In this episode, we explore how to go from blogging flop to massive blogging success. We explore what to do when you don’t hit it big at first.
Host 0:04
Welcome to The Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.
Jillian Leslie 0:11
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Blogger Genius. Now, I have a question for you. Have you thought about starting your own business?
And so you said, “Okay. Well, what do I need?” “I need a WordPress blog.” And then, you went to start a WordPress blog and you found it so technically difficult that you gave up.
Well, imagine if you could get a pair of experts who know exactly what they’re doing to get your blog set up in a matter of days, and who are available to help with any technical questions you have.
And then, you could go off and start creating content, building products, connecting with your customers. Okay. Well, if that sounds good to you, then I want to announce that David and I have rolled out a service called Blog Start.
We will set up your blog for you and get you going and get you started on the right foot. We’ve heard from so many people that this is a hump they can’t seem to get over. We want to help you.
This is interesting. Head to MiloTree.com/BlogStart and you can learn about it and sign up. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at Jillian@MiloTree.com. I would love to answer them. Once again, it’s MiloTree.com/BlogStart.
For today’s episode, I am interviewing Lauren McManus. She and her business partner have first started a blog that didn’t go anywhere. Then they started another blog that was successful, a fitness blog and lifestyle blog.
And then, they started a business where they teach people how to grow online businesses. What is incredibly cool about what Lauren talks about, is she is a digital nomad. In fact, when she was talking about it, I could feel I was so excited because David and I dream about that.
We have a daughter so it’s kind of impossible for us to do that but our vision is that we could work from anywhere and travel the world. You’ll hear Lauren’s story. I think you’re going to find this incredibly interesting. So without further delay, here is my interview with Lauren McManus.
Lauren, welcome to the show. I’m super glad that you are here.
Lauren McManus 2:41
Thanks so much for having me, Jillian. I’m excited to be here.
Jillian Leslie 2:44
Okay. We were just talking offline about your life. As a mother who kind of has to stay put because my daughter is in school, I find your whole life so fascinating. Okay. So first, would you share your entrepreneurial journey and then how you got to be living the life that you are living right now.
Lauren McManus 3:06
Yeah, absolutely. I started out in a very very different career path. I was actually a CPA. I was a tax accountant in Dallas.
Jillian Leslie 3:17
Oh my God.
Lauren McManus 3:18
Yeah. I was working the nine to five and/or sometimes much later than five, and climbing the corporate ladder. That was the life that I had envisioned for myself.
At that time, I met Alex Nerney, who is my business partner. He was a personal trainer and always had his heart set on doing something in the online world through running his own business or working in internet marketing in some way.
We first started a health and wellness website. I was a former vegan and with his personal training background, it was kind of what we bonded over. It took a few months of working nights and weekends to try to get this website off the ground.
In fact, our first one failed. We started a new one but we ended up making six figures with this little blog in its first year. At the end of that first year, we had quit our jobs, we had begun to start traveling.
And then that was around the time that we started to Create and Go, which is our main website now. This was all within the span of the first couple of years. We were able to quit our full-time jobs and run our blogs full time.
And now, I am doing this interview from Valparaíso Chile. I actually travel full time while I work on my blogs now. It’s a totally different life than I had ever envisioned, but I’m absolutely loving every second of it.
Jillian Leslie 4:41
The thing that was so interesting that you’ve shared is that you travel with a group of digital nomads.
Lauren McManus 4:48
Yeah. It’s actually really cool because this travel group that I’m with, it’s called the WiFi Tribe, and everyone in the WiFi Tribe also has some sort of remote jobs. It could be freelancing or being an entrepreneur and running your own business like I do.
It could be just working remotely for a company back at home or somewhere else in the world. But honestly, throughout the week we all work a fairly normal kind of nine to five schedule.
In the evenings, we go out and explore the city. On the weekends, we often take trips hiking. This weekend, we’re going to the Atacama Desert.
So yeah, it’s a really awesome way to network with other people that are building their own businesses or working in different industries and also just to safely and in a fun way explore different parts of the world.
Jillian Leslie 5:40
How long have you been living nomadically?
