A behind-the-scenes update on a change I've been making at Bloom & Grow: after years of offering my freebies as open downloads, I'm now requiring an email address to access them. I wanted to share my full (evolving) thinking in case it gives you permission to change your mind on something in your own practice.
Key Points & Timestamps:
-
00:00 - Welcome and intro
-
00:18 - The backstory
-
01:10 - Why I've had a change of heart
-
01:35 - People don't click on web search results anymore, apparently
-
02:24 - Web traffic is down overall
-
02:53 - AI roadblocks
-
03:52 - Freebie set up
-
04:53 - Keeping an eye on results
-
05:13 - New website navigation
-
06:07 - It's okay to change your mind
Resources Mentioned:
-
My freebies page: camillefreeman.com/freebies
-
My book: Write Better Newsletters: Grow your 1:1 Practice with Emails People Actually Want to Read
-
My weekly practitioner notes: sign up at camillefreeman.com (or grab a freebie and join the list at the same time)
If you want to check out the new setup, head to the freebies page; some are still in transition, so you might see a mix of old and new setups. If there's something in your own practice that doesn't feel in alignment anymore, I hope this gives you a little wiggle room to change it. You can always change it back 🖤
Thanks for listening.
I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a voicemail with feedback or submit a question (click the pink "Send Camille a Message" button on the side of the page) 💚
Camille's Helpful Links for Practitioners
WEBVTT
00:00:00.487 --> 00:00:03.977
Hi there! Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman,
00:00:03.977 --> 00:00:07.847
and in this show, I share tips, tidbits, and resources for herbalists and nutritionists
00:00:07.847 --> 00:00:08.985
who are in private practice.
00:00:09.821 --> 00:00:13.117
Today, I wanted to give you some behind-the-scenes information about a change
00:00:13.117 --> 00:00:17.547
that I am in the midst of making relating to freebies on my website.
00:00:18.174 --> 00:00:21.152
If you have read my book, Write Better Newsletters, you'll know in the book,
00:00:21.477 --> 00:00:27.447
I talk about how several years back, I decided to just let go of any gating
00:00:27.447 --> 00:00:31.067
of my freebies, meaning you do not have to sign up for my email list to just
00:00:31.067 --> 00:00:32.914
get the freebies that I have on offer.
00:00:33.691 --> 00:00:37.277
My thinking there it was essentially that if somebody wants to be on my email
00:00:37.277 --> 00:00:41.077
list amazing I would like to have them but if all they want is the freebie and
00:00:41.077 --> 00:00:44.477
they don't actually want to hear from me every week I really don't want that energy on my
00:00:44.907 --> 00:00:49.133
you know I want to be sending my weekly practitioner notes to people who actually want to receive them
00:00:49.568 --> 00:00:52.244
so I thought why not just make it easy for people to,
00:00:52.865 --> 00:00:57.257
get what they want without having to sign up for my email list so I went through
00:00:57.257 --> 00:01:01.211
and I changed everything so that you could just click to download and my freebies,
00:01:01.664 --> 00:01:04.108
and I had a setup where I could email them to you,
00:01:04.677 --> 00:01:09.762
and or email them to you and add you to my mailing list depending on what you wanted.
00:01:10.642 --> 00:01:14.247
So recently I've been thinking about this and I've had kind of a change of heart
00:01:14.247 --> 00:01:18.397
around the whole thing and some of it has to do with just the way that my business
00:01:18.397 --> 00:01:22.264
is structured, some of it has to do with how things are working in the world today,
00:01:22.734 --> 00:01:27.030
and some of it has to do with AI and how AI is interacting with websites.
00:01:27.745 --> 00:01:34.252
So let me share why I've decided to start requiring an email address to get my freebies.
00:01:35.221 --> 00:01:40.587
Well, for the first thing is that I read, or I didn't read, I heard on a podcast,
00:01:40.587 --> 00:01:43.997
I wish I had bookmarked it, or I could remember which one. I believe it was
00:01:43.997 --> 00:01:45.670
an NPR podcast, but I can't be sure.
