Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future

Ep #183: Melanie Gorman: Lead Generation Made Simple — No Tricks, Just Results

• Beate Chelette • Episode 183

Share episode

Had an AHA or Insight? Share it:

Tired of complicated marketing strategies that don’t deliver? Melanie Gorman, founder of Crownsville Media, shares how to attract leads by being real, staying consistent, and ditching fear-based tactics. If you want a smarter, more human way to get clients—without the hype—this conversation is for you.

Melanie Gorman didn’t set out to be a digital strategist—she started her career in mental health. But like many purpose-driven professionals, she quickly realized that her impact would be limited unless she learned how to reach clients. That realization set her on a new path—one that turned her into a sought after marketing partner for therapists, coaches, and entrepreneurs who want to market themselves authentically.

In this lets-keep-it-real episode of the Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future, Melanie shares how her background in therapy helped her decode the emotional blocks that keep many business owners stuck—especially when it comes to promoting themselves. From why we feel resistance to marketing, to the subtle self-worth issues that show up in client attraction, she goes into why we want to find and yet avoid doing the work to find leads and offers grounded, compassionate solutions. Melanie also outlines how to use your intake calls, website language, and SEO strategy to align with your values and attract leads—without ever resorting to fear-based messaging.

Marketing has a bad name, mostly because of outdated fear based tactics. This episode offers a mindset shift. Whether you’re burned out from bro-marketing, confused by SEO, or struggling to explain what makes you different, Melanie offers clarity, strategy, and a deep respect for the real humans behind every brand.
 👉 To learn more about how Melanie and her team help service professionals grow with integrity, visit crownsvillemedia.com and book a free consultation.


Resources Mentioned:  Website | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube

_____________________
We appreciate you, thank you for listening. Let us know in the comments what resonated in this episode, we want to hear from you.

Leave a comment, like, share with one person who needs to hear the message our guest shared.

Take our QUIZ and find out what your talent is worth in this market: What's Your Talent Worth (http://WhatsYourTalentWorth.com)

Follow us on Instagram:
Check us out on Tik Tok:
Work With Us

Melanie Gorman:

Hi, I'm Melanie Gorman. I'm the founder of Crownsville Media, and on my episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, I share some tips and tricks that you can put into practice right now for how to get leads from not just somewhere, but from anywhere.

BEATE CHELETTE:

This is the Business Growth Architect Show for founders who don't follow trends. They set them for entrepreneurs who aren't here to fix the past, but to build the future they actually want to live in. Hi. My name is Beate Chelette. I'm a Palisades fire survivor strategist and the entrepreneur behind a multi million dollar tech exit Tuva Gate. And every week I bring you the fire real guests, real strategy and the real talk on how to control your mind move fast and create your future. This is where strategy needs energy, because your next level needs both. Let's grow and welcome back your host, Beate Chelette here from the Business Growth Architect Show, and our Founder of the Future is Melanie Gorman from Crownsville Media. And Melanie addresses something that many of you struggle with, and that is how to address leads. Because you leads are going to have to come from somewhere. Melanie, I'm really excited to have you on the show

Melanie Gorman:

talk about slow to topic. Thank you for having me.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Thank you so much. So Melanie, for somebody who's never heard about you or is unfamiliar with your work, tell us who you are and what problem you solve for your clients.

Melanie Gorman:

So 20 some years ago, I trained to be a mental health therapist, and not long after doing that, I realized that building a private therapy practice was very limited by all the technology. So I got into digital marketing. It's a long story, but I got into it. And what I re the problem I solve for people is how to be authentically themselves. So what I realized was that it's really difficult to be a therapist and find leads at the same time, because so much of what digital marketing asks us to do is to market based on fear, like we have to scare our clients. We have to talk about their symptoms. We have to talk about the things that they're afraid of, and we have to poke at those things in a way that inspires or motivates someone to want to be a lead. And I think there's a better way. I think there's a way to be authentically ourselves and be rooted in our values and also find people and help people out there in the world. So that's what I do today. That's the problem I solve for my

BEATE CHELETTE:

clients. Is it a fair statement to say that marketing in general? I mean, we see the same thing in internet marketing, in literally any, any, any industry. It's always this fear based if you if you don't solve the problem that hurts the most then it can be solved. I always say myself, if the fear, if the pain of staying is not greater than your fear of change, you will not make any changes. So I think we are in partially a trained environment, because that's what we expect internet marketing to do. You know, the thing the IRS won't tell you what Big Pharma hides from you. It's like all these kinds of language. Do you think that stuff even works anymore?