Lauren McManus 5:44
I’ve been fully nomadic for a little over a year and a half now. Alex and I both started traveling with the WiFi Tribe about three and a half years ago.
As I was saying before, we would travel for a month or two, and then we would actually go home for three or four months because I will say that if you are building a business or doing anything that requires a lot of time and deep focus, it is very difficult and distracting to also travel while doing that stuff.
So, we did it on and off. But now that my business is pretty steady, things are pretty consistent. I’ve now been a year and a half of full-time travel while also running my business.
Jillian Leslie 6:24
That is so cool. That is so cool. Okay. So you start your first blog and it fails. Then you start this health and wellness blog, and it succeeds. First of all, what was the difference?
Lauren McManus 6:44
We created this website and we had these ideas. At the time, we were young. We were 25 and living in Dallas. We were trying to aim this website towards other people that were in that demographic, people that wanted to be social and still be healthy.
Really it was based around us. Us and what we thought what we wanted, what we thought other people might want because of what we wanted. We ended up creating a product. Nobody bought it.
We ran a webinar. There was maybe 12 people in that webinar, and two of them were our mothers. And the funny thing is this product that failed, it was a diet program. Nobody bought it.
What ended up happening is we scratch this blog and we started a new health and fitness blog. This time we kind of hit our faces. We wrote a ton of different kinds of content. We began to get more and more Pinterest traffic. We begin to learn what articles were the most popular.
Because of being on Pinterest, our target customer became not some 25-year-old person from Dallas who didn’t have a family or kids, it was actually about a 45-year-old woman who was a mother. That’s because that’s the average demographic on Pinterest.
And so, what we ended up doing was actually repackaging this old diet program that we had written into a new one. We learned how to market it to the right person this time. It sold immediately.
It wasn’t that our product was off. It was that we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know who our target audience was.
We took the time to drive the traffic and build that audience first before trying to monetize it. I do think that is one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of website owners and bloggers do make when they’re trying to monetize.
Jillian Leslie 8:45
Now, this was a diet program. So, was it a course? Was it like emails that you would send? Was it a membership site? What was it?
Lauren McManus 8:57
It actually started out as an ebook. It was a set of like four ebooks that you would get in kind of a package. We made improvements to the program after that and we actually did include videos that kind of explained it.
The core part of it is actually just an ebook but there are now videos just kind of explaining some of the concepts in more detail. We do a Facebook support group that comes along with it so that people going through this diet can go through together and ask us questions.
And yeah, that was the main product that we had in our health and wellness website and kind of how we got started.
Jillian Leslie 9:33
Okay. Are you still selling that product?
Lauren McManus 9:36
We are still selling it, yeah. We have actually tried to run a membership program. Running a membership program is often kind of the Golden Nugget that a lot of people hope to achieve at some point because of the recurring revenue.
Yes, it can be incredible. We tried to do upsells behind the product and this membership program was part of an upsell. What we realized is that the people that we were attracted to this program were not very tech-savvy.
We ended up getting some backlash because people didn’t understand that they were buying into a membership program. And so, we ended up actually just deciding to scratch that whole part of it afterward because people weren’t understanding it.
People were getting upset about it. It just turned out to be not a good match for us and for our audience. We did also have that mistake along the way.
Jillian Leslie 10:37
Okay. Let’s talk about Create and Go. Create and Go is a whole separate blog and business.
Lauren McManus 10:47
It is. Essentially, the premise behind Create and Go and what we teach in the courses that we sell in Create and Go is really exposing the journey to going from zero to six figures between the first failed blog and the second one that did become successful and that we do still also run today.
It’s basically going from zero to six figures in that first year and all the mistakes that we made. We teach about getting started, writing content, building your email list, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and eventually creating your own product.
It’s kind of all the different strategies that we learned in monetizing that first blog.
Jillian Leslie 11:28
Got it. Your target audience there is kind of potentially like you who want to leave their nine to five and build their own business.
Lauren McManus 11:38
Absolutely. It kind of turned into that because the first course that we created was actually on Pinterest traffic.
At the time, we didn’t quite know what Create and Go was going to be but we believe that Pinterest traffic was what really unlocked everything for us with monetizing this first website.
