How to Pivot Your Blog If You’ve Taken a Traffic Hit

What happens when your blog takes a major traffic hit after years of blogging and steady growth? You need these blog pivot strategies.

I’m Jillian Leslie, host of The Blogger Genius Podcast. I sast down with Nell Foster from Joy Us Garden to talk about this. Nell is a blogger, YouTuber, author, and gardener with over 50 years of experience with plants.

In my interview with Nell, we cover everything from how she stumbled into blogging, grew her business, grew her YouTube subscribers, and now is pivoting her business after getting impacted by Google algorithm updates and after losing 90% of her traffic.

Show Notes:

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The Seed of an Idea: Nell’s Journey Begins

Nell’s career started with selling gardening accessories. As the digital world evolved, she expanded into blogging and creating YouTube content, amassing over 135,000 YouTube subscribers.

Overcoming Digital Challenges

Nell discusses a significant setback when a Google algorithm update drastically reduced her blog’s traffic. Instead of giving up, she’s diversified her income by selling digital products like ebooks (which you can now write easily with ChatGPT), demonstrating the importance of adaptability in the online world.

Diversifying Income Streams

Nell has developed multiple income streams, including ad revenue, sponsored content, and affiliate marketing. She also sells digital products and focuses on business growth, ensuring her business’s sustainability.

Expanding Monetization Strategies

Nell talks about her book launch for beginner gardeners and her interest in new monetization methods, such as starting a membership site and converting workshop content into ebooks she’s selling with MiloTreeCart. I encouraged her to use her online presence and expertise to boost sales through her email list, YouTube channel, and blog.

Building a Community and Engagement

Nell is dedicated to growing her email list which is currently over 14,000 subscribers and engaging with her audience through weekly newsletters and social media. She emphasizes community building and drives traffic to her blog and YouTube channel with strategic content. Her team, including virtual assistants and content contributors, is essential in developing her business with new workshops and book projects.

Conclusion:

Nell’s story highlights the dynamic nature of online business and the importance of being flexible and resilient. Her journey and blog pivot techniques offer inspiration for anyone looking to establish or grow their digital presence. Keep an eye out for more stories and tips from online entrepreneurs on The Blogger Genius Podcast.

Other Related Blogger Genius Podcast episodes You’ll Enjoy:

• 2024 SEO Shifts: Strategies for Success Today with Lily Ray
• Master Google Updates: Essential Survival Guide for Niche Bloggers! with Steve Wiideman
• Boost Your Blog Pageviews with Pinterest Now with Kayla Watkins

MiloTreeCart, the Best Tool for Non-Techies to Sell Digital Products

I also want to introduce you to the MiloTreeCart, a tool designed for non-techies to sell digital products easily. It comes with features like fill-in-the-blank sales pages, check-out pages, a sales dashboard, upsells, and customer support. MiloTreeCart is currently available for a lifetime deal of $349 or three easy installments of $116.33.

Transcript: #331 – How to Pivot Your Blog If You’ve Taken a Traffic Hit

Jillian Leslie (00:00:00) – Hi, I’m Jillian, welcome to a brand new episode of the Blogger Genius podcast. But before I launch in, let me pose a question to you. Have you started selling your knowledge and expertise directly to your audience, or are you still relying on traditional methods like ads and affiliate links to monetize? In today’s rapidly changing online landscape, relying solely on these methods is a risky strategy. You need multiple income streams, and this is exactly where MiloTreeCart shines. Imagine being able to sell unlimited memberships, digital downloads, workshops, coaching, and mini courses in less than five minutes. Yes, you heard that right. What used to take ten minutes is now even quicker. Thanks to our newly rolled out AI sales pages. They are simply magic. If this is piqued your interest, I encourage you to book a free 20 minute zoom call with me. In this call, I’ll help you craft your personalized digital product strategy and share best practices that have led others to success. We’ll explore exciting new ways to think about your business.

Jillian Leslie (00:01:13) – To book your call, visit MiloTree.com. Scroll down and you’ll see my calendar and prepare to have your mind blown. Schedule your free consultation today. Start diversifying your income streams. I’m excited to help you discover a whole new way to monetize.

Announcer (00:01:36) – Welcome to the Blogger Genius podcast, brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Gillian Leslie.

Jillian Leslie (00:01:43) – Welcome back to the show. I have a very interesting episode for you today. I am interviewing my friend Nell Foster. She is a gardener, designer, blogger, YouTuber, author, and has been gardening for over 50 years. What we are talking about today is what it’s like when you have been at this for a long time, and you get hit by one of the Google algorithm updates. Now shares that at the height of her blog, which was during the pandemic when everyone was outside gardening, she had close to a million page views per month, and that has dropped precipitously. In fact, her traffic now is probably one tenth of that. Nell is super open, talks about her journey, talks about what she is doing to pivot her business, including leaning heavily into selling digital products like ebooks and workshops and memberships.

Jillian Leslie (00:02:44) – She shares how she stumbled into YouTube and now has over 135,000 subscribers. We talk about how you want to stay in the game of online business. You have got to be nimble, you’ve got to pivot and you’ve got to take it in stride. I think you’re going to really like this episode. So without further delay, here is my interview with Nell Foster. Now, welcome to the Blogger Genius podcast.

