Pizza Muffins

Ingredients:

• 2 Cups All-Purpose Flour
• 1 Tbsp. Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp. Baking Soda
• 1/4 Cup Sugar
• 1 tsp. Each Salt and Dried Basil
• 1 Cup Cheddar Cheese, cubed
• 2 Eggs
• 1 Cup Yogurt
• 1/4 Cup Butter, melted
• 1/4 Cup Pizza Sauce
• 1/2 Cup Mozzarella, shredded

 

Directions:

 

Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners. In a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, salt, and basil. Stir in cheddar cubes.

 

In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, yogurt and butter until smooth. Stir into flour mixture just until well combined and no dry spots remain. Add batter into muffin cups, dividing evenly. Spoon 1 tsp. pizza sauce on top of each muffin; sprinkle each with shredded mozzarella.

 

Bake at 400 F for 20 minutes or until golden and a toothpick inserted in center of one of middle muffins comes out clean. Let muffins cool in the pan for at least 5 minutes before removing, then let cool completely on a wire rack. (Freeze muffins in an airtight container for up to 1 month; defrost at room temperature.)

 

Sides:

 

• Spinach salad with dressing
• Fruit punch

Mini Calzones

Ingredients:

 

• 1 Roll Your Favorite Biscuits 
• 1/2 Ricotta Cheese 
• 2 Cups Shredded Mozzarella
• 2 tsps. Grated Parmesan Cheese
• Dash Salt 
• Dash Garlic Powder

 

Directions:

 

Open the biscuits and roll each one out flat with a rolling pin. If the dough sticks to the rolling pin take a little bit of flour and sprinkle over the rolling pin. 

 

For each biscuit add a 1/4 tsp. of Parmesan cheese onto one half of the flattened biscuit. Then add 3 Tbsps. of mozzarella and a tsp. of ricotta. Sprinkle with a little salt and garlic powder. Fold the biscuit over on itself. Crimp with a fork. 

 

Cook at 350F for 14-17 minutes or until the biscuit is golden brown. 

 

Sides:

 

• Spaghetti sauce for dipping
• Green salad with dressing
• Iced tea

Ham & Mozzarella Sticks

 

Ingredients:

 

• 4 Ham Slices
• 2 String Cheese Sticks
• 2 Green Olives
• 2 Toothpicks

 

Directions:

 

Take two ham slices and wrap around one cheese stick. Add the olive to the seam and secure with the toothpick. 

 

Serves: 1

 

Sides:

 

• Red Seedless Grapes
• Mini Pretzels
• 100% Real Juice Box

 

Italian Sausage & Broccoli Egg Muffins

Ingredients:

 

• 1 lb. Italian Sausage
• 8 Large Eggs
• 1 Cup Broccoli Florets
• 1/2 Tbsp. Vegetable Oil
• 1/4 Cup Milk
• 1/2 tsp. Baking Powder
• Salt & Pepper to Taste
• Freshly Grated Parmesan Cheese

 

Directions:

 

In a large pan, fry up the sausage until it’s no longer pink.  Remove from heat and add broccoli florets

 

In a medium bowl whisk together eggs, milk, oil, baking powder and salt and pepper.

 

Lightly spray a 12 cup muffin pan with oil. Spoon the sausage mixture evenly into each tin. Pour the egg mixture over the top and sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

 

Bake for 15-20 minutes at 375 F

 

Refrigerate lunch portions overnight and add to lunch box in the morning. It’s portable and yummy!

 

Sides:

 

• Jello with fruit at the bottom
• Apple slices
• Milk

Banana Burrito Ideas

Peanut Butter & Jelly

 

• Whole-Wheat Tortilla
• 2 Tbsps. Peanut Butter
• Banana
• 1 Tbsp. Jelly

 

Nutella and Peanut Butter

 

• Tortilla
• 2 tbsp. Peanut Butter
• Banana
• 1 tbsp. Nutella 

 

Fluffer Nuttier Roll-Up 

 

• Tortilla
• 2 tbsp. Peanut Butter
• Banana
• 1 tbsp. Marshmallow Fluff

 

Directions:

 

Spread peanut butter over the tortilla. Peel banana and put it at the edge of the tortilla. Spread the banana with your optional topping (jelly, Nutella, marshmallow fluff) and then roll up the tortilla.  Fold the ends to hold all the ingredients inside.  For a yummy alternative warm up the tortilla in the microwave for 10-15 seconds for an ooey gooey treat.

 

Pair with these items to make a delicious lunch your child will love:

• Fruit cup
• Yogurt
• Non-sugary drink like Water, Bai, or Crystal Light

Develop A Game Plan For The Future

We touched a little at the end of yesterday’s blog post on the whole idea of moving forward and continuing to improve our email marketing game. Trust me, there’s always room for improvement, for anyone, including me. While an audit like this is a great way to update and improve things, it’s just as important to keep an eye on things and tweak them more regularly going forward. At the same time, it’s easy to put this task on the back burner and focus on new and exciting or more urgent tasks instead. That’s why it’s important to make a plan to keep improving your auto-responder going forward. 

