Episode 626: Monetization Trends for Bloggers – How to Sell Your Expertise in the Form of Digital Products with Jillian Leslie

EBT626 – Jillian Leslie

Intro 00:10

Food bloggers. Hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth, and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom. Whether that’s financial, personal, or professional. I’m Megan Porta. I have been a food blogger for 13 years, so I understand how isolating food blogging can be. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported.

Supercut  00:38

You are going to want to download our bonus supercut that gives you all the information you need to grow your Instagram account. Go to eatblogtalk.com/Instagrowth to download today. 

Megan Porta  00:53

Are you wondering about new ways to monetize your business in the coming year? If so, you are going to love this episode with Jillian Leslie from MiloTree. She talks about digital products being a great way for food bloggers to monetize their businesses, whether they’ve done it in the past or not. She talks all about how to get started with this, which project you should start with, what tools you need if you get hung up on the tech aspect of it, and my favorite part of the conversation was her advice to just get started and consider it an experiment. Do it ugly, do it messy, and learn along the way, no matter where your business is at. I think this will be a really valuable episode for you going into 2025. it is number 626 sponsored by RankIQ. 

Megan Porta  01:43

Food bloggers. It has been a tough year. Am I right? We have endured a lot of changes in our industry, and it feels like the blows just keep coming. One thing that has remained constant this year is the Eat Blog Talk mastermind group, the way we show up for each other, and the fact that the members in the group are pivoting when needed. Staying in touch with relevant information and thriving is huge, and it says a lot about the group. I want to share this audio clip with you from Kristina. She’s the blogger at When Salty and Sweet Unite. She is part of the group this year, and here are her thoughts about you, considering joining the group next year in 2025. For more information and to apply go to eatblogtalk.com/mastermind, here is Kristina. “There’s just something about people who are investing in themselves. There’s just something about us that we get it like we want it. We’re gonna go get it. We’re gonna go figure it out. And let’s all do this together, right? There’s no room for negativity. There’s negative things that happen throughout that, course, but that’s not what we’re focused on. Yeah, and I think in free groups, I noticed there’s a lot of negativity, and I don’t know why that is like, is that because this is truly a free group? Is that because we’re not touching on mindset enough. Is that because, like, when you get free, is what you get is free? Like, I don’t know, right? So I don’t have an answer to why that is, but I just feel like, you know you can make it happen, like, if you want, if you want that growth, because I understand not everyone can do a mastermind, but somehow, somehow you can make it happen, whether it be do a payment plan. We found a way to make it work. Yeah, it has really, like you said, it’s absolutely worth it. Now, back to the episode. 

Megan Porta  03:31

Jillian Leslie is the co founder of the blog catch my party and software company MiloTree, which empowers bloggers to sell digital products to their audiences. Jillian is also the host of the blogger genius podcast, where for the past six years she has been interviewing successful online entrepreneurs, content creators and industry experts. Her goal is to empower bloggers and creators to build successful online businesses so they can change their lives and have the freedom they crave. Jillian, so happy to have you back on the podcast. How are you today?

Jillian Leslie  04:03

Oh, I’m great, and thank you for having me back, and it’s always fun to connect with you.

Megan Porta  04:07

Totally agree. We always have the greatest conversations. Okay, so we’re going to talk today about just monetizing for food bloggers. We’re going to talk about digital products, how people can start thinking about that as we get into a new year, before we get to all that juicy stuff, though, do you have another fun fact to share with us?

Jillian Leslie  04:27

Ooh, okay, my fun fact is I eat chocolate in the morning every day with my coffee.

Megan Porta  04:35

Oh my gosh. Okay. So what kind of chocolate?

Jillian Leslie  04:38

Dark chocolate, like 85% and I just need it has, like, a little pick me up so I have, like, one or two squares, but I don’t eat it throughout the rest of the day. The only time I have my chocolate is in the morning.

Megan Porta  04:52

It must taste good with the coffee. I imagine?

Jillian Leslie  04:54

It does. It does something about like, I take a little bite, and then I drink my coffee, and it comes. Kind of melts, and it’s like a whole ritual for me. 

Megan Porta  05:02

I love that. So my husband is in love with dark chocolate, and my boys and I tease him because he likes the really, really dark stuff that is just so chalky and gross to me. 

Jillian Leslie  05:13

My husband can do like 90 something. 

Megan Porta  05:16

It doesn’t taste like chocolate.

Jillian Leslie  05:17

And I find it so bitter. 

Megan Porta  05:19

To me it is. It’s so gross, but he will crave it. In the evenings, he’ll just be like, I want one square of chocolate, and we’re just like, ew gross so you can have it.

Jillian Leslie  05:29

I am with you, but like, 85 I’ve worked my way up to 85. 

Megan Porta  05:34

Yeah. And it’s supposed to be so good for you too, that really dark chocolate has so many good benefits. 

