The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 109. How Bloggers Can Leverage Digital Products with Jillian Leslie

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

How can bloggers leverage digital products for their blog? In this episode, we have Jillian Leslie, an expert in online business and blogging on to share more about digital products. Jillian shares her personal journey in creating diverse income streams. Whether it's through affiliate marketing, digital products, sponsored content, or online courses, the opportunities for diversifying your income stream as a blogger are endless. The most important thing is to make sure that it aligns with your brand and audience. Tune in to hear more wisdom from Jillian!Thanks for listening! Let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsCheck out MiloTree Cart HERE!Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode109

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. A couple weeks ago, we got an email. And I was super excited when that email came in, because it was Jillian asking about collaborating for a podcast. And I have been on her email list for quite some time learning from her. And so having her here on the Ultimate Blog Podcast today is such an honor. And we are very, very excited to share Jillian Leslie with you. Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast, Jillian. Oh, you guys, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I would love for you to share with our community a little bit about who you are and who you serve. our community a little bit about who you are and who you serve.

Oh, I like that. Okay. I started building businesses online in 2009 with my husband. And already, by the way, when I say that people are like, oh my God, that's so much to unpack. Because I do, I work with my husband. And we built a site called Catch My Party. And it is, we've grown it into the largest party ideas site on the web. And what I say is, if you're a mom and you are looking for party ideas on Pinterest, you will ultimately end up on my site because we have a very large Pinterest following, something like 2.7 million followers. We pin every day. That has been a huge traffic driver for us. And so we have built our business kind of on the backs of Pinterest and Google. And then, and I was sharing this story before we pressed record,

which is we were initially getting tons of traffic from Facebook. And then back in the day, many of you might not even remember this, Facebook started turning down their reach, which they've done. And we went, oh no, we're gonna go out of business because our traffic is drying up. And then we noticed that Pinterest was sending us a lot of traffic.

And we said, we need to lean into this. So we didn't at this point have all of these millions of followers on Pinterest. My husband, who is a technologist, built a pop-up app for us, which we've named Milo Tree, is our pop-up app, named after our favorite tree in Hawaii. And anyway, and so we put it on our blog. Go to Catch My Party, you'll see it. And it'll pop up and it'll say, hey, follow us on Pinterest. And it shows our most recent pins. And guess what? It worked. And it started growing our follower count, growing our reach on Pinterest. And we said to ourselves, whoa, if this works so well for us, maybe it will work for other bloggers

and creators. And then we rolled it out to other bloggers and they started using it. It started growing their Pinterest followers. And they said, how about Instagram? And we're like, great. And you can grow your Instagram followers with it. And you can grow your YouTube subscribers. And then they said email. And we're like, great. And now you can grow your email subscribers. And you can grow your TikTok followers. And we play really well with Google, even though people go, no, you can't have pop-ups

on your blog. You can have our pop-up because we care so much for Catch My Party. You better believe we've optimized it to the hilt. So anytime Google says something, we listen. Anyway, so you can safely use it on your blog. And guess what? We rolled it out and bloggers love it and they use it today. Then during the pandemic, I was telling you this, I got lonely and I said, I want to start a community of bloggers to help them grow their businesses. Oh wait, and I had started my podcast,

the Blogger Genius Podcast. I started it six years ago and I love it. I didn't even start it with like a business goal in mind. I just wanted to learn from really smart bloggers who were in it like me, because we've talked about this. It's lonely when you have to face yourself alone every day at your computer.

So I have my podcast and then I'm like, I want a community of people that I can show up on Zoom with and started this coaching group and I loved it. And what I started hearing from the people who are these pretty experienced bloggers, they hate technology and they want to sell stuff. Because, as I always share, you need multiple income streams if you are a blogger.

It changes too quickly. Things dry up, like our Facebook traffic drying up. Things like that have happened all the time for us. So you've got to be nimble. Therefore, my community of people were like, how do we sell? So I started helping them set up convoluted systems of payments. And I said, you know what? I talked to my husband and I'm like, we could solve this for bloggers, for creators, for women predominantly, although men buy my luxury cart. But it's typically that blogger who does something really, really well and has a community of people and wants to sell stuff but is too overwhelmed to put it together.

And I'm like, great. We're going to do that. So we rolled out Milo Tree Cart about six months ago. And it has been so fun and fantastic. And I was sharing that it honestly gets me up in the morning when I can look at our dashboard and see who's making money. It is so cool to go, David and I'll be like, so-and-so, you know who's kicking butt? So-and-so.

