to. Place it near you to remind yourself and, throughout the day, focus on them and repeat a few times, to feel the truth embody you.

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1 /

I deepen my connection with spirit and discover the unique ways it speaks to me.

On a mental level, you may accept the notion of the divine power and love of the universe, but it can feel challenging to truly feel this physically, emotionally and spiritually. Are you clouded by your perception of what that experience should look and feel like, and turn to others to emulate what they experience? You can define for yourself how your connection to spirit looks and feels.

2 /

I am an open and clear channel to receive guidance and clarity from my guides and the universe.

The ability to see things from different angles gives you an understanding that your previous conditioning or narrow view may not have offered as the best way forward. There are many possibilities and courses of action, some of which may be much better aligned with you and your truth, and offer greater spiritual learning and growth.

3 / 

My body is a powerful messenger and I listen carefully to the signs and guidance I receive.

Receiving messages from the divine occurs when you open up to every possible way for that information to come through you. Acknowledge it, feel it within your body, if and where it resonates, and choose to act on it or let it go. Imagine that every cell in your body is connected and open, listening for the more subtle and quiet messages of knowing.

4 / 

I open myself to seeing new possibilities that align with my spirit.

The ability to see things from different angles gives you an understanding that your previous conditioning or narrow view may not have offered as the best way forward. There are many possibilities and courses of action, some of which may be much better aligned with you and your truth, and offer greater spiritual learning and growth.

5 /  

I am connected with all beings and feel the wisdom of all of life embedded within my body, mind and spirit.

There is an abundance of wisdom we can receive from nature, animals, the stars, the planets and the universe which is often overlooked. Such intelligence is the key to our survival, happiness and spiritual growth. Take a step back from your physical self and connect with that ever-present underlying nature of all things and feel its love, peace and connection to all.

Go deeper and find gentle ways of further unlocking parts of your spirit, your inner sage. The Inner Star Oracle helps you in trusting that inner wisdom, serving as a tool to receive guidance from spirit and to help you on the path of healing your connection to your self.

A unique oracle deck + guidebook featuring sacred symbols and affirmations offering a reminder of our inner wisdom, imagination and intuition.

Find out more about the Inner Star Oracle card deck.

You can share these affirmations on your Instagram or pin them on your Pinterest inspiration boards! You can find me on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

SHARE WITH OTHERS

The post Affirmations for Connecting With Your Intuition appeared first on The Darling Tree.

During the new moon, our thoughts become potent. Think, plan, visualise and be clear about your desires as they have the potential to become reality.

Here’s a card spread you can do as part of your new moon practices, using an oracle or tarot deck, or mix it up if you like.

Shuffle the cards, as usual, and ask these questions as you draw the cards:

1 /

What is this new moon cycle bringing up for me?

The energy of this moon cycle will have particular things it wants to bring to your attention. This card will show a pattern, behaviour or belief that you need to work on or be made aware of. This may allow you to heal a block, move through a challenge, or allow for spiritual growth.  

2 /

What wants to emerge or grow during this cycle?

We like to plan and control the situations and outcomes that come to us, but the universe can bring us even more magic, delight and joy in ways that we might not even be able to see right now. This card can let you know what you can make space for by surrendering some of that control.

3 /

What do I need to release this new moon?

Understanding what is blocking us, or how our perspective needs to change, is such an important step in being able to move forward into our true potential. This card can uncover what is often unconscious, so that we can become aware of it, which is when change begins.

4 /

How can I focus my attention to bring my desires into reality?

Most days, we can be distracted by so many things that are competing for our attention. It’s easy to forget those intentions we created at the start of the cycle. Allow this card to help you know the most potent way you can co-create with the universe.

5 /

My affirmation for this new cycle.

Bring this message into your month by finding ways to include it in your daily practices. You could add it on your altar, set yourself some reminders to repeat your affirmation, create a piece of art including the words, or light a candle while reflecting on your affirmation.

Go deeper and find gentle ways of further unlocking parts of your spirit, your inner sage. The Inner Star Oracle helps you in trusting that inner wisdom, serving as a tool to receive guidance from spirit and to help you on the path of healing your connection to your self.

A unique oracle deck + guidebook featuring sacred symbols and affirmations offering a reminder of our inner wisdom, imagination and intuition.

Find out more about the Inner Star Oracle card deck.

You can share this spread on your Instagram or pin them on your Pinterest inspiration boards! You can find me on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

SHARE WITH OTHERS

The post New Moon Oracle Card Spread appeared first on The Darling Tree.

The Darling Tree has been around for 11 years! Wow. When I created this business I could never have imagined all the different offerings and opportunities that would come to be created under this magical umbrella. I thought it would be fun to share with you how the business has evolved over the years.

This is a visual journey of the designs, art and products that I’ve created. I really do hope you enjoy the throwback to my various past business and internet adventures.

2008 − 2011 ～ The client years

The Darling Tree began as a graphic design business in 2008. I had been working for another web design company for a few years and felt like I would be better at more creative design work than what I was doing working with more corporate businesses. After a few months of freelancing on the side, I had built up a client base that allowed me to go out on my own fulltime.

During the next few years, I worked with some incredibly talented people and businesses, many of which were in creative fields themselves. This was also the peak of blogging, and I loved being able to do some really fun design work for blog designs. This was my first website for the business!

Of course I launched my own design blog! It was 2010 and I had to get in on the fun. I named it August Empress. It was amazing being able to share creative work, ideas and artists I loved. I’m still obsessed with the header illustration I had commissioned by artist Honor Bowden. Aside from doing client work, running this blog was how I started growing an audience and becoming online friends with other bloggers.

2012 ～ My first e-course

After designing so many blogs for clients, and a couple of years of running my own, I decided to create an online course about it! It was called Your Darling Blog and was designed to help people create their own blog designs. This was in the early days of people talking about creating passive income and I saw a need for providing this info which wasn’t really available elsewhere.