Jillian Leslie  05:40

I recommend it in the morning. 

Megan Porta  05:41

Okay, I will give that a consideration. Okay, so if anybody listening does not know about the amazing MiloTree, would you mind just filling them in a little bit on what MiloTree offers? 

Jillian Leslie  05:55

Sure, so MiloTree is software that my husband and I built. Oh, he built it, and it’s really for bloggers to sell digital products to their audiences, to offer freebies, to grow their email lists. And we have a pop up that many of you use on your site to grow your social media followers on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and grow your email list with it. That’s really where we started. We saw this need for ourselves. So our first site is Catch My Party. And if you go you can see our pop up, and you can see our site is still like there and growing, and it’s the largest party ideas site on the web. And we saw this need to grow our social media followers, and my husband built a pop up, and when it worked for us, we offered it to other bloggers to say, hey, this works for us. Chances are this will work for you. And then we saw another need during the pandemic, where food bloggers and other kind of like craft bloggers wanted to create memberships, paid memberships, and they would have, like, big Facebook followings, even like a Facebook group, and they wanted to figure out how to get paid for that group, how to have members. So we kind of looked around at what we could hack together for people. It was really complicated. The one as I’m going to I’m going to talk a lot about problems today and solving people’s problems, the problem we saw, and we see it all the time. Technology is really hard, so if we can serve up easy tech for you, it’s complicated on our end, but it’s simple for you, we want to build that after I saw how complicated it was to help these women start memberships, I said to David, could we build this and could we build it better? And we started. We got to work. And now, with MiloTree, our cart, you can offer any sort of digital download and sell it, and we’ll deliver that PDF. Let’s say to your customer, you can set up subscriptions, memberships. You could do coaching. It’s a way workshops. It’s a way to easily get paid for your knowledge. You can sell products and services simply so MiloTree one you can sell digital products, as I said, and then one thing we’re really leaning into is helping people grow their audiences, because that is becoming even more important for all you bloggers out there. 

Megan Porta  08:33

Yes, that is a very important piece of our businesses right now. And I will say I use MiloTree for Flavor Media Summit, and it has been great. I love the ease of use of it. It’s not one of those super complicated platforms that requires a ton of time to set up. It is just you’re in and out. You figure out what your product is, you fill in the details, and literally, it’s ready to sell. It’s super easy.

Jillian Leslie  09:01

We use ChatGPT with our prompts, and boom, you’ve got an AI generated sales page immediately, and you can just edit it, and boom, you’re selling. That was really our intention. How fast can we get somebody selling?

Megan Porta  09:17

I know, right? And you guys have nailed that end of it for sure. So you talk to a lot of bloggers, you serve this service to a lot of bloggers, right? And these bloggers are selling something. They’re selling, either ebooks or, like you said, workshops. What are some other things that you are seeing bloggers sell right now? 

Jillian Leslie  09:40

Food bloggers are actually our biggest cohort of customers. Food bloggers found MiloTree and are like, Ooh, this is interesting, because food bloggers have content already, and what it is, it’s not about it’s about looking at your content and seeing how you can slice and dice this content and sell it. And we were just so, for example, like, I recommend every food blogger at least sell an ebook. Test it, try it. Figure out how. Because, you know, you go, well, a lot of bloggers come to me and they go, but it’s already on my site. It’s on my side, for free. Why would anybody pay for this? And I get that a lot. What I want to say is, and we were just talking about this before you press record, it’s not necessary. It used to be like, I’m just going to put my 10 best recipes together and bundle it up and sell it as an ebook. And I go, wait, you need to go one extra step these 10 recipes. They can be your most delicious, your best or your easiest recipes, but they need to solve a problem. So for example, they could be 30 minute recipes, they could be five ingredient recipes, they could be recipes for picky eaters. They could be Gluten Free Recipes. So but you’ve got the thing is, like, what is the envelope around these recipes? What is the solution these recipes… Like, what is the problem these recipes solve? So that’s where I challenge you to think about your content. Go to Chat GPT and ask. Say, Hey, I you know, even if you, let’s say, do lots of different things, go talk to ChatGPT and say, what problem could my recipes solve? And I say, start there. 

Megan Porta  11:32

I love that you’re relying on chat GPT. I think it can be so resourceful for things like that, things that you don’t necessarily see right away, but it might be obvious to a robot, like, oh, you could solve this problem. 

Jillian Leslie  11:45

Greayt, well, it’s, you know, it’s funny, because I get on calls with people and talk about their businesses and, like, immediately I have a million ideas for them, and they’re like, Oh, my God, Jillian, you’re a genius. And I’m like, I’m not a genius. I’m just fresh eyes because you’re so close, like I am with my own businesses. You know, you get blinded.

Megan Porta  12:07

We do all of us. We all fall victim to that. 

