how to grow a business without being a slave to social media

Summary

a listener question from Justin. he’s in the police force looking to transition out, possibly to fitness, wants freedom and flexibility for his family. wants to know how I built businesses without becoming an influencer. here’s the whole answer.

1. I don’t grow organic social followings because I think I’d be bad at it. my life isn’t that interesting. family, fitness, business, that’s about it. I lean on earned media via SEO and paid media via ads. neither is glamorous. both compound.

2. every platform has an algorithm. you have to play one of them until you no longer have to. there are two doors, earned and paid. earned is SEO and organic social. paid is ads. pick the algorithm you want to get good at. you can’t sit out the game.

3. for SEO I use hub and spoke. you pick a core topic, the hub. then you write spoke content that answers every question someone might have around the hub. type your topic into Google with a letter behind it and ride the autocomplete. answer every one of those questions in a blog post. link each one back to the hub.

4. the goal of content isn’t to sell. it’s to own a space and generate leads. someone hands you their name and email in exchange for something educational, a checklist, an ebook, a short training. now you have permission to build a relationship.

5. that relationship lives in a subscriber base. the subscriber base is the actual asset. algorithms change. Facebook pages used to print money and now they print zero reach. Instagram is one policy update from the same fate. if your business runs on someone else’s algorithm, it isn’t yours.

6. once you have a base, the algorithm becomes a tool, not a master. you can keep playing the game without it owning you because email lands 100% of the time and the relationship is yours.

7. and the whole thing only works if you actually solve a real problem. someone pays for an oil change because they don’t want to do it themselves. the mechanic doesn’t feel bad. you shouldn’t either. you’re just helping people who need help. that’s all business is.

8. pick one channel. SEO if you can write. paid if you can spend. build the subscriber base in parallel. solve a real problem for a specific group. don’t try to be number one. you don’t need to be. try harder.

Transcript

why i avoid the influencer game

You have to play some sort of algorithm game until you no longer are required to. And let me explain that a little bit more. Every thing has an algorithm that we’re kind of a slave to at first when we start online. So if you want to generate eyeballs on your content, you want to generate leads and customers.

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, let’s get right into it. I did mention in the intro episode, I would be answering questions. And that’s what I’m doing today. On that note, if you ever have a question, email me directly, Jerred at BetterHumanBusiness.com.

Just spell my first name correctly when you do that, J-E-R-R-E-D. And that goes directly to me. No assistance, no help, no anything like that. That email address is mine and no one else touches it. So if you have a question, please fire away and it will get answered on the podcast. Now I’m going to summarize Justin’s questions here.

Justin, you know what you asked. But ultimately, Justin is in the police force looking to transition out. And possibly in the fitness industry, maybe not. But does want more freedom and flexibility for his family. He kind of wants to know how I got started, how I created leverage. And a big thing that he heard me mention that he’s interested in is how did I grow businesses without the help of social media?

Without being an influencer, how do you build an online business? And I think a lot of people have interest in that because a lot of these influencer brands, they have a huge reach and some of them do phenomenally well. But just because you’re good at social media doesn’t actually mean that you’re very good at business.

And I’ve actually consulted for a lot of people in which that is the case. So let’s go over it. You know, how I got started and how I’ve run every single business has basically been the same way. So first let’s start with an overarching concept of you have to play some sort of algorithm game until you no longer are required to.

And let me explain that a little bit more. Every thing has an algorithm that we’re kind of a slave to at first when we start online. So if you want to generate eyeballs on your content, you want to generate leads and customers, you need media. And so you need content. And there’s only two ways. There’s earned media and there’s paid media.

earned and paid media

So paid media would be any kind of advertising. So you’re putting money in to let’s say Facebook or Google or it could be something outside of that and they’re promoting your content to people. Earned is where you’ve actually earned it. So this is more like an organic Instagram following where you have a million followers and you can tell them to go buy X, Y, and Z and they just do it because you’re an influencer and you said so.