 

Let’s start by looking at some of the things we already talked about. It’s a good idea to review your lead magnet and consider changing it out every three to six months. Go ahead and put that on the calendar. As previously mentioned, you also want to continue to add new auto-responder messages to the list. You can either set aside a particular day of the week to do that, or work on it in larger batches. Let’s say you’re going to add one new email message per week. You could put it on the calendar as a weekly activity that gets done every Tuesday morning for example. Or, if you prefer to work in batches, you could set aside a day every couple of months where you write and add 3 months’ worth of emails. Find a rhythm that works for you and then get in the habit of doing it regularly. 

 

Next, I want to share three other tasks related to list building and email marketing that you want to plan on doing regularly going forward. They are all important as is everything we’ve talked about so far. Make them a priority, put them on the calendar and get it done. Your list and your business will grow that much faster when you do. 

 

The first thing is to make it a habit to look at your opt-in stats. We talked in earlier posts about how much you can learn from them. Look at open rates and unsubscribes in particular. The most important stat for your bottom line is of course how many people take you up on your offers. Study any email offers or solo emails that are converting well for you and try to do more along those lines. 

 

Next, you want to look at your opt-in conversion rates. Play around with your opt-in forms and pages, the placement of the forms, the copy etc. and see if you can get that percentage to go up. Most auto-responder services give you the ability to split test your forms and pages. Take advantage of that. Set up tests and always have one running. Continue to try to beat your previous conversion rate. 

 

Last but not least consider setting up different opt-in funnels. You can target specific subsets of your target audience with special funnels designed just for them. This allows you to speak directly to them and their particular needs. Of course, you could also go wide by setting up a funnel on a related topic that your current readers may also be interested in. Continue to grow your list by setting up new funnels and new auto responders on a regular basis. 

Are Your Messages Serving You And Making You Money?

 

In the last blog post, we looked at the messages in the auto-responder sequence to make sure they are serving our audience. Today we’re going to go through that list again, but this time we’re making sure they also serve us and help us make money. Remember what I mentioned yesterday about taking care of our audience and only providing offers that add value to ensure long-term growth. Today is all about getting more people to look at those quality offers and taking us up on them. 

 

Your best friend here is the analytics data from your auto-responder service and anything else you measure like click through on affiliate links etc. You may even want to dig around Google Analytics and see what helpful data you can find there. Setting up goals for example is a good idea to see what’s working and where in a funnel you’re losing people. 

 

I find it helps to track three different metrics when it comes to this. The first if of course the open rate. If your subscribers don’t even bother to open your emails, you need to do something. Start by looking at the subject line and see what you can do to improve it. If that doesn’t work, it may be a problem with the subject matter. In that case, I suggest replacing the message with something different. 

 

The second metric you want to keep an eye on is click through rate for any links in your email messages. If you’re not getting clicks, chances are that you’re either not writing a strong enough call to action or that the content and/or offer isn’t all that interesting to your readers. In either case that’s something you want to fix. Go back to what you’ve learned about your audience and what interests them and what they need to solve their problems. Craft the offers and content with them in mind. Keep going back to the questions of what they need to know and what they need next that we talked about in yesterday’s post. 

 

The third metric you want to take a look at is unsubscribes. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that you panic and delete messages anytime you see someone unsubscribe. Instead, I want you to look at the big picture here. You will always have some people unsubscribe from your list at various points in the message sequence. What you want to look for is spikes in unsubscribes at a particular message. Look at those emails. Is the topic different from what you usually share? Did you try to sell your readers too hard on a product you love? Rework those messages, toning down the copy, or even replacing it with something that’s better suited (either product or content) to your target audience and see if you can improve those stats. 

 

There’s a lot you can learn from your stats and from what your readers tell you. Start to pay attention, start to listen, and start to take action going forward. You’ll find yourself becoming a better and better email marketer as time goes by. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s really about isn’t it? It’s about finding your audience, serving them, and making a comfortable living in the process. 

Are Your Messages Serving Your Customers?

We started to audit our auto-responder messages yesterday by reworking the welcome email. Now it’s time to tackle the rest of them. If you followed my advice of signing up for your own list with a separate email account, you can edit and work through them as they hit your inbox. Another option is to open them and edit them one at a time as time permits in your auto-responder dashboard. Either options works, just make sure it gets done sooner rather than later. 

 

Today we going to look at each of those messages from the point of view of our subscribers and customers. You want to look at both the content and the offers you are presenting them with. Let’s run through some questions you may want to ask yourself as you read through each of the email messages. 