I remember when I first launched the course with 25 spots, and it sold out on the first day. I thought that was the best thing ever! While I was creating all the content, however, some personal things happened which meant I was burning the candle at both ends and working way too hard.  I ran the course a few times over the next year or so, with an updated design and website later down the track.

2013 ～ Coming back to art

When it came to client work, this was a year that I really wanted to be clear with who I wanted to work with and what I wanted to work on. I pulled back a lot of web development. My design style was very feminine with a lot of illustrative and fine details. The projects that I worked on were so well suited to me that the process and experience of working on them were really enjoyable.As the year went on, I knew I had to find other creative activities outside of client design work. I was beginning to feel that need to express myself and found my way back to art. Even though my work was creative, purely making art for myself was just the thing I needed. I had signed up to Flora Bowley’s Bloom True e-course and fell back in love with painting.

This led to using art as a mindful and spiritual practice, and after a few months, I decided to create a new blog called Maps to Herself. This was a beautiful space for me to share artworks with a deeper meaning and things I was learning about myself.

2014 ～ The pattern period

Early in the year I visited Bali for the first time, as part of Flora Bowley’s painting retreat. This opened up my eyes to the possible opportunities there are in creating an art community as well as making an income from your art. This was a really fun period of creating more bold art and patterns. I also updated my website as I wanted to bring in projects that aligned with this direction also.

I was beginning to play around with art on products, including prints, textiles, wood, and even yoga mats. At this point I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to go and chose to explore a few different areas like licensing, collaborations and limited editions.

2015 ～ Expanding products

This was also a year of exploring new products including leggings and metallic tats which I loved so much. I also had my first foray into working on some oracle cards designs, initially for personal use. In my design work and illustrations, you can certainly see more and more sacred geometry and spiritually based artwork coming through. 

It had now been a few years since my first e-course, and I had an idea for a new course to help other designers run their design businesses in alignment with who they are, the clients they want and projects they dream about. Flowing and Thriving was launched and had a really great response.

A few months later came the Unicorn Project, a fun 30-day email series for people to focus on their dream project or idea which they wanted to bring to life.

2016 ～ Sharing art practice

Another new website! My design was really moving towards the more magical, ethereal aesthetic particularly with digital collage and illustration (and more purples hehe). I was beginning to work on my first oracle deck and similar products, and I wanted the website to reflect this new direction.

During the year I created two new intuitive art online workshops, Amulet and Inspirit. This was the first time I had created videos for an e-course with a completely different type of content. It really did push my comfort zone, but it was absolutely worth it to help others create art while setting intentions and creating from a place of connecting with your intuition.

2017 ～ A deck is born

Absolutely this was one of my favourite things to create and launch. After almost a year of work, the Inner Star Oracle was finally ready to launch through Kickstarter. If I ever needed a sign that I was on the right path, this was clearly it. The Kickstarter reached the initial funding goal in 12 hours, and the whole campaign absolutely blew me away.

2018 ～ A slower pace

During 2018, I felt a need to take things a little more slowly, choosing to spend time resting and reseting. There were a couple of small video art classes contributed to larger creative courses run by others, as well as finding time to explore my own personal art and design style.

Later in the year I bought an iPad and iPencil so that I would be able to play with the Procreate app. It’s incredible and has become an important tool in many of my creative projects now. I love drawing and sketching with it.

2019 ～ Looking ahead

The year started with a new website design, after three years since the previous one. It’s the version you are looking at now! This time around I wanted to go a little more refined but still keeping with a magical energy. And I also wanted to bring in an Aussie flavour, in particular, some Australia flora.

A couple of months after launching, I was off to Tulum on an art brand retreat. This time to focus on the overall vision of the business has slowly been percolating in the months since. I knew that I wanted to continue creating products, while also exploring the publishing world a little more.

So far I’ve brought out new card altars, the perfect companion to your oracle and tarot decks, and a new calendar for 2020. Also in the works are a new ecourse for those who want to create their own decks, and a brand new deck!

That’s the whole rundown of what I got up to in 11 years of services, products and offerings! 

P.S. No, I didn’t pull out all my own external hard drives to find my old website designs. There’s a great website called Wayback Machine, which is basically an archive of the internet if you can believe it. I don’t know how they do it, but that’s what I used to quickly create this timeline of designs.

The post 11 years of The Darling Tree appeared first on The Darling Tree.

There seems to be a pattern for each redesign I go through, it happens around every 2 or so years. This would be my 5th redesign since my first The Darling Tree site in 2008. Each website has felt like an expression of where I am creatively and personally, as well as the shifting and evolving vision for my business.

I hope you enjoy this peek into the process, and find some useful resources along the way.

Rebranding my Business

As I began thinking about how I wanted the new branding to look, there were a few important things I knew I wanted to do. Firstly, to expand the colour palette from primarily purples and blues. While I do still use them quite a lot (most people can still recognise my work from a mile away), the new branding was an opportunity to see what other colours I could integrate.

^ The inspiration and colour moodboard I created for the rebrand.

The last design I felt was very mystical and ethereal. This time around I wanted to go a little more refined but still keeping with a magical energy. And I also wanted to bring in an Aussie flavour, in particular, some Australia flora. I was interested in building up a few design elements that could work in various ways, something that didn’t work quite as well with taking elements from my last website and trying to expand on it elsewhere.

^ Sketching logo ideas, and more finalised illustrations on the right.

After creating the moodboard, I used Procreate to sketch some logo ideas. These are mostly combinations including the moon and stars, a snake, a waratah flower, gumtree flowers, peacock feathers and a female figure. There are a few variations and these can all be used on different items and still be recognisable. I did feel that this type of illustration style does show up in a lot of my work, as well as my oracle deck, so it would be something that would be relevant for the foreseeable future.

^ Coloured versions of some of the logo combinations.

The simple textured backgrounds are used quite a lot through the website and other graphics that I create. They also became the backgrounds for these floral drawings I created for the websites. These are all created within the new colour palette. Both the backgrounds and drawings were also created in Procreate. Something I do love with Procreate is that it uses layers in the same way Photoshop does, so you can easily change and manipulate things to suit any other purposes you need the illustration for. They were a lot of fun to create.

