Michelle Lomas
Jodie Allen is talking to me from her home in Gympie, Queensland, true to the Stay At Home Mum brand. She's the founder and chief creative officer of Stay At Home Mum, the author of five books, one of Queensland's most influential top one hundred and to top it all off, she's also a Suzuki ambassador. Jody's journey is one of those stories that inspires through its adversity. She started a digital publication after being fired from her job while eight months pregnant. Not knowing what to do and unsure how to ease the struggles of family finances, she created a Facebook group to ask mums for advice. A few weeks later and thousands of members later, she realised there might be something in this. That's when she decided to launch Stay At Home Mum, a now thriving publication with a loud, passionate, and hilarious community of mums from all around Australia. And she's done it all with zero experience or training.
Jody Allen
No, no business experience. I was a secretary.
Michelle Lomas
So I think that's going to be very interesting for the people listening. A lot of the people listening are going to be experienced marketers and are probably going to be wondering how did you build such a phenomenal audience? So let's start with how it all began.
Jody Allen
Well, Stay At Home Mum started quite by accident. I had two babies in twelve months and at the same time I was made redundant from my job and we were in the middle of building a house as well. Like everything, the shit hit the fan generally. So we figured out that if we wanted to keep the house that we were building, we only had fifty dollars a week to spend on groceries. So that was incredibly difficult for the first two weeks. I just cried and hit walls and thought my life was over, then I thought, well, I should just give it a go. So there's a lot of trial and error, lots of getting back to basics, lots of getting all Grandma's books out. In between that I thought, oh well, I'm going to start a Facebook page so I can actually find more information on how to live frugally and how to find all these hints that mums have. So no, it was just something silly to do one day and I started asking people questions and then all these mums started joining and sharing all this brilliant information. So at the end of week one, I think we had ten thousand followers. And then twenty thousand and fifty thousand and one hundred thousand. And this information was just gold. It was just so good. I'm like, there should be an encyclopedia for all this information so that it is easily available for all mums to have. So I thought okay, yeah, got to start a website.
Michelle Lomas
Tell us what the numbers are doing. What are the numbers saying to you?
Jody Allen
Oh, we're currently just above a million unique users a month. It goes really, really well when it's not school holidays and then during school holidays it goes down a bit because mums are out and things like that. And we've managed to sort of keep it just above a million, which is amazing. Like we don't spend a cent on ads or anything like that. So it's one hundred per cent organic. And I'm so, so bloody proud. I really am.
Michelle Lomas
You're like the case study in turning adversity into opportunity. And I feel like it's so unique that you stumbled across this gap in the market, that so many mums have all these ideas that they want to share as well. And they're constantly looking for ideas. Like I'm a voracious Pinterester. I don't even use half the ideas I find in there because I'm just like, I'm saving all these great money saving tips and smart cooking things and sheet pan recipes. And it's almost like you stumbled across it and then just grabbed onto it for dear life. Is that kind of why you think people just keep coming back time and again?
Jody Allen
That's exactly what it was. It was a big opportunity. I'd always wanted to start my own business, but I too was looking everywhere, could never think of anything that was good that hadn't already been done. And I suppose one of the biggest problems I had was that all the parenting sites that I looked at when I was a mum, it was all experts, a lot of them that didn't have children, telling me how to be this perfect mum. Where was the website for normal people? Where's the normal mums website? And there just wasn't any. And that was another thing I would love, a parenting site that is by real mums, for real mums, that tells it how it is. And that's what I've sort of kept to this day. I like to think of it as, all the fancy parenting sites are like Myer and David Jones, but I'm a Big W website. And that suits me just fine because there are a lot more Big W mums than there are Myer and David Jones mums, one hundred per cent.
Michelle Lomas
I am absolutely exhausted by the textbook child psychologist coming and telling me how to raise my son and feed him right. Like mate, if he's healthy and he's eating his food and I can still get up and do a nine to five job and everyone's happy at the end of the day, that is my job done for the day. Absolutely. And I'm sure that's why your mums love what you do and they come back time and again, because we are so tired of being preached to and having the mum guilt. And it's so refreshing to just have content that's really talking to us.
Jody Allen
I want mums to feel good when they came to the site, not leave thinking that they're somehow less. Because that's not how it is. Parenting is really hard. One of my favourite things is to just take a screenshot of my washing pile. I quite often do that and put it on the site. I'm like, come on girls, who can beat it? Let's go! And it's always great. Five hundred comments of washing piles and mums being proud of it. It's so good.