Melanie Gorman:

I don't know. I feel like when somebody's legitimately in a mental health crisis, when someone names the crisis on their website, like you're you know you're anxious and it's preventing you from going to work, or your trauma is preventing you from being in relationships, people identify with that, because that's what they feel, right? Those are real, live things and experiences that people have. So I do think that naming the problem is important, but there's a way to name it and then authentically lead people to getting help, versus, like, really dragging them down into the pain, right, and then over and kind of opening up the old wound and saying that's the only way to get people to get help. People are smarter than that. I think people are more intelligent. The pandemic allowed our conversation about mental health to change. So mental health is now everywhere. You can see an ad from better help on every YouTube video you ever watch, if you just give it a second. So we're pedaling mental health as opposed to authentically trying to help people own their mental health and get better. And I think the difference is, you name the symptom, you talk about the pain they're in, and then you lead them to the empowering solution that helps them to do something, as opposed to saying, you know, your life is going to be terrible if you never do something else. There's just a different way to do it.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, I agree with you that we certainly see a lot of transformational changes, and I think a lot of the changes are really good. I mean, I see this in the internet marketing world. We've talked about it on the show, on other industries, that a lot of this language just doesn't work. So it's about, if you understand, you're right. It's about finding this, this correct language between what you really feel addressing the problem without making it sort of this manipulation tool. If I understand this

Melanie Gorman:

correct exactly, I think there's a way to name what people feel so that they see themselves in your marketing, right? And I think that's a critical component. And once that happens, you can lead. Them with choices to what they want to do next, instead of pushing on the buttons of catastrophe and everything's going to fall apart, and you're going to do this to your children if you don't learn how to heal this thing. I just think there's a more value based way of doing marketing that allows intelligent people to say, I understand this is what's going on for me, and I'd like to know what my options are, because I think you could talk to people in a straightforward way, and they will do something. So I that is a way that lead gen, when I work on that with my clients, really does turn the corner. And people who don't otherwise like marketing feel better about marketing, right? Because the other side of it is the therapist needs the client to stay in business. I mean, that's a reality for all of us of being in business. So there has to be a way that we can kind of let these two things live together. You do need to market your business so people know your doors are open and that you have availability and that you're not full or out of price or and by that, I mean, like priced out of their pocketbook, because therapy is not an inexpensive thing in the United States, it's very expensive. So and at the same time, there's a lot of different options for how to get therapy, so the more you lead with information and education that's authentically who you want to be to your clients, the more the right clients show up.

BEATE CHELETTE:

How did you figure this out for yourself? Because I think that part of it is that we are trained by what we see and the courses we take and the programs we buy into. So was there a moment for you when you looked into all of this and said, Yeah, I get what they're doing, but this is not for me, and here's what I'm doing instead, was the pivotal moment you can share.

Melanie Gorman:

I have two I remember being in final years of graduate school and talking to a career counselor about what I was going to do with this degree. And I said, well, where's the class you take for how to build a private therapy practice? And she said, What do you mean? We don't do that? And I said, Well, I just took out$70,000 in loans, I would I have to pay this back, right? So how do I make an income? Because this is 25 years ago, therapists were making $8 an hour, right? There's a chain of command when you become a therapist, where you have to earn your hours, and you have to do all this effectively, pro bono work in some ways, and then low pay work in other ways, and that's how you earn the right to be a therapist. You have to earn your skill. It's not a cerebral thing. You have to practice, right? So the practicing part is just part of the journey. Anyways, this person said to me, sorry, we don't teach people how to build a business. And I thought, That's absurd. Like you would never go to get your MBA, and nobody taught you how to or get a get a law degree, and nobody would teach you or mentor you on the next steps, but it was not available, And to this day, has is not available in the in many universities like you don't learn how to build a business. So that felt strange to me, energetically, spiritually, it didn't make sense to me either. Because we value the things we spend money on, we value right the things that we invest in we really put a premium on in terms of how we spend our time, do we make good use of it? So the idea that therapy wasn't a valuable thing to invest in didn't make sense to me either, because I think our mental health is one of the most critical elements of living a healthy, happy life. Yeah, that it wasn't valued in terms of how to build a business around it as a practitioner, nor was it valued at the rates that people were charged to me. Set up this dissonance around it. I could not those two things didn't add up. So I started on this journey of trying to figure it out. And that's the that was the moment that I thought, man, there's something missing here, and I want to try to help figure it out.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Well, as a matter of fact, I have the same conversation with the lawyers that I speak to and the doctors. They also not taught how to run a business. And you know the doctors that are going to medical school, and now they're surgeons. And you know, they have what half a million in in medical school did, and now they need to figure out how to how to make that money back. They go into into hospitals, and then they hate their work, and then they try to figure out how to do their own so I think that the problem on the education versus the how to run a business with the education, how to be successful. That's a gap that, frankly, keeps you and me now in business, but it is painful on how some of these basic things are not being managed. I think you're the perfect person with your background to ask, what's the psychology behind me? And not wanting to figure out how to do the leads, or having such a difficult time with it? What is it?

Melanie Gorman:

So that's such a great question. I mean, I feel like people, there's a self worth issue that shows up for people they really do struggle with. You know, I'm the right person for the job because, I mean, that requires a level of inner confidence, and not every you. Person that, in any industry has done their own work, right? So I do think we can only take people as far as we've gone ourselves. And there is a journey that all of us, independent of our profession, are on, so spiritually, psychologically, like whatever our backstories are, and we all have them. We all came from something, right, even if it was perfect, you came from something. So a person's willingness to answer the question of why I'm the right person, why I'm the right therapist to help you, leads into feeds, into the marketing. Right? Because when we're confident, confidence is not like, I don't care what you think confidence is. I feel confident. I feel capable and like I'm the right person for the job independent of what you think, right? So that is not something that is a copywriter gives you. It's not something that's fed to you. It's something you earn, right? And you earn it by dealing with your own demons and facing the things from your past that cause you to not feel like you can stand up for yourself as a qualified professional. And I do think that that interferes with clients all the time, right? All the time. This is something where, yeah, one of the things we do in in my agency is that we interview people not unfamiliar to this situation. We interview them to listen for their their value, that they can't come right out and say, right, we've asked them questions to tell us, you know, so tell us why. If someone comes to you for anxiety, depression, trauma, like, how would you treat this person? What would you do? Like? What are the ways you would approach their unique situation? How do you like? How much value Have you put into helping people based on your own training? Because that's something that most therapists have in spade is mountains of training they've done. You know, every CEU they can, they go to, every class, they take, every extra study thing that they can do. And it's a testament to how seriously they take the work that they do.

BEATE CHELETTE:

I see what you're describing these challenges. I see, as I said, across all industries. I think the question is like, what are you really good at? Or what do you want? Is just challenging for people? I do agree with you. I think that our psychology from our childhood comes in, that the stuff we've heard, also society, don't brag. And specifically for women, I think we have an even larger thing to overcome, because well behaved girls are seen but not heard. My mother always told me, let the work speak for itself. Don't brag. And that just doesn't work at all in marketing, because then we'll never work another day again. So let's, let's switch gears here and talk about, okay, listening to this episode. I'm going, you know what? I am confident that I'm here to help more people. How do we get them in the mindset, and then how do we get them into the action set to, you know, figure out where the leads are going to come from.

