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Columbus marketing playbook: Adding a New Revenue Stream To My Marketing Business (Full Plan)

A practical business-growth playbook about building a sustainable marketing practice, choosing additional revenue opportunities, and making the work support the kind of business you actually want to run.

Andy Milligan Andy MilliganFounder of MMG Studio and CMO

A practical business-growth playbook about building a sustainable marketing practice, choosing additional revenue opportunities, and making the work support the kind of business you actually want to run. This written playbook focuses on the activities and decisions demonstrated in the video, so you can adapt the approach without needing to copy the exact words or setup.

What this playbook covers

The video packages a practical working session around Adding a New Revenue Stream To My Marketing Business (Full Plan). Read it as a guide to the underlying activity: identify the situation, choose the right next move, and build a repeatable way to do the work well.

Build from a clear commercial foundation

Growth gets easier to manage when you can explain who you help, what you help them do, and how the work creates value. Use that foundation to judge new ideas. If a new service or revenue stream does not reinforce it, complexity can outrun the opportunity.

Add capacity and offers deliberately

New revenue does not always mean adding more clients or more services at once. Look at the margin, delivery effort, sales cycle, and repeatability of each option. The right next move should make the business more resilient, not simply busier.

Use the numbers to steer the work

Track the activity and outcomes that matter: qualified conversations, proposals, delivery capacity, recurring revenue, and cash flow. Simple measurement gives you a better basis for deciding what to improve, pause, or scale.

Take the useful part into your own work

Use the framework, then tailor it to your audience, offer, capacity, and goals. The goal is not to reproduce the video. It is to make one useful improvement in your own work.

  • List your current revenue sources and rate each one for margin, repeatability, demand, and delivery effort.
  • Choose one growth idea to validate with a customer conversation or a small paid test before building a full new offer.

Continue learning

Explore more marketing playbooks from the Columbus community for additional field notes, tools, and retrospectives.

For a local conversation about the work, see upcoming Columbus Marketing events.

Watch the source video

Watch the full recording on Andy the Marketer on YouTube. The complete transcript remains available below for reference.

