Today we’d like to introduce you to Dayana Aleksandrova.
Hi Dayana, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
In 2017, I was miserable at my office job. I worked in the sales department of a tech startup and to be honest, the environment had gotten quite toxic. All I wanted to do was to be free – to wake up whenever I want, work from wherever I want, and travel. So I made a radical move – I quit without savings or a plan. I had a couple hundred bucks to my name so I took a flight to the Dominican Republic to volunteer at a tree house resort.
I wrote blogs and did social media for them in exchange for a free stay. I vowed not to leave until I figured out how to work from my laptop. It took me 21 days. I landed my first-ever retainer for copywriting and with that income, I was able to finally start my digital nomad life.
In 2021, I scaled my small copywriting side hustle to 6 figures and was able to live fully nomadically, from the Canary Islands to Costa Rica, France, Portugal and more. Now, I still write copy for big brands but what takes the majority of my time and energy is coaching other freelancers (including copywriters, designers, and creators) how to build and scale their own businesses so they can have it all too – the freedom, the income, and the fulfillment.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Oh, God no! It was a very bumpy ride throughout. Just as I had secured a humble but sufficient income in my business, the pandemic happened and I lost all of my clients overnight.
I went from feeling like a “successful independent freelancer” in January of 2020, just having returned from an amazing brand-sponsored trip in Morocco to… unemployed and on my mom’s couch in February!
All my clients at the time were in the travel industry and I had to pivot fast. Which I did. It took me a few weeks of long hours applying for gigs on Upwork, taking on any work I could get (I even ghost-wrote articles for Entrepreneur Magazine at $50 a pop). Drastic times call for drastic measures and looking back, this experience made me a whole lot more resilient.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Activated Community?
I’m a Certified Business Coach for freelance entrepreneurs and a copywriter for brands.
I work very closely with people who are in the process of building their own businesses. To be honest, I’m more of a tutor rather than a coach but I just use the word “coach” because it’s industry-accepted.
I teach my clients skills such as how to sell without feeling “sleazy” – my signature method is actually called “Sell Like An Empath!” We go over pitching and I help them prepare a cold pitch that can not be ignored. In fact, one of my clients has a 75% cold pitch open rate.
We dive into practical mindset work, because most often, when building a business people lack confidence, clarity, and tend to suffer from “impostor syndrome.” All the work that I do with my clients is very hands-on. They have my number and can text and voice note me between sessions.
I pride myself on my “no-fluff” approach. For every challenge, I help my clients create a step-by-step plan and act until it’s resolved. I copy-edit their pitches and websites, I literally log into the back end of their website to give them support, we do sales role play exercises, and I assign them weekly homework for which I hold them accountable.
One of my favorite client case studies is a marketing strategist who turned a $297 project into a near-$8,000 retainer. Another client went from never having worked online to a retainer with a SAAS company that paid her $65K per year. I’ve had a mother of 2 finally drop her people-pleasing tendencies with her clients to scale her business to an average of $15,000 months.
But apart from the numbers – what’s most fulfilling to me is seeing my clients pursue their goals without fear. We replace the fear with an experimental mindset. And it works every time.
I have a 6-week business training program called OEA (Online Entrepreneur Accelerator) that teaches creative freelancers the fundamentals of business so they can stabilize their income. We’ve already run 3 seasons and the 4th one launches this fall.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Resilience. I know, it’s not sexy but it’s necessary. In my younger years, I failed more times than I could count. And at one point, I just stopped caring and started pursuing exactly what I wanted.
I have a theory… and that is that we only have so much F’s to give. And when I ran out of mine, everything became so much easier.
Pricing:
- 1:1 coaching starts at $1,250
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.dayanaaleksandrova.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dayana_aleksandrova_/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dayanaaleksandrova
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/dee_centralized
- Other: https://coachdayana.mykajabi.com/oeaseason3
Image Credits
Photo by Aliona Koval