Jillian Leslie  12:09

So go to ChatGPT and like, go, hey, here are my top recipes. Give me five problems that these recipes could solve. See what it comes up with.

Megan Porta  12:19

Yeah, or even more, offer 25 recipes, and maybe you can make the collection bigger and sell something else. 

Jillian Leslie  12:26

Absolutely. So that’s where as bloggers even like, I think that for food bloggers were like, we got this idea of a niche. We got this like, it took a while for food bloggers to really embrace this idea that the more niched down you were, the more success you’d have, because people would know you for a certain thing. But now the next piece is seeing yourself as a problem solver, seeing yourself not just in a niche but a helper.

Megan Porta  12:58

Okay, so aside from ebooks, are you seeing food bloggers find success with other digital products?

Jillian Leslie  13:04

Absolutely. What I recommend is you start with an e book or a guide or some sort of digital download. And I say that because they’re easy now, especially with ChatGPT, and we offer AI prompts to help you. We can talk about that, you know, later, I can give you the URL to, you know, create your own ebook with with like, chat to meet you today. I believe everybody should do this. It’s just too it’s too available, like it’s right there for the taking. But then a lot of times, what food bloggers their next step would be doing a live workshop, which is, by the way, like down and dirty. I’m talking Zoom. I’m talking you, kind of talking to the audience, people potentially showing up live to cook along with you. And down and dirty in that it’s okay, kind of, if things go wrong, or it just, it needs to be just kind of casual, like low stakes. This is not a course. This is not a cooking show. It’s you showing up, teaching something, solving a problem for people, but getting people to know, like and trust you, getting people to so let’s say I’m vegan because I know, like, vegan blogs are so popular, but eventually people will go to chat GPT and go give me a vegan recipe for lasagna. And the difference is, it’s like, oh, I don’t want that recipe. I want Megan’s recipe, or I want Michelle’s recipe because I know like and trust her, she’s like my friend. So that’s where I believe blogging is shifting. And so then once, by the way, you’re recording this workshop, go sell it as a mini course. I don’t recommend creating courses right now. I feel. Like that has crested, but you selling my workshop for, I don’t know, smoothies or my workshop for this, but remember, package it in solving a problem. Give people a reason why they would want to purchase this from you. Now, where the big money is is really in memberships. You know this Megan, because you have a membership, there are like, these cool communities of people who come together for you, but also for each other. So maybe it’s like you make easy toddler foods, okay? Maybe you can make a membership for people who have picky eaters, or who have toddlers, or who, whatever, who have like, weird diet, not weird, but dietary thing, they can’t eat salt, or they can’t eat sugar, or they’re trying to lose weight, whatever it is. If you can make a community, that’s where the recurring revenue is, that’s where a lot of the money is.

Jillian Leslie  13:05

With the memberships, you do have to build up that No, like trust. I feel like I’ve seen some food bloggers try to start memberships without the community, and that really engaged, know, like trust factor that we talk about, and it really doesn’t work very well, but the food bloggers who do have all of that do such a good job with creating memberships.

Jillian Leslie  16:22

And one other thing, let’s say you’re listening to this and going, oh my god, Jillian, that’s like, way too intimidating. Go put a bundle of digital downloads together. People love purchasing bundles. So it’s my ebook, it’s my guide, it’s my whatever, my my workshop, my recorded workshop, people love that, especially if they feel like they’re getting a deal. So you can sell them all individually, but then bundle them up and then create excitement around selling it. Hey guys, I’m only offering this for this week. Get my bundle. It will solve this problem. Here’s all the great stuff you’re gonna get. You know, think about it as like a party and that. I have seen food bloggers be really successful selling. 

Megan Porta  17:11

What if somebody is listening and they think this all sounds great and wonderful. Jillian, but how do I actually get started with this? I don’t know which product to start with. It all sounds great.