Melanie Gorman:

I mean, I think the best way to think about lead gen is to get curious about the client and how the client behaves. This is more psychology, right? But when I am thinking about finding new leads for my business, I want to understand how that person is looking for me. What are they searching for? Where are they attention based marketing is the big thing. Now they don't. You know, everybody's talking about AI, but attention based marketing is really where people spend their attention. Is like our we're so strapped for time. If I give you 40 minutes of my life to listen to this podcast, I must really care about what you're talking about, because I could spend that 40 minutes doing absolutely anything so understanding where your clients spend time and where they're willing to look for someone like you, and thinking less about how you want to sell yourself and more about how that person needs to be talked to, is are really good clues. So I tend to go spend a lot of time on places like Psychology Today, like what are people looking for? But I don't just look there. I look at all the niche therapy directories, because those are small little ecosystems of where people are looking for someone like a therapist to figure out, to help them with their lives. And you can spend a lot of time doing that kind of curiosity based research to figure out how your ideal client is going through, the journey, the buyer's journey, to figure out what they need. Once they figure out what they need, then your marketing kind of begins at that point. Because I feel like so much of what we're seeing in this transition away from Google and into AI, right? Whether it's Gemini or it's perplexity or it's Chad, what we're seeing is that people want to think through their problems in a different way, right? They want to be able to ask a bunch of questions back and forth and figure out the there's an inflection moment where they can't solve it themselves. That's the curiosity we all need to start taking and thinking about it. Doesn't matter how the client gets to you once. They get to you, how do you become the solution? How do you become the person that they pick over somebody else? And I think a lot of that comes from knowing who your ideal client is and how they want to spend their time, what they're looking for in terms of therapy services. So the mindset has to be one of a curious student, right? And for therapists, their absolute best resource are their intake calls, right? Every person, every call that comes into their office, every person that sends them an email and says, This is what I'm looking for. That's the stuff to mine, because that's gold, right? And it's true. If you do free consultations, like any of those things, provide that kind of data for you, if you listen to it, and I take every single call that comes in to me, I make an effort to speak to people, even if I know they're a wild lead, they're never going to go anywhere, because what I'm curious about always is what led them to me, and I had my first lead a therapist in Washington, DC, because I'm in Maryland, so right there, and he's at the end of the call. I said, How'd you find me? And he goes, Oh, I want chat GPT. And I was like, Oh, here it is, right the first one. And I he was doing research around, you know, SEO practitioners that specialize in therapists and have done this work for mental health providers for a long period of time. And he did all of that work in ChatGPT and then said, Well, who's the best person to talk to? And I came up so that mindset of being curious and then representing that on the website in a way that speaks to the pain points the clients have, but with that sort of educated human values perspective, so you're able to say, now that you're here, this is what we can do together, right? And doing it your way. I think the biggest compliment my clients get from their clients is when they say, I felt like I read your website and I was having conversation with you, like the person I met on this consultation is the same person that was on my website. And I think that marriage of curiosity that leads to the copy, that leads to the confidence to say who you really are, and being clear about your values, being clear about who you are and how you what you stand for and what you can do for people, I think all of those things together are going to get you the leads that you're looking for.

BEATE CHELETTE:

So what I'm hearing you say now is it's actually really interesting. I've never heard it quite like this before. Is that you were saying that now AI is actually changing certain parameters or algorithms on how things are being approved. I mean, we always have heard this be authentically you, because everybody else is taken and that never makes any sense until you're sort of in it. But I think this persona driven marketing on how do I portray myself with the watts of cash, the fast planes, the girls, the this or that, that was only always attractive for a very small percentage of young men that Aspire the girls, the cars and the watts of cash. I don't think that even applies for 99% of everybody else, but it was very successful and very appealing. This, to me, is is absolutely crazy making now, if I am now more aligned, and that's the purpose of this whole show, is to say, but I feel mission driven. I have a stronger purpose. How do I now take this and create this consistency, consistency throughout, which is what I'm hearing you say, there has to be consistency in how I show up and how I talk and how I do my job and how I am in the world, because there's no more hiding. Is that true?