^ New illustrations for some prominent background areas of the new website.

In all, I was really happy with how the design came together. It allowed me to reflect on where I am right now in life and business, what feels good to me and what I wanted to express to others who happen to come across my path.

Redesigning my Website

I’ve changed a few of the features I’m using to see if they work better for me and might be useful if you are managing or looking at updating your WordPress website.

A quick word about WordPress and Squarespace. I did use Squarespace for a couple of years, at that time I found it very limited in what I could do with it. I understand why so many people use it and I know that the features have improved in the last few years. WordPress is my first love, is super flexible, and I think recent developments have made it have the same level of easy development options for the less technical user like implementing drag and drop builders.

Elementor Page Builder

The main change that I’ve made is trying out a different page builder plugin. I previously shared that I was using Divi page builder which was and I still think is a great product. Out of curiosity and enjoying trying different things, I wanted to give another highly recommended plugin a go, which is Elementor.

After taking a bit of time to familiarise myself with Elementor’s features and functions, I’m impressed and love the way it works. These page builder plugins have eliminated almost any limitations to beautifully customising your website, which used to be quite a big issue in the past with WordPress for non-developers. While I used to custom-built WordPress things, I did take a step back from coding when responsiveness became more and more necessary and it was harder to keep up with the latest developments. So even for myself, I greatly appreciate a plugin that requires the least amount of coding as possible. I just want to make the point of how much easier things are these days for anyone to be able to create what they need with their websites. Elementor does a brilliant job with offering so many settings and options that make it work brilliantly for desktop, tablet and mobile, and there are so many customisation options to cover almost anything you want to do.

One reason that I did want to try Elementor is to see if it was more light-weight and faster than Divi-built pages, and I think it is. Divi seems to have a heavier load of coding in templates, as well as inputting code that doesn’t seamlessly switch back over when you change to a different theme or plugin. Elementor works within the WordPress editing framework in a way that when you ever decide to change the theme or stop using the plugin.

^ A screenshot of how the Elementor page editor appears when editing my homepage.

When editing a page with Elementor, you have most of the editing tools show up in a left panel. The sections, rows, columns, and modules all have drag and drop capability. You get a live preview of the changes you make, as well as a pretty close live preview of how the website will look on tablet and mobile, although not 100%, you still need to check on those devices. It does allow you to target and adjust your settings for tablet and mobile which is fantastic! You can make your site look exactly how you want across all devices.

There are many modules you can add to your page quickly and easily (the below is just an example of some, not all). The ability to customise pretty much every little detail has to be my favourite thing with Elementor. It will take some practice but it won’t take long for you to realise how powerful it is, especially when you love finessing your design and the little details.

^ Some of the module you can easily add to any web page and customise.

When I was using Divi I was using both Divi theme and page builder together. This plugin works with most up to date WordPress themes. It’s not crucial to have any theme in particular because you can use this plugin to customise everything on a web page. I do use the GeneratePress theme now because it’s simple, fast and lightweight, but the peeps at Elementor actually just released their own theme called Hello. So if you do need a theme if you use this plugin, it’s a great match being from the same creator.

The instances where I did custom code things were only with adding the top notification bar. In this case, it was simply because I couldn’t find a notification bar plugin that worked how I would have liked it to, but this isn’t an issue related to Elementor.

There is a free version of this plugin, but Elementor Pro includes more modules and templates amongst other things.

Get Elementor and Elementor Pro here

Random Content Plugin

A feature I added to my site in the last redesign and still have is the magic guidance page where you can draw a card from the deck online for a quick and free reading. This is the most visited page on my website, and I’ve been asked many times about how I create it. The answer is the Random Content plugin. I use this plugin so that the URL is always the same, but when you visit the page different content loads into the page. In this case, it’s the image of the oracle card and its meaning.

Using the plugin, you create a group of content pretty much in the same way you create WordPress posts. It’s the content you want to show up within a section of the page, not the whole page itself. Below, you’ll see the content within the thin blue-lined section is the content that changes with each page load. So when you have created your group of content, you copy and paste a shortcode for the group into a text module within the page you want it to show up on.

^ The area in the thin blue-lined rectangle is pulled from a group of content.

When I was initially planning to create this page on my site I thought it was going to be a lot more complicated. But luckily, this plugin made the process easy. It will just take some time if you are creating lots of different pieces of content to load on the page, in my case I had to create 55 pieces of content for the whole oracle deck. But the setup was pretty straight forward.

Get Random Content plugin here

WP Staging

I mention this plugin as it’s the best option I have come across to easily clone your website, particularly if you are making some significant updates to it. It’s basically a one-button click, and everything is duplicated nicely to a second cloned website. This includes all the themes, plugins, content and database from the site you clone. So once you have made the changes to your cloned site, the next thing is the plugin allows you to then push it live to your main website.

You can create as many staging sites as you like with the free version of the plugin, but you will need the Pro version to be able to transfer a staging site to the live site. The one thing to keep in mind is that any new content or orders created on your live site while you are working on your cloned site, they will not update on the cloned site. Meaning that if you just push your whole cloned site to the live site, anything new from the live site will not stay. So you need to make sure you choose the right settings when pushing your changes. And always back up everything before you do anything drastic! It sounds a bit scary I know and this is more for people who know a little more about WordPress, I just wanted to share because this plugin can make an even more complicated process a bit simpler and quicker.

Get WP Staging here

Other Plugins

I’m still using a few of the previous plugins I mentioned in my older post. I use Woocommerce for my online store. I have switched from Australia Post to Sendle (a 100% carbon neutral service based in Australia) for domestic and international shipping which integrates with Woocommerce and suits my needs pretty well.