Jillian Leslie  17:24

Okay, go here. Go to Milotree.com/ebookprompts, and I you will get 19. I think it’s like 13 prompts. And I will walk you through creating your first ebook. I even have Canva templates to put your ebook together. But I am going to say something that kind of gets people uncomfortable. I am going to say, Do this down and dirty, B minus work faster than you want because you’re testing. People come to me and say, I tried selling a digital product, it didn’t work. Digital products don’t work for me, and I say, good for you. And that was a test, and that one didn’t work. But let’s see if you can come up with a new test. Maybe you talk to people and say, Hey, what? First of all, very much get close, close, close to your people so that you can talk to them. Have like three VIPs that will talk to you and tell you what they’re struggling with. Again, remember, frame it in the language of I solve problems for people, because that is where you get people to take out their credit card and purchase. So you ask them, What do you want like in your email newsletter. Give very you know, ask people questions, get people talking to you, and then go test another product. And this is why I say do not think about creating a course which will take six months to put together, unless you’ve been able to sell pre sell it five times like it doesn’t make sense. What makes sense is these, what I call ad vats. You need a lot of them because you’re slowly honing in on what your people will buy from you. You have a hypothesis. Chances are you’re pretty close, but you might not be hitting. You might not hit the bullseye on the first try. And this is what you know, so funny, because I was, I was being asked this on another podcast, like, well, if I sell something, like, let’s say I go out to my whole list and I try and sell something and it’s not successful. Like, have I burnt out my list, and can I go back out with another product? And I’m like, of course you can, first of all, nobody, nobody’s paying attention to you. How many emails do you get every day? Like, do not think you’re that special, that people are like, whoa. Megan offered this thing. And I’m so embarrassed for her, because, like, nobody’s thinking about that. Yes, go to your list, you know, a week later with your next offer, like, go, try, go, put it out there. And if people unsubscribe, well, their loss. So this is, like, what I want people get so uptight about. What if I do it wrong, go do it wrong. Who cares? That’s learning. So this is all like. One thing that I see in the world of blogging, especially food blogging, is there was a formula, and if you followed the formula, chances are you could get it to pay off for you. It might take a couple years, and you would create all these blog posts, and you would optimize your keywords, and you would do all of this stuff to get it to work. And I believe now the world has shifted, and while, yes, I believe traffic is still incredibly important, but it is harder to come by, and the rewards aren’t there in the same way. So people, I think, have been and by the way, a lot of people have really suffered from their income, declining, traffic declining. However you can reframe it as we’re back now the like the field is leveled, and it’s about people testing and trying and being creative. 

Megan Porta  21:30

I love that. It’s all an experiment, right? So it’s not a one and done. Don’t do one thing, put one digital product out there and get frustrated and then be done with it. You’re saying, use that as a learning tool, and keep growing, keep experimenting, and you’ll eventually find something that works.

Jillian Leslie  21:49

Yes, and talk to people do not do this in a vacuum, like offer somebody, let’s say the person who is always commenting on your Instagram posts, befriend that person and say, hey, could I DM you? And if they’re willing to talk to you, buy them a Starbucks. Be willing to like do this, but dig deep with a couple people. This is where I see the world of blogging shift. It was kind of this one to many model where you had all these anonymous visitors, users, and now the way I see people having success is it’s one to fewer. It’s one to actual people that you know, that you’re building relationships with, that want to learn from you. So you’re not just another food blog. You are a person who represents a point of view who, yes, makes beautiful food, but it’s like, now I’m in a relationship with you. 

Megan Porta  22:51

Yeah, that’s really beautiful, actually. Yeah. I love that great way to frame that.

Jillian Leslie  22:55

And it we but it is a mindset shift. And for a lot of food bloggers who are more introverted and like, I just want to take photos of beautiful food. Well, this is kind of the new world we’re living in. And you can think about it this way, content because is becoming cheaper and cheaper because of ChatGPT, like, the world is shifting, has shifted. So even if you go, what, I’m an introvert, I’m like, great, go be an introvert. But then figure out as an introvert how to still put your point of view out there.

Megan Porta  23:24

It is possible. A lot of food bloggers I know are introverts, actually, I would say most of them are, so they figure it out, so the rest of us can too, right?

Jillian Leslie  23:33

And building businesses online. I mean, if you have not learned this yet, you just haven’t been in the game long enough. Everything shifts and changes, and there are seasons, and those seasons come and those seasons go, and that’s just the nature of it. 

Megan Porta  23:48

Yeah, you learn that when you’re in the game, even for a couple of years, you’re like, Whoa, everything is changing constantly.

Jillian Leslie  23:55

And don’t think it’s and this is something too I think that people go, Well, I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing, and then eventually it’ll come back. And I with my again, David and I started catching my party in 2009 and I will say, in my experience, things don’t die die like traffic is not dying, but they don’t typically come back around to how things were it’s like everything evolves moving forward. 

Megan Porta  24:24

You have to roll with it. You’ve got to go with the flow. 

Jillian Leslie  24:26

You have to roll with it. 

Sponsor  24:28

Hello there. Awesome food bloggers taking a really quick break to chat about RankIQ. I love this keyword research tool, and you’ve heard me talk about how much it has helped to grow my traffic on my own blog, Pip ’n Ebby, I obviously love the traffic growth I’ve experienced, but I’ll tell you about an additional reason I love this tool so much, which is how quickly I can publish a post compared to my pre RankIQ days one. I don’t do as much searching on the front end of the process of deciding on a keyword, because there are so many ideas just waiting for me right inside the keyword library because of this I dig into the writing portion really quickly and with laser focus. Two, I write each post with confidence, because each keyword has been hand picked promising low competition and High search volume. With other tools, I approach each keyword with hesitation because I really don’t know how each one will perform or whether it’s going to produce traffic for me and three, the RankIQ optimizer is the best optimizer out there. No joke. It provides very specific words and phrases to use in my content. This makes the writing process go so quickly and smoothly as the optimizer acts as my guide, leading the way to a comprehensively written post, go to rankiq.com to sign up and check it all out for yourself. Now back to the episode. 