And I'll go look at her dashboard and see what she's selling. And I'm like, you go. So that is really interesting and exciting. And I try, especially right now, as we're growing our platform, to get on a call with everybody who purchases to say, how can I help you? How can we talk through this? Here are some of the strategies I'm seeing people do where they are having tremendous success, which by the way, I'll happily share with you guys and like how to make it easy for you. Because as a blogger,

we wear so many hats. I want to make selling products and services effortless. Effortless. Jillian, I just love you. Oh, thank you. Here's why. I think so often people ask us this question, like, why are you sharing what you know? Don't you want to keep that secret for yourself kind of thing? And you are proof that the blogging industry is not like that. As we learn things, we share them because we believe that if there's room for one, there's room for all. And you are just a perfect example of that. I love that about you. And I also love that you spoke this so effortlessly. And that is that in blogging, we must know that pivoting is part of the job description. It just is.

And you know what I'm going to say? A stomach ache is part of the blogging experience. You cannot get rid of like meaning, oh my God, Google just did a, you know, oh my God, they just rolled out a new upgrade or a new update. It's like, oh, yeah. And I hope to normalize that. I hope to say, you have a stomachache. I have a stomachache too. And I just did a series. I just shared this

tips on selling. Right. And what I shared with you guys is it's what I wish somebody had told me. And the first I did a four part series. They're each like 15 minutes long. And the first, I did a four-part series. They're each like 15 minutes long. And the first one is selling is weird and uncomfortable because everybody thinks, oh, you sell and it's effortless for you. Why do I break out in hives trying to sell? And I want to say, oh no, everybody feels this. And it is a muscle and you get better at it. everybody feels this and it is a muscle and you get better at it. And yes, you fake it till you make it and it's awkward and weird, but it's how you grow your business. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think too, as you blog more, when we start blogging, we are creating content. But like you've said, you have to learn to kind of offer different things,

offer more things like digital products and things like that. And I think that that's an important thing to learn. You don't have to start there. I wouldn't recommend starting there actually. Learning how to do SEO and keyword research and creating content and building up your email list. At that same time, I wouldn't also be creating your very first product or service. I think that would be a lot to take on. But knowing that in time that your blogging business can expand to that, and that it can produce revenue for your business to fuel the things that you want to do. And that's really something I want to dive in with you today is talking about these multiple income streams that bloggers have. And you've just shared, I think you just shared about four different

income streams that you have of things that you've created. This doesn't even include things that you're an affiliate for, sponsorships, anything like that. So how long did it take you to really understand, okay, this is how I have to do this? And what encouragement do you have for somebody who's maybe even been blogging for a little while and they might be getting bored with just the blogging piece of it and they need something exciting or maybe they need more revenue in their business? What's the encouragement that you would provide them about why it's so important to have multiple income streams? Okay. It's important to have multiple income streams because as we talked about the stomach ache, the fact that you are constantly pivoting is just,

that's like for everybody. Get used to that. And what you want are lots of irons in the fire because you do not know how things will change. And therefore like protect yourself, protect your revenue streams, understand that, okay, I've got to put hold in affiliate stuff and this is starting to pay off. Okay, my SEO, well, my blog traffic is growing.

Okay, I'm starting to come up with some digital product ideas. Maybe I can reach out to sponsor X whose products I love and do something with them. Those are kind of, I would say, the big four horsemen in terms of monetizing. And I'd recommend trying out each one and trying them multiple times. Like I reached out to a brand and they didn't respond back to me. Okay, well, you know what? Fine. In three months, I'll reach out to another brand and see if they respond back to me. One thing that I have learned is that business building is all about trial and error. It's all about at bats. You can think of it as dating.

Like you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find what runs charming. Business is like that. And you might be like listening to another blogger and oh my God, they've had tremendous success doing this strategy. Well, it's worked for them. Maybe it'll work for you.

It's probably worth seeing if you can try their strategy, but there's no guarantee. Your audience is different. Your audience is different. Your niche is different. Everything about your social media is different. So you got to find what works for you. Now, how do you do that? Well, it is by getting close to your audience.

And that's weird. Again, if you're a person who likes to kind of, who finds their blog kind of safe, I put the content out, people kind of consume my content, and there's a real distance between that, especially food bloggers. I find this to be very true. I know how to take beautiful food photos, but like you don't really, I'm hiding, hiding is too strong a word, but like I'm staying safe behind a certain place. I'm saying that's not really going to work. I always think you can put yourself out in front of your blog, kind of like you're welcoming people into your blog. That's the way I would start to think about yourself. And therefore, hey, get to know me.

