Over the summer, I took our kids on our yearly pilgrimage to Utah.   Most of our time was spent in the mountains or out to the field, riding horses, chasing cows and running free.

After a month away, it is time for a State of the Experiment.

Recap:

A few months ago, I joined Maskcara Beauty as a distributor to see if I could find success in an MLM by applying online business principles and not pushing any products on my family and friends.  You can check out the original post about the Maskcara Experiment here and the follow up post here.

While in Utah, I did 7 photo shoots.  I, Michelle Gifford, did the makeup for each photo shoot.  That is pretty amazing.  As an artist, I was trained on the techniques and now I can do makeup all by myself.  All of my makeup and brushes fit in a little bag that I can take with me, do the makeup in just a few minutes and take the bag along for touchups.  If you are a photographer, you need this makeup (and I’d love you on my team!).  I’ll be sharing my photo shoots on this blog but here are a few teasers.

Now down to business:

Before we launched our Maskcara website, JoEllen, my sister-in-law and business partner, spent a lot of time creating a color match quiz (you should take our Maskcara Color Match Quiz here) and creating our email list.  From this email list we have gotten more than 350 subscribers.  This has been our best resource and has helped us so that we are color matching (helping clients find the right color) almost every day of the week.  We also participated in an online Beauty Bash where we could invite 10 customers to participate.  We sent out an email and had 7 responses within the hour of sending the email.  That, my friend, is the power of email marketing.

I recently created an email marketing course for girls on my Maskcara team.  Our girl, Leslie, took the course and put it into practice and has seen instant success.  I am bursting!  Seeing Leslie take these principles and within 24 hours set up her own email system and put it to work has been so exciting.  I will be opening up this email marketing course for purchase soon but if you want it for FREE you can sign up to be on my Maskcara team and get the rest of my courses for free (contact me with questions).  

We’ve been spotted

A fellow Maskcara Momma, found our color match quiz and asked to be taught how to create one for herself.  Turns out that more than 1,000 of the artists wanted to find out more and we taught an online class on it.

Helping all of these women find success in business makes me so happy.  So much so, that I am opening back up my Biz with Michelle Facebook group.  I will be starting free online training there.  I’d love for you to join me there.  This is for any of my online business mommas.

State of the Business update:

Success

Bethany Monroe, a friend who had moved away from California, has been following my Maskcara journey.  She has wanted to start a blog for years and she loves makeup.  So, she joined my team and she got her blog up and going in the first week of being a part of our team.  I’m excited to see what she does with the company. (I’ll have a spotlight on her soon.)

With buying two artist kits ($399/each) and shipping to New Zealand, we entered this experiment with about $1,000 investment.  In the last few months, we have almost made enough to pay off this initial investment.

Problems

I ran a few Facebook ads over the month and didn’t have as much success with the ads as we do with organic traffic from Pinterest and Google.  I will be tweaking this to get it right, but we sure do love FREE organic traffic that we get from knowing how to work SEO and Pinterest.

That is the summary of our experiment to date.  I have been pleasantly surprised at how much I love this experiment and this product. What do you think?  Have any questions?  I’ll be honest with you, so ask away.