Megan Porta  25:43

What about tech? I know this can be a huge hang up for people who haven’t sold digital products in the past. They might be like, I’m not techie. I don’t I don’t know what I need to get get started, and that can be something that can stop them from doing this. So what tools do we need to get started? 

Jillian Leslie  25:59

Honestly, what we our philosophy again. So like, I have strong points of view, and you might be like, cool, or you might be like, I totally disagree. But for example, when we looked out at the landscape and we’re like, okay, we want to create a very simple way for people, for bloggers, to sell their products and services. So we looked at like Kajabi, and Kajabi gives you so much. However, the criticism we kept hearing is, oh, my God. This is very expensive, and this is a lot. And I noticed when I used, I think, podia, and I kept finding myself having to go to YouTube to watch videos to figure out how to do stuff. So we said, hey, we don’t want to be your email service provider. What we’re going to do, we’re going to integrate with every email service provider. So we integrate with MailChimp and mailer light and Flowdesk and ConvertKit and everything, because we just want to integrate, therefore your email addresses, like you offer a freebie, cool, you’re integrated. Those names and email addresses just get automatically sent, and then you get to decide how you want to use email going forward, we also, by the way, collect the name and email address, so even if you don’t have an email service provider, that stuff will be saved on your dashboard, so you know you’re still collecting them. But we’re like, we don’t want to be an email service provider as well as a payment platform. So we say, go start a membership. But we don’t want to be your membership platform. We go, go use a private Facebook group. Go use Zoom. Go use circle. Go use whatever it is that you want, and we’ll get you paid, give you awesome, simple AI generated sales pages. So our job is to to kind of say, Yes, this makes sense, because this is easy, and then the rest of it go like, Be your own seller. Be your own entrepreneur. And therefore we want it simple. You can be selling your first product in five minutes, 10 minutes like that, depending on if you want to add your own images or or just use our images that we provide. So that, again, is the problem we solve. If you’re a tech bro, do not look at our product. We’re not for you, but for your audience, Megan, we are for you, 

Megan Porta  28:30

Tech bro, I haven’t heard that before. That’s funny. Yes, the people who want the ease and just to like what I was saying earlier with flavor media, I wanted a platform that was just super easy to set up. In a couple of minutes, I could have my product up and ready to sell. It’s for people who want that.

Jillian Leslie  28:48

I want to take away the options. I want to say, trust us. Like I we’ve optimized your sales page for and it looks great on mobile, for example. So like, give us that so that you are freed up to just get because the truth of the matter is the setup part should not be where you’re focused. Where you are focused is selling, and selling is awkward. Can be it’s a muscle. You get better and better at it. But one thing that I see is people will pay for some expensive platform and then spend months or you’re not necessarily working on your course, but you’re working on setting all this stuff up with all this complicated technology, and in a weird way, you can hide behind that. So I’m going to say, Go sell. And I’m going to say, go over, sell, go. Tell people why what you’re offering will make their lives better. And that is like you’re a helper. Put on the hat of the helper. Believe in yourself and what you’re offering and. Remember, when people pay for your product, they are more apt to use it than if they got it for free. 

Megan Porta  30:07

Yeah, people don’t seem to not understand that, right? That whole concept.

Jillian Leslie  30:12

Absolutely, if I were to say where one, please don’t lie to yourself, like, if you are hiding behind like, oh, well, I’ve got to get, you know, this big, complicated software set up. Just be honest and say, Yeah. And I’m also kind of scared to move forward and it’s just one step at a time, and give yourself grace and, like, let it be messy. I talk a lot about B minus work. That tends to be the thing that I share that gets the most response. Because when I which is, by the way, B minus is above average. I’m not saying do average level work. But the thing about B minus is it enables you to test and try and put it out there and work on your selling skills or whatever. While you are iterating, it’s like you’re more vibrant if you allow yourself not to be perfect.

Megan Porta  31:03

Absolutely, oh, gosh, I love that so much. 

Jillian Leslie  31:06

So I want to kind of give you this. Oh. And the other thing, when you’re talking about tech, like, we’re here, we’re real people, David, I mean, you’ve talked to us, like, whenever you’ve had questions or issues, you just, like, email us and like, David will immediately email you back and be like, oh, you know, how’s this, or whatever. So please. Like, if you’re not ending up in some weird talking to some weird bot, we want to hear from you. We, you know, we love it when we get feedback from you guys. So do not be afraid of the tech at all. And also, right now we offer a 30 day No, like, like, free plan, try it out for 30 days. Go get your freebie up and offered, because that’s the other thing email today, I think, you know, forever people said, Oh, the money’s in your list, and you need to grow your list. But it was a little abstract. And I think today we recognize that those people on your email list are gold. 