Read the video transcript

Kind: captions Language: en I'm Andy and you stumbled across my channel where I teach you in public my process for building a $1 million marketing services community empire. This is your first time to the channel, this is the format we usually follow. I start with an up or I start with I start by strategizing in public, telling you everything I'm doing to grow across all three of my businesses. Next, I'm going to be showing you what's working and what is not. So reviewing a little bit of game tape, accountability, action items, what we're going to be doing to improve. And then finally, I'll close you out with an update slashgrowth stats across all the channels that I'm prioritized on growing. So LinkedIn, YouTube, other content updates and things like that. So to start off, I want to strategize in public. This is a very timely update. Current priority is I have the agency leaders lunch club tomorrow. 22 people or 18 to 22 people. I know one guy is inviting four people, but this is my first time ever hosting an Inerson event for marketers here in Columbus. So, what I've done is I've sent out a quick email yesterday just letting people know what to expect. Really kind of personalizing the onboarding and making it, you know, as the perfect event for people sending, "Hey, hope you had a love weekend." actually sent this to each person individually as they received it, but they received it individually, but I sent it in bulk using folk. See what I did there? Nice sort of rhyme. Said little housekeeping. Um, shout out to Eric who's going to be capturing photos, all details regarding parking, restaurant, etc. And I also went there yesterday to visit the place and kind of pick out an area. I think it's going to be awesome. I have a great place picked out kind of on the right side. a couple tables, couple chairs, really good environment to foster some killer conversation. And yeah, I'm also going to be writing personalized letters to everybody and sending that their way as well. Um, business side, I have a meeting here at 12 to be a relatively short video, but I was just reviewing a little bit of game tape on our video DMs now that we've been doing them for a few days now and sent a total of 12 that I think are really wellcrafted. So, we've gotten one response that was a really warm, good response. We've scheduled a coffee meeting with the decision maker at this one. And she's also said that she's bringing it up in a conversation to in a budget conversation for September. And I think our big biggest bottleneck right now is that we're not even getting views or opens. So, if I go to my sent mail, I need to prioritize a prioritize follow-ups now because a lot of these aren't going aren't getting responses, which is really unfortunate, but it's kind of it kind of sucks because they do take a long time and ideally they open them and see them. Deliverability is good so they are landing in inbox. These are verified emails, but our biggest bottleneck right now is getting them to open the video and watch it. So, a few things that I changed just on the CRO side of things is I have prioritized more sending the um keeping it really brief. So, finding a commonality point in the beginning, the Loom video and putting social proof afterwards and also making it much shorter. So, I think this is great. What I want to do is um get a follow-up sequence together just to kind of make it better. Obviously, it's just 12, so it's not even a large enough sample size to really determine if it's working or not. So, I'm going to keep doing it because I think it's a great strategy and it's something that I can control input based goals. So, I'm going to send three more today. Send three every single day. And the thing about these is that they do actually take time. So each of them sending three of them probably takes 45 minutes or so to make it a really good one. But yeah, I have a whole list. When I'm browsing on LinkedIn and I'm connected with with the decision maker at one of these companies, I will add them to the pipeline natively within LinkedIn and it automatically ties the person in the company so that kind of in one shot I can see the company website and the person I'm going to be sending the email to. Bulk does have native enrichment. So, what I've been using this for is going in and hitting enrich. And you can see it will find their phone number. That's something I could do as well is using a cold call as a follow-up sequence. That would be interesting. I thought about getting a business line, but I could use my personal cell as well, just cuz it's remaining small. But, um, yeah, follow-up sequence is going to be the next bottleneck problem to solve because we're landing in the inbox. It's step one. It's personalized and it will get a good response. You just have to see it. So, um, yeah. So, now that we have company emails and things like that, we have her her email now. It does a really good job of finding multiple and I can always use hunter.io to verify as well. So, that's currently what's working and what isn't. On the LinkedIn side of things, my content has not been performing quite to my expectations or um just in terms of, you know, top ofunnel metrics like engagements, impressions, things like that. Our weekly impressions are down a little bit. But something I did want to talk about is I'm trying to open up a I'm getting the foundation set up for opening up a new revenue stream. So, I've gone and I've created a podcast partnership doc. Shout out to Tass Bober who gave me hers as a reference. If you guys have never heard of the Marketers Exit podcast, I was a guest recently. Great show. Tim and Tass do an amazing job putting this together. Highly recommend you check it out. But essentially, uh, I started I landed my first brand partnership with a website AB testing tool. And while it's not a huge contract, it is good. It's $1,500 a month just for a couple newsletters. And I do enjoy making them. So, I'm going to continue to pursue that, built a case study around this. And I put it put together a good foundation here of uh testimonials, audience size. Um I used codecs to manually skim through all my posts for the last two years and add to these. So, while this isn't this isn't completely accurate because it changes technically every day, more posts, more impressions, things like that. I did have a couple posts that went viral that I included as some post formats. podcast um podcast metrics partnership format. So an ad integration webinar short form video including some of the the viral videos that we had pop off last year. Then uh like a website deep dive which went kind of viral too. And then like a text graphic format pricing and packaging. And I'm pricing myself very