Nell Foster (00:03:18) – Hi, Gillian. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jillian Leslie (00:03:20) – Today to talk to me about you, your business and gardening. And we just talked about how with age comes wisdom. So I feel like that might be a theme that we kind of roll through this episode. So you were saying you did not get the internet until you were in middle age?

Nell Foster (00:03:44) – Until middle age, and the same with the cell phone too. I remember a friend of mine had it was when I was in San Francisco, had a cell phone. It was a first one. It was the size of a shoe. It was huge.

Nell Foster (00:03:56) – And now a cell phone is a computer. So really seeing a whole lot of different changes.

Jillian Leslie (00:04:02) – So how did you get into planting the gardening and then turned that into an online business?

Nell Foster (00:04:11) – Well. I was born and raised on a farm. My dad was really into vegetable gardening. We had a lot of land. My grandmother was really into flower gardening. We had a greenhouse off of our house, so I just grew up with plants and I actually studied it in college. Also, I’m the person who’s worked in my field the whole time. So and then I worked in the house plant trade when I first graduated, and then I started my own business when I was in San Francisco, I did garden design, and I also had a commercial Christmas decorating business. They went side by side. I’ve been in I’ve been in gardening. As I say, my dad would send me out to the garden to pull weeds with my teeth when I could crawl, and I was in a diaper.

Jillian Leslie (00:04:56) – Wow. So when did you how did you start? Did you start a blog? Why did you start this and how did you start growing it?

Nell Foster (00:05:04) – Well, the business was originally called joyous because I was going to sell fully decorated miniature Christmas trees, and I moved from San Francisco to Santa Barbara just because I wanted a little slower pace of life.

Nell Foster (00:05:18) – I also wanted more sun. And, I started doing small trees, and then I changed it to Joyous Garden because then I started to manufacture women’s gardening accessories, garden bag, aprons, kneepads. And that was good. But I decided I didn’t want to go the sales rep route I was going to do online only, even though I didn’t know anything about online.

Jillian Leslie (00:05:43) – So you were going to sell these products online? Yes.

Nell Foster (00:05:46) – Okay. Online.

Jillian Leslie (00:05:47) – And what year is this? What year?

Nell Foster (00:05:49) – I’m trying to think it’s. I moved to Santa Barbara in 2006, so it might have been 2008, 2009 so early. I yes, early on I was early on, I had no idea what I was actually doing and I would blog. I started to blog as somebody suggested that blog to bring some recognition to the website. So I would just blog about something in my garden, and then I blog again in three months, so it wasn’t like it was fully thought out. And then I started to do YouTube pretty early on.

Nell Foster (00:06:28) – Wow. And then. And then I started to work with Ehow. I remember.

Jillian Leslie (00:06:34) – Ehow okay.

Nell Foster (00:06:36) – I don’t know if they’re I don’t know if they’re around anymore or not, but I did videos for them to try to bring some recognition to Joyce Garden also. So wait.

Jillian Leslie (00:06:47) – I want to stop you there. Currently. How many YouTube subscribers do you have?

Nell Foster (00:06:52) – I have 134,000.

Jillian Leslie (00:06:54) – Okay, so you saw something in YouTube getting on to YouTube because you like were way ahead of everybody else growing your YouTube channel?

Nell Foster (00:07:06) – I think so, and I don’t even I can’t even tell you. I’m sure you’ve spoken to people who have no idea. I know how I got started blogging, but I don’t know what made me do YouTube. Wow. Because I wasn’t watching a lot of YouTube. So I don’t know. You know, somebody must have said you should do YouTube B because EOW found me on YouTube. So I was already on YouTube then, but it wasn’t like YouTube was a great plan. I was just like, oh, I’ll do some videos.

Jillian Leslie (00:07:36) – Okay. And by the way, what gave you back in the day the bravery to do YouTube? Because I still talk on this podcast, talk about, hey, put your face on video, get out in front of people, let people get to know your vibe and what you talk about, what you stand for. How was that for you?

Nell Foster (00:07:59) – Well, it’s interesting because I think of myself as a friendly person, fairly outgoing, but I’m very private too. So actually, when I started my business, I didn’t even want to have an about page. I wanted to be one of those mysterious. But that didn’t work all that well because, you know, people want to know about you and all that. So it wasn’t that bad because I was having somebody was filming me who I knew really well. She worked with me. So it wasn’t as though I had a whole big film crew or anything, and I was just talking about things. And I look back on, you know, some of those older videos and I’m like, oh my goodness, I know.

Nell Foster (00:08:39) – Well, it’s it’s like how you look back on your first blog post, it’s like, oh my God, what was I thinking? Yeah.

Jillian Leslie (00:08:45) – Your photos. Oh God, I cringe, I cringe.

Nell Foster (00:08:48) – I know and and had no idea what, what SEO was or any of that. But I’ve gone through phases with with YouTube where I was really doing it every week on a regular basis. I probably do it every other week now.

