#113: IMPORTANT—How to Find Success During Coronavirus

Mar 23, 2020

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Today, I've got a special episode, where I'm talking about how to find success during coronavirus. Yes, it is possible if you know how to pivot your business.

These are scary times, especially as online business owners, bloggers, and entrepreneurs.

We've watched our Catch My Party traffic fall by half in one week!

But if we can solve problems for our audiences, we will be okay. I believe that in my heart. And our businesses will be stronger for it.

My advice: Be the light for your readers because we all need more light right now.

My hope is that this episode gives you a roadmap for how to look beyond the paralysis, fear, and panic that we're all feeling, and shift your focus back onto your audience so you can become a resource, guide, and helper.

And your audience will reward you for it!

How to Find Success During Coronavirus

Host 0:04 Welcome to The Blogger Genius Podcast brought to you by MiloTree. Here's your host, Jillian Leslie.

Jillian Leslie 0:11 Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Wow, what a time we are living in. The word that just keeps popping up for me is "unease". I just feel like everything is off balance. But that is why I'm going live with this interview early because I want to give you more balance, especially in your online business.

I'm interviewing Matt Molen from Personalized Paths. He is my email marketing guru. What we are talking about is how to move your business in the right direction during this uncertain time, how to be there for your audience, and still build your business.

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Okay. This interview, I think you are going to really get a lot out of it. What I love about Matt is he gives actionable, practical real tips and ideas.

For those of you who need to feel inspired, this is the interview for you. I got off this call, and I just felt lightness and excitement, and a way to really be there for my audience. So without further delay, here is my interview with Matt Molen.

Matt, welcome back to the show. I am so excited to talk to you right now.

Matt Molen 2:29 Well, Jillian, thanks for having me. I know that there's a lot on people's minds right now. And, you know, you and I have been chatting a little bit.

I think there are some things that people could be doing in my area of expertise that they're not doing, and I just want to have a chance to talk about it a little bit.

Jillian Leslie 2:45 And first of all, I have to say you reached out to me yesterday and you said, "Hey, do you want to talk about how people can respond to this very uneasy time?"

And I will tell you that you gave me a feeling of solace because of the normal seat like, "Of course, I want to talk to you." Because when I talk to you things are normal, and we're talking about business.

Even just when we got on this call, hearing your voice, I said that to you. I said, "Oh, it just feels comforting." Mostly because I'm doing what I normally do.

And by talking to you, I'm not checking the news. I am not thinking about my family and all the worries of the world. So, I want to thank you for reaching out and for just giving me let's say, 45 minutes of normalcy.

Matt Molen 3:36 Well, thanks. I love that you think of it that way because that's how I've been thinking about it is that most people right now, myself included, are feeling very uneasy, very uncertain. Not just about blogging, but about life in general.

And, I'm getting all these emails. You are too. In fact, I got one in my inbox. It kind of made me laugh. It was so ridiculous. It was from a life insurance company that I don't even have a policy with.

And the message was, "Hey, this life insurance company is open." Thanks so much, guys. What a help that was. And so, I think that we're getting so much news. It's distracting. It's hard to concentrate.

And if you're a blogger in this in this environment, you're worried about your ad revenue. You're worried about your site traffic? Just the general feeling of where is this going?

Jillian Leslie 4:34 Yes. How long is this going to last?

Matt Molen 4:38 On top of that, our routines are disrupted. So that's weird. It's hard to focus. And then, I think that I've seen this other thing and I feel it too. Is this desire to reach out and help somebody somehow.

Jillian Leslie 4:50 Yes. Yes.

Matt Molen 4:52 All of that usually is leading up towards paralysis or a lack of strategy going forward. Now my area of expertise, of course, is with email marketing specifically for bloggers. I have the benefit of talking with content creators every single day about their email.

On top of that, I'm looking at email campaigns that are coming across. And I'm just going, "Man, you guys are blowing this." Because this is a situation unlike any other.

And what I thought that I would do, I know I've been on the podcast before and I shared kind of my system. Many people may actually, or not many, but some people may actually be familiar with the way that I think about things and my system.

Jillian Leslie 5:29 Yeah, and we will of course link to your previous episodes. So, definitely.

Matt Molen 5:35 Awesome. But this situation is so different that I wanted to come and share perhaps an email strategy that your listeners could think about employing for the next few weeks or months if that's how far this thing goes on. Hopefully not. But that's what I want to talk about today.

Jillian Leslie 5:56 I'd love it. Love it.

How to Think Differently About Your Business During Coronavirus

Matt Molen 5:57 Okay. So, what I want to tell everybody, first of all, is that I want them to lace up their running shoes. All right? I want them to think that they're getting ready right now mentally to get out and work.