moderately to start with. 2,000 for a couple post 3,000 for core 5,000 for flagship. If you look at Tasses, she charges exponentially more, but she's also had experience with this, which definitely makes sense. Oops. But this would be cool to kind of unlock this revenue stream. Is it a is it a distraction? Maybe. Probably is. But as I continue to build the newsletter and build the audience, it's going to be a much more compelling value prop. I just have to kind of have this in place. So, um, I'm glad I have this to get started with, and it takes a little bit of leg work off on my end to start this from scratch if a brand were to reach out. I also use Claude to put together um, using a couple resources to put together a list of people that would be perfect fits. So, I have contacts from the tools that we already use like Web Flow, SE Ranking, and other ones that could be a match based on the customers we serve and what we do. So, HubSpot, uh, Pawbox is a healthcare marketing related software. ClickUp is a software I use, notion I use, Gamma, I use, Figma, I use obviously. So, I use a couple resources from JClaus's lab uh, that Justin Moore created. So, if we go into partnerships, I hate this, by the way. Where where do we stand on the best display formats? If anyone uses anything other than tabs like this, the horizontal one, you're just crazy. This is the this is the only way to do it. But a couple resources that I use to put this together is a brand pitch worksheet. So I use a combination of the LinkedIn API called Voyager to find the contacts that matched these company sizes given their brand size, this company titles, these job titles given their company size and also get pitches together using this rope method I put together, which is really cool. Um, so it's going to help me draft all that stuff. I just have to get the outreaches together and this will be working its way into our outreach cadence moving forward. I'll probably make a full video just on doing the outreach itself but and I might create a course at some point on how to get brand partnerships given that this is my current experiment. By the way, what my big vision for this is that I take everything and I package it into courses like on some kind of a community or I just publish it all here for free on the CMO website. To be determined. Right now it's just a newsletter to get jobs delivered weekly. And I also might start start to drip some of this in the in the newsletter as well. Some of my lead generation experiments and outreach etc. So um yeah that is I need to get I have a meeting here at 12 like I said but that would be really cool if we could unlock another revenue stream just from our existing content. And yeah I'm I'm pretty excited about that. It'll it'll be really cool to be able to do that. And while it may not be ludicrous in the beginning, I have spent a lot of time building up this brand equity and getting testimonials and things like that for the podcast. Uh, and speaking of the podcast, I did have one more update. Um, we will be hiring on a different editor for for a different uh editor for each of the podcasts. And that has been my bottleneck is just getting ahead of schedule and really having a cadence in place for getting ahead on the podcast. It's been very weekly. It's been very just the schedule has been driving the work, unfortunately, which is the one thing I preach against. But while we do have episodes recorded, that's never a bottleneck. It has been the production of getting these things out in a timely manner. So, we have multiple saved and not published within Riverside. I do plan ahead as well as I can to kind of get this. We have Angela's next week. And we have a few more in Riverside waiting to be uploaded. I also want to record more solo ones, but again, editor bottleneck means I don't have YouTube content that I can repurpose as a podcast. And obviously the uh the native podcast is falling behind as well. So, we do have several that have been recorded, not published. And if I can just bulk give these to the editor, he's familiar with how to use Riverside can download the footage, create a killer hook and intro, and maybe even make a clip per episode as well, that would be amazing. Then I'm no longer the bottleneck there. Uh, another update on the team. Clark has been doing a good job. We're launching another website this week for uh, 2SP and the site is looking absolutely amazing. Has faced a lot of production bottlenecks with their team and things like that, but just the way the website is looking currently. See if I have the staging uh, here we go. I'll bring up the staging website here real quick. They'll be working and partnering on as a SEO client longer term. So despite all the the headaches and getting this thing launched, it's going to be a great beautiful amazing uh case study that we publish on our website because it is healthcare, you know, athletic sports wellness related and it is gorgeous. So take a look at this nice mega menus. Boom. All six of their locations. Boom. Boom. About nice mega menu as well. Yeah, this is just it's a gorgeous site and I'm truly truly proud of this. We had to look up a hook up a whole CRM integration for this and it's been a mess of complexity that we've had to work our way through here, but they went and like just in terms of all content, gathering team images, etc. We built out their team page. We need to make sure that that link connects to their teams template page. Boom. Yeah. So, making sure that give me a live team member here. Here, Abraham. Boom. Yeah, this looks great. Coolest part that I like about this website is if you go to their footer um the stat the team members dynamically update with all their information on it which is really cool. Um and they all look on brand too as well. So that's pretty awesome. Stoked about that. That and it's just a beautiful design as well. like there's there's no overstating how how valuable the design is and how much it's going to do for their business and yeah, they're going to they're going to be a long-term client, too. So, I'm super stoked to launch this website. All the athletes that they've worked with as well, super cool professional sports teams. Yeah, that is awesome. Yeah, and of course, all their team photos. So, yeah, um that's what I'm doing today. I have to jump on that call here soon. I'll keep you guys posted on the status of sponsorship outreach and how that's going to be working. Opening up a new revenue stream as a business using testimonials, social proof, and our existing content in order to do so. And I will keep you posted. This is day, you know, multiple hundreds um of building this marketing services community empire. Stay tuned for next time. Love you. Talk to you soon.