Because all this traffic that we got was how we were able to test out our email opt-ins and test out different product ideas and learn who our audience was and build our email list.
All the traffic that we got made such an impact. At the time, Pinterest was still just so so unknown as such an awesome source of traffic. The first course that we created was on Pinterest.
The second course was actually creating your own products. Again, when you’re driving traffic, if you don’t know who your audiences yet, you’ll begin to kind of learn through getting the feedback through your email list and comments in your articles.
We learned through the travel and stuff that we were posting, we’re actually attracting people who said, “That’s great. All the money sounds awesome, but how do I even start? How do I even start a blog? How do I do this?”
And so that was what made us then turn back and go create a new course, which was how to actually get started. And so yeah, we kind of did a little bit of a flip flop.
I can’t say enough how important it is to drive traffic and create different types of content and build an email list to kind of figure out who your target customer is, who your readers are and what they’re interested in before you try to start making your own products or start monetizing.
Jillian Leslie 13:16
Imagine growing your Instagram followers with no work. Highly engaged followers. Now, imagine it with Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube. How about new email subscribers? Seriously, no work.
This is all possible if you install the MiloTree pop-up on your blog. David, my husband and I, started our blog Catch My Party in 2009. We’ve since grown it into the largest party idea site on the web with millions of page views per month.
We did it with hard work and our secret weapon, our MiloTree pop-up which David built for us. We’ve grown our Pinterest followers to over 1.3 million and our Instagram followers to over 164,000. Right now, 8000 other bloggers just like you are using MiloTree to grow their businesses.
With MiloTree you can focus on growing one platform or switch between several. But here is the important thing, if you aren’t converting your visitors into followers, subscribers, and customers, you’re honestly wasting your own traffic. Make this asset your visitors work for you.
Since we’re bloggers, we get bloggers. So we’ve optimized MiloTree like crazy. It’s a snap to install, it won’t slow your site down, it’s Google-friendly on mobile, and it’s so darn cute. You can even add animated sparkles to your pop up if you like.
Sign up now and get your first 30 days for free. Please pause this episode and head to MiloTree.com to sign up. I know you will thank me.
As a bonus, once you sign up, I’m going to send you weekly actionable business tips to help you grow your business. I’ve been at this a long time and I have a lot to share.
Remember, your scarcest resource is not money, it’s time. So let MiloTree free up time for you so you can focus on the other important parts of your business. What are you waiting for? Hit pause, head to MiloTree and sign up today.
So you would then let’s say, write an article or write a blog post, pin it to Pinterest, and then how would you collect that person as an email address?
Lauren McManus 15:29
We have email opt-ins on our blog. We’ve tried many different things. We have little forms in our footers. We did scroll maps for a long time. Now, we have stuff custom coded into our website to have banners at the top of our articles.
But that was essentially it. I mean it was kind of like this shotgun approach. When we first got started, it was this health and wellness website.
We wrote everything from yoga to other types of exercise, recipes, dieting, weight loss. At the time we didn’t know what was the most popular and how we’re going to monetize it.
And so, we actually, at one point in time, and in our biggest testing phase right before we began to make money, and when we’re really focused on building that email list is that we actually had five different email opt-ins, and five different email funnels set up on this blog.
They were around those topics I just named – diet, weight loss, fitness, recipes. Because at the time, again, we didn’t know. What we found was that most of our audience was gravitating towards yoga and weight loss.
And so, that is what ended up causing us to create products in both of those spaces rather than recipes or make a workout program. That was kind of a lot of experimentation.
It was only through those emails that we collected as well that we were able to figure out not just as a weight-loss that they’re interested in, but at the bottom of our first email, we would say, “What’s the number one thing that you struggle with when it comes to yoga or weight loss?”
What we realized is that we didn’t just get back, “Oh, I’m too lazy to go to the gym.” The responses that we got back were, “Hey, I am 45 years old. I have three children. I work a full-time job.”
We were able to actually get all these responses and form this kind of customer avatar from the stories that people were telling us. That is what enabled us to remarket the old product in kind of who exactly we were selling it to.
Jillian Leslie 17:37
That is so powerful. Now, were you offering lead magnets? Like here are, you know, five tips or something like that. Or were you just sending people to articles?