Jillian Leslie (00:09:02) – Okay. And so let’s now talk about your blog. So you’ve got this business where you’re selling gardening paraphernalia to women. Yes. And then you and you’re starting your YouTube channel and you then pivot to no longer selling products but to blogging.

Nell Foster (00:09:24) – Exactly. I, I think as, I went on in the gardening accessories business, I discovered that you can’t really just. keep it going with just a few a few products. You have to expand with different materials or different things, and I just wasn’t that into it to do it. I, I think you really have to be into manufacturing, you know, you have to be into into whatever you’re doing to really be into it.

Nell Foster (00:09:57) – And I didn’t find it creative enough. I still wasn’t making a lot. I was making it mainly off of ads and off of the YouTube income.

Jillian Leslie (00:10:06) – Okay.

Nell Foster (00:10:07) – And now since then, we’ve diversified, do a whole bunch of different sources of income, although none of them is nearly as substantial as the ad income was.

Jillian Leslie (00:10:19) – Right. So that’s what I want to talk about. Okay. So you get you you then sign up with your with receptive. Right.

Nell Foster (00:10:26) – Well, I didn’t sign up with them at first because you have to have 100,000 to I think I was with Google AdSense then I was with my metric.

Jillian Leslie (00:10:39) – Okay.

Nell Foster (00:10:40) – I forget what they were called before that. And then I went to Ramdev, which was at the right.

Jillian Leslie (00:10:46) – Okay.

Nell Foster (00:10:46) – So this is the third one.

Jillian Leslie (00:10:48) – And when did you join with Ramdev?

Nell Foster (00:10:52) – Random. I joined probably 2019.

Jillian Leslie (00:10:57) – Okay. And your traffic I take it continued to grow.

Nell Foster (00:11:02) – It was doing very well. Yes.

Jillian Leslie (00:11:05) – Okay. And it was doing even I get through the pandemic, it was growing because people were home gardening.

Nell Foster (00:11:12) – Oh yes. It was really, really good during the pandemic. You know, it was good. 2020, 2021 and into the beginning of 2022, it was really high. I mean, it was it’s still okay now, but it was really high. I think we got to like 890,000 page views a month, and now our page views are nothing compared to that.

Jillian Leslie (00:11:35) – Okay. So now tell me the story of what happened.

Nell Foster (00:11:40) – It was the updates. A as I said, you know, last year was really interesting because we had Ga4 go in.

Jillian Leslie (00:11:48) – So that’s all when we had to upgrade to Google Analytics four.

Nell Foster (00:11:52) – And then I came in after that and everyone was like, oh, it’s going to take our job. And then after two weeks we’re like, hey, AI is here to stay. So that was fine. But it was the updates, you know, the Google updates in the in the fall that really hit us anyway.

Jillian Leslie (00:12:08) – Okay. So one day you’re looking at your Google Analytics and you see a significant drop.

Jillian Leslie (00:12:13) – Did it drop over a month. What what it.

Nell Foster (00:12:16) – Dropped over like more like a month. And for us I wasn’t thinking too much about it because our income goes up February through like August being like a garden blog. So it normally goes down in November, December and January because that’s when food bloggers get to shine at that time. And if you’re a DIY blog doing holiday stuff, but but for us, we went down and I think we just went down, down, down. And then and it got to be the 1st of December. I was like, wow, we are really down. And January, January, February were really low, but now we’re starting to come back up a bit okay, a bit.

Jillian Leslie (00:13:01) – Okay. Well now will you share what your traffic. How much did your traffic drop?

Nell Foster (00:13:07) – we are now at like 94,000 pageviews a month.

Jillian Leslie (00:13:10) – Wow. Okay. So from your high to now, you like.

Nell Foster (00:13:14) – I mean, that was a high. We’re we’re usually usually the average might have been 380 to 420.

Nell Foster (00:13:21) – You know, pageviews a month. I have for you 420.

Jillian Leslie (00:13:28) – And what did you do? Like did you, for example, reach out to Aptiv and go, what’s going on? Did you start reading about SEO and recognize, oh, there are these updates, what is going on in your mind?

Nell Foster (00:13:42) – So I reached out to Wrapped Up anyway because in January, on top of everything else going on, we launched a new website. So we had to contact them. So I was talking to them about it and they’re like, oh yeah, the traffic is always down. And had January and I was like, yes, but it’s like really down. And they said, oh, the Google updates. You know, they didn’t say too much about the Google updates. So I don’t know if they were just trying to be.

Speaker 4 (00:14:12) – You know.

Nell Foster (00:14:13) – I keep a neutral ground on it, but I, I. I was sort of a little bit I wouldn’t say I was paralyzed, but I was just like, oh, you know what’s going on? You know, what am I going to do in January, February? Because I’m like, it should be going up, up by now.

Nell Foster (00:14:31) – And I think after I got the, you know, over the shock of it, then I contacted you in March because I wanted to redo our book, and I also want to do workshops now. So it’s just you’ve had I’ve just had to pivot about thinking what to do, and the traffic could come back up at some point. But I mean that that might be a year.

Jillian Leslie (00:14:57) – Now tell me about this. When you switched websites or like you did a whole redesign because. Yeah. So we at Catch My Party did a redesign and it tanked our traffic.