Now you don't have to get on calls with me or whatever, but just ways that you can reach out to your audience, whether it be asking questions in your newsletter, doing a poll on social media. But the interaction is really where I see the future going for bloggers because there's AI. going for bloggers because there's AI. And the way that you win against AI is by you being human. The more human you can be, that's your superpower because AI can't, it does sound human, but it's not. I'm like living and breathing and we're connecting right now and it feels really good. And so all the information is out there. I was talking to a woman yesterday who purchased my luxury car. She's

a food blogger. And she said, I can't do meal plans because there are so many meal plans. I said, okay, but there aren't necessarily meal plans from you. So how can you put yourself in your meal plan so that people say, oh, this isn't just a generic meal plan. I didn't post it like right into chat GPT, hey, create me a meal plan, which it could, but I'm willing to go that extra, I don't know, step and buy your meal plan. So this is where when you're thinking about creating products and services and in your blog, how can you personalize it? And how can you get close to your people so that they start to tell you what they're struggling with? And if you can tap in to those problems, you will have ideas for products and services that you can sell. And that's how you get your foothold.

But people say to me, okay, well, what do you think of this product idea? And if I like it, I'll go, oh my gosh, great. And they'll say, so you think it'll work? And I go, I have no idea because I'm just me and maybe I'm not your target market. So you have to get out there and test it, which means you got to create the product and I'm going to talk about how to do it fast and easy. You got to put it up and get a sales page and sell it.

All these things are hard, but they get easier. And then you know, okay, they didn't like this, but maybe they would like this or they like this. How can I build off of that to find more success? So it's messy. It is super messy. But that's how you build successful businesses. Yeah, there's so much to unpack there. But I like the fact that you brought up the AI because I think that's where everybody is just feeling extremely overwhelmed right now. Like how am I even going to compete if people are using AI to write their blog posts, to create their content, to offer services and products? But I think you spoke it perfectly. People still want to connect with someone who understands their problem. And so nobody's going

to be able to do that. Like you are with your own audience. Like you said, you're going to get to know them in some way, shape or form. And as you start to collect these things that they're telling you, it could just be small things like a comment they leave on your blog, an email that they send you. Pay attention to those things and start to collect those. And if you're struggling with what to offer, you know you want to go to the next level and start selling something, start collecting that so you can start to have some ideas. But I think one thing that people really struggle with is then taking like these random ideas and pulling them together, they want to create like this perfect offering that everybody's gonna sign up for and buy right out of the gate. And so what are your suggestions when you're very first getting started? And you're like, Okay, I'm going to create my first product. Now what?

Okay, so the first thing is, please start embracing this idea called B minus work, which I just randomly came up with when I had my coaching group one day. And I said, I want I gave them like a homework assignment. I said, please, this should not be perfect. I don't want A-level work. I want B-level work. And then I go, no, I don't want B-level work. I want B-level work. And I could see their shoulders all drop because I'm saying, please, I said,

you give me perfect work, I'm gonna be disappointed. This is just an exercise. And it stuck with them. And it's funny because I talk about this a lot. And the one comment I get from people who listen to my podcast is, what resonates with me is B minus work. And I have post-its like all over my desk that say B minus work every day because I have to remind myself of this.

Like I'm thinking too much. I'm getting caught in my head. Okay, what is the easiest thing to do? How can I put this out there fast and easy? And B minus is above average. So I'm not saying crappy, crappy work, but I am saying doable work. And I always tell this to the people who buy my luxury card. I say, create something, an ebook, a checklist, templates, whatever it is, like something easy. And if you feel weird about it, email it to me. I'll look at it. I'll be your best

girlfriend who will tell you if you have spinach in your teeth. So I'll look at it and tell you, whoa, this is embarrassing. Or, whoa, this is good. Go put it out there. And I will tell you, people totally take me up on this. I've never said to anybody, whoa, I'm super embarrassed for you. I'm so glad you shared this with me. No, I have said, this is great. Go put it up there and go test it. Or I have even said, hey, this is great, but I might like flesh out the beginning or this part isn't as clear or create a stronger call to action or whatever it is. But I have never said to anybody, oh my God, I'm so embarrassed for you. Whoa, never. So please know we judge ourselves so much harsher than other people do. So therefore, one, B minus work. Two, find problems that are painful. We like to do this, which is like, oh,