Lauren McManus 17:49
No. Again, we had the whole funnels built out. We created five different email opt-ins. We had those five opt-ins running. One of them was on weight loss.
It was so much heavy experimentation in that phase because if we had one lead magnet that didn’t work, we would create another one. We would spend a few more days creating another one.
So it was like the five tips for this or the five hacks for that. I would create different covers for them. We would split test all of this stuff to make sure that we’re getting the right conversion rates.
If we weren’t getting a high enough conversion rate, we ended up scrapping the opt-in, changing the headline, or changing the cover. We change something and kept tweaking it until we got what we wanted.
So that was kind of how we honed in on yoga and weight loss. Those had the highest conversion rates.
Jillian Leslie 18:36
That is so great. I recommend this all the time. I call them at-bats, which are how many at-bats you have to be constantly tweaking and changing and not see these as failures, but as learnings.
Lauren McManus 18:56
Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, so much of what we do is about marketing, right? Like whether it’s your emails, your sales pages, the way that you talk to people. Marketing is so, so, so important.
It was all those tweaks, all those things that you have to pay very close attention to that helped us learn how to be marketers. Neither one of us are marketers.
We both had a background in business. We have business degrees, but I was an accountant. Sales and marketing was not my thing at all. But how we learned marketing was tweaking headlines and designing these covers for our lead magnets and stuff.
Yeah, it was really really fun. I wouldn’t always call it a fun process, I guess because at the time we weren’t making money so it’s a bit stressful. But I’m so so, so thankful that we went through that process of trial and error because it taught me so much.
Jillian Leslie 19:50
Yeah. And like how not to take things personally.
Lauren McManus 19:54
Yeah, absolutely.
Jillian Leslie 19:56
Because I can’t tell you how many stories entrepreneurs will talk to me or email me and talk about how demoralizing it feels. And I go, “No, no, no. Reframe it. Reframe it. It’s testing. It’s just testing.” You’re on your way so keep learning. It’s learning and testing.
Lauren McManus 20:15
Yeah. One of my favorite things to tell my students is just honestly to embrace failure. If we had just hit a home run from the beginning, we’d still be running the health and wellness website, but we definitely would not be teaching internet marketing right now.
Because it was only through all that trial and error that we were able to learn so much, and so much that we were able to create a whole new business out of that. And so, I’m just so thankful for that learning process.
Once you do begin to start figuring it out, that learning process makes you appreciate it so so so much more because you really earned it, you know,
Yeah. I call it mining for gold. That we are all miners, you know. We’re all just like looking to see, “Oh, is it this or is it this?” What are people connecting with?
Yeah, absolutely.
Jillian Leslie 21:05
Okay. On your website now where you teach people how to build online businesses, you have a ton of content. So would you guys be writing all of this content?
Lauren McManus 21:16
Yes. Honestly, it does help that there are two of us. I don’t think we could have done it. We have hired out content from time to time. On our health and wellness website, all of our content now is hired out.
We even still go through phases where we don’t write content for months and months at a time. And then we started back up again.
For us, what kind of opt-in works best is when we are creating a new course or embarking on some new project in our business, we kind of dive in headfirst and kind of let a lot of the other stuff kind of sit for now.
We do have a team to help us make sure that we run things that, you know the normal processes as they continue but we used to call it product creation mode. When we’re creating a new course, we would just forget everything else.
We would stop writing content for weeks or months at a time and only focusing on creating this course. And so yeah, we do still write content but we also produce YouTube videos, we update our courses, we go on podcasts, we send that kind of content to our audience.
So we’re not always always always writing. As we’ve grown, we found that it’s less important to constantly produce new articles, but we definitely have gone through those phases as well.
Jillian Leslie 22:34
Got it. What does your team then look like? So, you and Alex work remotely? I mean meaning you’re not in the same space, same place. You’re like halfway around the world?
Lauren McManus 22:45
That’s correct. Yeah. Yeah, we both do a lot of traveling. And yeah, for me, it’s full time. It’s crazy because we waited way too long to actually build a team. We did it all ourselves for the first couple of years.
And then, we first hired a customer service manager. That kind of grew a little bit from there. And so, we now have a core team of four or five people.