00:01:46.263 --> 00:01:50.338
Anyway, the hosts were talking about how a recent study had shown that,
00:01:50.954 --> 00:01:56.485
I forget if it was 60 or 70% of Google searches don't end in a click anymore.
00:01:57.129 --> 00:02:02.377
Meaning people are just reading the AI summary the AI summary of whatever their
00:02:02.377 --> 00:02:06.097
question was without actually clicking through to verify anything this was a
00:02:06.097 --> 00:02:08.817
little bit of a shock to me because I actually have those AI summaries turned
00:02:08.817 --> 00:02:11.717
off because I'm specifically trying not to use them,
00:02:12.239 --> 00:02:14.597
so I hadn't realized that was,
00:02:15.197 --> 00:02:18.387
quite so pervasive and I'm also finding like wow on my own website,
00:02:18.996 --> 00:02:23.722
overall traffic is way way down and I think it has to do with what's happening I do know that.
00:02:24.492 --> 00:02:27.598
Things from my website are showing up in AI search results for people.
00:02:27.598 --> 00:02:31.406
I'm getting people saying, oh, I found you through ChatGPT or what have you.
00:02:32.076 --> 00:02:37.178
So the landscape is definitely changing. And, you know, I know that AI tools
00:02:37.178 --> 00:02:40.540
are very sophisticated at this point and that putting,
00:02:41.103 --> 00:02:45.858
my freebies behind a, it's not a paywall, but requiring an email address isn't
00:02:45.858 --> 00:02:47.837
necessarily going to be a major,
00:02:48.435 --> 00:02:53.317
road bump for AI scrapers that are going through and gathering content.
00:02:53.843 --> 00:02:58.228
But I also thought you know these freebies are things that I put a lot of time
00:02:58.228 --> 00:03:03.514
and love into and I would just rather them have a speed bump in front of them,
00:03:04.218 --> 00:03:08.188
even though I know the speed bump is not 100% accurate and so on and so forth
00:03:08.188 --> 00:03:10.838
but it does make it a little bit more complicated and makes it a little bit
00:03:10.838 --> 00:03:15.240
more challenging for some you know one of these AI,
00:03:15.887 --> 00:03:20.018
scraping tools to get to that material and I am working on creating some more
00:03:20.018 --> 00:03:22.986
freebies I have some great ideas that are going to be coming out in the fall.
00:03:23.537 --> 00:03:27.118
So I thought, you know what, I think that my mind has changed on this.
00:03:27.118 --> 00:03:33.593
I think that for right now, I'm just going to have freebies so that people can,
00:03:34.109 --> 00:03:37.076
put in their email address, they can get the freebie email to them.
00:03:37.615 --> 00:03:42.198
And if they truly find my practitioner notes that go out once a week to be incredibly
00:03:42.198 --> 00:03:45.568
bothersome, or they're not reading them or whatever, there is an unsubscribe
00:03:45.568 --> 00:03:49.469
button in every single one, they can just click that and leave the list.
00:03:49.997 --> 00:03:51.431
So that's kind of my thinking, that.
00:03:52.287 --> 00:03:55.677
I've evolved and the situation has evolved over time.
00:03:56.351 --> 00:03:59.115
And so I'm going to be doing it differently. And maybe I'll try this for six
00:03:59.115 --> 00:04:00.405
months and change my mind and
00:04:00.405 --> 00:04:03.717
say, oh, no, never mind. I think the old way was better and go back to it.
00:04:04.352 --> 00:04:08.925
But for right now, this feels more in alignment with the way that I want to
00:04:08.925 --> 00:04:11.882
be moving through our current landscape.
00:04:12.345 --> 00:04:17.848
So I'm in the process of all the back end stuff that goes into setting up,
00:04:18.220 --> 00:04:23.275
you know, email, you know, setting up the email, the process of getting an email,
00:04:23.275 --> 00:04:26.632
you know, having these freebies emailed to you, depending on which one you want and so forth.