Woochimp and Mailchimp for WordPress continue to be my go-to for email marketing integration. And Instashow, which is now named Instagram Feed, is still my preferred Instagram plugin. Two of these are available on the Envato platform. I’ve just discovered that Envato has released their new Elements subscription, so if you do use a lot of cool plugins from there as well as needing graphics, templates, photos or videos, this could be a great option.

While this isn’t currently setup, I thought it might be useful to know how I plan to set up my next course on my website. This is purely based on how much I loved the simplicity and ease of how Paul Jarvis delivered one of his courses. It uses Restrict Content Pro to create a logged-in student area where the lessons are presented, and his own plugin WPComplete to help students track their progress through the content. Simple but effective!

I hope all this info has been helpful. Do let me know if you end up using some of these, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Some of these links are affiliate links. I don’t use them often and only if I genuinely love a product and have used and tested it.

The post Creating my dream website – 2019 Edition appeared first on The Darling Tree.

Towards the end of April, I eagerly prepared for my first trip to Mexico. Only a few weeks beforehand did I discover that I would be taking this trip. After receiving an email from Betsy of February 13 Creative personally inviting me along to her Art Brand Retreat in Tulum, it was an instant yes for me. Not only had I been dreaming about attending Magic Jungle some day, but in combination with Betsy, it became a magical opportunity to attend with a focus on art brand and business. The two sisters behind Magic Jungle, watercolour artist and teacher Ana Victoria and dreamweaver Margarita, were not only hosting us but also joining in this intimate group of artists.

Betsy is a coach who has come from a background of various roles in the commercial art and publishing world, and has worked with many artists that I myself have admired over the years. One of them was a design client of mine which is how we first met. She is the go-to person when you need help with anything relating to business around your art. Whether it’s expanding and fine-tuning your vision, contract negotiations, licensing deals, your business potential and understanding your worth and power as an artist.

For myself, I was coming into a stage in my business where I am considering which paths I might like to explore in terms of publishing, licensing, distribution and wholesaling. To date I’ve self-published all my own work and I’ve come to a point where I think I could also create some amazing things in partnership with other businesses. So the timing of this retreat was pretty ideal.

Above: Ana Leovy and I hanging in the gorgeous pool in between sessions.

The Retreat

Over our few days together we worked through defining our values and mission, shared a lot about what works and doesn’t work, learned how each of us have found success in various different ways, and brainstormed what each of us might be able to do with our marketing and social media.

While this is far from your typical networking event and we were there to learn from Betsy, spending time with artists who have done some things I would like to do; the stories, advice and potential contacts that come up are so valuable. As someone who does not often attend group events, and while it’s sometimes overwhelming, I know that so much value can be gained from doing it. In addition, to have people meet you, get to know you, and then be able to tell you or reaffirm your unique gifts and voice, it’s pure gold as an artist working on your own. I feel like I was spoiled with the people I was able to do this with, and I miss them all terribly.

Betsy really helped us with understanding where each of us currently are, what we can do and how we can do it. And I also wanted to give a shout out to Chuck, Betsy’s husband, who somehow managed to explain a lot of the legal side of an art business in a way that we not only understood but could engage in interesting conversations about. He gave us knowledge that enables us to recognise our rights and our value, how to keep our best interests at the forefront and know what we can do in the future.

Above left: A lovely illustration that Jennifer (@augustwren) created of the group on the last day. Above right: Ana Victoria’s (@anavictoriana) watercolour interpretation of one of the Uplift Each Other card from the Inner Star Oracle which I absolutely adore.

The Location

Well the location of our retreat, Holistika Tulum, could definitely be described purely as the magic jungle. Everything around the place has grown and expanded organically. There is sacred geometry embedded everywhere, beautiful mosaics spotted around the place and messages on signs which always make you smile. We were spoiled with the most delicious spread of vegetarian dishes, it was food heaven. Even weeks later I am still dreaming of that food!

We experienced a welcoming ceremony around the fire pit, swam in the purifying waters of a cenote, floated after a sound bath in the most majestic sound temple, meditated (and drew cards from the Inner Star Oracle!) inside a Mayan head and occasionally I’d swim in a huge pool all to myself under the blanket of stars at night. We also triple checked our beds each night to make sure no creatures were already cosy within them, it is the jungle after all!

While we were there, Tulum’s arts and culture festival ‘Art With Me’ was happening as well, so lots of extra creative artists, performers and installations were present around the resort. 

Above left: The altar we created on our first night to set our intentions and bring together our energies for the next few days. Above right: Third eye chakra mosaic, one of the many mosaics around Holistika.

The Group

Now let me tell you a little about each of the ladies that I was lucky enough to spend time with.

Ana Leovy

Ana has such a colourful, free and diverse artistic style, and she is very funny and outright adorable.

See her Website and Instagram

Dariana Moreira

Dari has such a great balance of not only creating but learning and sharing about the creative process. 

See her Website and Instagram

Jill Dryer

I think we were all just in awe of Jill’s imagination and how she uses humour to connect with people.

See her Website and Instagram

Salli Swindell

Salli’s illustrations always feel joyful, playful, and beautifully styled. Exactly as she is in person.

See her Website and Instagram

Jennifer Orkin Lewis

Jennifer is the sweetest soul and incredibly talented, her work is a wonderful reflection of her dedicated art practice.

See her Website and Instagram

Karen Stanton

Karen is a fun, quirky, and playful artist, and loves to live in the beauty of the present moment.

See her Website and Instagram

Meenal Patel

Meenal’s kind and loving personality is so evident in her work. It was a real gift to have her in the group.

See her Website and Instagram

Ana Victoria Calderón

Ana’s watercolour skills are the bomb, and you’ll always find her painting no matter where she is!

See her Website and Instagram

Margarita Calderón

Margarita brought so much magic to the retreat, creating rituals for us, like sending wishes flying into the sky on fire.