this could work. And it's like, no, what you want to be thinking about is what is somebody struggling with enough that they will pay for a solution to? Look in your own life. So if it's like, I don't know, bath bombs. Well, you know, okay, but like why? Like what is it that this will help with my sore muscles? So here are some, just a quick six things to think about. Does your product make somebody money? Those are great products. People will pay to think about. Does your product make somebody money? Those are great

products. People will pay to make money. Does your product save people money, right? People will pay to save money. Does your product make something easier? Because I will pay that saves time. I will pay for time and ease. Does your product move me away from pain? I'm fighting with my husband. Does your product move me toward happiness? I want to build the relationship between me and my daughter. Or does your product raise someone's social status? These are six triggers that if you can put your product

in at least one of these buckets, this is how it becomes a nice to have and moves into a must have. So this is where I would start to be thinking. And then my third tip is poke at the pain. Third tip is poke at the pain. Not selling like how great this product is. It is. Are you struggling with X? Are you struggling? Because guess what?

And I'm going to poke at it a bunch of times. Not because I'm mean, but because I know if you are the person who has this pain point and I keep poking at it and telling you, I've got the solution for this, you're going to feel it. And you're going to feel it so much that you're going to take out your wallet and you're going to pay and buy this. Now you have to deliver in that, like that's the given. And by the way, the people I talk to, they're not selling snake oil. And I have to remind them of this because we all think like, ooh, again, it fits into those weird selling mindset stuff where I say, no, no, no, you are providing real value. But if you can change somebody's life and make it better, oh my God, what better thing

to do in the world? Like people need your solution. So these would be my three tips. B minus work. Figure out if you can come up with a product that fits into one of these six purchasing buckets and poke at the pain. We have found an incredible resource for you with Milo Tree Cart. Milo Tree Cart is founded by Jillian Leslie, host of the Blogger Genius Podcast. So she knows exactly the kind of platform a blogger needs to sell their products.

There are ready-made sales pages, one-click sales funnels, a user-friendly sales dashboard, all while also getting a dedicated support team to assist you. You can bundle your digital downloads or sell them separately. You have unlimited product storage and all file types are accepted on the platform. Milo Tree Cart simplifies the process of getting your digital products into the hands of those you created them for, all while generating more revenue for your blogging business. Click the link in our show notes today to sign up for Milo Tree Cart and start earning more from your digital products in 2024. Those are great tips.

And they make it very simple. And I think that often we can kind of tell ourselves the story, well, like, I don't have a product to create. I don't know what I would create. And I think it's kind of taking yourself out of that frame of mind and sitting down and putting yourself in the seat of somebody who needs what you're going to create. One more tip. Please do not have your first product be a course. Why?

Because you're going to go off. You're going to pay for some expensive course platform. You're going to feel like some sort of fancy entrepreneur. And you are going to spend six months at a minimum recording your videos, cutting up your video, editing your videos, creating all your PDF, doing all this stuff. And you have this fantasy in your mind that this is going to sell like hotcakes. And you have no idea that it's going to sell like hotcakes. And I have spoken to so many people who have been burned by this belief system. You want to create a course, go sell it first before you record one video. Go sell it. See if you can get three sales, five sales. Because if you go ask your friends or

people even in your community and go, hey, would you want a course on whatever? They're going to say yes. You say, okay, here, pay me. I'll give you a discount. I'm going to sell this course for $400. I'll sell it to you for $200. Buy it right now and you will get all these perks and bonuses. Buy it and see if you can sell it. If you can sell it, then I'm like, okay, definitely go make that course, but make it easier, shorter, less intense than you think is deserving of your course, right? You want to do the B minus work course, but do not. I think as bloggers, we have this mindset of I'm working on my business

and I'm not making any money. And then I, okay, so the solution is I work harder on my business and somehow the money should happen. You guys know this in terms of, I'm sure your audience, you have to connect those two things. They don't just magically work together. I can't tell you the number of people I interview who have said like, Oh my God, I was working so hard on my business and I couldn't figure out how to tie that to actual income. So of course I think it can be a sinkhole. Go do a live workshop. MyLotteryCard, we give you everything you need to do this, where you go teach something to people for one and like your people are going to rally behind you and you're going to hear what people say. You're going to hear it's like live and it's much more organic and you will learn more from doing that. The work to put it together is not that hard. And go do three of them and sell them as a mini course. Yeah, it's really just kind of breaking it down