Nell Foster (00:15:10) – It did, it did.

Jillian Leslie (00:15:12) – So I don’t know. You know ultimately we built it back. But that was so shocking and I think it was our old site was so ugly and so like teen girl and and so we thought we were doing such a great job. And we went, we went photo like photo forward. And there wasn’t enough text for SEO. Like we didn’t know, we didn’t think it through. And ultimately, while it looked better from an SEO perspective, it really hurt us.

Nell Foster (00:15:44) – I don’t think that, you know, because we were already going down in December and and January is always slow, you know, for us anyway, I don’t even I don’t even pay attention to January that much because, it’s not our month to shine. Got it. So I wasn’t too concerned about that. The traffic didn’t seem to go down too much after the website, you know, launch. Good. Okay, so I don’t think that had anything to do with it. I, I mean, I just hadn’t even thought about that.

Jillian Leslie (00:16:16) – But so let’s talk about then the book and other ways. So you’re monetizing via rap with ads. You’re monetizing ads.

Nell Foster (00:16:24) – Our our next big source of income would be YouTube.

Jillian Leslie (00:16:28) – YouTube. Okay.

Nell Foster (00:16:30) – We get we work with home talk on, you know, Pinterest. So we get paid by them. wait, wait.

Jillian Leslie (00:16:37) – Go backwards. What do you wait? How do you get who are you working with? Their home talk. What is home talk?

Nell Foster (00:16:43) – Home talk is the it’s a big it’s a big site that has all sorts of home improvement ideas and we work with them.

Jillian Leslie (00:16:51) – So you do sponsored work with them. Sponsored content.

Nell Foster (00:16:54) – Yes. Yes, yes. Okay. and we do the Facebook, we get we do videos on, on Facebook. So we get a little bit of ad revenue from that. We do KDP, but we aren’t going to be having KDP anymore because we now have our book through you. And then we have the Amazon Associates because we do the affiliate marketing. And we’re also with like.

Jillian Leslie (00:17:20) – Okay, my friend, those are that’s like a lot of nice income streams. Now I get it. Like your ad revenue has been your biggest and that taking a hit can be painful. But I love how you are thinking about your business.

Nell Foster (00:17:35) – Right? So we are diversified, but nothing brings in anything like the ad, you know revenue does. Yes. The book we we launched the book to our subscribers over the weekend and we got like, you know, 55 sales.

Jillian Leslie (00:17:47) – Good job.

Nell Foster (00:17:49) – And we’re just started. We just put it on the website this morning.

Jillian Leslie (00:17:52) – So good job, good job. So let’s talk about you wrote this book when and now you’ve just updated it and tell me the story of the book.

Nell Foster (00:18:02) – Wrote it back in probably I I’m really bad with the date. Maybe 2011.

Jillian Leslie (00:18:10) – Wow.

Nell Foster (00:18:12) – A while ago. But the thing is that plant information does not change. It’s not like it’s current. You know, there might be a fertilizer I use I don’t use anymore, but otherwise the information is all still good. But I just wanted to go over it and add some things because I’ve learned a lot more being a garden blogger.

Jillian Leslie (00:18:30) – And what is the book title? What is the book? Who is it for? What’s it about?

Nell Foster (00:18:35) – It’s for a very beginning. A gardener, so they can get their houseplant gardener. It’s a houseplant book. It’s called Keep Your Houseplants Alive. It’s just aimed at making people feel more confident and happy. Stop them from wasting money on, you know, plants. Just to think about buying a plant before you just go in and, and, you know, and purchase it.

Nell Foster (00:18:57) – I mean, if you go in and you purchase like a dish towel, it’s okay because it’s just going to sit there. Right? But a plant you’ve got to keep alive. So you should know what the plant is and, well, what the conditions it likes. So it’s just really practical information. It’s what plants like, what plants don’t like. And then there’s also 33 plants that I think are really easy, easiest to take care of. And then we have some flowering plants in there too. And just, you know, things I’ve learned I think it’s 100 and I think it’s 122 pages.

Jillian Leslie (00:19:32) – Okay. And you just now put it to you. You were one of our mileage car customers. We talked about this. You’ve just put the PDF up, created a sales page and you’re selling it on. And how did you first sell it? Through email.

Nell Foster (00:19:49) – We sold it. We sold it in preview to our website, our our website customers, our, email subscribers. We we offered it to them at a discount first because I thought that would be a nice thing to do.

Nell Foster (00:20:03) – And then we just got it up on the website, you know, this morning.

Jillian Leslie (00:20:08) – Nice nice nice nice. I’m interrupting for just a second to say it is time to not only diversify your traffic sources, but diversify your income sources. Go write that book. Start selling your knowledge to your audience. And I’m here to help you go get my freebie where I will give you the 13 AI prompts. You need to write your entire book in under three hours. I have been getting great feedback on this freebie because people say it just walks me through the whole process to grab it. Go to Mylo tree.com/book prompts e b o okay prompts prompts. Get it now. And now back to the show. The one thing that we talked about before I press record was, when you’ve been at this as long as we have. You see so many changes you get good kind of rolling with the punches. Not that they don’t hurt. They hurt. But yes, it’s not your first rodeo.

