Growing Your Income with Content and Marketing: Insights from Coach Jenny Melrose

Most Valuable Lesson or Insight

The most valuable lesson from this conversation is that building a sustainable online business requires a strategic approach to content and marketing. Jenny Melrose emphasizes the importance of understanding your audience, creating valuable content, and using email marketing to nurture relationships and drive sales. She also highlights the need to move beyond social media and focus on building an email list to maintain long-term connections with your audience.

Top 5 Between-the-Lines Lessons

1. Social Media is a Starting Point, Not the Endgame: While social media is a great way to attract attention, it’s not enough to sustain long-term growth. Building an email list ensures you can stay connected with your audience even if social media algorithms change.

2. Freebies Should Align with Your Offerings: Your freebie (e.g., guides, checklists, or workshops) should provide immediate value and align with your paid products or services. This helps potential customers see the value in what you offer and builds trust.

3. Content Should Be Intentional and Thematic: Instead of random posts, focus on creating content around specific themes or topics for a set period (e.g., a month). This helps establish your expertise and keeps your audience engaged.

4. Email Marketing is a Long-Term Strategy: Regularly emailing your list with valuable content (at least once a week) keeps you top-of-mind and positions you as an expert. Over time, this builds trust and increases the likelihood of conversions.

5. Plan Your Launches Strategically: Map out your product launches and marketing efforts based on your revenue goals and audience needs. For example, hosting summits or workshops can be a great way to grow your list and pitch higher-ticket offers.

5 Actionable Steps

1. Create a Lead Magnet: Develop a freebie (e.g., a guide, checklist, or mini-course) that aligns with your paid offerings. Use it to grow your email list by offering it in exchange for email addresses.

2. Set Up a Sales Sequence: Once someone joins your email list, send them a series of emails (5-7 emails over a week or two) that address their pain points and introduce your product or service as the solution.

3. Email Your List Regularly: After the sales sequence, continue to email your list at least once a week with valuable content, such as blog posts, podcast episodes, or tips related to your niche.

4. Plan Content in Themes: Focus on specific topics or themes for a set period (e.g., a month). This helps you dive deep into a subject, establish authority, and create content that can be repurposed across platforms.

5. Host Events to Grow Your List: Consider hosting online summits, workshops, or webinars to attract new leads. Use these events to showcase your expertise and pitch your higher-ticket offers, such as courses or memberships.

Transcript:

Welcome to business chats. Today we're going to talk with Jenny Melrose. She is a coach.

She's going to help us figure out how to grow our income with sharing her secrets apparently. So let's see so we can learn from all of her knowledge. Hi Jenny.

This happens every single week. I try to accept your invitation or your request to join and then it doesn't and I don't know what's happening. Hopefully Instagram will allow me to do my thing.

This is insane. Jenny I think I sent you the invitation. Did you get it?

Yeah I see you're here and I'm gonna send it again. It's like it resets. Shut up.

Where are you Jenny? I'm so excited about this live. I feel like I need all the information that you can share.

All right so there you are. Hello.

[Speaker 1]

It's a little delayed. I don't know if it's my where.

[Speaker 2]

I can't hear you. Okay good. Oh okay now I can hear you again.

Hi how are you? I'm good thank you. How are you?

I'm great. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited about this.

Yes me too. I am as well. Can you please share with everyone who you are and what your specialty is?

Yes of course. My name is Jenny Melrose.

[Speaker 1]

I am a business coach that works with online business owners that are trying to grow their presence with content and marketing so they can be found easier.

[Speaker 2]

So basically I need you in my life. I'm here. That's what you're saying to me.

That's amazing. So I was checking on your website and you have some very interesting I don't know. I don't even know how to call it.

You have these lines to say learn how to grow your income with proven techniques and the latest strategies and you're like game on. Let's do this. I love all the content that you have on your website.

So can you tell us how exactly someone that has been maybe in business for about two years three doing everything themselves. How can they improve that strategy? Yes.

Online.

[Speaker 1]

I would say like the biggest thing when it comes to coming online especially like if you have a brick and mortar if you have services if you have digital products it's really understanding who your audience is so that you can create content that is going to attract your ideal audience. And I think one of the things that we see people first start on is they start on social right. They go to Instagram or tick tock or even potentially Facebook and they try to start there which is great.

It's a good spot to start. It's easy. It's free.

There's no cost to do it. But if you are not if you are strictly doing your marketing efforts on social you are missing out on the potential of being able to actually continue to have those people. Social is very short.

It is you either get their attention right in the very beginning and it does well or it dies and you never see those people again. So with that in mind you want to be growing your email list. You have to make sure that you are offering them something in exchange in order to be able to stay in contact with them and show them that you can solve their problem either with your product or your service and can be that complete solution for them.