and making the work a little easier for you. And then in the long run, you can start to compile everything that works into some bigger product at the end of the day. I talk to people because I get on calls and they will have these magnificent visions of their business. And I say, okay, that sounds beautiful. It sounds

technically incredibly difficult to put together. So what you want to do is start really small and slowly build your income so that at a certain point you have so much income, you can pay to have somebody put together this super complicated system that I still promise you will break and won't quite work. But do it that way. Like we have these visions of how it's all going to be so beautiful. And then I go, go get three people to pay you. I think that's great advice. I also think it's scary advice for somebody who's never done it before. I can remember the first time that we heard that. And we were like, Oh, gosh, sell it first and then create. But the process of doing that is learning what your people actually need. It's getting that personalized attention and those conversations are starting. And then

you're creating something that they actually need. And it's just like you said, it's providing solutions to the problems. And what do we do? I think we're all content creators, because what do we do when something really works for us? And then we talk to a friend, and they are experiencing a similar pain point. Well, we say, Oh my gosh, I tried this thing. Or have you tried this? That's what selling is, is what we do every day in our normal lives. And so I think when we kind of take off this hat of, I'm just in blogging for the money or whatever. And instead, we're like, no, we're helpers. That's part of the job description. And that's what we do. We help people with the pain point that they have. Or like you said, kind of poke that pain and really get people to open up about like,

what are you going through? How can I help you? You might be just a couple steps ahead of them. How can you show up and serve? And I love the process of this idea, I mean, of B-minus work. We often say, you just have to know 1% or 2% more than the person next to you. It's very similar. We tell ourselves that we have to be at a certain level in order to be able to start sharing or start doing or start creating. And that's not true. A lot of times people want somebody right there in the trenches with them who can relate to what you're doing and what you're saying. A lot of times we don't want the quote unquote expert because we feel like they're unreachable. Absolutely. So don't be afraid to share where you are in the journey and how you can show up. And then in turn, it can support your business, which when you make money in your business, then you just get to help more people.

Exactly. Exactly. In fact, somebody who is a friend who is in my coaching group and who's a really successful blogger is this woman named Anina Bell. And she has a blog called Le Chef's Wife. And it's a food blog. She's married to a French chef. And what she says is like, and this totally works for me, which is I don't want to learn from him. That's too intimidating. But he teaches her. And then I learn from her because she's a student as well. She's, of course, much more advanced than me, but that's where, again, you don't need a PhD, fancy degrees. He is so out of my league that he wouldn't probably know how to dim it down to where I am, but I wouldn't feel bad asking her my dumb questions. Again, if you can think of yourself as somebody's best friend, like a little wiser, maybe like a older cousin who can just be like, I see you, I know where you are

and I know what you're probably struggling with. So let's get that. Like, I think that one thing that I try really hard to do in my own podcast is get the gems so that somebody else doesn't have to make those same mistakes or doesn't have to make them for as long or as costly or whatever. But it can go, oh, okay. Like, I can just, like, build this little path and not, like, fall into the ocean, you know? build this little path and not like fall into the ocean, you know, or like, I could just like, I can just save myself the heartache and the expense and the time and just move faster. My goal, like I say this in all my emails to people like who are doing my legit card, I'm like, my goal is to help you move faster than you feel comfortable. I'm going to be that cousin, that older cousin,

who's going to just kind of push you a little bit and say, I know you've got it in you. And by the way, as women, we struggle with things like, I don't want to be salesy. And I say, please be salesy because you being salesy, I don't know you guys that well, but I will promise you that if you guys were selling something, you could sell it more and not get anywhere near the point of being salesy. You guys could be like, oh, I'm so disgusted with myself because all I do is sell. And I will probably go, guys, I don't think you're selling enough. And I will probably go, guys, I don't think you're selling enough. So please know that we don't know how to be salesy. So if you are thinking, oh, God, I'm sending that additional email and my audience is going to be pissed at me.

Well, first of all, hope that that person unsubscribes from your email list. Yeah. And you go like go be salesy. Yeah. Yeah. And you go like, go be salesy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that where a lot of people stop is they create that first thing and it doesn't work. So then they're like, Oh, that's not my thing. People don't want to buy from me. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. I can't create something good enough. Well, I think you answered part of that is we probably just haven't shared it enough. We haven't told people about it enough. So I think that that's probably what stops people in their tracks the most. It's not the first one that they do. It's