Melanie Gorman:

I think so. And I think, I mean, look like I think the more that you are, you everywhere you go, it's easier to it. Life becomes easier. Do you know what I mean, like, there's some without like this. You know the way some people market their business? I mean, they don't show up as them their real self, which takes a lot of work to get ready. I mean, it's a lot more than putting makeup on in the morning, right, to actually show up as somebody who isn't your real self, because you're trying to score a lead or you're trying to close a deal. I think some business, and this is a reality check for people, some businesses don't have clients because they're selling something the world isn't really interested in, right? So I do think that when you get into authentic marketing, part of what you have to actually ask yourself, is, is the world interested in what I'm selling like I when I talk about doing SEO for people, I talk about, I want to help optimize your websites to strangers who are looking for you can find you. It's all great. When your business is referral based and people are just showing up because of who you've been in the world, that's great. But if you're trying to market to Strangers. Strangers have to want what you're selling. And when you get into, you know, this discussion about how to be more authentic with myself, there is a question mark of, is the world interested right? There has to be something pragmatic about what you're offering world. I had a client not too long ago who wanted to sell a pro. Private art studio that was so she bought the space, and it was she transformed it and made it into a suite of businesses where someone like you or me could go rent the space and we could have a conference there. And it was like different rooms were done in different ways, and one had computers, and one had big blackboards and all this sort of creative space for a meeting space. And her thinking was, everything with business is super stodgy. You've got to have something out there in the world where people can go and kind of figure this out, and they can make this space their own. They can be super critical cooking class or whatever, right? And it failed utterly miserably, right? Because she put this art space, this studio for big conferences, in a small town in West Virginia, right where there wasn't an easy access point from the train station or from the airports, and she didn't build it and then market it and spend money on advertising to get in touch with people from New York or DC or even Philly that had the money to afford a space like this, she just built this big, beautiful space in this beautiful part of the world, and had nobody show up. It was complete crickets, right? And had to price it because of all the renovations, so that you and I couldn't afford it for our daughter's birthday parties, right? So she couldn't make secondary use of it. There has to be a pragmatic reason why someone would invest their money in you, and it has to solve a problem that people are aware that they have without you convincing them, right? Because if I have to convince every person that this problem is real, right, they're not aware of it. They're not searching in chat, GPT, they're not doing all this leg work to figure out how to solve the problem, right? So find something that's practical. I have

BEATE CHELETTE:

the best example. I always think about the boundary coach. When the boundary coach called me and I said, Do you think that people that need boundaries have any awareness that they need boundaries, or do you think that they think the problem is other people consistently take advantage of them? That's 100% and to this day, I see boundary coaches. And to your point, it is really important that you have to address the problem through the lens of the person that wants to buy it, because if they're not aware of the problem, you don't have a sale,

Melanie Gorman:

not at all, not at all, because the whole buying journey is something that we don't talk about enough, right? We spend so much time. I call it the dance, right? We spend so much time in my world, mental health, right? So, okay, I feel really rotten. I'm going to go the internet and I want to figure something out. Great, here's my symptoms, right? Okay, great, Oh, okay. I need more sleep. I need some exercise, right? I probably need to drink a little less. I need to, okay, I'm gonna do these things, and then you do those things, and it doesn't solve your problem. And you go back to the internet, and we do this dance back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until we reach a point where we cannot solve it ourselves. And there is a because we are also human beings that think it's our responsibility to take care of ourselves. Right now, you can make arguments counter to that, but I think most people out there in the world don't look at the world and say, fix me. I think they look at the world and say, It's my responsibility, and I'm ashamed of the fact that I can't figure this out, right? Which is why Google got to be so popular in the first place, because you can look anything in the world up at three o'clock in the morning, right? And people do, and there's evidence that people do based on data and, you know, SEO tools like sem rush, like you can see how many people look anything up, right? So knowing that you get a sense of, you know, the boundary stuff and how absurd it can be, right, for people to think that that's the coaching that they need. Find the thing that they really need, right? You want a relationship. Your relationships don't work out. They don't work out because, you know, like, why don't they work out? Like, what's Ha, so then flip it, have a conversation and ask some questions. That's how lead gen, I think, really gets going, and how we make a big difference in, you know, people having thriving businesses versus struggling businesses?