So finding a way to grow your email list and continue to create that content that's going to attract your ideal audience is the best place to start and to continue.

[Speaker 2]

Okay so you're using social media to just get on the first step of getting in touch with people and then bringing them to email. Now about freebies because you have to offer something in return for their email address. What are the best type of freebies that you have seen that work really well and really engage people?

[Speaker 1]

So you want it to be in line with the product or service that you're going to offer because if it's not in line they don't understand what the next step is and you want to be able to give them a little bit of a win. I would also say like if you want to think of it as it being in line and being the very beginning stages of what your product or service is actually going to offer them. Okay so you can give them a little bit of a whether it's from a guide whether it is a planner whatever it might be kind of in line with your business and what you're trying to then get them into is then where you're going to want to take them so they can have that little bit of a win and then see that I definitely got value out of this free thing.

It makes sense for me to pay her to have the complete solution on how to fix this.

[Speaker 2]

Okay amazing so for example a first step would be maybe an audit of their systems or in my case their website or their brand.

[Speaker 1]

I mean an audit depending upon what that's going to consist of because the audits can be valued at over thousands of dollars so when if you are going to give an audit for free it needs to be something that isn't going to take a ton of your time still is going to give them some sort of solution. I would start with honestly giving them a guide so they can audit themselves so that you can have kind of like a checklist that you offer to them like if they're going to be looking at their blog seo give them a checklist of what they are looking for within a blog post to make sure that they're seo compliant and are actually going to attract those right people because they've done the keyword research they've used the headers they've made sure that the keyword is throughout their content. Giving them something like a checklist might be a better first step because an audit is something that's highly valuable and something you should be charging for.

[Speaker 2]

Okay amazing I love that. Do you recommend any other types of very specific freebies for maybe different types of industries?

[Speaker 1]

Yes so give me an industry and someone that you know that's in your audience.

[Speaker 2]

For example a fitness coach.

[Speaker 1]

Perfect so if that fitness coach is geared towards let's just say because this is really easy because I have a client that's working on this right now that is geared towards women over 40 who are pre-menopausal and have found that they're struggling with their weight. So she may do a it could be a one-off workshop that she's going to do for them as the first step to coming in and that could be her freebie as well as again I always go back to like a guide. I'm a former inner city school district teacher so I really believe in being able to give them something so that they can learn from it and continue to move forward and have actual physical work done.

So the guide might consist of five daily habits that they need to be doing. They need to be getting their water in and maybe they need to be being grateful as part of what it is that they have to like gear towards. So you're going to give them space to be able to write down what they're grateful for.

So it's kind of like a work book version of it and all these different things but a freebie just has to give them that value. So again they see that yes you're the right person for them and they can get definite value from it.

[Speaker 2]

Amazing I love that. So after we get all of these people on the email list what is the following step?

[Speaker 1]

So if you have something to sell and to offer them I would let them know that from the very beginning. I would offer a sales sequence that's going to walk them through what it is the pain points that they probably have and what it is that you offer. Then from there once they've gone through that sales sequence whether they've bought or they haven't bought I'm going to continue to engage them.

I would recommend you email your list at least once a week and you're giving them valuable content. You can send them to a blog post you can send them to social media but you are giving them value that is showing that you're the expert that can help them solve their problems. So if they didn't take that step to work with you then maybe over time they will see that be from your content that you are the right person.

I personally email my list three times a week. I'm giving them content that is out there that I have a podcast that has over I can't even believe I'm saying this out loud but it's seven years worth of content. Oh my god.

There's a lot of content out there and I can provide them with old content and new content as we continue to move forward so that we stay up to date with all the marketing trends and things like that. But I try to make sure that it's very kind of content centered making sure that if we're going to talk about social media and we're going to talk about Instagram for we're going to talk about it for a month. We're going to make sure that it's really thorough.

We've answered the questions. We've gone into the things that we need to go into and more than likely if I'm going to talk about Instagram it's because I have a product that I'm going to offer in the back end of that as well. Your content should continue to show that you are expert in whatever it is that you have to offer to them.

So when you are putting out content it shouldn't be random content that doesn't isn't connected to your services or your products. It should be things that you actually offer.

[Speaker 2]

When you suggest us having like a theme each month or every two weeks or so so you can actually focus all of your efforts.

[Speaker 1]

So what I actually recommend is that you start with something that you asked us because this is what we're doing inside my membership right now. We are doing content sprints where we take a look at first our goals for the next three months and we do our goals based on the revenue from 2023. So what product services did you see most revenue coming in from?