See her Instagram

Coming Back Home

It was really hard to leave Mexico! This was such a unique experience and I’m so happy that I took the chance to go. The biggest lesson I walked away with (although there were many) was believing in my ideas and not being as scared to devote myself to them. I have been finding ways to limit myself or play small and this is not what I want to be doing anymore. From everything that each person shared, the real experience behind the scenes of their own businesses, makes it so important to make time to connect in real life, not just online.

I hope you enjoyed the recap!

The post Entering the Magic Jungle appeared first on The Darling Tree.

Over the years I’ve launched a few different products and offerings in various ways, and with physical products, it’s usually been through website pre-orders. When I started planning out how I wanted to bring the Inner Star Oracle deck into the world, I decided to give crowdfunding a go. So earlier this year in February I launched my first Kickstarter campaign.

In a few short hours after clicking the button to go live, I was over the moon to see such a beautiful, uplifting and reaffirming response. The deck reached the funding goal of $16,500 in just under 12 hours and went on to raise almost $44,000 by the end of the campaign. It all unravelled in a way in which I felt incredibly loved, supported and aligned, not only through the campaign but the whole process of creating this deck.

I’ve been meaning to share my experience with launching the deck and Kickstarter campaign, so here it all is! It may give some insight into what’s involved, maybe help you decide whether Kickstarter may be the platform for you, as well as getting some info about the product development and fulfilment of a new and successfully backed project.

Why Kickstarter

There are a few crowdfunding platforms around now, some offer different features and options. Kickstarter is a worldwide platform and backers can be located anywhere. My decision to use Kickstarter was based on these factors:

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It’s a large platform and many people who were interested in the deck were already familiar with Kickstarter and had pledged there before, But it was also simple enough for new users to back a project for the first time.

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It’s an all or nothing system. If you don’t reach your funding goal, your project doesn’t receive any of the pledged funds. I feel like this method is pretty effective in encouraging people to pledge.

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With a huge number of people using Kickstarter, I thought it may create some new customers who did not already know about me or the deck. If they had pledged for a similar project previously it may be suggested to them, or my project could also be featured on the site if it’s going well. I believe that around 15% of backers came from within the Kickstarter website and not directly from me or my audience.

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A few friends had seen success in their campaigns which was wonderful to witness. With launching a physical product with a large upfront cost, this was a better way forward than doing pre-orders on the website. Deciding to launch the deck in this method would give me more reassurance in moving into production, and the funds to do so.

So the platform to use felt like an easy decision, though not without some nerves of course. The next main thing I had to consider was what exactly I’d be offering.

Reward Levels

I am absolutely certain that what you offer should be as simple as you can make it. Your objective with launching on Kickstarter is to focus on one main product. There are a few thoughts around that:

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It’s far less complicated for people to understand what they are pledging for. Each reward level that increases in price should really be an extension of the previous level, or something similar like a different quantity or variation of the product. Add additional value to each reward level that builds on a previous level.

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Having different reward levels for different type of products means backers are limited to only selecting one of those products (unless they are bundled together in another reward level). If you do this, it’s very likely there’ll be people who want to select more than one reward level.

The only way around this is for them to add the extra cost for another item to their current pledge. This requires extra admin on your end, and to be very organised when you are actually fulfilling everyone’s pledges. When you have hundreds of backers, it will be more difficult to keep track of individual changes to pledges.

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If your main product is something that is higher in value, for example $30 or over, you might included a lower priced option that is somehow related to the product. Just so people who can’t afford to pay more can still be involved in supporting the campaign. In my own campaign only a handful of these were selected, I’ve seen the same thing happen with others. The best example I’ve seen is in Emma Kate’s campaign, where she offered a digital download of her planner for pledges of $1 and above.

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Most campaigns also include a much higher priced reward level, mine was for a bundle of decks for retailers to sell or coaches to give to clients. I do plan to wholesale the deck later this year, but this was a way for me to offer that on a smaller scale. I’ve seen other people offer one-to-one mentoring, retreats, commissions and other time based offerings of higher value. Again, I don’t usually see these reward levels filling up but it’s nice to include as an option. People will almost always choose the reward level that simply includes the product you’re launching. As seen below, the magic edition of the deck was the most popular, followed by each of the early-bird reward levels, which were all limited to 50 backers.

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I think it’s ideal to have around 10 reward levels to keep it simple, plus some special early-bird levels. I had 15 levels, mainly because there were two versions of the deck. Had there only been one version, it would have stayed around 10.

Funding Goal

This is definitely one of the hardest things to decide on in a Kickstarter campaign. On the one hand you want to be sure to reach your goal and on other hand still push yourself a little to make it high enough to perhaps cover the cost of more product. With printing costs, it’s often beneficial to order a higher quantity to bring the cost per item down. Of course this only applies if you sell the extra stock, there’s no savings if your product is just sitting in a box in your spare room!

It’s something that might not seem obvious at first, but the shipping costs that are added to pledges are added to your funding total. In my case with 490 backers, I had to account for a large part of the funding goal including these additional shipping costs, not just the amounts set for the rewards. By planning out your own breakdown of costs, it will help you decide, at the very least, what your absolute minimum goal would need to be to make your project happen.

Reaching my funding goal of $16,500 would have allowed me to print 500 decks. At the end of the campaign I had around 490 pledges that included 700 decks, and I ordered the production of 1,250 decks. At the end of the year I’ll be ready to do a second print run.

Costs + Fees

The money side of the campaign is definitely one that takes a lot of thought. Knowing all of your costs in creating your product on various amounts of orders and the minimum you need to actually go into production will determine what the funding goal should be. As well as production of your product, keep in mind the costs for packaging, postage, payment processing and kickstarter fees, tax and, if you’re registered in Australia, GST (Yes, you will need to work out how much of your final funding payout is from Australian customers and pay GST on that).

To help you out, this is the breakdown of where all my received funding went:

As you can see, the majority of the funding went to cost of production, fulfillment, and business expenses. In my case, the profit from the deck primarily comes from selling the additional stock on my website. Keep in mind that if you reach higher than your goal, this will likely increase your costs as well. Make sure that no matter what target you reach, that you are able to cover the costs.

