Case Study – How Louise Built a High 6 Figure Business in Just 3 Years

Let’s say – like most people in the online business world – you didn’t go to college to get a fancy marketing or business degree.

In fact, you bloomed a little later when it came to taking your first steps as a solopreneur.

Perhaps you studied a completely different subject at university, worked for years in the corporate world or earned your living practicing a vocation of some kind.

At first glance, people might think such a backstory would disqualify you from becoming a solopreneur...but they'd be wrong.

The path from online business newb to solopreneur success story comes in all shapes and sizes and today's case study will show you that your past is an asset, even if it doesn't look that way at first.

The following online entrepreneur and her info-product based business not only took a late and unlikely path to solopreneurship, but survived all the bumps and bobbles along the way to build a 6-figure business in 3 years!

So, if you want to gain a step-by-step guide on how to become a solopreneur who builds lean and profitable online businesses powered by Thrive Themes, read on...

In fact, she kept hearing story after story of 19 year olds who turned down college educations to start their own successful ventures straight out of high school!

Regardless, Louise decided to take the plunge into solopreneurship and soon found herself struggling to create an online brand.

Fortunately, Louise began to realize all those years of study and professional work offered useful skills to build a business including analytical reasoning, how to design good A/B test experiments for her business, the basics of coding and organizational skills.

Long story short, Louise is now the Co-founder of Nourishing Brands LLC which operates multiple, 6-digit health and nutrition websites including:

Each of these websites now sells a wide variety of digital and physical products including cookbooks, meal plans and online courses.

And guess what...ALL of Louise’s websites were built with and rely heavily on the Thrive Themes suite of plugins. The design capabilities, A/B testing power and speed of implementation Thrive Themes provides Louise has become a key hallmark of her success.

I'll show you why in a second, but first...

I know you’re wondering how a lawyer with a physics background ended up creating an online business empire in a super niche corner of the nutrition industry.

Well, Louise says her father was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes some 15 years ago and required insulin injections to help control his blood sugar.

In search of a better way to treat his symptoms, Louise discovered the world of low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets – food protocols high in fats and very low in carbohydrates.

Learning more about it, she decided to try the low-carb protocol for herself to lose a little weight and still finds herself down the nutritional rabbit hole all the years later.

This led Louise to build her first WordPress websites – mainly blogs – around what she thought was interesting in the realm of healthy nutrition.

Because there was so little cost associated with starting a website – apart from her time – Louise’s first website was profitable in a few months from its ad revenue alone. Mind you, this was before she had any products to sell on her site.

However, you couldn’t really call Louise’s initial website a business. It was more like a personal project not losing her any money at that point.

In fact, it took Louise 3 years after the launch of her first WordPress blog to create and sell a product.

But more on product creation later. First, I need to tell you how Louise used to build her websites...

For several years, Louise's first WordPress sites used various free and premium themes like Thesis Themes and Genesis Framework.

But when she eventually got around to creating lead generation and sales pages, Louise cobbled together a gangly combo of plugins and services to get the job done including Leadpages, OptinMonster, OptimizePress and Unbounce.

So when Louise found Thrive Themes back in September 2015, she was so impressed by its design, lead capture and split testing capabilities, she quickly pulled the trigger on purchasing a Thrive Membership.

The hundreds of landing page and opt-in form templates made building websites much easier for Louise. Her websites looked better, the lightboxes converted higher and all of her sales pages were instantly mobile optimized.

By early 2016, all of Louise’s sites had been overhauled to use the Thrive Minus Theme with Thrive Leads and the old Thrive Content Builder deployed in full force.

Now Louise builds all of her new sites with Thrive Architect, Thrive Leads and the other Thrive Themes suite of plugins from the start.

So let’s step back a sec and look at Louise the blogger – before she’d sold any of her own products.

Like all of us, she struggled with some imposter syndrome and self doubt issues in the beginning:

Louise says her online ventures didn’t really take off until she started viewing what she did as a business instead of a personal project or source of income for her lifestyle.

It was at this point Louise knew she needed to find much faster ways to identify what her audience actually needed so she could start creating products to build a real business.

Let's jump forward now to look at the present day, ass kicking entrepreneur version of Louise.

Even if you’re not interested in low-carb meal plans, pay attention kids because Louise is about to give you her technical recipe for achieving online success in your own ventures.

Simply put, Louise Hendon has become a master of shipping and rapid implementation on her websites...and the Thrive Themes plugins are the power tools helping her to execute!

Here’s how Louise gets her jobs done lightning fast – usually in a couple of hours – when it comes to all the different types of content she creates for her sites:

Louise has organically developed a set of content categories for her websites over the years to better systemitize her content generation.

Since Louise’s sites deal with health and nutrition, she started by publishing recipes and blog articles, but found 5 distinct category types emerge over time:

1. Recipe
2. Recipe listicle → a recipe blog post structured as a numbered list
3. Other listicle
4. Article
5. Success story

Each type of content has its own standard structure and creation process.

