Jenny Melrose is a former inner-city school teacher turned lifestyle blogger, creating great quick and easy recipes and projects for busy parents.
Diving into her new blog, The Melrose Family, allowed Jenny to have an identity of her own. She quickly realized she could earn an income and replace her teaching salary. Four years later, she sold her site for six figures and created her coaching business to teach people how to market their business online and understand that they hold influence.
The Importance of Problem-Solving as a Business Owner
“I will say that if you’re coming online, be prepared for change. You have to be flexible and be a student of marketing.” However, the amount of information you need to learn to succeed can be really overwhelming. “I think it’s important to have groups that you’re part of so you can ask others for referrals.” Find out what podcasts and workshops they attend that are helpful.
She recommends having products or services that connect with and help solve a problem for your audience. In addition to having products and services to communicate with, Jenny highly recommends meeting people in person. She believes that it’s essential to understand, research, listen, and find out the options that are out there in marketing. Find out which teaching style works best for you and seek out those learning opportunities. Coaching is also another great way to learn. “You need to find the coach that teaches the way that works best for you.”
Deciphering Business Reports
Are they giving you all the information and showing their expenses? Do they have a team? If they’re making seven figures, that’s not a solo person running a business. So look at their profit and loss as a business but be careful not to jump into the comparison trap.
Jenny says not to compare yourself to someone else’s dream or the path they chose. Everyone has different challenges, family life, and work situations, so don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t progressed to the level of success that someone else has achieved.
Product Creation in Your Business
After creating your product or service for your new business, remember to generate website traffic. Utilize as many different avenues for website traffic as possible to diversify the number of ways you can attract people to your site. Jenny suggests multiple routes to your website because if you have all your eggs in one basket, if that basket gets dumped, then you’re financially screwed. “People used to rely on Facebook for traffic. No, I don’t hear anyone talking about Facebook unless they’re paying to apply and they are running ads.”
The Importance of an Email Marketing List
Having an email marketing list is essential to promote your products and services. “You also still have your old reliable traffic so that if you’re trying to create content and creating that relationship with them and building that you can still use your list to send them to that content and to hopefully share that and get more people on your list.”
Growing Your Social Media Following
One of the items that Jenny teaches is that you have to know your worth. “When you get asked to work in exchange for granola it’s a product. Whether it’s even for free, they’re going to promote you.” You’re going to get more social media following. “I think it’s really important that you do renegotiate and tell them that in order to keep the integrity of your site, your readers, and any previous brands you’ve worked with only work on compensated content.” From this point, you can show value, the ROI that will come from working with you by explaining your audience and the reach you then have because of that audience.
Common mistakes influencers make is that they think that brands want to work with them because of them. Brands want to work with influencers because of the influencer’s audience. Where they shop, how old they are, or where they live is what they look for in an audience.
Creating Your Own Products and Services
Influencers that are getting paid don’t want to walk away from their sponsor money. However, it’s money that they don’t have because it’s not their product or service. When you continue to scale your business, the sponsorship won’t be worth your time. I made three times more money selling my own stuff than one entire influencer contract is worth in the last 30 days. “When you have your business set up, it makes all the difference.”
Market Research
The first thing I would say is, do your research, know what they’re looking for. You’re going to need your avatar’s goal to understand whether or not your audience is the right fit. Next, show the audience that you have the perfect fit for their problem.
In addition, we know what makes us the expert, how we’re unique, and then able to bring our expertise to the table. “To whomever, you’re pitching, whether it is a brand, whether you’re pitching for media, it’s important to understand that positioning.”
Lastly, you’ll need a call to action, or CTA, on each of your advertisements, blogs, and social media posts. How do you want them to get back to you? This is the one component of sales that is so often missed. You have to be very straightforward where you tell them to hit reply. Be clear and spell out what you want your potential client to do next step.