Nell Foster (00:21:25) – It’s not my first rodeo.

Nell Foster (00:21:26) – And I think it helps to be a bit stubborn to explain. Well, I was. When getting the business going, you think, oh, you’re going to put this stuff out on the website, on the internet and everybody’s going to come read it because it’s so fabulous and all this. But and then it’s like, okay, there’s nobody there. So you just have to persevere. I don’t think anybody’s an overnight success. You know, there probably are some people on, you know, TikTok or whatever. But I think in the blogging world it’s, you know, we all know it’s not like it’s like the turtle pace, but it does pay off in the end. And it is a really rewarding and very interesting, you know, career. I do enjoy it, even though it drives me crazy sometimes. But, it is I think it’s I think it’s good if you can roll with the punches.

Jillian Leslie (00:22:18) – Absolutely. I think it teaches you to roll with the punches.

Nell Foster (00:22:22) – Roll with the punches, and also be an a resilient to and to not take things personally.

Nell Foster (00:22:29) – Because when our traffic started to go down, I was like, oh my God, oh my God, there’s something wrong with us. La la la. And then I started to hear other and not that misery loves company. Yes we do, but I just heard other people and I was like, okay, I wasn’t the only one.

Jillian Leslie (00:22:47) – No. And the most recent updates I’ve heard from people have like really. Yes. Kind of knocked down, got.

Nell Foster (00:22:55) – Hit by the I don’t think we got hit by the recent ones that much. I think ours was in the fall because I know that some people are really are really blindsided by the March 1st. Yeah.

Jillian Leslie (00:23:08) – I think that Google now having I think Google is also trying to figure stuff out. And with this advent of AI content and there can be blogs that show up one day, they’ve stolen content, you know, they go, hey, I like rewrite all of this, and now you’ve got some blog and it’s really difficult for Google to go, wait, is this AI? Is this not.

Jillian Leslie (00:23:33) – And they’ve kind of taken out swaths of bloggers trying to police AI blogs. And in the process, real blogs got taken out as well.

Nell Foster (00:23:46) – Right? I mean, because if you saw I mean, I haven’t been blogging. I’ve been blogging seriously, seriously as a career since probably 2018. But my blog has been up since 2011 or whatever, so I’ve been in it for a long time. So I was like, And I use a lot of AI in my blogs too. That’s interesting. I’m not vague and I’ll say, oh, I lived in AI, I grew up in New England, and I grew this here, and I grew it on the coast of California. Now I live in the Arizona desert, so I’m growing this here, and I, I can compare how it grows. So I have a lot of my experience I’m putting into things too. So and we use all of our own photos. I mean, how much more original can you get, right. Yeah.

Jillian Leslie (00:24:32) – I would, I would say from what I’m learning and I, I have a new blog post, a new podcast episode going live soon from another SEO expert that what you’re doing, being AI, being personal, sharing information that only you have that isn’t just regurgitated from other blogs or I like you will win in the end.

Jillian Leslie (00:24:55) – Plus, having a YouTube channel which is also owned by Google, there’s like cross, I’m going to call it juice that you get from being on multiple platforms.

Nell Foster (00:25:08) – Exactly. And that’s why I said next year it might all work itself out a bit. I don’t know if we’ll ever be back up, but I think because our content is so like original and we use every once in a while, you know, we use the stock photo because we, you know, we’ve aligned with some growers so we can get some pictures from them, which we always give credit to. But like 90, 96% or 98% of the photos on our website Rs.

Jillian Leslie (00:25:41) – yeah. I do think based on what I’m learning, I feel like that is you’re in the right direction. Like I feel like Google is also what they do is they roll out these updates and then they have to course correct. Yes. And I just had.

Nell Foster (00:25:59) – Somebody tell me that this morning.

Jillian Leslie (00:26:01) – And you continuing to put out new content is also really good because you can rank for the new pieces as well.

Nell Foster (00:26:11) – Exactly, exactly. So I’m not. But on the other hand, it’ll be nice to have some other aspects to my business like, you know, the digital and I am excited about doing, you know, the workshops.

Jillian Leslie (00:26:23) – So let’s talk about that. So okay, you come to me. So you think I don’t know if you were how did you find me? Were you listening to the podcast or.

Nell Foster (00:26:31) – Well I listen to podcasts in the morning, you know, work podcast when I’m getting ready and I’m putting around because I like to do things in the morning, you know, not I’m not the kind of person who had jumps out of bed and I go to the desk. No, no, no, I have to, you know, go out and putts in the garden, scoop out the pool, go out and see what’s in the front yard. Yeah. And, you know, take care of the cats and do all this. So I was like, I want a new podcast because I was I was listening to simple Pin media, eat Blog Talk and Food Blogger Pro because food blogs and garden blogs are pretty similar or similar in a way.

Nell Foster (00:27:08) – And I googled best blogging podcasts, and yours and yours was one that came up and I knew a couple of the other ones. I was like, oh, I don’t want to. So I started listening to you.

Jillian Leslie (00:27:22) – Oh, wow.