Payments

At the end of your campaign, Kickstarter will beginning processing everyone’s pledges. Some credit card payments are declined or there may be other issues around collecting the money from a backer. Kickstarter sends reminder emails to have them processed. After a week or so, if payment hasn’t successfully been made, their pledge will be cancelled. It’s something to keep in mind, that your final funding amount may be a little lower due to some cancelled pledges. I personally contacted all of these backers to check if they still wanted to go ahead with their pledge and pay via paypal instead. It just requires some extra admin.

Also, it takes around 2 weeks from the end of the campaign to receive your money from Kickstarter. This allows them time to process and try and sort out any of these payment issues.

The Launch

So of course, there’s lots of work involved ahead of a launch, and there’s a few things I wanted to share here that I felt were important ahead of and during the campaign.

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One of the first things I did with the deck, 6 months before this Kickstarter project went live, was have a digital version of the clarity edition available to use on my website. That is several months of people already using the deck and seeing if it resonates with them. This also allowed people to play with it while I was still finishing the design of the magic edition. Also on the same web page, I had a mailing list sign up for people who were interested in the physical deck, who would be added to a specific group on my main list. I had over 300 people in that group, and I believe around 3,000 in total on my newsletter list at the time of the launch. The reason for creating the group is so I had the option to send an extra email to them, knowing they really wanted the physical deck.

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At the end of last year, I added a link in one of my newsletters to ask people if they’d be interested in helping to share the Kickstarter campaign when it launched. Over 200 people said they’d love to help, and their names were added to a segment on my list. So, when the campaign launched, I was able to shoot them an email to let me know how they could help share the campaign. I created 20 or so graphics and photos that I uploaded to Dropbox and created a link to, so they could pick any image they liked the most to share.

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I used a unique domain name www.innerstaroracle.com that redirected to the kickstarter campaign, rather than sharing the super long kickstarter page url or a url shortening service. There were two main reasons. Firstly, it’s easier to remember and share. Secondly, once the campaign was over and I was opening up pre-orders on my website while the deck was in production, I could then redirect that domain name to the sales or product page on my website. If people heard about the deck or clicked to the campaign after it finished, they would be directed to the right place.

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I sent out email campaigns and scheduled some social media posts to let others know the campaign was beginning soon, and when it had launched. During the campaign I mostly shared small updates about how the campaign was going, some of the stretch goals that were happening, and lots of thank you’s for everyone supporting it. Fortunately, lots of people were sharing simply because they wanted to, which did mean that people didn’t always have to hear about it solely from me.

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Now for actually created the Kickstarter project page, one thing everyone needs to do is create a video for your campaign, as it’s featured at the very top of the page. I had thought I would just attempt to create the video myself, but fortunately a wonderful friend of mine, Masa from 11Past11Studio, offered to help me out. He did a wonderful job, and most definitely contributed to 40% of over 2000 who played the video, watching til the very end. While I’m no expert on video engagement, that seemed like a high percentage to me! Having the video really helped to share the story behind creating the deck, and to see and hear straight from me as the creator.

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As for the rest of the project page, I included lots of images and info about each edition of the deck and the stretch goals. I created a graphic to explain each of the reward levels in a way that would make it easier to understand the different between them. I also included a link to the digital version of the deck for people to experience using it, as well as a couple of testimonials. Kickstarter does allow you to add a prototype gallery, and I uploaded videos showing all the cards of the deck, and opening up the boxes of each edition to see each part of the deck. However, there’s no stats provided for that section so I’m not aware of how people engaged with it. I made updates to my campaign page throughout the 30 days, to share more about the stretch goals and when new funding targets were reached.

Just a final note, You need to allow around 2-3 days for Kickstarter to approve your project. But you can launch any time you want, or make any edits you need, once it’s approved.

Creating the project page on Kickstarter is fairly straight forward if you have already planned out all the different areas I’ve mentioned, ahead of time.

Campaign Boosts

I have to admit, the aspect of a Kickstarter campaign that I was a little anxious about, was how to create and keep up momentum over the 30 days. Of course it requires a fair amount of marketing, but what I really wanted was for the campaign to roll out organically. I didn’t plan a whole schedule of guest posts or interviews, and other than asking people on my mailing list if they’d be interested in sharing, I directly asked only a handful of friends to share. I completely understand the value of doing things like guest posts and interviews, particularly if your audience is small. But I trusted that my sharing the process of creating the deck over a few months, as well as having an online version of the deck people were already using, that lots of people were ready to jump on the campaign when it launched.

So keep in mind what you are doing months ahead of a launch, not only about how you will promote the launch when it’s happening. If people have never heard of your product until launch, it will take more time to get them on board. These were a couple fun things I planned for during the campaign to help keep up momentum, and most of these are things that I had seen others do well in their campaigns.

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Creating a special early-bird offer. I think this is one of the most important and effective ways to get your campaign off to a good start. You need to make sure the price you offer still works for your overall budget and funding goal. One thing you can keep in mind is possibly planning it so that if your early-bird offers fill up it means you would already reach your initial funding goal.

In my case, the early-birds filled up incredibly fast. I believe, aside from the general excitement of the launch, that’s why it reached the initial goal so quickly. My early-bird rewards levels, when sold out, totalled just under my funding goal, but with the added shipping costs it pushed the funding amount higher than that goal.

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The second way I wanted to keep people engaged was to have stretch goals after the initial goal was met. The first 5 targets at $21k, $23k, $25k, $27k and $29k, if raised, would add an extra 5 new cards to the deck, making it a 55 card deck. The next stretch goal was $36k, which was a custom screen printed deck pouch to be included with every pledge for a deck. My next stretch goal, which wasn’t reached, was for a die cut vinyl sticker.

All of these were closely related to the product I was launching or featured designs from the deck. I think it keeps things simple when everything you offer, as rewards levels or stretch goals, fits in well with the product you are launching. You must plan for the costs of any stretch goals ahead of time. Calculate how many backers you will need to supply extra goodies to, especially if they are given to everyone even as your number of backers and funding amount increases.