Where are you going to put your marketing efforts? And then we're going to look at okay we're January through March right now if we're looking at the next three months is there content that's valuable to those people January through March. Sometimes you have different industries that see like you know the ebbs and flows of business where sometimes it's just very um for example fitness January everybody wants to hear all about it.

Yeah um December November when it's the holidays they don't want to hear anything about it. Don't talk to me about fitness in November December for most people. So it has those ebbs and flows um but when you're then looking at your January to March you want to start to look at what's that content who am I gearing it towards because a lot of times people will have different people within their audiences.

For example that fitness coach she may have someone that is over their 40s um but isn't quite to a point where they're ready to take that leap and to put the effort into doing the fitness and doing the workouts every day. Whereas she might be trying to move those people along to get to a point where they are ready and they want to do like personal one-on-one coaching or they want to do a course that teaches them all the fitness moves. So now you have these two varying audience members that you need to create content for and you want to think about okay if I'm creating content for the person that's already ready to make the fitness and do the things then that's the content that I want to be answering.

So she's going to be asking questions about like how do I do what's the exercise for cardio um what's low impact on my knees for cardio. So that's the type of content that you want to be creating for her because you then as that fitness expert doing maybe your course shows them all these different exercises they can be doing or you offer what I'm training like that to do it. So yes to answer your question I would definitely recommend looking at those blocks of content it just is easier and then as you create that content you can interlink especially if you're writing blog posts where articles build upon each other and people get caught in that spider web and stay on your site.

We want more time on our site it shows that we're the expert.

[Speaker 2]

Exactly so in case for example um a marketing agency or a designer we might have clients that are not designers of course they're business owners they're focused on their thing they just want to make more money they don't care how I move this pixel to the left and how much that improves everything. So I might add a little bit of that information but I feel like most of the content that us in this type of industry should share should actually be more business related than you think. Do you agree?

[Speaker 1]

I would agree because then you're going to be able to show them that their time is better spent on paying the service based business owner right for having someone else do it for themselves especially if you're that person like service base and you do copywriting or you're a designer you want to create content that shows them that hey I offered this and it's going to save you more time in order to do this. So yes I would say business topics but also I would give them some of the like not necessarily DIY you know being able to do it themselves but kind of like behind the scenes.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah exactly that makes sense so they can relate to the results that you got on a specific project and then they can see the value that you're actually offering. I love that so you were saying the the first step after they join the email list would be sending them through a cell sequence about five emails once a week and then you said that you email your list three times a week right. So that's after the cell sequence and then you start just giving value and then you go on a launch sequence or a cell sequence every now and then.

That's correct. Okay how long do you do you suggest going back into the cell sequence after you have provided a lot of value.

[Speaker 1]

So it depends upon your products and how they kind of can work for you. I will also do sometimes I'll do a launch where I'm making it very specific I'm trying to get them into say a like a workshop that is going to be able to be very geared towards the specific problem that they have and then maybe my course is what solves it. So that is like a first area that I can start in or for example I host online summits.

My purpose of hosting the summit is to grow my list one but two it's awesome to then be able to show that I have a membership where they can come in and they're going to get this here very similar content and it's going to be just me and they're going to get coaching from me at the same time. So with that in mind I do a summit twice a year and at the end of the summit I then host an event to get those people from the summit into the smaller event with just me to then be able to pitch my membership. So it's kind of like looking at your calendar over the course of a year and saying okay these are the products and services that I have based on revenue from 2023.

These are the ones that I see like I could definitely make an impact in my revenue. So I'm going to kind of plot it out over the course of a year to figure out when I'm going to kind of do launches or pushes to get yes.

[Speaker 2]

Okay yeah makes absolute sense. Thank you so much for being here with me again. I just want you to please tell everyone where they can find your podcast what's the name and of course about your membership which sounds amazing.

[Speaker 1]

Of course thank you so much first of all for having me. You can find me follow me here on Instagram if you have any questions you can obviously DM me any questions that you have. My podcast is called Influencer Entrepreneurs and if you just search Jenny Melrose it will pop.

It's been there long enough it will definitely come up and then my membership that I talk about is called Influencer Entrepreneurs Insiders and it's weekly trainings that we actually do live via Zoom so that coaching questions can be answered when I'm doing the training so they can actually apply it. It's that teacher in me. I always want to make sure that if there's questions we get them answered immediately.

[Speaker 2]

Yeah totally I love that. Thank you so much for sharing all of those details. I know a lot of people are going to find it super valuable.

Again thank you so much for being here with me. I'm definitely looking forward to checking everything that you have on your website like right now.

[Speaker 1]

Thank you so much. No I appreciate it and again if there's any questions please don't hesitate to DM me. I am always in the DMs trying to answer questions as much as possible.

[Speaker 2]

Amazing. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.