And then the other earned where people don’t talk about as much is SEO. So searching and optimization. So there’s earned and paid. Within earned there’s SEO and then there’s social. So you know, let that settle in your brain. But that’s the basic overarching concept here. They all have an algorithm.

So ads have their own algorithms that you have to get good at. SEO has its own algorithms and it changes all the time with SEO rules, but so does social media. If you’re just posting stuff on Instagram, it has to be entertaining and educational, but not too controversial. And they change the algorithms again all the time.

Like, hey, we want more videos, less pictures, longer form, all these things. These things change constantly and you have to, you have to pick which one you want to be good at. It’s really not an option, especially with how business operates today. It doesn’t matter if you’re brick and mortar or online only.

If you want to get in front of more people, you have to play some sort of algorithm game. And for brick and mortar people, that might be a little bit more SEO. For people online only, that might be paid social media advertising or an organic social following. But those are the games that you’re playing.

So you just pick which one you want to get good at. The ones I’ve gotten good at and the ones, the games I like to play are earned media, SEO and paid advertising. I’ve stayed away from growing a huge organic social following. And really guys, I just don’t think I’m very good at it. Like I’m doing a little bit more of that stuff now, but I just, it feels like a popularity contest and like, I just don’t think that I’m, I would be good at being popular.

I don’t actually feel like I have a very interesting life. Like I do, like I have family, fitness, business, like I don’t do much else. So I’ve stayed away from that, you know, just out of my own, what I perceive as weaknesses. So what I’ve done a lot of search engine optimization. So dive into that topic alone, like get Googling, buy the courses, do what you need to.

But it’s really simple. You are going to pick a topic. So from all my brick and mortar people out there, if you’re a physical therapy practice, because, you know, that’s a lot of you listening, or if you are, you know, a fitness coach looking to drum these things up, you are probably going to have something that you kind of specialize in, right?

the hub and spoke seo method

So like if you’re a fitness coach, maybe it’s a specific type of fitness. So concurrent training, so, or CrossFit or military, a firefighter, something like that. And then if you’re brick and mortar, maybe if you’re a physical therapist, maybe you have a more specific niche that you are into. So like pelvic floor or CrossFitters or whatever it is like you might have something very specific.

And so that’s where you’re going to create content around. And so they call it the hub and spoke method, and this is not going to be exhaustive on SEO. Like I said, I’m keeping these episodes short, but if I can throw you down a path that gets you further, that’d be great. So the hub and spoke method is where you kind of have your core content.

So if that was like for me, when I was getting started, it was garage gyms, and then it was just answering every question you can. And those are the spokes that come off the hub of garage gym, like how to start a garage gym, why start a garage gym, all these things, like as many questions as you think you can answer about this content in a great way to do, to do this is to actually go to Google and use their auto complete feature.

So you can say like, you could type in garage gym and then the letter a, and it’s going to give you 10 different recommendations on like garage gym a, and then it’ll have all these things that pop up. Now you can do this with your topic. So go enter in your topic, police, fitness, space, a whatever, and just start answering all these questions in the form of blog content and linking back to your, your hub.

So again, I tried to get super tactical, but in a very short, um, what would be a short podcast here? I could do like an entire course on SEO, but again, these things are changing very frequently, very rapidly, and it’s an algorithm that you have to get good at. And it’s the same with, uh, you know, paid social media advertising.

You have to be good at writing copy. You have to be good at putting the right, um, type of creative and in the right places. Um, and then social, I’m not going to give any suggestions on like the organic one cause I’m not good at it, but it doesn’t matter whichever ones you’re doing. The goal of those things is not to sell a product.

The goal is to kind of own the space that you’re in either locally. Like if you are a brick and mortar, uh, location owning the space for your area. So if I were to own a physical therapy for athletes in Dallas, Texas, you know, something like that, I would want to own that specific hub. And same online.

If I want to own firefighter style fitness, like I want to own that online. You want to own those things, but not sell things. I mean, you do want to sell things, but that’s not the goal of the content. The goal of the content is to generate leads, okay? To generate people who are so interested that they will give you a name and email address in exchange for something else that you have.

the subscriber base is the asset

Um, you’ve seen these things. It could be a webinar, an online training, an ebook, some sort of download. Um, it could be for free training. It could literally be for anything that’s educational, that helps people take the next step with your business, which is further education. It’s slightly gated.