In addition to her blog posts, Louise also uses special content pages leveraging a very specific feature of Thrive Architect:

Finally, Louise says her Breadcrumb Category Pages are very useful for boosting organic traffic as seen in this Keto Chicken Recipe example:

When it comes to creating opt-in forms, Louise doesn’t have a strict process.

What’s much more important is launching her opt-in forms as quickly as possible so she can start testing them.

In fact, Louise tested 39 variations of a lightbox opt-in form for PaleoFlourish.com alone! She experimented with everything from the number of seconds before the popup displayed to the color, design and copy of the lightbox.

And to show you Louise never stops when it comes to testing, she’s currently running a new lightbox test on KetoSummit.com as we speak:

Also, because the new Google Chrome ad blocker no longer allows lightbox opt-ins on mobile and a majority of internet users now browse the net on non-desktops, Louise says the power to control what opt-in offers appear where has become super important:

But here's one of the most beneficial lessons Louise has acquired from extensively A/B testing her opt-in forms...she now uses them to test different offers against each other.

For example, Louise will test free beginner guides against free recipe books against free meal-plans.

This learning not only increased Louise's email signups, but also revealed entirely new products for her business such as a new subscription based meal-plans she just launched on a new site called Mealplan.club.

The takeaway here is that A/B testing your opt-in forms not only grows email lists, but also helps validate new product ideas if you know how to design your experiments correctly!

Louise doesn’t spend too much time building her landing or home pages since she's finds it better to customize some of the high-converting Thrive Themes template for her own purposes.

Again, the most important thing for Louise is to get her pages shipped as quickly as possible and the 250+ Thrive Architect landing page templates help her execute fast.

For example, Louise’s KetoSummit.com Free 7-Day Keto Challenge landing page is a Thrive Architect template she quickly modified and launched:

And for homepages in particular, once Louise customizes a template to her needs, she simply clones and repurposes it for new websites.

Take a look at how she used this homepage strategy on the following 3 websites:

It may not surprise you to learn that when it comes to sales pages, Louise A/B tests the crap out of those too. How much and how often is she testing her sales pages?

Impressive! 50 sales page tests in 90 days?! How does Louise do it?

With the rapid-fire Build - Measure - Learn feedback loop Thrive Architect and Thrive Optimize provide, of course!

Louise really understands how important testing your sales page is because even a seemingly small improvement in your conversion rate translates into a HUGE difference in sales revenue.

How much of a difference can testing the design and copy of your sales page make? Here’s an example Louise shared to help illustrate this point:

This sales page originally converted at 1%:

But after extensive testing of design elements and sales copy using Thrive Optimize, the current iteration of the same sales page now converts at 2%:

Louise says the biggest difference Thrive Themes made for her business is its ability to create sales pages super-fast. Thrive Optimize then allows her to continually run A/B tests on those pages so her conversion gains compound over time.

So there you have it: the origin story, entrepreneurial evolution and step-by-step content generation guide for building your own info-product empire using Thrive Themes like Louise did.

Of course, your own journey to business success won’t look exactly like Louise’s so let's recap the big takeaways from Louise's story so you can apply them to your own online business:

Whatever your background is, use it as an asset to build your company.

Louise showed us that her science background helped her with A/B testing and HTML coding while her corporate career taught her how to be organized and professional when dealing with customers.

Reflect on your history and you'll find all sorts of gems you can put to good use as a solopreneur.

Although Louise's online nutrition empire was built around her own interests and desire to help her father, ultimately, it didn't become a real business until she made a deliberate shift to focus on her audience's needs.

Become the cheerleader for your potential customers and they'll reward you for it.

The best way to discover a high converting opt-in offer, sales page or product is to avoid wasting time trying to build the perfect one.

Take your current insights about the market, execute on your best guess about what to create, ship two versions fast, and then let the transformative power of A/B testing go to work for you.

The feedback you get from the real world will tell you what does and doesn't resonate leading to better products, higher conversion rates and happier customers over time.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel each time you build a new website, landing page or opt-in form.

When you find a template design that works, repurpose it for your next great (or possibly bad) idea. This way, you'll avoid wasting time before the real work begins... your A/B testing.

Louise says one of the best investments she’s made in becoming a successful business owner has been surrounding herself with more successful entrepreneurs than she is over the years.

Selling was one of Louise’s biggest challenges early on because imposter syndrome always made her second guess whether the things she was working on were good or useful enough.

If you need help getting over your own issues with shipping projects, imposter syndrome, or procrastination due to perfectionism, make sure to listen to Shane and Hanne’s ActiveGrowth podcast series on overcoming those personal barriers here.

Louise's final piece of advice is to just get out of your own way:

Now that you’ve read about Louise’s journey from online business newb to entrepreneurial role model, what are your next steps?

Will you crank out a new online business website in a weekend using Thrive Architect and one of our 250+ templates to validate it as fast as possible?

Or will you take a few minutes to create a quick variation of your current sales page or opt-in offer to try and improve its conversion rates?

Or perhaps you’ll set aside some time to reflect on what your customers actually need so you can give them an offer they can’t refuse…   😉

Tell us in the comments section below how Louise’s story inspired you to take a positive action for your own online business. Or if you have a similar story we would love to hear yours!