00:04:26.992 --> 00:04:30.815
I am still not a big fan of what they call the funnel, where you get one of
00:04:30.815 --> 00:04:34.242
these freebies and then you get 17 emails trying to get you to buy something.
00:04:34.689 --> 00:04:39.575
My plan is I'm going to send you the email with the link to the thing that you
00:04:39.575 --> 00:04:43.025
had wanted. I will send you one follow-up email in case the first one fell through.
00:04:43.420 --> 00:04:46.005
I know that happens to a lot of people. And then I'm just going to pop people
00:04:46.005 --> 00:04:51.745
into my regular practitioner notes email list for them to go about their merry
00:04:51.745 --> 00:04:53.160
way and unsubscribe if they want.
00:04:53.554 --> 00:04:57.005
I'm going to be keeping a really close eye on unsubscribes from people who've
00:04:57.005 --> 00:05:01.945
come in through one of the freebies. And if I notice that most people are getting
00:05:01.945 --> 00:05:05.679
the freebie and then unsubscribing, I may go back to a different,
00:05:06.236 --> 00:05:08.552
you know, to the old method or think of something different.
00:05:09.232 --> 00:05:12.912
And that's just something I'm going to, I'm going to be watching over time.
00:05:13.753 --> 00:05:17.905
So there you go. I've been doing this rearranging behind the scenes.
00:05:17.905 --> 00:05:23.110
I also rearranged my navigation menu to make it easier to find some of the free,
00:05:23.656 --> 00:05:28.055
resources that I have available. So a lot of tidying under the hood has been
00:05:28.055 --> 00:05:29.862
happening at Bloom and Grow these past few months.
00:05:30.192 --> 00:05:34.802
If you want to check it out, you can go to camillefreeman.com slash freebies and see what's on offer.
00:05:35.045 --> 00:05:37.745
Like I said, I'm going to be adding some more, a couple more things I have in
00:05:37.745 --> 00:05:39.504
mind for the fall. So stay tuned.
00:05:40.014 --> 00:05:43.015
And you might see that some of them are still just download.
00:05:43.015 --> 00:05:46.375
They're not behind the email yet because it takes a long time to get all this
00:05:46.375 --> 00:05:48.112
set up and I'm doing them one by one so,
00:05:48.657 --> 00:05:51.845
I'm making my way some of the free like I have a couple freebies that are just
00:05:51.845 --> 00:05:55.265
classes that are available on YouTube and so those I'm just like if they're
00:05:55.265 --> 00:05:56.498
on YouTube people can watch them,
00:05:57.073 --> 00:06:01.415
great go for it but the other ones I am going to put behind that email the email
00:06:01.415 --> 00:06:04.865
gate and just play with that for a little while and see what happens so the
00:06:04.865 --> 00:06:07.635
big takeaway here is not necessarily what you should do with your freebies if
00:06:07.635 --> 00:06:10.705
you have them or if you don't have them I'm not saying you need them.
00:06:10.705 --> 00:06:12.068
That's certainly not my implication.
00:06:12.381 --> 00:06:14.935
But what I wanted to do is just give you an example of changing your mind.
00:06:15.185 --> 00:06:16.584
My mind. I'm changing my mind here.
00:06:17.008 --> 00:06:19.893
Because this is what happens when you're in practice.
00:06:20.421 --> 00:06:23.846
Your thinking shifts, the landscape shifts, things are different.
00:06:24.241 --> 00:06:27.215
And so you might have said like, oh, this is what feels really good for me right
00:06:27.215 --> 00:06:30.562
now. And then a few years later, something else might feel really good. And that's okay.
00:06:31.201 --> 00:06:35.415
That's part of adapting to your environment and adjusting to the conditions
00:06:35.415 --> 00:06:36.327
that you find yourself in.
00:06:36.808 --> 00:06:40.065
So if you need to change your mind, feel free to do so.