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, I agree with you. And then, and then, how would you address the vulnerability, the sharing of who I am in all of this? And I want to give you, give you some examples. We just lost our house in the Palisades fire a couple months ago, and now my mother's in the hospital. She's 90 years old in Germany, so there's sort of a lot going on. How does vulnerability of what I am going through factor into this? And the reason I'm asking you this is because a lot of people feel that they have to, that they can only teach what they've already solved, and they're worried that, if they're sharing, that they're in the mid of figuring it out, that that somehow reflects back on them. What's your take on this?

Melanie Gorman:

I think there has to be a reason for it on some level, right? Like, if you're you know you're gonna go see your mother, I think sharing your vulnerability that you know there's a purpose to it at times, right? So you're. Are dealing with, you know, your mom, and I think that that could have an impact on your time. It could have an impact on your focus, right? It could have an impact on how a client shares a story and it chokes you up, right? Because you're in that space. I think in all of those things, there's a good reason to be vulnerable and to share that, arguably, you want to share that with people you're safe with, you know what I mean, and people that are not going to manipulate that and use it for their own benefit. I don't think, like a lot of people ask me, Should they share their whole story and their about page? I think your about page on your website is incredibly important, right? So, and therapists are trained not to self disclose like so there's a big part of the therapist training where it's really about it's all client focused. It's not about me, it's about you, right? So I take the line that sharing your story is something that is a personal decision, right, and you share it to be on the same level with people, right? So you share it to be human, right? Otherwise, at times, it can feel like it's top down, it's power focused, right? Which is not the point of that, nor do. But I also don't think that you need to share everything your life story isn't required to be qualified to be someone's therapist or to be their coach or to do those things. So I think sharing should be contextually relevant, and you should think about the reason why you open up about certain things. If it is like the stuff with your mom, then you may need to share that because you need people to understand and have compassion for where you are. I

BEATE CHELETTE:

call it like a measured release of information. And to your point, there has to be a point to it, but I agree that vulnerability is a it's almost like I'm hearing you say it's a tool to be used deliberately, not recklessly.

Melanie Gorman:

Well, yes, I mean, I think everyone should, has to think thoughtfully about being vulnerable with people that are not safe to be vulnerable with, because, unfortunately, not everybody has a good heart, you know what I mean? So no, and I do think that there are moments in life where Loving yourself is really critical, and sometimes you just have to say, I can't do it today. You know what I mean? I'm having a hard one, or whatever that might be. Like, being honest about your situation without giving all the details being vulnerable. Doesn't require a full self disclosure. Right? Being vulnerable can be, you know, I need to take personal day, yeah, or

BEATE CHELETTE:

I'm dealing with something family related, or I've been really triggered, I'm gonna need to find my center. So there's ways around it. So now we've covered that we can use our website. We've covered that we need to be consistent in how we show up in all areas of our lives. We talked about vulnerability, measured vulnerability, so now, how does all of this help me to get better SEO and get the leads in?

Melanie Gorman:

So I think they're two separate questions. SEO is really going to come down to understanding how strangers look for you. I mentioned that a little bit ago, like thinking through and using data to give evidence that people are looking for whatever it is you're selling in whatever way you want to sell it, so someone like me can help you figure out, like, what that data is, because there should be evidence. There should be something that's not my opinion that says this is valuable, because that's not enough to get the lead right. So, and then getting the leads once you know the data is about having two sides your website and your content reflect your educated opinions about whatever you're talking about, right? So blogging is really important, right? So that you're having an ongoing conversation with Google. So, and the way that things are working with AI right now, your blog and your landing pages of your website are are fed into the AI systems, and pieces of them are exposed based on the questions that people ask. So couple data points for you. The average Google search is three or four words. The average chat GPT search is 23 or 24 words, right? So we don't always know the questions that we're trying to ask, and we need workshopping. We need to think it through. And chat GPT, AI of all perplexity or whatever, when you use they give people this opportunity to be really human and and to ask these kinds of questions, and then make your way down through the buyer's journey, and then eventually get to a place of saying, What do I do? Where do I go? Who can help me? So your website has to be fully optimized to be discovered for that answer, right? And your blogs, all your content, really feeds into the AI engine and and helps expose you as a trusted source. What and a chatGPT and Gemini are very different. They gather data from different sources. So the second part of everything is marketing. And marketing is finding your group of people sharing your content. Whether it's a podcast or it's a blog, social media, posts like sharing that and developing a relationship with those small pockets of people that are into what you're talking about. So you prove that there's interest, and then you become a contributor to that discussion. YouTube, second biggest search engine in the world, right? So if you're a video person, be there. Have be in that conversation. But you have to understand, you know, the value of a long form and a short form video, right? And they're incredibly different. So marketing, after you've figured out your niche, and then you're in the place of being in this ongoing conversation, is about listening and understanding. Are people paying attention? Looking at your analytics, like, which of your podcasts do people pay the most attention to? There's a clues there for what you should do. More of your leads come from people being interested in what you have to say organically, like not because you pushed it on them, but because they found you and they want you. My leads, by and large, come from the website. I have the blogs that I've written, and I just started doing podcasts and being guests on podcasts, so this is new for me, so, but the majority of my leads come from referrals, right? So I'm very clear with clients, like, I'm full, I can't take anybody else, or I'm open, and I have room in my calendar, right? And my clients on the regular refer people to me, because I do a good job, right? And when you do a good job, word of mouth spreads, but you have to, you have to feed all of those things. You have to work all of those things. And then, you know, it's kind of like you're Geppetto in your in your workshop, like you're really kind of tweaking things and tinkering, and you're in relationship with your marketing. So it's not one and done, right? It's something you're into and you're doing all the time, and that's where you're that's where the gold is,

BEATE CHELETTE:

yeah, and then you think you have it figured out, and then something happens, and then there is an event, or the market changes, or AI shows up, or something, something, and then you have to go back and rearrange everything. We've been doing this for a very long time. A lot of our our our organic exposure comes through LinkedIn and the newsletter and the outreach and podcasting is a long term game. You down to two podcasts. You have to have hundreds for this SEO and the links to really work like you. I've gotten my first client through chatgpt Because I'm the authority. It's called Open AI for a reason, so other people will have access to your stuff, and you can do a lot of really good competitor research right now, because they are doing their stuff in AI, and because it's open, you can see it, but then it has other benefits on the other side as well. So now, is there anything specific as we're closing our interview? Is anything specific on my website that I should be watching out for, like, is it better to have SEO done professionally? Are there, like, any sort of, okay, do these, like three things, you know, if you do nothing else, do these three things to help our audience.

Melanie Gorman:

So make sure that you are using a tool for keywords. You want to make sure that you have, you know, legit keyword research where you can say 320 people look this phrase up over the year, and you can establish the roots of it, right, so that your website is read in a particular way. And you want to make sure all of the SEO fields are filled out. Page title, meta description, one h1, tag, your H twos and your H threes make sense, and they're sort of nested. The way I explain that to clients is, think of SEO like a book, right? So your book is your one h1 tag, so title of your book is your h1 your chapters are your H twos, and the sub sections in your chapters are your H threes. So your H threes are these are not design elements. There are specific ways that you're talking to these engines, and you're saying like, this is hierarchically more important than something else. So make sure you fill all of that stuff out and that you're using all of the SEO tool like so you know, in addition your heading tags, your alt text, so that people can understand your images, right? You make sure your anchor text makes sense. Anchor text is the words that you're using in a link. Don't stuff them with your keywords, right? So use all of the fields that you can for SEO. And I guess the last thing I would say is make sure that you're regularly producing some kind of content, and that you understand which AI engine is taking it in, right? So for example, chat GPT doesn't take in YouTube videos, right? So thinking through things like that, right? Gemini is the Google based AI, and it's taking in all Google features, right? So if you're a big YouTube person, you should play. On really targeting Gemini, so understand the different engines and how they work. And you could just get a graph of this, and it'll show you, this one does this, and this one does that, like all of stuff is available out there in the world. Do I think people can do SEO on their own? You know, bias to be fair,