Okay? Because so much of this is preparing your mind to take action. These are unprecedented times and it's going to require… I'm not saying unprecedented levels of work, but it's going to require a different way of thinking and a little bit of hustle to really optimize and be of the most service that we can be.

I recently did a talk on this. I was telling some of the people that were on my list that I was doing it. I got an email back from a lady that runs a Disneyland website. Her website is 100% about Disneyland. Her message to me was, "Email saved me so far."

And what I'm going to talk about today, and I'll come back to her. Her name is Jessica. I'll come back to Jessica's story at the end about what she did. But email saved her.

Think about what it must be like with her site. Disneyland closes. She's got nothing to talk about. Nobody's doing any searching. Her ad revenue has got to be tanking. They're not buying her products.

For her, she is probably staring down the barrel of an uncomfortable gun, if you will. What I want to start with though, is that I want to start with an overarching principle. This principle always works. This is the principle that I live by for marketing in general. And that is solve your reader's problem.

Solve Your Readers' Problems Now

Jillian Leslie 7:37 Love it.

Matt Molen 7:38 Solve your reader's problems. If you keep coming back to that over and over again, it's going to change the way you think about your opportunity here. So, let's talk about email in general, and what to send to your subscribers right now.

I have seen… You've probably seen this too. And I don't fault people for sending this. They're sending emails that say, "How can I help?"

Now, the spirit behind that is I want to help you. I want to know what you're going through. Here's the problem with that, though. Everybody is uncertain because this is new to all of us. Your readers, they don't know what they need.

Jillian Leslie 8:19 Exactly. You're putting the onus on somebody to tell you what they need.

Matt Molen 8:27 Exactly. And they don't know what you can do. They don't know what they need, but you as the subject matter expert, you do know to a degree, what they need within your sphere of knowledge and influence.

So the question I have for anybody listening is, "What problem can you solve in the right now? How would you provide value in this environment right now?"

I got some examples of some really positive examples that I got from some emails from people. Just today I got one from the best ideas for kids. It was a hundred plus indoor activities. There's a lot of moms with kids at home. That solves a problem.

I received one eight days ago, which I thought was almost prophetic. But it was, "Don't panic. Be prepared. Free 14-day meal plan and shopping list." That was from Favorite Family Recipes.

One of the sub-headers in there is, "A little panic planning can bring great peace of mind." And so I thought that was good. I got another one that was an activity binder for teens.

So, some people are understanding the value that they can provide to their readers. But let's talk for just a second. There are some blog categories that are really hard hit.

We've got travel. We've got fitness. We've got finance. Or just "lifestyle" in general. Who's thinking about even Easter activities right now?

Jillian Leslie 9:59 Absolutely. I think in terms of fashion, for example, the last thing I want to do is buy clothes right now. I'm in my pajamas.

Matt Molen 10:10 So, the brainstorming activity that I would do if we had people in the room here together is I would say, "Look, let's think about it for a second. Fashion blogger, travel blogger, finance, blogger, fitness, blogger, what problem can you solve for your readers right now?"

If I'm a travel blogger, and I actually do have a travel blog on the side, we need to be thinking about what's going through our readers' minds right now. Well, they're sitting on vacation plans. Maybe not right now but down the road. They don't know should they keep them.

What are refund policies like? What are cancellations like? Is now a time to actually book cheap flights in the future? Do I go look for hotel values right now?

As an aside, we have some trips planned out late in 2020. Those hotel rates have dropped. So, do you advise them on how to go change those? You see what I'm saying? There are ways that they can solve a reader's problem that is unique to this situation.

Jillian Leslie 11:11 Absolutely. I have my assistant for Catch My Party and I will tell you that our traffic has died because if you were planning that mermaid party for your daughter next month, you're not planning it now.

We have a content schedule where we have our blog posts blocked out for a couple of months, and we literally said, "Oh my God, we seem tone-deaf." If we are posting about a fun summer party, even summer, because who knows? And what we did was we step back and we said, "People are home."

Our users are typically… Our visitors or moms. How can we bring some festivity or some lightheartedness, or just something to moms? And what we thought about was… Well, a couple of things.

How to Plan A Virtual Party During Shelter at Home

One, how do you plan a virtual party? What platforms can you use to do that? What kind of games can you play online with a group of people? What if it's a group of, you know, five-year-olds versus what if it's a group of 15-year-olds?

We're right now building out a bunch of content about how would you do that. Or we give printables away for things like… We have like game night printables.

Well, guess what? You know what? Maybe for your family you could print out a couple printables and put out some games and have a game night just to break up the monotony or just have a little bit more play in this stressful time.