Jillian Leslie  32:04

I was talking to somebody who’s running Facebook ads to grow her list, and she has gotten her acquisition costs down to, I think, $1.50 and that is great. If you could pay Facebook $1.50 to get one email lead. That’s pretty incredible. That’s that’s cost effective, but if you can offer something for free and get email subscribers, think of each one worth at least $1.50 if not more, to you. So I was talking to somebody recently, and she’s like, Oh, I’m trying to make money, and it’s really hard. And I said, how big is your email list? And she’s like, 300 and I’m like, okay, you’ve got work to do on that list. Just because, if you think of everything as say, you know, certain percentage of people on your email list will buy from you. The larger that list is, the larger, the more customers you will get. And she was kind of, like a little sad about it. And I said, Think of every email subscriber put like, as if you’re putting $1.50 in your pocket. Those are really valuable. So in fact, here’s another freebie that we offer to help you create your first freebie, and you can just grab that at Mila. Let me see MiloTree.com/freebieprompts. And what we’ve done is and it’s like three AI three Chat GPT prompts, or whatever service you use. And what it will do is create an irresistible cheat sheet that you can then offer to grow your email list. And if that doesn’t work, go make another one and another one. I don’t know if you’re doing this, Megan, but one thing that I have found is, because I use my I use our own product, my MiloTree, I will come up with a podcast, and I, and I don’t think I mentioned this, I have a podcast which, Megan, you’re been on multiple times, called The Blogger Genius podcast, and I just recently recorded an episode about, like, Black Friday sales, and why everybody should offer a Black Friday sale. And I’m like, Okay, wait, I’m gonna give people, I’m gonna come up with, like, a Chat GPT prompt to help you come up with what you could be selling, and some email templates. And now I just create these PDFs in Canva and then offer them to my audience on my podcast. So that’s why like, I’m like, What is, what’s the URL again, because it’s so easy. So if for like, I recommend everybody for your top five posts. I don’t know if you talk about this, offer a freebie on all of your top five posts that are specific to that post.

Megan Porta  34:47

That is great advice, right there. Yeah, like, what is the what is the pain? As you’ve said, what can you solve for each post? And it really doesn’t take that long to put something like that together, right?

Jillian Leslie  34:58

Absolutely, especially with. MiloTree, like go, just upload it, we will deliver it. So it’s just like, I want to give people a way to find that connection between what their audience will pay for and what you offer. 

Megan Porta  35:15

Okay, anything else about tech or different digital product ideas how to get started. 

Jillian Leslie  35:22

Okay, so use like, feel free to like. The tools that our customers use are things like zoom, things like, as I said, a private Facebook group, like, do not think tech is not going to solve your problem. In fact, you want to use like, my mother, who’s in her 80s, knows how to use Zoom. Like, if I give her the link, she can, like, log in. You know, she can show up. She doesn’t quite know how it all works, but there she is. So you want to be instead of wowing, let’s say you do a membership like, wowing your people with, like, all this insane technology. Like, don’t do that make it simple. And this is always my word, and I think it’s going to be my word for 2025. Is simplify, simplify. So I get on a call. This is like a perfect example. I get on a call with a woman yesterday who wants to start a membership, and she’s telling me all about the membership she wants, and all the different pricing plans she wants. And I’m kind of confused. And I go, Okay, so you’ve already launched this? And she’s like, No. And I said, Wait a minute, you’ve got like, four different pricing plans, like, if you want the one month or the three month or the six month, you know, and she’s got this whole thing in her head. And I said, you have, I’m like, I was kind of confused because it sounded so like advanced. And I said, Okay, I have to be honest with you, I think you’re parting the cart before the horse, please. Like, you could you do, like, a monthly plan and maybe a yearly plan, and that’s it. And make and then she was like, and then they’re going to be PDFs, and we’re going to meet, I’m going to have experts. And this was, like, in a membership, and I go, Whoa, like, why don’t you try it with one thing? Like, you’re going to meet twice a month, like, for an hour each time the end, and see what that’s about before you start, especially in your head, building out this super complicated membership. That’s not why people will join your membership. They a, don’t care about the tech, and you do not want and two like B, you do not want to burn them out with all of this stuff you want to show up as a real person solving people’s problems.

Megan Porta  37:46

I’ve done that before. I’ve over complicated. I think that was one of my big issues starting out as an entrepreneur. I thought that was serving people, but then learned very quickly that the simpler you can make things, the easier it is to consume. People are like, okay, I get that. So, yeah, starting simple, I think is a really good route to go. 