00:06:40.065 --> 00:06:43.755
I hope this gives you a little bit of wiggle room to reconsider some of your
00:06:43.755 --> 00:06:47.285
own strategies. If you need to, if you get to where they just don't feel right
00:06:47.285 --> 00:06:49.225
on your heart, it's okay to change
00:06:49.225 --> 00:06:52.062
them and see what happens and you could change them back if you need to.
00:06:52.729 --> 00:06:55.755
All right, I hope that helps. If you want to check out the freebies,
00:06:55.755 --> 00:06:57.756
like I said, go to camillefreeman.com slash freebies.
00:06:58.198 --> 00:07:01.425
Or if you want to just sign up for my practitioner notes and you don't care
00:07:01.425 --> 00:07:04.926
about the freebies, you can do that on my website as well. I'll put the links in the show notes.
00:07:05.454 --> 00:07:09.725
Otherwise, I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. I will be back soon.
00:07:09.725 --> 00:07:11.853
Thank you so much for the work you do and take care.
00:00:00.487 --> 00:00:03.977
Hi there! Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman,
00:00:03.977 --> 00:00:07.847
and in this show, I share tips, tidbits, and resources for herbalists and nutritionists
00:00:07.847 --> 00:00:08.985
who are in private practice.
00:00:09.821 --> 00:00:13.117
Today, I wanted to give you some behind-the-scenes information about a change
00:00:13.117 --> 00:00:17.547
that I am in the midst of making relating to freebies on my website.
00:00:18.174 --> 00:00:21.152
If you have read my book, Write Better Newsletters, you'll know in the book,
00:00:21.477 --> 00:00:27.447
I talk about how several years back, I decided to just let go of any gating
00:00:27.447 --> 00:00:31.067
of my freebies, meaning you do not have to sign up for my email list to just
00:00:31.067 --> 00:00:32.914
get the freebies that I have on offer.
00:00:33.691 --> 00:00:37.277
My thinking there it was essentially that if somebody wants to be on my email
00:00:37.277 --> 00:00:41.077
list amazing I would like to have them but if all they want is the freebie and
00:00:41.077 --> 00:00:44.477
they don't actually want to hear from me every week I really don't want that energy on my
00:00:44.907 --> 00:00:49.133
you know I want to be sending my weekly practitioner notes to people who actually want to receive them
00:00:49.568 --> 00:00:52.244
so I thought why not just make it easy for people to,
00:00:52.865 --> 00:00:57.257
get what they want without having to sign up for my email list so I went through
00:00:57.257 --> 00:01:01.211
and I changed everything so that you could just click to download and my freebies,
00:01:01.664 --> 00:01:04.108
and I had a setup where I could email them to you,
00:01:04.677 --> 00:01:09.762
and or email them to you and add you to my mailing list depending on what you wanted.
00:01:10.642 --> 00:01:14.247
So recently I've been thinking about this and I've had kind of a change of heart
00:01:14.247 --> 00:01:18.397
around the whole thing and some of it has to do with just the way that my business
00:01:18.397 --> 00:01:22.264
is structured, some of it has to do with how things are working in the world today,
00:01:22.734 --> 00:01:27.030
and some of it has to do with AI and how AI is interacting with websites.
00:01:27.745 --> 00:01:34.252
So let me share why I've decided to start requiring an email address to get my freebies.
00:01:35.221 --> 00:01:40.587
Well, for the first thing is that I read, or I didn't read, I heard on a podcast,
00:01:40.587 --> 00:01:43.997
I wish I had bookmarked it, or I could remember which one. I believe it was
00:01:43.997 --> 00:01:45.670
an NPR podcast, but I can't be sure.
00:01:46.263 --> 00:01:50.338
Anyway, the hosts were talking about how a recent study had shown that,
00:01:50.954 --> 00:01:56.485
I forget if it was 60 or 70% of Google searches don't end in a click anymore.