Michelle Lomas
So proud to be a messy mum. I really want to talk to you about failure. Some of the big phenomenal failures that you've had, and your perspective on how great failure is. I thought that was incredibly refreshing.
Jody Allen
Failure is fabulous. Failure is good, it means you've tried something. And it can break your heart at the time, but you just got to get up, dust yourself off, realise, okay, what have I learnt from this situation? And then just get on with it. From what I've learned, and as I said, I have no business background, but to me, business is just a series of hurdles that you have to jump every single day. And whether you're willing to get up and keep jumping those hurdles is whether you're successful or not.
Michelle Lomas
And your biggest failure?
Jody Allen
Our biggest failure? We thought that we would try a membership site on Stay At Home Mum, because a few people had done it and a lot of new sites had gone to membership sites and things like that. So we thought okay, yep, let's give this a go. So I spent probably thirty grand getting this little membership site all set up and done, and it was all beautiful. And then as an incentive, we thought, very wrongly, that maybe we would have an aspirational gift to encourage people to join. So we got Louis Vuitton, and like, I'm a Big W mum, I should have done a bloody voucher for Big W, it would have done better. And I think we had four people join up. So mind you, they got tickets. It was a pretty good deal for four people, they had the chance to win the Louis Vuitton bag. There was about seven thousand dollars worth of prizes, our lady in WA won it, which was great. But we did learn so much from that. What not to do. And membership sites just do not work for content sites. Yeah, we learned the hard way, but boy, did we learn it? We just failed fast and started something again.
Michelle Lomas
That would have been devastating, I imagine, but I love that you just picked yourself up and went, all right, let's keep going. And how bougie of you, Louis Vuitton, that's very Kardashian.
Jody Allen
Oh I know, fancy! Anyway, again, we've had prizes that are worth thousands and thousands. But do you know the very best prize I think we've ever given away that went batshit crazy was a bloody Chrisco hamper. So it's funny, you can have something that's only worth a couple of hundred dollars and you have thousands and thousands and thousands of entries. And you can have something really schmancy and you get four. So that really told me, stick to your demographics, stick to what mums want, stick to the Big W type theory. I learned so much from it.
Michelle Lomas
You did mention that there was a big competitor who will remain nameless but might be a very popular song by the pop group ABBA, who went and did something very similar a couple of weeks later. And it was very good to see they also were not very successful, correct?
Jody Allen
That's right. It kind of, I felt a little vindicated after that, which was good. Like if they had done it and it worked, I would have been more devastated. But the fact that they failed too, yeah, I kind of felt a lot better about it. I don't want to see anyone fail including competitors, but at the same time I had a little smile.
Michelle Lomas
Yes. So it's good to know it's not the way you did it. It's just your audience saying, no, I'm not paying.
Jody Allen
That's right. Yeah.
Michelle Lomas
You're the chief creative officer and you write a lot of the content for the site yourself. And I want to understand your creative process, because in the industry at the moment, there's a lot of data informing content. And a lot of that conversation around instinct is getting diluted with the data conversation. What's the data telling us? Is it going to work? Has it worked before? How do you incorporate data into your process or do you still just use instinct?
Jody Allen
It's a bit of both. I must admit it has been purely instinct up until a couple of years ago, where the rest of the team kept shoving data down my throat and I kind of had to listen. But it was really hard because I'm not a numbers girl at all. So now with my thoroughly researched topics, I will use it to suggest and do a little bit of research on what's trending and keywords and things like that. But saying that, all the articles that go batshit crazy on my site are usually thought of that morning or in the middle of the night, written and smashed out, and they go really well. And because of that, I have just kept doing it. While I've got all these ideas and I think it'll go great, I smash it out, get it out, no research, and I just know that they'll love it because I write about things that I would enjoy reading.
Michelle Lomas
I love that, write things that you enjoy reading. If you don't enjoy writing it or you don't enjoy reading it, that's your signal. I'd love to ask what you would tell a brand or a marketer if they were looking to create content to build audiences. And it comes from my own experience as well. I've led a few content marketing divisions and worked with clients, and often they start with amazing intentions. We want to create content for audiences, it's all around people, not our products, we want it to be engaging, don't worry about the brand. But then they get nervous about broaching topics that audiences really want to hear. And that strategy begins to get watered down to a point that it's so P.C. that it's lost its essence and the impact that it could have. So what advice would you have for brands looking to use content as a way to build audiences?