Nell Foster (00:27:23) – Okay. that’s how I found you through Google. Oh, wow.

Jillian Leslie (00:27:26) – See? It worked. So then I’m talking about, hey, like tap into new income streams and you think to yourself, hey, I could do that.

Nell Foster (00:27:35) – Yes. Well, I, I knew that we wanted to republish the book, and I wasn’t sure Amazon takes such a big cut of a book. And I had heard about Lulu because you could do, you know, no physical books, too, but you’ve got a format them in different ways. And I knew that you had been talking about, you know, digital publishing, but I wasn’t sure if you publish through you and you still did Lulu two or you still did Amazon. So I wasn’t sure how how it worked until I had the consultation with you.

Nell Foster (00:28:14) – And then I thought, well, that sounds fine, because Amazon doesn’t promote our book where we aren’t like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling or somebody who comes out as an instant bestseller. They will promote them then. So I thought, well, we’re going to do all the promoting anyway, so we might as well get the money. Right.

Jillian Leslie (00:28:32) – And I say, and, and.

Nell Foster (00:28:34) – And, and it was so easy to use that MiloTreeCart and you answered, I will tell people that I had like 3 or 4 questions the day that we were uploading, and Gillian got right back and she said, if you have any more questions. So it was very it was very easy, even for an older dog to do.

Jillian Leslie (00:28:57) – Well, you by the way, you are more tech savvy than most. I’m just going to say, oh.

Nell Foster (00:29:01) – Well, well, I’ve got I’ve got a couple of younger people who work with me too, so they can help me out a a bit, but I figure a lot out because you can, you know, find some things on the internet too.

Nell Foster (00:29:13) – But no, it was very the dashboard is very user friendly. Hooking up stripe, all that. It was easy.

Jillian Leslie (00:29:20) – Great. Now here’s we were talking about the possibility of you starting a membership, right. For plant lovers. And then you and we just talked about because I have a lot of material on my library card on how easy that is. And the truth is, the people making the most money, selling digital products typically have memberships. And then you’ve just come back to me and said, look, starting a membership, I kind of want to try this out. I want to start doing workshops. And I think that is an awesome idea.

Nell Foster (00:29:52) – Well, I think because it’s my, it’s my personality and I don’t mean, you know, I just like, I, I have a lot of different interests. And like, for instance, I’ve got a lot of experience with, with a bougainvillea, which has like half a million searches a month. It’s a gold mine. And so I thought if I did this, I could do like a bougainvillea wear workshop every other month, and I could do bougainvillea, bougainvillea pots.

Nell Foster (00:30:17) – I could do growing succulents indoors. I could do basics of houseplant care. I could do, you know, different, different topics, which I think would be more my personality. I could probably do like a bougainvillea one every other month and just get new people on it. But I have some questions about it, which I’ll ask you.

Jillian Leslie (00:30:39) – To email me. But, here, here’s what I would say. The thing about a membership is you just sell it to one person once, and then they get you get to continually charge their credit card every month. So that’s where the money is like. That’s why it’s easier with workshops. There are certain advantages. One, you get to kind of test it out and see who shows up for you. Build those relationships. you have to make those sales every time. That’s the downside. But you’ll also have the zoom recordings and you’ll have them in a membership as well. But you can then resell those zoom recordings as mini courses.

Nell Foster (00:31:17) – Exactly. So I figure that would work out well for me in the beginning, actually, to get my feet wet that way.

Nell Foster (00:31:28) – And that might be something I might, you know, because there’s a lot of a lot of, you know, topics I’m thinking more like, not like a hands on workshop, but more like an, an intensive kind of a thing to do for like an hour, hour and a half. So and by the way.

Jillian Leslie (00:31:45) – And then you have that content and now, especially with AI and transcribing, you can turn that into an e-book.

Nell Foster (00:31:52) – Yes, exactly.

Jillian Leslie (00:31:53) – So you’ve got this and the, the fact that you are so comfortable with YouTube that people get to see you and know you, you have so much going for you right now. Now, I just have to tell you that because I talk to so many bloggers and online entrepreneurs and so, for example, you know how to put your face in front of people and you know how to connect on video because you have so many subscribers and your YouTube channel is so active, so you not then selling that expertise is like you’re missing something. It’s like connecting all the dots.

Nell Foster (00:32:31) – So it is comfortable for me. I mean, if I had a whole crew here and I had to do that, but if I’m just filming myself or I have one person here, it’s very easy for me to do. And now that I, I get pretty much the same. People commenting on every video, so I know the names are. I actually turned off comments on my blog because I was getting so many and and the questions were so long, it was taking me so long to read the comments. I was like, I can’t do this, you know? We were just getting so many. So but I, I know I can. That’s the place that I can connect with people.

Jillian Leslie (00:33:08) – Yeah. Yeah. And and so I get on calls with people who are bloggers and let’s say they figured out something like food blogging and they understand they have understood SEO and keyword research, and then they want to kind of do what they’ve been doing. But yet then their traffic gets hit and I say, okay, now it’s time to pivot.