And those are the people that we work very close with on a daily basis like our customer service managers. We have a couple of those. One for each blog.
We have a couple of site guys that help us with SEO and just general site maintenance and stuff that we are not technical enough to be able to handle.
And yeah, so we have maybe four or five core team members, but we also have maybe an additional two or three freelancers and stuff that we work very closely with too.
Everyone is remote. We all communicate through Slack so it’s pretty great.
Jillian Leslie 23:39
I love Slack. I use it with my team as well. I think I would die without Slack. Everything is right there.
Lauren McManus 23:48
It’s actually how my travel group, my WiFi Tribe community communicates as well. We’re all in a city together and we’re usually spread across three or four apartments. Everyone works during the day, but we all have access to Slack channels.
That’s kind of how we plan out what restaurants we want to go to and how we plan out our weekend trips and stuff. I use Slack for my fun travel stuff. And I also use it for my business. So, I can’t say enough good things about Slack.
Jillian Leslie 24:15
Now, you guys publish your income reports.
Lauren McManus 24:19
We do.
Jillian Leslie 24:20
Could you talk about that? And like why you decided to do that, what it’s like, whether if you feel like it holds you accountable, that kind of thing.
Lauren McManus 24:31
Yeah, absolutely. We published income reports. I mean honestly, we started doing it because that’s what other people were doing in the blogging space.
When we were first starting with the health and wellness blog, we were reading income reports. We were reading them every time they were published every month from people like Pat Flynn and Melissa Griffin and Michelle Schroeder Gardner.
Those were some of the top bloggers that we were following. They were all publishing income reports. This is what inspired us and kind of let us know really what’s possible with their online business.
It was very inspiring. When we eventually got into kind of the business blogging space as well, we honestly just followed suit because that was what the top people in our niche were doing. It’s a bit weird having that out there because you know anybody like your family can see it.
Jillian Leslie 25:23
Like your mom. Yeah, exactly. Your aunts and your cousins could be like, “Hey how are you doing? Maybe I should take you up for a loan?”
Lauren McManus 25:32
Yeah. Your family and your friends. You’re definitely exposed to that. It’s a bit weird but definitely something that you can get used to.
To be honest, I don’t think that too many of our family or friends really check out our websites much anyway. They’re kind of, this is kind of some weird online world that we have that they just aren’t really a part of.
A lot of my travel friends look it up because they’re also starting their own things and more in the online world. But yeah, I mean that’s why we started publishing them. We publish it still once a month.
We just get so many amazing comments from our readers and a lot of replies back to our emails. People find it very inspiring. I think that monthly income report is kind of a reminder for them to keep pushing forward.
They’re having a lot of down days because they’re struggling to build their business and to make money. They’re kind of in the trenches, as we say in those early days. I think that that once a month is kind of reminding them of what’s possible.
Jillian Leslie 26:33
Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So, for bloggers today, where do you think the opportunities are?
Lauren McManus 26:43
Where do you think the opportunities are? Well, I do think that there’s always so much space at the top. I mean people are always like, “Well, you know, there are so many other people doing this already so, is there even any point?”
The best thing I can say there is that we got started in one of the most oversaturated, I think weight loss is like the number two or number three search topic in the world. It’s ultra-competitive and we were able to make money within the first few months.
There’s always room at the top but I do think that you need to find what your unique selling point is. For us, getting started on Pinterest helps tremendously which is why we teach our bloggers to start with Pinterest.
The other favorite platform that we have is YouTube. I think that YouTube especially is not as competitive because it’s a lot more difficult to get your face on video so a lot of people just don’t bother with it.
A lot of people are going after Instagram these days because it’s just so popular but I think you just need to find your way. I do think that Pinterest is still the best source for bloggers.
We just tell our bloggers to just speak from experience. Don’t get too overly focused. Think when you’re creating your topic and what you want to start your business on.
It should be something that you have experienced and that you’re knowledgeable about because at the end of the day you’re just sharing your story.
If you share your personal story, that automatically makes you unique from everyone else. Your story might be similar to others, but it’s never going to be the same.
Jillian Leslie 28:29
Absolutely. Now in terms of YouTube, how often are you guys making videos and what are your videos about?