Jody Allen
That when you take risks, you see the rewards. Like I've fallen on my face more times than not, but some of the biggest traffic days I've had on our website have been where we've taken the risk and talked about taboo subjects and covered products that mums might not normally talk about, or letting brands let us tell the story in our own words, warts and all. Just taking that risk can be so, so good.
Michelle Lomas
I know I do.
Jody Allen
But I love writing about how much I hate them and it straight away, like ten or fifteen minutes, can have five or six hundred comments going. I love them. I love them. That's great. But you know, it's just good to be able to do that. My mums should know before they spend that kind of money.
Michelle Lomas
And that's really interesting. And I really thought about this a lot, to be honest. Like I've talked about the fact that, so are you okay with making mistakes? And I wonder why a lot of us marketers are so afraid of making mistakes. We love innovation, we love new things, but we never want to be the first. And we're always extremely cautious about trying something new. And I feel like maybe that stems from the fact that we have university degrees and we've done ten, fifteen years climbing the ladder to be the experts. And we have this fear of being wrong. Whereas when you start something from no knowledge or training, you're kind of okay to just give things a crack.
Jody Allen
I think that has been the case. Because my best mate, Nicole Millard, who's still a partner at Stay At Home Mum, came on really early to give me a hand. She was handling the social media and she's very accomplished, she's incredibly smart and went and did all these courses on social media and was doing what everybody else was doing. And then I'm like, Nic, this isn't working, you can't do it like this. You know, let's get rid of everything that you have learnt about social media and just try this way, which was very much fly by my gut and taking chances and risks. And it worked, it really did work. I had to beat the professionalism out of her to get her to take those risks too. But for us, it has really paid off because we are always willing. I have a list on my blackboard of all these things that I want to try, and normally the technology isn't there yet, or there's some reason we can't go ahead with it yet, but I love trying new things. Don't think it doesn't affect me when it fails, it does. I'm human and I cry all the time. But I just think that's the trip, the online hustle that you have to take these risks for reward.
Michelle Lomas
So I want to talk a little bit about how you make money. Yeah, the real meaty stuff. How do you make your dollars?
Jody Allen
The meaty stuff. Well, like most content sites, we make money in various ways. There are probably ten different income sources, but our biggest one is affiliate marketing. A lot of other content sites do not do it, and I think they're crazy. Yes, it takes a lot of work, and I mean a lot. But over time it has just proven to be the best way of advertising products without shoving them down people's throats. We also have things like programmatic advertising, we sell eBooks, we sell advertising links and article inserts and things like that. But day to day, affiliate marketing is by far eighty per cent of our income.
Michelle Lomas
Wow. Eighty per cent. That's huge. But unsurprising. Everything that we've talked about regarding content, it looks like a lot of what you've been doing, failing, testing, trying different content and getting that sort of model right in terms of what your audience is seeking, is a huge part of that success. Because you know what they're interested to see, what products they might be interested in. And so does that make it a lot easier for you in terms of the conversion of that?
Jody Allen
Yeah, absolutely. We've worked with some really big brands doing just advertising campaigns over the years and they are just so much hard work. They are hard to convert because brands are very, you know, it's got to be this, it's got to be done this way. And our demographic just see right through it. They know it's a great big ad. I love affiliate marketing because I can talk about whatever topic I want and that is huge. And I can find a product to weave into the story that fits the content and sell it natively. And mums don't know they're being advertised to. We have all the legalities and everything set up. But it's not a hard push. It's okay, this is what we use, if you're interested here it is, but we're not pushy. And we've just found that pushy advertising is just not the right way to go, not for our demographic.
Michelle Lomas
And so what have been some of the most successful affiliate programs that you've run?
Jody Allen
Well, we probably knock back more brands now than we actually take on, because it's got to be a good fit. We have just worked with so many people in the past where it hasn't quite been a good fit and it ends up a disaster, really just a disaster for us and a disaster for them. And we want advertisers to get bang for their buck and we know right away whether it's going to be successful or not. I don't want them to waste their money.
Michelle Lomas
If you could just give one piece of advice to the people listening in terms of marketing, what would it be?
Jody Allen
I'm so glad I don't know it all. I think if I had studied and done all the university and everything, I might think differently. But I think it's actually to my personal advantage that I haven't seen that side of it, because I don't know what I don't know. And yeah, that works for us. I love it.