Jillian Leslie  38:07

Think about our world like David and I talk about this all the time, that technology is supposed to make things easier for us, and just like, fly and have to get your boarding pass into your wallet on your phone. And I again, I can do that, but I think about, like, my mom and how complicated all this stuff is for like, my people. And like, not like, like, my mom’s smart, but it’s like, yeah, remember back in the day you had, like, a paper piece of paper that you handed to the woman when you were boarding the plane. And in a strange way, that was simpler than it is today, even though today it’s supposed to be simpler, because technology solves all these problems. So we look in the world and we’ll be like, Oh my God, why is this so hard? 

Megan Porta  38:53

It is so true. I know simple is good and MiloTree. I feel like, does that really well, simple is something that describes MiloTree. It’s the best because of that.

Jillian Leslie  39:03

If I feel like, like, today, I really feel like, the more human you can show up. So like, maybe you’re the person with the messy kitchen, and maybe you’ve been hiding that from your audience. Tell people, because there are other people out there with messy kitchens who will say, Wow, okay, your kitchen isn’t perfect. My Kitchen isn’t perfect. It’s those little it’s like, why we weirdly like Instagram stories, because we like to see that other people are just like us.

Megan Porta  39:32

Yeah, be a real human, yes, yeah.

Jillian Leslie  39:35

And just with MiloTree, we’re real. Like, email me at, you know, always [email protected] I love hearing from people. I want to hear what kinds of… So anyway, this woman yesterday, just to finish this story, where I said, Okay, simplify, simplify. And then I said, How many people do you have on your email list? Because she’s ready to start this big membership. Now, the thing is, I said, and she said, something like, I’ve got 300 and I said, Okay, I. You know, a good conversion rate is 2% 2% of those people will join your membership. But let’s say you have an amazing conversion rate, so let’s say it’s 5% okay, we’re maybe she had 200 people on a lift, I don’t know. We’re like, Okay, you’re gonna have 15 people, and then you’re gonna be providing every month all of this content and PDFs and experts and whatever. I said, pare it all down, but know that in the beginning, it could be just a few people, but the way that you grow this is by growing your email list. So I said, I gave her our my email my prompt to create a cheat sheet. And I said, if you create this and get it to me tonight, I will review it and give you my feedback. And guess what, this morning, I wake up and there is an email from her, and I’m putting my money on her. And she, of course, in her email is like, hey, this isn’t great. I know I need to flesh it out, blah, blah, blah, but here it is, and to be honest with you, it was better than she thought, because really it was just to be like a little nugget of something, right? And I said, Make sure, like my notes to her, make sure you put your branding on it, make sure it links back to your blog and put like, kind of a like, some message from you, so that people who get it read this personal message from you saying, like, I’m in your corner. I you know, she helps, like, I think, like women in their 30s, with their careers and and so where they’re feeling kind of isolated, and it’s like, Hey, you say I’m a real person. I’m here for you. And she’s like, and I go and go put it out there, see what people think. 

Megan Porta  41:41

That’s what you have to do. You have to do it. I think you’ve used messy, like some people say, do it ugly. Just do it period, get it out there. And then you can always refine. And people do appreciate that real factor as well.

Jillian Leslie  41:55

absolutely no, you need to deliver meaning. Like, for example, if you make recipes like they need to work. So it’s not like, oh well, it might work, might not. I’m gonna kind of put that out, let’s say messy or unfinished. No, the recipe needs to work. It’s the packaging around the recipe where you it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Megan Porta  42:17

Perfection. There it is. There’s the word that we all strive for perfection. It doesn’t exist. It’s not going to happen. I know it’s a hard one for us content creators to get past, I feel like.

Jillian Leslie  42:28

And the word, okay, I have another word for me. One is simple, and the other one for 2025 is grace.

Megan Porta  42:35

Ooh. I like that. So talk more about that. Why? Why did you pick that word? 

Jillian Leslie  42:38

Because I think that. I think about how many times I cringe over myself. I write an email, let’s say for my newsletter, and I write my newsletter every Sunday, and I’ll read it over, and there’ll be a big, glaring typo, and of course, I cringe. It’s almost like a shiver, and I’m like, Oh, how did I not see that? And so like, how many times a day am I cringing at something I did? And then I go, and I think the antidote to that is grace. I’m doing the my best. I’m getting my newsletter out. And yeah, they’re going to be typos. And again, if you go, Whoa, Jillian has typos in her newsletter. I need to unsubscribe. Maybe you’re not the right person for me. Like there are enough people who will also give me grace who don’t even notice the typo, like I’m being so much harsher on myself than I ever would be to you Megan, or to this woman yesterday, when I was I get it to me and I, you know, and her kind of saying, Oh, I’m not sure I did it, you know, it needs more. And I’m like, You’re good. 

Megan Porta  43:47

Yeah, that applies to all of us, though I think we’re all so much harder on ourselves than we are on other people. It’s just default, I feel like, and we have to intentionally work toward not doing that. It’s hard. So I love Grace as a word, just stopping yourself in your tracks when you see the error in the email and just okay, I need to have grace with myself. I am human, just like everybody else. Stop berating, stop punishing. 