Lauren McManus 28:37
Just like with the content on our blog, it’s one of those things where we’ll go host a year without publishing a video. I don’t know that we’ve actually gone quite that long but we used to publish videos a couple of times a month or so back when we first started.
Once we had a bunch of videos ranking for the certain keywords that we wanted to rank for, we kind of turned our sights to other things and stop posting for a few months.
Alex is actually the one that does most of the YouTube videos. I think he’s got about 98% of the videos on there. It’s just more of his jam. He’s actually just getting started in doing those again.
I think we’re going to probably see one every month or two. Now he puts a lot more work and effort into them than he did in the beginning.
Jillian Leslie 29:24
Are they about health and wellness or are they about growing businesses?
Lauren McManus 29:28
No, they’re about growing businesses. Again, because that target audience that we have on the other website, that demographic really doesn’t spend much time on YouTube.
But in the online business world, YouTube is an awesome source of traffic because that’s kind of where the younger demographics hang out. So that is what we use.
We use Pinterest for both blogs. Pinterest is the primary source for Avocadu, our health and wellness blog. But we use Pinterest and Google SEO and YouTube for the online business blog.
Jillian Leslie 30:01
Got it. Okay. Now in terms of advertising paid ads, do you do run a lot of paid ads?
Lauren McManus 30:11
Do you mean like paid ad traffic to our website?
Jillian Leslie 30:15
Are you running Facebook ads and Instagram ads and things like that?
Lauren McManus 30:19
Yes. Yes, we do. We don’t on our health and wellness website because the ROI just isn’t high enough. Our products are average at about $30-$37.
As much as we would have loved to, haven’t been able to do some paid advertising on that website. We were not able to. On top of that, online advertising in the weight loss world is very difficult.
Jillian Leslie 30:42
Very expensive.
Lauren McManus 30:44
Yeah, yeah. Especially just to get ads approved in the weight loss industry. It’s pretty difficult. But we do run promoted pins on Pinterest, and we run Facebook ads. We do a little bit of Google and Instagram, but not too much.
Jillian Leslie 30:58
Okay. And this is to drive people then to Create and Go?
Lauren McManus 31:02
Yes, yes. Our courses are much more expensive on that blog so we’re able to kind of find a sweet spot with the ROI on those ads.
Jillian Leslie 31:12
Got it. Okay. I’m going to ask this as a two-part question. Back in the day when you guys first started, how many hours a week were you working? And today, which is what? Like four years later? How many hours a week do you work now?
Lauren McManus 31:30
When we first started, we worked a lot. I mean we worked for about four or five months on the first blog while we actually had full-time jobs. We would work three or four hours every evening and we will work most of the weekends straight through.
So I mean, we’re working a lot of hours on top of our regular jobs. But after we quit our jobs, honestly, we still worked a lot. In part, it is because we were trying to grow this business.
It’s also becoming we were very passionate about it. We actually loved it. We knew that the more time that we spent in the beginning, the more it would pay off in the end.
There were definitely weeks that we worked probably 70-80 hour work weeks easily after we had quit our jobs. Because what happened was we quit our jobs before we’re making any money.
We had some savings. And so we moved up to Seattle in Alex’s dad’s house and kind of holed ourselves away there until we were able to start making money. We probably worked 70 or 80 hours a week at the worst.
Now honestly, a typical 40 hour with the general nine to five which is funny because we talked about escaping the nine to five but really when everybody else works a nine to five, you kind of almost settle into that nine to five workspace anyway.
And so yeah, we work about 40 hours. I mean some weeks we take off entirely and some weeks we might work more than that. It really just depends on what projects we’re doing. For me, where I’m traveling and what I’m doing.
I just went to Patagonia about two weeks ago and I took about nine days off. So yeah, it’s nice because it almost looks like a normal job now but it doesn’t have to be. We still have the freedom to work whenever we want and how often we want to work.
Jillian Leslie 33:13
Yeah. I think that’s what’s so special about what we all do, which is you could work nine to five, but it’s up to you. And if you want to take the day off, you can. If you want to work all weekend, you can.
You know that you have work to do but that there’s no boss who is looking over your shoulder going, “What? What do you mean you’re leaving it for?”