All it costs someone is their name and email address, their contact information. And now you can start providing more value to them. And then that’s where the nurture process begins. And so you’re building a relationship with people. And when you’re starting out, I don’t recommend like automating these things.

I mean, you really need to find out who your audience is and build a relationship with them. Um, you need to be communicating with them, email directly back, Hey, I saw that you just downloaded my thing. Like, let me know if you have any questions and you might not get a huge response rate, but over time you will, as people realize like, Hey, there’s a real person trying to communicate with me and I’ve done all of this stuff and I still do a lot of these things because I’m very interested in getting feedback and hearing where people are at in the community.

So we’re building up this subscriber base, right? This email subscriber base, and this is where you really actually have an asset. Okay. So going back to my statement of, we’re going to play the algorithm game until we no longer have to, well, you no longer truly have to, once you have this large subscriber base.

So once you have this large subscriber base, you can kind of do whatever you want. Um, because if there’s massive changes in any of the algorithms, no matter where you are, that’s okay. You can learn and adapt to those algorithms if you’re still utilizing those, uh, ways of, of gaining media. But it’s not going to hurt you in any short term, uh, sense because you have the subscriber base.

You can still communicate, nurture, build relationships, make offers and all of those things. So that’s what you want to be doing. Building the subscriber base to where you’re not as dependent on the algorithm. Like for me, the scariest thing imaginable is to have an entire business that runs off Instagram.

Some people might be totally cool with that, but if you know, with what happened to Facebook pages, Facebook pages used to be very profitable. You could post things there. Now it’s zero reach, zero reach. Like you post something on a Facebook page and there’s nothing. If that ever happened to Instagram, it’s going to become just a paid media platform and then you’re gonna have to go find out where else you can do organic and move to the next thing.

So it can be scary to get really good at these things and then own nothing when you don’t actually own any of the media, i.e. the subscriber base. It’s just a scary place to be. So no matter where you’re getting the media, the eyeballs, the people, the human beings that you want to build a relationship with and eventually make offers to for your services.

humans need their problems solved

This is how you get it. You have to either get good at earned media through organic social or through SEO or paid media, which is advertising. And all you’re trying to do is build up as many people as you possibly can that you can build a relationship with and make offers to. I mean, that’s the game.

That is the game. That is how you do this. And I wish I could make it more complex, but it’s not. You just have to be a human being, provide valuable content to real human beings, be genuinely interested in what they want and who they are, and then make offers that fit the needs that they have. Everyone feels bad when they’re like trying to sell things, but you shouldn’t because I don’t feel bad when I go to the guy who’s going to change my oil in my truck because I don’t want to do it.

I would rather someone else do it who’s a professional and can do it quicker than I can. Right. And so I don’t, he doesn’t feel bad selling me that, but we feel bad sometimes when we’re selling our content. We feel like people don’t want it, but people do. People need their problems solved. And that’s what all you’re trying to do in business is figure out what is the biggest problem these people have.

And when I say these people, I mean specific to your audience, your core, what problem can you solve for them? And if you just think like, okay, here’s my product, here’s my service, and I don’t really care what people want, but I’m going to go get the leads and I’m going to sell the thing that I have.

You’re going in the wrong order. You can have a product or service, but if that product or service does not adapt to your audience, the people that you have, your conversion rates are going to be really low. No one’s going to want it. You need to actually solve a very serious problem for somebody. And when you do that, you’ll be able to leverage your income and your audience to build new things and start new ventures and go on and so on and so forth.

But there’s a lot more I can dive into in this topic, and I think I will. It’s already given me a ton of ideas, just hashing it out right here from the notes I took on this one. But I do appreciate the question. And if you guys have any feedback for me, let me know. Specifically, if you want to email me a question, again, jerred at better human business dot com.

And I will answer your question on the show. Thank you so much for listening. That’s it for this one.