Jillian Leslie (00:33:32) – Now it’s time to step outside of your blog. Welcome people into your blog. But you’re now the face and people do not like it. When I say that, I get a ton of pushback and I say, there. It’s about how you are different from the other, say, food blogs in whatever niche. It’s no longer just people coming to this faith like how you didn’t want an about page. Now it’s all about the about page.

Nell Foster (00:34:02) – Exactly. It’s like.

Jillian Leslie (00:34:04) – Why would I trust you now? Oh, because you I see you on YouTube every week, or I see that you are real and I like what you put out there and your plants are so healthy. I want to learn from you.

Nell Foster (00:34:18) – Yes, exactly. So I figure that’s that’s a good place to advertise because a lot of people. So the thing with doing the workshops is because we have the subscribers, we have email subscribers, we have YouTube, we have, you know, Facebook, Instagram. We’re not that big on it’s not our big thing.

Nell Foster (00:34:37) – I don’t do TikTok. I do YouTube shorts because the audience on the shorts is different than the audience on the long form. So no, I do both on YouTube.

Jillian Leslie (00:34:49) – How have you and can I ask how big your email list is and how you’ve grown it?

Nell Foster (00:34:55) – We are 18,000.

Jillian Leslie (00:34:56) – That’s amazing.

Nell Foster (00:34:58) – Which I don’t know if that’s that. I mean, I don’t honestly in before Covid I would go to some. Some, you know, conventions and things, but we really didn’t talk traffic all that much or how how many subscribers we had. And now it’s kind of changed because SEO has gotten really big and that. So I don’t know if 18,000 is a lot because I don’t know that many. I don’t know that many bloggers now.

Jillian Leslie (00:35:28) – Yeah. Well what I will say is there I, I look at your business from where I’m sitting and I see opportunities all over the place because your email list is where you can make sales. That’s the closest you get to people. Although I don’t know on YouTube because you’re, you know, you have that close relationship.

Jillian Leslie (00:35:48) – But email is amazing at making sales. So how do you get people how have you grown it to 18,000?

Nell Foster (00:35:57) – We, I think it’s just by blogging on probably a regular basis. We offer a couple of handouts. When people sign up to, we will talk about it. I’ve got a sign up in in YouTube. I don’t know how many people go from there, but every every one. Once in a while we’ll mention it on Facebook, but it’s mainly off of the blog.

Jillian Leslie (00:36:25) – Interesting, because I feel like that is a goldmine for you that you haven’t even yet mined in a in a way for sales.

Nell Foster (00:36:34) – Well, I think too, like when I was first starting out, you know, we didn’t even have a newsletter at all. And then we got one and I think we were sending it once a month. And then we started sending it to two times a month, and now we send it every Thursday.

Jillian Leslie (00:36:52) – Now, is the intention of your newsletter to build community to drive traffic to your blog? Ultimately, it’s again a great sales vehicle when you are writing your newsletters.

Jillian Leslie (00:37:04) – What your intention?

Nell Foster (00:37:07) – I think it’s to bring intention to the blog, but I also like the idea of people who are interested in what we are offering to, you know, to build that community. But if they were on the blog, that’s how they sign up, you know? Right. Most of them.

Jillian Leslie (00:37:26) – But I mean, does it are you doing it to get traffic? Are you doing it to get eyeballs on YouTube? Like are you highlighting? Yes.

Nell Foster (00:37:35) – Because we send out our news letter is is typically two blog posts and it might be an old one and, and a new one because there’s new subscribers all the time. And then we’ll do a short or a long form video will do a pin. So it draws people to all the different things we have. And then we have a little band at the bottom that has three of our favorite things we offer through like, and we change that every month. Got it. And now the book will be on there every now and then to.

Nell Foster (00:38:06) – So it’s just basically to bring some traffic to the blog and to, you know, because some people may not even know we have a YouTube channel. So we always do a short or a long form video on there too. And then, you know, we have the LDK band. So we’re trying to I think we’re just trying to make that people aware of everything we offer and do.

Jillian Leslie (00:38:30) – Now when you talk about WI, who’s in your who’s on your team?

Nell Foster (00:38:35) – Our Miranda is on my team. She’s in Tennessee. She’s she’s a virtual assistant. Cassie is here in Tucson. So there’s two. And then we have Grayson with Imarc, who is the one that watches the website God and the guard dog. And that’s basically the team.

Jillian Leslie (00:38:54) – Okay. And are they full time?

Nell Foster (00:38:56) – And me? Oh. And then, well, Lauren is in Maine, and she writes articles every month.

Jillian Leslie (00:39:04) – Got it. Okay. Wow. Well, that’s a that’s a nice team you’ve got.

Nell Foster (00:39:08) – Yes, yes. Everybody has their things and they’re all independent contractors.

Jillian Leslie (00:39:14) – Great. So now as you look forward in your business, where do you feel yourself wanting to go?

Nell Foster (00:39:24) – I in terms of the law. You know, I think it’s hard to know now because as we know, it’s like, I would like to see doing more like the custom things, you know, the workshops and, we started a book on, indoor succulent care, and it’s like, you know, 60% done. And now I’m like, well, we’ve already get this book published, so now we can get the next one. I’ll start on that. That one probably end of August, getting that wrapped up and out too. So I see going more that way. I don’t I don’t know if I have I mean, I just, I just kind of go year by year. And because I could have had a grand plan, you know, last year. And it would have been, it would have been bye bye this year. Yeah.