So it's amazing how quickly we said, "Oh, my God. Our normal content doesn't work anymore." We understand because my assistant and I are both stressed out. Like, what would we want? And that's kind of the direction that we're heading in.

Matt Molen 13:10 I love that. And you know what that tells me? This is the type of people like you who get into this business, for this reason, is to innovate. It is to create. And quite often we get into a rut, we get into our routines, and we stay in our lane.

What this is forcing you to do is look at your expertise, and twist it a little bit. Turn it on its head, and come up with the solutions to the problems using your expertise. You know how to party.

Jillian Leslie 13:40 Right.

Matt Molen 13:40 And being able to convert that into today's dynamic, wow! I could see NBC News interviewing you just because that type of content is going to be so readily available, or so readily adopted. People are going to want that. They want to have some fun for all the reasons we've been talking about.

So, that's the power though. When you figure that out, that's the power of having a robust email list. Because the traffic isn't necessarily coming to the site now. Now, we need to use our list and drive people to the site so that they can absorb it, so that they can then share it with their friends.

Why Email is More Powerful Than Ever

Jillian Leslie 14:21 Absolutely. Because for example, I don't have the time right now to be hanging on social media to be like, "Let's go to Pinterest and just kind of browse around." But if something comes into my inbox, I probably will open it.

Matt Molen 14:36 Exactly. So, if you and your team and everybody within the sound of my voice, if they write down three to five problems that they can solve for their readers in this current situation, and maybe different problems than they ever otherwise would have been.

The good news is that in most cases, you probably can leverage your existing content. You just have to twist it a little bit. Sometimes you got to make new content.

That's why I was talking about we got to lace up our running shoes, it's time to hustle. The next question that I want to address is how often should you now email these people?

One of the most common rebuttals, I guess, from people that have not adopted email is, "I don't want to annoy people." Well, yeah. You know what's annoying? It's that email from that life insurance company. You didn't ask for it.

Jillian Leslie 15:12 Good question.

I call them the tone-deaf emails. Like, how many of you have I gotten in the last week?

Matt Molen 15:39 They're not solving my problems, therefore, those are annoying. However, it's not spam if you're providing value. If you are solving your readers' problems, especially right now, they are all yours.

So, let me give you a little analogy. I used to work in the daily deals industry. In that space, as you can imagine, ecommerce Q4 was huge but especially Black Friday weekend. There are deals left and right.

We sent so many emails and people absorb the emails. They wanted the emails because they're deal seekers and they wanted to know what was hot then. Would that activity have been appropriate in a different time? No. That would not have been appropriate.

But for you Jillian with Catch My Party, and the example that you just talked about, this might be your Black Friday. You can probably serve more than you currently are.

And I say that to everybody who's listening. This might be your Black Friday. People need to hear your solutions. So, what does that mean for you? How many emails do you send per week? That's going to be up to you.

But here's a couple of things for your consideration. I have four things. Number one, do your automated emails make sense? If you've adopted the Matt Molen system, you know that I love automated emails.

My Forever Series, for instance, is a big part of what I do. But, like right now with my Disney Cruise Forever Series going, where it tells people what to expect on the private island? Does that really make a lot of sense?

Time to Pause Your Email Series

When I could take that slot, I could pause the Forever Series, pause that automation, and I could take that slot and send something that helps them right now. That's number one. Do your automated emails make sense?

Number two is to recognize that you can serve more. What I mean by serve more is you can send them more emails. More emails than you think. Heck, you could have done it before. You just didn't believe me before.

But now for sure, you can serve more than you think. What does that mean for you? It might mean an email every third day. It might mean if you're doing one email a week, it might mean two.

For some of you who have a ton of great content, it might be an email every other day. I don't know. And you might want to test and experiment with it. But if you have the spirit of service, and you're solving your readers' problems, you can do more.

Number three, we're sitting here. So much has changed at the date of this recording. So much has changed just in the last few days. It feels like it's been weeks. Things have progressed in a crazy fashion.

Plan Out Your New Emails

But I think we've settled into what the normal probably looks like, at least for the next few weeks. So, plan it out. I have a resource for you. If you want it, we'll drop it in the show notes. Jillian, if you're willing to do it.

Jillian Leslie 18:42 Of course.

Matt Molen 18:43 And all it is is a very simple calendar that shows the dates, the day of the week. And it asks you what problem can you solve for your reader? What is your reader thinking about?

So basically, you just go through that and you say, "Well, okay. If I'm at Catch My Party, I know that they're wanting to do a virtual party with friends." Well, that would be fun because the kids get stir crazy. Okay, that would be one thing.