 

First though, spend a few minutes defining your target audience and your ideal subscriber. The more you know about this person, the easier it will become to edit these messages and craft new ones going forward. Picture your ideal customer and subscriber as a fictional character. Be as detailed and clear as possible. This will be the person you’re writing to as you work on all your email marketing. 

 

Does The Subject Line Grab Their Attention? 

 

Start by examining the subject line of each message. It’s what determines whether or not your subscribers open your email. It can be helpful to look at the stats in you auto-responder software to find out what emails have high open rates and which ones don’t. Rework the subject lines of underperformers and see if you can’t find a way to grab your readers’ attention. 

 

Are You Serving Them With The Content You’re Sharing? 

 

Next, take a look at the content you’re sharing in your emails as well as the content you’re pointing them to in your messages. Maybe you’re linking to a blog post or a video. Examine each piece of content and ask yourself if it serves your audience. Are you helping your readers? Are you answering their questions, addressing their concerns, or entertaining them? Keep your ideal subscriber in mind as you work through the content. If something doesn’t serve them, take it out of the auto-responder sequence or edit and change as needed. 

 

Remember, you’re building a relationship here and you have to earn your subscribers’ trust before they will become an integral part of your customer base and your online business. 

 

Do The Order Of Messages Make Sense? 

 

As you are working your way through your auto-responder messages, it’s also a good idea to review the order of your messages. Is it making sense and is it presenting your readers with information, tips and offers in progressive order that makes sense? You don’t want to present the solution to a problem you haven’t discussed with them yet for example. 

 

Review the order and timing of your auto-responder emails and tweak it as needed. You’ll be surprised how much difference a simple switch in emails can make when it comes to open rates, and sales from your product recommendations. 

 

What Do They Need or Need To Know Next? 

 

Another way to look at this as you’re editing your a/r sequence is to ask yourself what else your readers need and what they need to know next. Not only does this help with the order of messages, asking yourself this question continuously will also help you to come up with more and more messages to add to your auto-responder. That’s something you want to continue doing going forward. In fact, now is the perfect time to put that on the calendar to make sure it happens. 

 

Is This The Best Product To Recommend? 

 

Last but not least, let’s talk about monetizing your list. Yes, you want to make offers and start earning a nice little income from your list. At the same time though, you should also have your subscribers’ best interest in mind. Are the products you’re recommending worth the money? Are they a good fit for your readers? Don’t make offers for offers sake. Make offers because you know this is something that will provide value to your audience. 

 

Go through the messages one at a time and improve what you can. Don’t be afraid to delete entire emails if they don’t serve your customers and subscribers and replace them with something else. Quality always trumps quantity here and you should be protective of your readers. Nothing kills a list faster than hitting them up with a bunch of crappy offers to make a quick buck. You’re in this for the long run and that means taking care of your people and your tribe. 

How Welcoming Is Your Welcome Email?

Today it’s time to rework the welcome email. I have yet to come across one that couldn’t use some improvement. More often than not, we write it up quickly during the process of setting up our list and then never look at it again. That’s really a shame, because it is the email that has the highest open rate of anything you send and is seen by just about every single person that signs up for your list. More importantly, those readers are hot leads. They just found you and signed up for your list and your lead magnet. They are very interested in what you have to say and what you can do to help them. In short, you have their full attention. Don’t waste that. Instead, use it wisely. 

 

By using their attention wisely, you can continue to nurture and grow the relationship with your readers, you can set expectations, and you can pre-sell them on the offer you present them with on the download or thank you page that we talked about in yesterday’s blog post. Let’s quickly go over the different components of a good welcome email. 

 

The subject line should be to the point and let them know exactly what this is about. Reference your site or your lead magnet in there. Next you want to give your readers a warm welcome. Tell them a little about you and your site. This is also a great place to set expectations. You can greatly improve your future email open rates if you let them know what’s coming and why they don’t want to miss it. 

 

If you publish a weekly newsletter, share a little bit about what’s in those newsletters, what day of the week they usually arrive in their email inbox, and what tag to look for in the subject line. Let’s say you publish a weekly newsletter for young parents. You may choose a tag like [Parenting News] as part of your subject line for each issue. Mention that in your welcome email so your readers can start looking for it. 

 

If you have an auto-responder sequence set up, tease them about what’s coming in the first email of the sequence and let them know when to look for it. You can also hint at exclusive content, coupons and the likes that are coming in the coming weeks and months. 

 

Last but not least, encourage your subscribers to hit reply and email you. Ask them a question, suggest that they share a tip etc. Get them to reply to you. Not only does this allow you to take the relationship to the next level and give you a chance to get to know your audience better, it also greatly improves your overall list delivery rates. 

 

Use this as a guideline to rework your own email, keeping your target audience in mind along the way. Try it out and see how well it’s working for you. As your understanding of your niche and your target audience grows, you may want to revisit and tweak the message. Make it a point to look at it every six months or so to make sure it still serves you and your readers well.