Jillian Leslie (00:40:14) – It’s that, you know, the thing is, like the, you know, the best way to make God laugh is tell him your plans.

Jillian Leslie (00:40:18) – I feel that way very much in terms of being an online entrepreneur. I think it’s I, I hold my like 1 to 3 month plan more tightly than, say, my year plan.

Nell Foster (00:40:33) – I think that’s a good idea now because we just don’t know what’s in. And I mean, next year the Google traffic might be back up. We don’t know, right? Right. I mean, that’s the thing about this, you know, business we’ve learned is that we don’t know.

Jillian Leslie (00:40:46) – Well, now I have to say that I’m super excited to watch this new path that you want to go down in terms of workshops and even more digital downloads, potentially a membership. And also two things. One, how to repurpose creatively, how to bundle stuff, how to take something and sell it as a video or sell it as an e-book, that kind of thing. Like getting really. Bold in terms of what you’re putting out there, and also leaning into selling stuff through your email list, through your YouTube channel, through your blog.

Jillian Leslie (00:41:26) – I think those are just through Facebook. Such rich ways, like you’ve got access to an audience that is incredible, like they’re right there for the taking.

Nell Foster (00:41:38) – And we’ve also got we also have pretty good monthly views on, you know, Pinterest who we put out tends to. Absolutely.

Jillian Leslie (00:41:48) – So okay. Now if somebody wants to first reach out to you to ask you questions, how should they do that and how should they find your content? Like where should where do you send people?

Nell Foster (00:42:02) – our website is our main hub, joyous garden.com, because we all know we own our websites, right. So that’s where everything is. All our social media is on there. But I think social media all the way across the board, Facebook and Instagram is joyous. garden.com. It’s a it’s joyous garden and it’s three words joy us garden. and and Pinterest and YouTube. I don’t really consider. Do you consider them social media? I don’t consider them. Are they more.

Jillian Leslie (00:42:37) – Is like search engines. But yeah.

Nell Foster (00:42:39) – I do too.

Nell Foster (00:42:40) – I don’t think of them as social media, but on them we’re joyous garden also. Okay. And and you can easily, easily find the, the YouTube channel off of the website too. There’s a big band in the middle of the website that says watch on YouTube. So.

Jillian Leslie (00:42:54) – Well, I love how you have been so transparent, sharing your journey, your ups and your downs. And I am just I have to just say, I’m so happy to have you as my friend and for you to come on the show. So thank you.

Nell Foster (00:43:08) – Well, it has been a pleasure getting to know you and you really are our responsive and as cheery as you sound on the podcast too. But it is. Thank you. And as we were saying before we got on it, it is a ride. So if you’re going to do it, put your seatbelt on. Yeah.

Jillian Leslie (00:43:26) – Hold on tight. Absolutely.

Nell Foster (00:43:29) – Hold on tight because you’re going to be. But I was like, so I’ll just have to say I was so frustrated in January and February because I, because I wanted to keep the business, because here’s a business you worked up right.

Nell Foster (00:43:40) – And it was doing well. And then. Yeah. And so it was I was like, I’m not going to give this up. But it was just so it was just so frustrating. But now I’m feeling a lot better.

Jillian Leslie (00:43:54) – Absolutely. Well, I hope to be part of your success truly, and help you guide you.

Nell Foster (00:43:59) – I mean, you are.

Jillian Leslie (00:44:01) – Well, again.

Nell Foster (00:44:03) – You are because we put because we found MiloTreeCart.

Jillian Leslie (00:44:05) – I really appreciate you saying that. Thank you so much.

Nell Foster (00:44:10) – It’s very easy to sell other things on there, because I never would have thought about doing a workshop because they just seemed. So. How do you set it up? How do you do it? You have to have all this stuff. But. It’s it’s been easy so far, so I will I will keep you informed about what’s going on. Awesome.

Jillian Leslie (00:44:31) – Well, again, thank you for coming on the show.

Nell Foster (00:44:34) – Oh, it was a pleasure to talk to you as always.

Jillian Leslie (00:44:37) – I hope you guys like this episode.

Jillian Leslie (00:44:39) – I find now to be such a breath of fresh air. I appreciate her honesty, her wisdom, and her ingenuity. She is somebody who embraces change, and I think that is the attitude that I really try to hold onto, especially now because I see things speeding up. So if you want to do what Nell is doing and find a new way to monetize, go check out my lottery card and start selling easy digital products. If you want to get on a free 20 minute call with me, you just go to MiloTree.com, you’ll see my calendar, sign up for a time. I’d love to meet you. I’d love to give you feedback and help you get started again. MiloTree.com. If you think this episode has been helpful, please share it with a friend. Also, I would be so appreciative if you right now when to iTunes gave the blogger genius five stars because this way other people can find it and I can continue to bring you fantastic guests. So thank you in advance for that and I will see you here again next week.