As you can see above, the campaign increased stadily during the 30 days, with the slowest increase happening just after the first week of the campaign.

In doing these two things, I saw lots of engagement throughout the campaign. Lots of people were sharing simply because they wanted to. They loved the products, wanted to support me and the kickstarter, and also really wanted some extra goodies!

Production + Fulfilment

Before I launched the Kickstarter campaign, I knew all the suppliers I would be using and the costs involved, had seen and approved samples and knew all the turnaround times for production. This included any items that would be added as stretch goals. It was important for me to be able to move straight into production as soon as I received the funds, and be able to ship out the decks as soon as possible. Here’s a few insights around having the product made and delivered:

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As well as the knowing the costs of the product, I knew exactly what packaging I would be using. I’d worked out the postage weight and cost for each reward level. I had plastic sleeves to put each deck into, wrap around cardboard mailers (in two different sizes because the postage slips were larger for international packages) that were the most time efficient to pack, postcards, white sticker labels for Australian orders and invoice envelopes for international orders. It’s surprising how much you have to think about in addition to creating the product itself. If you don’t want to end up spending excessively or unexpectedly on packaging and postage, do your research beforehand to find the most cost effective solution.

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The one thing that did and continues to frustrate me is how expensive it is to ship internationally with Australia Post, as a small business who doesn’t have thousands of orders to negotiate better prices. I am so grateful to wonderful customers who are willing to pay the extra to get the product. If the majority of your audience is in the same country as you, it definitely makes things a little easier. With the deck, I knew ahead of time that I needed the weight of each deck including packaging to stay under 500g, as going over that doubles the cost of shipping internationally. I encourage you to ask printers or suppliers to estimate the weight of the product your creating while you are getting quotes.

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For my deck, the cards and booklets were printed with a local Brisbane supplier that I knew and trusted. They had printed the Unicorn Project journals and all the moon energy calenders previously. The boxes were outsourced to China via a local contact. As much as I wanted these also to be done locally, the costs were just too high, and I wanted a really high quality and sturdy box to house the deck. I found the process really easy regardless, they communicated well, delivered quickly and the end result was of high quality.

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If you are able to get all items of your product created and assembled at the one place, that is ideal. because the boxes for my deck were printed with a different supplier, I had to assembled all the boxes myself. Adding a deck of cards and booklet into each box and placing that into a plastic sleeve for protection, a few hundred times over, does take some extra time!

The overall timeframe between receiving the funding to having all the products ready to ship was around 5 weeks, and I spent just over 2 weeks after that on packing and shipping all the orders out.

So that’s really it! Everything that I could think of around the whole Kickstarter campaign. I really hope it was helpful and useful. If there is anything you want to ask me about it, feel free to shoot me an email!

The post Launching my oracle deck with Kickstarter appeared first on The Darling Tree.

After almost 2 years on Squarespace, which felt like far too long, I am now back with my beloved WordPress and I couldn’t be happier. Years ago I taught myself how to code WordPress sites and themes from scratch. That knowledge is still useful of course but so many awesome resources have been released in that time which means that WordPress can do almost anything you want a site to do, without too much technical complexity.

I love customising the design of a website as much as possible as well as having access to lots of features and implementations. I won’t delve into why Squarespace didn’t work for me, I still think it’s a great service for simple websites, but you can do so much more with WordPress. If you love Squarespace for the drag and drop builder, there’s a new guy on the WordPress market that is pretty awesome! More on that below.

I come from a graphic and web design background of 13 years, you may know this was my main service for many years, helping clients create gorgeous brands and websites. For a period I also offered WordPress development, but it was never my main love, which is design. To be able to build a site where I could have fun with the design while also being easy to build was really important to me.

After launching this new website a couple of months ago, I’ve had a lot of people curious to know what I used, so I thought I’d share some of the resources. If you’ve been tinkering at your site for ages, want to make some improvements, feel like you don’t know enough to work on your own website, or want to make your processes run a bit more smoothly, hopefully, these resources will help you.

Divi Theme and Visual Page Builder

I have to say that this product made me pretty excited to get back onto WordPress. The Divi theme offers a gorgeous basic layout but it’s Divi Builder that is the superstar. Just a quick word about Divi Builder, if you plan on building a whole site with it you do need to plan to keep using. If you decide to switch back to the standard WordPress page editor it will be a lot of work to sort out all your page content again. But I think once you’ve used it, you won’t really want to edit your pages any other way. You can use it with any WordPress theme though, it doesn’t have to be the Divi theme.

So Divi Builder basically switches your page editor to offer more advanced modules and options which allows you to easily create and edit sections of the page with drag and drop capability. Before the visual builder was released, the page builder was just used to replace the normal page editor in the backend of your site. But when the creators of Divi released the Visual Page Builder, you can edit everything on your page in a live preview, which makes it so easy to arrange your content and move things around.

^ How it looks editing a page using the visual page builder, simple and user-friendly.

Another thing I love with Divi Builder, even though there are layouts and templates included, is it’s really easy to just start building your own custom layouts, which is the best way to create something that looks more unique to you. You can save your layouts, sections and modules to easily load them in other pages. You can make modules ‘global’ which means if you have a section of your website that appears on other pages on the site, you only have to edit that one module and it will update in all other instances that you use it.

^ An example of the page builder which replaces the standard page editing window in admin.

You can also use the page builder on blog posts (like this one!), not just pages! Seriously, this opens up a big opportunity for people who aren’t web developers to create interesting layouts. You can mix up the content almost like a magazine rather than having all basic text. Granted this will take more time but I love that it’s an option.

And one last thing that I’ll mention, with using the Divi theme and builder, most of the site is automatically responsive for other devices. With the Visual Page Builder, you can preview the layout for Mobile and Tablet, and make any adjusts you need to make it look great. 

Finally, a bonus point to Divi for using my signature colours in their design, it makes me feel all the happier when editing my pages!