Jillian Leslie  44:15

Yeah, and I have a 17 year old daughter who, of course, at that age, you know, is plagued by feeling ready for the word cringe. And I am always saying to her, give yourself grace. Give yourself grace. And I can see in her, almost like her shoulders go down a little bit when I say it, and I feel it in myself of like, give myself grace. It’s okay. It’s really okay, like, nobody’s dying. Like, let’s put this in perspective.

Megan Porta  44:45

How important is this really? 

Jillian Leslie  44:47

Yeah, and do I need to have that, you know? So I’ve joked that, you know you’re in, you know how I’m going put stuff out that’s a little more raw, a little messier. What was your word that you used? Ugly? Than you would want. And if you feel that tiny little twinge in your stomach of oof, is this okay? Put it out like that’s the right spot.

Megan Porta  45:10

That’s a good, good spot where you know it’s it’s a good time to do that, yep. Oh, what a great conversation. Okay, is there anything Jillian, we’ve missed?

Jillian Leslie  45:19

Okay, so wait, I want to say this again, please, everybody, move faster than you want go right now. Get my freebie prompts so that you can just like, boom, create a cheat sheet that is that I’ve optimized to be enticing. And again, you can get this at Milotree.com/freebieprompts, and definitely start there. And by the way, you can then go put it up in MiloTree and offer it and put it out there and over offer it, because it will solve a problem for your people. But it’s like, I if there was one thing I hope to inspire your people to do is just do go do it and and see what happens. And by the way, if anybody says they know what the future is going to look like, even in three months or six months, they’re lying, because they don’t what’s cool about right now, we’re all figuring it out. 

Megan Porta  46:19

So true. 

Jillian Leslie  46:21

One thing though, that I do believe is you being a person, interacting with other people like that is the scarce good people need people.

Megan Porta  46:32

Yeah, that is so true. Keep that in mind. I’ve said that to my community so many times in recent months, in 2025 you need to keep that at the forefront of your mind. You need people 100% if you get to the end of 2025, without people, you’re going to be in a tough spot. So include people all throughout the year. It’s such a priority.

Jillian Leslie  46:55

Yes, and it’s no longer users coming to your blog. These are people and befriend them. Oh, gosh,

Megan Porta  47:03

I love that. Well, thank you, Jillian, this was so good. And you mentioned all the freebies you wanted to I know you mentioned, we’ll put these in the show notes too, just in case you want to go there to look. But do you want to mention any other freebies you guys have? Or do you want to reiterate any of those?

Jillian Leslie  47:17

So, yeah, so again, milotree.com/freebieprompts and Milotree.com/ebookprompts. These are just one word, and then get my prompts and start like just seeing what happens, like be playful and curious and think in terms of problems, but know that there’s support there for you. 

Megan Porta  47:41

That’s great. Everyone. Go check those out, and we’ll put those in your show notes. Jillian, so if you would rather go there and just click over, you can definitely do that. Those will be found at eatblogtalk.com/milotree3. Do you have either a quote or words of inspiration to end on, Jillian?

Jillian Leslie  47:58

Okay, so this is it’s on my in a post it on my desk, and it just says, do what you can with what you have where you are 

Megan Porta  48:08

That ties in perfectly to what you were saying. Just start, get started.

Jillian Leslie  48:12

Yes, I don’t have to be anything more than I am, and I can still make things happen in the world.

Megan Porta  48:19

Yes, one little step at a time. Amazing way to end. Thank you. Thanks for joining. And then if people want to find you, if they want more information about MiloTree, where can they go? Okay,

Jillian Leslie  48:31

so you can just go to Milotree, M-I-L-L-O-T-R-E-E.com, and check it out and again, 30 days, free trial. Also you can email me because, remember, I really do love hearing from people like in your Megan, so many people in your audience have reached out to me, and you can email me at [email protected], you can DM me on Instagram at MiloTree, I’m super easy to get in touch with and give me your questions or share your fears with me, or, you know, tell me, like, where your wins are, like where you’re how you’re seeing the world, because that’s what I love to do in my podcast, which is the Blogger Genius Podcast. I love talking to experts like you Megan and other people to see how they are processing, digesting the landscape today. It’s almost like, you know that that thing about everybody, like those blind men, feeling an elephant, and everybody feels something different, that’s kind of what I feel like the world is like right now. And I’m trying to interview enough people, talk to enough people, to figure out what that elephant really looks like. 

Megan Porta  49:43

Like that awesome. Well, yeah, I hope you guys feel comfortable reaching out and thanks again, Jillian, for being here. Thank you for listening food bloggers. I will see you next time. 

Outro 49:54

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you posted it to your social media feed and stories, I will see you next time you.