Lauren McManus 33:37
Yeah, absolutely. And it really, I think depends on where you’re at with your business because, for us, we’re still actively trying to grow it.
We could work half that amount or even less and mostly maintain what we’re earning right now. But we are still trying to grow it so we are investing the 40 hours or more to still grow the business.
Jillian Leslie 34:02
Now, what about your business are you guys most excited?
Lauren McManus 34:09
The next couple of big projects we’re working on, we have not yet done webinars for the longest time. We just said we do not want to have to do webinars.
We want to create our business in a way that we can make enough money doing launches and things without having to be tied down to these monthly webinars.
But now that we have built our business, and we’ve got things pretty stable, we do believe that webinars will greatly increase our income and also help our audience out and so webinars and then starting a podcast probably in the new year.
Those are two big projects and where we think that it’s going to help our bottom line but also be something that is super helpful to our audience. So it’s kind of like a double reward there.
Jillian Leslie 34:54
Now, in terms of webinars, are these webinars to ultimately sell your products?
Lauren McManus 34:59
Yes. Yes, we often discount our courses kind of on a monthly or quarterly basis to our email list. They would be webinars that we would put in those launches when we do discounts but they would also be in the email funnels that we have that sell our products.
Jillian Leslie 35:18
Got it. Got it. Well, this is great. Okay. Do you have any parting piece of advice for my audience entrepreneurs at all different stages?
Lauren McManus 35:31
I think just tying in what I was kind of saying before, just the importance of connecting with your audience. Finding that way to still be super relatable and find out who your target customer is.
It’s about finding out that information that again, creating that customer avatar because without it you will end up mismarketing and not able to sell your products nearly as well. But also just being able to remain transparent as you grow as well.
This was a comment that Alex and I get in our YouTube channel a lot is how transparent we are. I think it’s because a lot of our YouTube videos, the older ones especially, are very unpolished.
Alex has surfer hair from coming out of the ocean of Nicaragua. A lot of the old videos, he’s actually just reading blog posts but he’s telling his story. I think that that relatability is what people find so refreshing and different about Alex and I.
We know all this because we talk with our audience often in our groups, in the replies we get back from our emails, in the comments in our articles and our YouTube channel.
It’s just so so so important to connect with your audience and learn as much as you can from them while you’re building your business.
Jillian Leslie 36:48
I think that’s great. That’s great advice. Okay, Lauren, how can people learn about what you’re doing and reach out to you?
Lauren McManus 36:55
Absolutely. My website is CreateAndGo.com. This is the main website, our online business blog. Our YouTube channel is also Create and Go. So those are two of the best places to check us out.
Jillian Leslie 37:08
Great. Well, Lauren, this has been such a pleasure. I think what you’re doing is so cool.
Lauren McManus 37:18
Thank you so much.
Jillian Leslie 37:18
I love that you’re actually doing it. I think that we all have this fantasy of being digital nomads, and you’re like my first digital nomad friend.
Lauren McManus 37:29
That’s awesome. That’s awesome.
Jillian Leslie 37:32
I’m really inspired by the way Lauren thinks about building businesses, putting out content, especially using Pinterest to get feedback, then building products that can serve your audience.
If that is exciting to you, if her lifestyle is exciting to you, if you’re ready to take the next step and start building your own business, and of course, you need a blog, please let us help you. We can take care of that part. We will optimize it. You don’t have to worry about it.
We’re always available for help. And then, you can focus on creating the content, building relationships, starting to think about products or courses, putting your vision out there and creating the lifestyle that you want.
Please head to MiloTree.com/blogstart. Again, it is MiloTree.com/blogstart. If you have any questions or you just want to say hi, I’m Jillian@MiloTree.com. I will see you again here next week.
Imagine a world where growing your social media followers and email list was easy…
It can be with MiloTree!
Try the MiloTree pop-up app on your blog for 30 days risk-free!
Let your MiloTree pop-ups help you get to that next level by turning your visitors into email subscribers and social media followers on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and YouTube.
Sign up today!
Install your MiloTree pop-ups on your site in under two minutes.
Sign up for MiloTree now and get your first 30 DAYS FREE!