Get Divi Theme and Builder here

MailChimp for WordPress

With the new site, I wanted to also get my Mailchimp lists, segments and automation organised and working smoothly. If you’re a MailChimp user you’d probably know that when you have one person subscribed to multiple lists, it doesn’t count that as one subscriber. This means that you could be paying more for your plan because it’s adding to your total subscriber count.

For example, say you have two lists. Your main mailing list might be 2000 people. And you have another list for people who are interested in your course with 200 people. Even if 100 of those people interested in your course are also on your main mailing list, they are still counted as an extra 100 people with them being on the second list.

If you’re still on a free plan this doesn’t matter as much, but when you are paying for subscribers this becomes more important. There are many other emailing marketing platforms which don’t do this, but Mailchimp does. I love using them too much to move, so I went about creating more effective segments and groups in my main mailing list which is for my fortnightly newsletters. This allowed me to keep the cost of my account down as I’m not doubling up on subscribers.

So my site has a few pages with different signup forms for different interests. The free resources page (which triggers an automated email to get access), the oracle deck and each of my courses. I can collect people who are interested in all of these various things, within the one mailing list. This is where MC4WP comes in because unlike a lot of MailChimp plugins, this one lets me add people from a specific form on my site to a specific group in my primary mailing list. Even if someone fills out a form on another page for a different offering, they’ll be added to that group, remain in any previous groups, and still count as one subscriber in my main list. This is the primary reason why I love this plugin.

Just quickly I did want to mention that there is one downside to having people interested in different things on the one list. Say you send an email to someone who expressed interest in a particular product, and they unsubscribe. Then they will also be unsubscribed from whatever else you send them with that main mailing list, for instance, your regular newsletters. But for me, I don’t send many emails to segments in addition to my fortnightly newsletter, so it isn’t a huge issue. Essentially I just love seeing how many people are interested in different things or where they signed up on my site (you can use merge tags for this too) and every now and then they might get an extra email.

What really helped me get all this email marketing organised finally was Paul Jarvis’s Chimp Essentials course, highly recommended!

Get MailChimp for WordPress here

Woocommerce

This is the eCommerce platform that I decided to use, I really just wanted to have everything in the same place in my WordPress admin as much as possible. I’ve only used it on digital products so far but do intend to also use it for physical products. I’ve used a few other eCommerce systems in the past like Shopify, Big Cartel, E-junkie as well as the eCommerce features on Squarespace, and compared to many of those I am enjoying this system.

The core product is free to install, you may need to pay for a few extra plugins to extend the features, the three extras I’ve needed so far are eWay Payment Gateway (to accept credit cards), Sequential Order Numbers (because WordPress numbers them like posts) and Autocomplete Orders (to autocomplete orders for products that are delivered online but aren’t a digital download). I’ll also get the Australia Post Shipping plugin when I have physical products ready, for live shipping costs.

In the same way that I love WordPress for being able to find plugins to do just what I need, I like that Woocommerce has the same benefit.

Get Woocommerce here

Woochimp

This is another plugin I use to integrate Mailchimp, but this time it’s to add people who have purchased from my shop to a specific mailing list and also to a specific group (again, this adds extra benefit to segmenting your list automatically). With the plugin, you can create conditions for adding people to a list or group, such as the particular product they purchased, the category of the product, or how much they spent. For me, just the ease of implementing this feature and the fact it simply did what I needed (I looked into Zapier which was way more complicated and didn’t work exactly how I wanted) is why I like this plugin.

I know just in the last couple of weeks Mailchimp has finally introduced their own eCommerce integration with Woocommerce but I haven’t explored that much yet since things are pretty much running how I want them to now.

Get Woochimp here

Instashow

Instagram is by far my favourite social media platform to use so I definitely wanted to feature it on my homepage. This is a great plugin to add Instagram feeds to your WordPress site, there are so many different variations for what you can display. You can aggregate multiple accounts, target specific hashtags, customise the widget and style to match your site and select the information displayed in the popup. It’s the best plugin I’ve come across for adding Instagram to your site.

Get Instashow here

Yoast SEO

If you aren’t already aware, having good SEO optimisation helps search engines find your site and list your website in search results for keywords and content people are looking for. I haven’t really spent much time on it before but I just wanted to mention this plugin in relation to Pinterest. Now, you may think Pinterest is all about pinning gorgeous images to create your own boards for inspiration, but essentially, Pinterest most powerful feature is the fact it’s a search engine, and one that can bring lots of traffic to your website. When you create lots of visual content, this is perfect since Google search is not as visual.

You may have noticed that some pins on Pinterest have bolded titles on them, these are Rich Pins, and these are preferred when people search on there to just normal pins. The way to create a Rich Pin is to make sure you have SEO and meta tags set up on your blog post or page, then validate the URL of that page here. Once you’ve done that, when you pin an image from your post or page to Pinterest, it will show up as a Rich Pin.

^ On the left is an example of a Rich Pin, on the right is a normal pin.

In addition to that, adding keywords to the description, and making your image interesting, can mean that more people will come across your content. I’m just starting to implement this myself and am interested to see how it goes. If you’re super intrigued about growing your traffic and mailing list with Pinterest, Melyssa Griffin has an in-depth course about this called Pinfinite Growth.

So going back to this plugin, it just makes it really easy to set up SEO on your site and optimise it on each page, it even gives you a red, orange or green light based on how good your SEO is, and makes suggestions on how to improve it. In the interest of being able to do this type of thing yourself, I think it’s an awesome plugin that is also free.

Get Yoast SEO here

This turned into a much longer post than I expected! These are just a few of the main resources I’ve used to build and run my site, I hope it’s been useful to you. I’m also keen to share more about the design aspect of the website but I think it will have to be in another post! Stay tuned.

Some of these links are affiliate links, I don’t use them often and only if I genuinely love a product and have used and tested it.

The post Creating my dream website with WordPress appeared first on The Darling Tree.