00:01:57.129 --> 00:02:02.377
Meaning people are just reading the AI summary the AI summary of whatever their
00:02:02.377 --> 00:02:06.097
question was without actually clicking through to verify anything this was a
00:02:06.097 --> 00:02:08.817
little bit of a shock to me because I actually have those AI summaries turned
00:02:08.817 --> 00:02:11.717
off because I'm specifically trying not to use them,
00:02:12.239 --> 00:02:14.597
so I hadn't realized that was,
00:02:15.197 --> 00:02:18.387
quite so pervasive and I'm also finding like wow on my own website,
00:02:18.996 --> 00:02:23.722
overall traffic is way way down and I think it has to do with what's happening I do know that.
00:02:24.492 --> 00:02:27.598
Things from my website are showing up in AI search results for people.
00:02:27.598 --> 00:02:31.406
I'm getting people saying, oh, I found you through ChatGPT or what have you.
00:02:32.076 --> 00:02:37.178
So the landscape is definitely changing. And, you know, I know that AI tools
00:02:37.178 --> 00:02:40.540
are very sophisticated at this point and that putting,
00:02:41.103 --> 00:02:45.858
my freebies behind a, it's not a paywall, but requiring an email address isn't
00:02:45.858 --> 00:02:47.837
necessarily going to be a major,
00:02:48.435 --> 00:02:53.317
road bump for AI scrapers that are going through and gathering content.
00:02:53.843 --> 00:02:58.228
But I also thought you know these freebies are things that I put a lot of time
00:02:58.228 --> 00:03:03.514
and love into and I would just rather them have a speed bump in front of them,
00:03:04.218 --> 00:03:08.188
even though I know the speed bump is not 100% accurate and so on and so forth
00:03:08.188 --> 00:03:10.838
but it does make it a little bit more complicated and makes it a little bit
00:03:10.838 --> 00:03:15.240
more challenging for some you know one of these AI,
00:03:15.887 --> 00:03:20.018
scraping tools to get to that material and I am working on creating some more
00:03:20.018 --> 00:03:22.986
freebies I have some great ideas that are going to be coming out in the fall.
00:03:23.537 --> 00:03:27.118
So I thought, you know what, I think that my mind has changed on this.
00:03:27.118 --> 00:03:33.593
I think that for right now, I'm just going to have freebies so that people can,
00:03:34.109 --> 00:03:37.076
put in their email address, they can get the freebie email to them.
00:03:37.615 --> 00:03:42.198
And if they truly find my practitioner notes that go out once a week to be incredibly
00:03:42.198 --> 00:03:45.568
bothersome, or they're not reading them or whatever, there is an unsubscribe
00:03:45.568 --> 00:03:49.469
button in every single one, they can just click that and leave the list.
00:03:49.997 --> 00:03:51.431
So that's kind of my thinking, that.
00:03:52.287 --> 00:03:55.677
I've evolved and the situation has evolved over time.
00:03:56.351 --> 00:03:59.115
And so I'm going to be doing it differently. And maybe I'll try this for six
00:03:59.115 --> 00:04:00.405
months and change my mind and
00:04:00.405 --> 00:04:03.717
say, oh, no, never mind. I think the old way was better and go back to it.
00:04:04.352 --> 00:04:08.925
But for right now, this feels more in alignment with the way that I want to
00:04:08.925 --> 00:04:11.882
be moving through our current landscape.
00:04:12.345 --> 00:04:17.848
So I'm in the process of all the back end stuff that goes into setting up,
00:04:18.220 --> 00:04:23.275
you know, email, you know, setting up the email, the process of getting an email,
00:04:23.275 --> 00:04:26.632
you know, having these freebies emailed to you, depending on which one you want and so forth.
00:04:26.992 --> 00:04:30.815
I am still not a big fan of what they call the funnel, where you get one of
00:04:30.815 --> 00:04:34.242
these freebies and then you get 17 emails trying to get you to buy something.
00:04:34.689 --> 00:04:39.575
My plan is I'm going to send you the email with the link to the thing that you
00:04:39.575 --> 00:04:43.025
had wanted. I will send you one follow-up email in case the first one fell through.