BEATE CHELETTE:

right? No, it's very hard to do it consistently. And we have a team, and we are very good. I think we got better at it, but I wished I had somebody that I I would feel does it consistently and is not just somebody who randomly fills out stuff, because that the challenge that I find, is people look at me as the boss of this company to tell them what to do. I want subject matter experts to tell me what I should be doing. And I think this is the SEO discrepancy.

Melanie Gorman:

Yeah, that's how I get hired by people. People say to me, they're like, this is a world I don't understand, right? And you know the concentric circles for me, 85% of my clients are in the mental health space, right? So they will say, like, you speak my language, that's why I'm the right person. And do this like, tell me what to do. And I think a good SEO agency is going to give you very tactical advice where you can take action on things and set your expectations fairly, because your point earlier was the right one, SEO is a long game, right? And those of us that have been doing SEO, the move over to to AI, it's like a wave, right? But there's been waves all the time. They just Google released a June update, core update today, right? And people like me are going to go, oh golly, like, here we go again, right? But here we go again. Is always in play, right? So that's just something that you know, you want an agency you work with to be able to give you advice and to be in the game of it, right? Like I'm talking to my clients about AI every day, right? I'm not shying away from it, right? We have to talk about this. We have to talk about how to use it. We have to talk about what makes sense, what's ethical, all that good stuff. So I think that the robotics of SEO tools are really helpful for because they'll evaluate your page. Did you do everything properly based on the focus keyword? Great, right? But there's more to it, right? So those are the pieces that sometimes having agency help can be

BEATE CHELETTE:

better. I think you are absolutely correct. There's a difference between hiring somebody who is an SEO specialist and all the HYPEE, HYPEE, LinkedIn, outreach, the link building and the SEO stuff, proceed with caution, because a lot of that stuff is not properly researched, is not geared toward you. They just go and do a couple of on page things, but they don't really go in the meat of what needs to be what needs to be fixed, because then, you know, as you said, then you need to go back in your what's a paragraph, what's a headline, what's a headline to what's a sub chapter, what are my bullet points? What's bold? Because all of these are being read and weighted in SEO, and so you want to be deliberate about it, what stands out to be the more important. And having a partner certainly makes it a lot easier. If it's somebody's full time job, I probably shouldn't be doing it only one so Melanie, for somebody who has now listened to this interview and said, My gosh, I need to speak to her, where do we sent them.

Melanie Gorman:

So my website is crownsvillemedia.com I'm sure you'll put a little link in, and I have a free consultation. You can just go the contact page and get in touch with me. I own it. I answer everybody's email. So, yeah, happy to talk to anybody

BEATE CHELETTE:

wonderful. Yeah, I'd make sure you mentioned the show. Well, thank you so much. You've been amazing. I really liked our non threatening, non hype conversation about what anybody can do to have your leads come from somewhere. So thank you so much for

Melanie Gorman:

being on the show you got. Thank you for having me, and that's it

BEATE CHELETTE:

for us, for today. So as you can tell, SEO does not have to be scary, and it does not have to be language that nobody can understand. It's actually something that makes a lot of sense the way we talked about it today. So please reach out to Melanie, and if you found this show helpful, please share it with somebody who needs to hear what we have said today. Thank you so much, and until next time and GOODBYE, that's it for this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, founders of the future, if you're done playing small and ready to build the future on your terms, subscribe, share and help us reach more Trailblazers like you. And if you're serious about creating, growing and scaling a business that's aligned with who you are, schedule your uncovery session at uncoverysession.com. Lead with vision. Move with purpose. Create your future you.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Beate Chelette

Host