In this interview, I talked with Kimra Luna, Personal Branding and Online Business Strategist, about how she turned her passion into profits.

How did Kimra figure out her passions?

A few things came together to point her towards her interests.
In high school she read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens and after reading the book she figure out “oh you can just help people”. In her theatre class, students were assigned a project to act out what they wanted to be when they grew up and then the others had to guess. Kimra acted out a monologue all about being positive, helping people, changing the world and everyone guessed she wanted to be Tony Robbins.
She was also in a video production class where every day they had the morning news and Kimra was the anchor. She would also save money to buy documentaries on VHS from a catalogue. She thought she would help people to make documentaries.

First Taste of Entrepreneurship

After high school, Kimra went to film school. While there she started booking concerts. This was something she didn’t know was a business and she became a booking agency without realising it. After a year, she dropped out of college and pursued booking concerts, moving from Seattle back to Boise, Idaho (where she’s originally from).
She emailed punk bands, got a ton of CDs and found the record company email addresses on the back of each one. She emailed them and got a great response and started scheduling them in.
This was her first taste of being an entrepreneur. At 19 years old, she made $90K in one year and travelled a lot. It was a great learning experience.
She then moved to California and couch-surfed with bands she knew. She got a job with a small booking agency which led to touring, selling merchandise, doing branding and promotion of bands’ products. This experience helped her get a mindset of selling.

Economic Downturn and Few Prospects

While in California, Kimra met her future husband whom she dated for 2 years and then got pregnant with their first son. This was in 2008 and the economy was going down the tubes. She decided to stop working in concerts because it wasn’t a great environment to have a baby.  Plus the music industry was suffering at that time as well. So she found herself relying on government assistance and living with her in-laws. There were no jobs where she could use her experience. The only job she got was working for minimum wage at a frozen yogurt store. This was a devastating time for Kimra because she was raised on welfare and didn’t want to to raise her children that way.
While it was a rough time, Kimra believes she was blessed with a husband and in-laws who introduced her to the law of attraction. Her husband showed her The Secret and it blew her mind. She recognised that her thoughts mattered and she decided they could get out of their situation. It took 4 years but they got there with that strong belief.
The experience of having her first son was traumatic and this is when she started getting into spiritual development. She became a Reiki master and had a small Reiki business out of her in-laws’ living room. She wanted to help people and she loved it.
The birth experience with her second son was magical and she wondered if she should become a doula or lactation consultant. There were so many things that Kimra was interested in. She was finally able to choose something she really loves – teaching.

A Move and Big Changes

Her husband found a job working for FedEx and it meant a move from California to Virginia. There Kimra had no family or friends and no computer and became a bored housewife. She had an iPhone and participated in Facebook groups all the time on her phone. She decided to start a blog and suggested to her husband that they use the money from their tax return to buy an iMac and he agreed.
Kimra started The Misfit Mama, a fitness, wellness and healthy living blog where she added recipes and workout videos. She shared all the things she enjoyed on the blog.
At this time she also joined a network marketing company selling organic products which fitted with her brand on the blog. Her audience grew very well through Pinterest and some of her pins reached over 100,000 repins. Despite a successful blog she didn’t quite know how to monetize it.
She decided to put together a Pinterest course but got no sales because none of her blog readers were interested. A friend in the online marketing space suggested she do a Google Hangout to show people how she got all this traffic on Pinterest.
Kimra had never done anything live but took on the challenge and shared how to build up Pinterest accounts. This was a great experience because she it helped her realize how much she liked teaching people.

Making Her Passion Profitable

During her Pinterest hangout, she offered Pinterest consulting to the audience and got 3 clients. This was the first time, she made money online. Her clients pins were often fine but their websites were bad so she ended up doing more brand consulting than Pinterest teaching. She knew now she could actually make money doing this. This is when Kimra decided to scrap her blog and start teaching people who actually wanted to learn the things she was teaching.
In January 2014, Kimra signed up for a credit card with a $5,000 limit and bought a few courses including B-School and a video course from James Wedmore as well as other smaller courses. She also purchased tools for her business like Leadpages, Ontraport and WebinarJam.
In May 2014, she created her website with a $100 theme and was ready to sell her first course. She launched “Crushing it on Facebook” and started doing webinars. She ended up doing 3 webinars in the first 2 weeks and got 1000 people on her list. She then decided to stop selling the Facebook course as it was geared more toward network marketers – and this wasn’t the ideal content for the new people on her list.

Creating a Program That People Want

So now she didn’t have a product but people would email her to ask her to teach them how to use tools 1 on 1. She created a package where she would help people for 12 weeks for $2000 and sold immediately three of these packages.
At this point, she asked her husband if he wanted to leave his job so she could get more clients because then he could watch the kids while she was on calls with her new clients. Through these calls, her growing Facebook community, and webinars, people were telling her all the things they wanted. Based on what they told her, she created what became her signature program – Be True, Brand You.
Her first launch (after 3 months in business) – brought in $62,000 in sales. Kimra believes it was so successful because she gave people what they wanted. While it was a test run, it worked and people loved it. She decided to open the doors again on Black Friday and made another $40k.

Big Launch for Big Goals

Kimra was now pregnant with her third child and needed a new car and set a goal to also get a nanny. Her goal was to get $200,000 in sales so she could get that car and nanny.
In order to do this big launch, she hired James Wedmore for a 2-day mastermind to map out her launch. She also bought Todd Herman’s The 90-day Year which is the favourite program that she’s ever purchased.
The launch resulted in $750K in sales and Kimra is still in shock about this. She is, however, proud of her work and her students get great results because the course is so actionable.
She is doing what she loves and has many other things she wants to do and products she wants to create. Some of her businesses will be more philanthropic and others revenue-driven to fund those efforts.

Kimra’s Advice on Turning Your Passion Into a Profitable Business

“Stop comparing yourself to other people’s paths. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what to do. Living life to the fullest and take risks.”
Visit KimraLuna.com for more information about Kimra and her programs.