00:04:43.420 --> 00:04:46.005
I know that happens to a lot of people. And then I'm just going to pop people
00:04:46.005 --> 00:04:51.745
into my regular practitioner notes email list for them to go about their merry
00:04:51.745 --> 00:04:53.160
way and unsubscribe if they want.
00:04:53.554 --> 00:04:57.005
I'm going to be keeping a really close eye on unsubscribes from people who've
00:04:57.005 --> 00:05:01.945
come in through one of the freebies. And if I notice that most people are getting
00:05:01.945 --> 00:05:05.679
the freebie and then unsubscribing, I may go back to a different,
00:05:06.236 --> 00:05:08.552
you know, to the old method or think of something different.
00:05:09.232 --> 00:05:12.912
And that's just something I'm going to, I'm going to be watching over time.
00:05:13.753 --> 00:05:17.905
So there you go. I've been doing this rearranging behind the scenes.
00:05:17.905 --> 00:05:23.110
I also rearranged my navigation menu to make it easier to find some of the free,
00:05:23.656 --> 00:05:28.055
resources that I have available. So a lot of tidying under the hood has been
00:05:28.055 --> 00:05:29.862
happening at Bloom and Grow these past few months.
00:05:30.192 --> 00:05:34.802
If you want to check it out, you can go to camillefreeman.com slash freebies and see what's on offer.
00:05:35.045 --> 00:05:37.745
Like I said, I'm going to be adding some more, a couple more things I have in
00:05:37.745 --> 00:05:39.504
mind for the fall. So stay tuned.
00:05:40.014 --> 00:05:43.015
And you might see that some of them are still just download.
00:05:43.015 --> 00:05:46.375
They're not behind the email yet because it takes a long time to get all this
00:05:46.375 --> 00:05:48.112
set up and I'm doing them one by one so,
00:05:48.657 --> 00:05:51.845
I'm making my way some of the free like I have a couple freebies that are just
00:05:51.845 --> 00:05:55.265
classes that are available on YouTube and so those I'm just like if they're
00:05:55.265 --> 00:05:56.498
on YouTube people can watch them,
00:05:57.073 --> 00:06:01.415
great go for it but the other ones I am going to put behind that email the email
00:06:01.415 --> 00:06:04.865
gate and just play with that for a little while and see what happens so the
00:06:04.865 --> 00:06:07.635
big takeaway here is not necessarily what you should do with your freebies if
00:06:07.635 --> 00:06:10.705
you have them or if you don't have them I'm not saying you need them.
00:06:10.705 --> 00:06:12.068
That's certainly not my implication.
00:06:12.381 --> 00:06:14.935
But what I wanted to do is just give you an example of changing your mind.
00:06:15.185 --> 00:06:16.584
My mind. I'm changing my mind here.
00:06:17.008 --> 00:06:19.893
Because this is what happens when you're in practice.
00:06:20.421 --> 00:06:23.846
Your thinking shifts, the landscape shifts, things are different.
00:06:24.241 --> 00:06:27.215
And so you might have said like, oh, this is what feels really good for me right
00:06:27.215 --> 00:06:30.562
now. And then a few years later, something else might feel really good. And that's okay.
00:06:31.201 --> 00:06:35.415
That's part of adapting to your environment and adjusting to the conditions
00:06:35.415 --> 00:06:36.327
that you find yourself in.
00:06:36.808 --> 00:06:40.065
So if you need to change your mind, feel free to do so.
00:06:40.065 --> 00:06:43.755
I hope this gives you a little bit of wiggle room to reconsider some of your
00:06:43.755 --> 00:06:47.285
own strategies. If you need to, if you get to where they just don't feel right
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on your heart, it's okay to change
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them and see what happens and you could change them back if you need to.
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All right, I hope that helps. If you want to check out the freebies,
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like I said, go to camillefreeman.com slash freebies.
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Or if you want to just sign up for my practitioner notes and you don't care
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about the freebies, you can do that on my website as well. I'll put the links in the show notes.
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Otherwise, I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. I will be back soon.
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Thank you so much for the work you do and take care.