getting to the second one or actually selling the first one that is the biggest roadblock. So if you put your first product out there, and it's crickets. What's next? What do you suggest? Okay. A couple of things. And by the way, this happens to so many people. They go, yeah, I want to be selling digital products, but it doesn't work for me. No, I tried it. I put together an ebook of like my best recipes and nobody purchased, or I put together my kids' activity stuff and nobody purchased, or I wanted to do a workshop and nobody signed up. Okay. One, start talking to people because you might not have hit the bullseye in terms of what the problem is. Two, I bet you haven't positioned it as a pain point. Remember getting it into one of these

things that people will buy. All of the information is out there on YouTube, on the internet. You're not honestly like you think you're original, but like anything you want to learn, you can learn. So what makes it different? What makes it different is empathy. You understand where they're coming from. You speak their language. You understand their pain. The more you can show that, the more, how many times do you go to YouTube and you've got a problem? And there are 16,000 videos, but you look and you go, is it this person I want to learn from?

Is it this person? Like how many videos do you click on until you find your person? So you want to be somebody's person, which means it's not about you. It's about how you can help them. So you put out whatever product it is and it doesn't work and it falls flat.

You will feel bad. You will like want to get into bed and put the covers over your head. And I'm going to say, okay, what else can you come up with? And because you're hopefully using something like my luxury cart and you can create and move and go. And, you know, this is where I run into those people who've spent six months creating the course and that's hard to recover from. But it's not hard to recover from when you've spent three hours creating an e-book.

And by the way, for your audience, I wrote an e-book using ChatGPT on how you can write an e-book using ChatGPT. And you can get it. And I wrote my e-book using ChatGPT in three hours because I wanted to test whether it was doable. What would it be like? And in the ebook has all the prompts I used to write my own ebook. And by the way, if you want to get that, just go to mylotree.com slash AI ebook and you can download it for free. And by the way, we sell it for $27, but for Black Secret people, we give it away. Because I want you to get going. I want you to get into ChatGPT and go,

okay, so I put this prompt in, and then I put this prompt in, and then I start to do this, and I massage it, and I go to Canva, and I use the template, and boom, I've got an ebook. Because it doesn't hurt as much if you've only spent, say, three hours on something,

and it doesn't work, then you've spent three months or six months. Right. It's just getting started. And knowing that there's no guarantee and knowing it's a process and knowing you're going to learn and iterate and talk to people. Yes. Yeah. I think the learning aspect of that is important. Instead of looking at, well, that thing failed. Instead, ask yourself, what's the lesson that was learned there? I mean, with Spark, we've had things that have failed. We've done things that were like, that was a waste of our time. We learned from it though. And you just take those lessons

and you move it forward, quite honestly. We each actually, speaking of that, we each independently have shared some of those things in a private podcast that we shared. So I'll put the link for our private podcast. Jennifer talked about a meal plan service that she had. I talked about mindset and where I was in my business and how those things needed to shift in our private podcast. So check that out as just another way of being vulnerable that just because somebody is a

blogger and they've seen, quote unquote, success, it doesn't mean that they've never had those moments of like, oh, crap, I put out the wrong thing or whatever. But you learn from them. And I think that that is the lesson here is learning from those things. But if we never put anything out, if we never put ourselves out there in any way, then we've never learned any lessons besides just sitting at home in our fear and letting that get the best of us. And I want to say that when we see people on social media, we see these successful bloggers, you have no idea what's going on behind the scenes. You don't know how much money they're really making. You don't know what their struggles are,

both professionally and personally. They're all, they've done stuff where they have kicking themselves and they've lost thousands of dollars. Like do not think the world is so beautiful for them and it just happens to not be beautiful for you. I think that's wonderful advice. Wonderful advice and something that I think a lot of us need to hear. So Jillian, thank you so much.

This has been enlightening and I'm so glad we got to share you with our community. We will put the link to that AI ebook that you shared. Will you also tell people where they can connect with you? Absolutely. So I read all my emails. I respond to all my emails. Email me at Jillian at MiloTree.com. Check out MiloTree Cart. And right now, if you purchase, you get a 30-day no questions asked money back guarantee. I only want you to keep it if you love it. And I will get on a personalized call with you and help you get set up for success. That's MiloTreeCart.com. And DM me on Instagram at Milotree. And please come listen to my podcast,

the Blogger Genius Podcast, and you guys are going to be on it soon. So I'm excited about that. Yes, we will put all those links in the show notes. And thank you so much. It was so great to connect with you. I've enjoyed your emails for a very long time. And so I'm just excited to finally have this connection with you. Oh, well, thank you guys so much for having me. Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at Spark Media Concepts.

You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the ultimate blog bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.