What if Social Media Disappeared? Marketing without Social Media

[00:00:00] The Women Conquer Business show is an educational how-to women in business podcast. That features stories, marketing news and real life experiences from fun and friendly hosts. Jen McFarland and Shelley Carney. Join us as we dive into the details. So you can slay marketing overwhelm, streamline processes and amplify your impact.

[00:00:23] You'll learn strategies and tactics, leadership skills, and practical advice from successful women entrepreneurs. To help you grow, nurture and sustain your business.

[00:00:37] Hello and welcome to Women Conquer Business. I'm Jen McFarland joined by Shelley Carney. What if social media disappeared? If you are freaking out at the very idea of social media disappearing in terms of your marketing, it's good that you're here, right? Cause that's what we're gonna talk about. There's literally thousands of ways you can market your business that don't involve social media.

[00:01:01] So are you overly reliant on social media? What if social media disappeared tomorrow? What would you do today? We're gonna talk about creating content and running a business. All the time we talk about creating content and running a business with social media and digital marketing tactics. In this episode, we're gonna talk about what you would do or what we would do.

[00:01:20] Social media suddenly disappeared. I'm not actually as reliant on social media. I think as most people think I am. So we're gonna discuss. What we would change about our marketing strategies, how we would develop our business maybe differently if we didn't have social media and even who they would reach out to and how we would go about reaching out to people.

[00:01:39] If social media didn't exist, put another way. We're gonna give you a lot of ideas about how you can get the word out and market your business without social media. So stay tuned. Because that's what we're talking about today. Yeah. But I haven't seen Shelley in over a week. How are you feeling? I'm doing well.

[00:01:56] I went to an appointment on Tuesday. Yeah. [00:02:00] Tuesday and had the staples removed from my surgery. And the nurse said, this is the best looking incision I've seen all year. You're doing great. I'm doing.

[00:02:13] That's awesome. I'm not lifting anything or doing too much exercise yet, but and just recovering, but I'm doing well in the recovery phase. Awesome. I hope you're being pampered cuz you deserve it pamper myself whenever I can. Okay. I have been. I've been on a spending spree. I'm just gonna just pamper yourself too.

[00:02:30] Pampering myself too. I am getting ready for She Podcasts. That's in a month. And as most people know, shipping takes a little bit longer. Sometimes you wanna be like as aligned with things as you can be. So I have ordered stickers cuz I'm very excited about that. Some. Some for Women Conquer Business.

[00:02:49] And then some also for the Strategic Marketing Membership, I've bought clothes. I have so many cool new clothes for this conference. I'm excited. And then I also, as many of I have a contract where I get paid for passive income for some of my content that I create. And every time I. Paid I go out and I upgrade my setup.

[00:03:12] So Shelley doesn't even know this. This is like breaking news.

[00:03:20] I bought myself a Rodecaster Pro. Oh, I know. So I can do like fancy buttons or a Pro II. Nope, just a Pro, just going with a little budget. I don't need a Pro II yet. And I bought some new. Things for camera setup and all kinds. And I bought a thing so that I, if I spill my coffee on the road, caster pro it's not gonna ruin it.

[00:03:42] so we all have to do things like I always buy gear with a case. And then in this case, something so that I don't just ruin it since it will be sitting on my desk. So I'm excited about that. I thought it would be here by today. It's not, that's fine. And then, yeah, I'm gonna have this camera. That's been sitting here.

[00:03:59] [00:04:00] I. There's somebody I follow on YouTube and she just did a video. That was like, what , why aren't you using your expensive camera? And I was like, oh, I felt seen I've got this camera that I can use for streaming and all kinds of stuff. And it just sits there. You bought a camera for it. Huh? So yeah, I bought a camera for it.

[00:04:19] This is before we met. It's like one of the things I bought, cuz I thought it'd be super fun and it works as a regular camera too. So then I was working on that. So that's part of what I've been working on as well. So I've been busy, like buying stuff cuz I like buying stuff. That's fun. That's what Toby's been doing as well.

[00:04:36] And. He's bought a, he's bought us a boat and a motor and a, all the things we need to go traveling and doing travel vlogs. And we've got these little clip on microphones for our little vlogging camera and yeah we're getting set up for so excited trips. Yeah. Yeah. You've had a lot of stuff.

[00:04:54] I think that has been just you're gearing up for Getting all kinds of stuff out there. That's right. And teaching it as well. So what we try to do on Wednesday nights is we show the video that we made on our trip. And then we talk about the equipment that we used to make the video so that people who are also wanting to be travel vloggers can learn how it's done and what kind of equipment they might wanna have for that.

[00:05:17] That's exciting. I've thought about doing cuz I have all this new stuff. Although, like you said, I don't have the Rodecaster Pro II, which is the newer version I have still thought about doing like a whole unboxing and whole video about this new setup because , it, it will be somewhat transformative.

[00:05:33] I also went out on Etsy, so I have all this stuff on my desk. And there's this guy who does 3d printing. That will attach to the bottom of your desk as holders for a lot of the stuff that I have. So I bought some of that too, so I can start clearing more things off of my desk. So yeah, it's very exciting.

[00:05:49] If you've never seen a 3d printer, like go find, oh yeah, go find somebody who has one, but you can make these custom holders. And I have things that are like a Cal Digital. It's a [00:06:00] way that I don't have to have. All these dongles hanging off of my Mac and all, all these things that kinda streamline my processes, that somebody apparently has the same setup as me, and is just selling these cases that are like custom fit.

[00:06:13] And you just hook them like onto the bottom of your desk. So I'm very excited about that. I think it could really, clear off. Did you say you have a 3d printer? No. Oh, you're buying the printer. No, I don't need a 3d printer. I'd. Yeah. Quote crazy with something like that.

[00:06:28] That's like the nerdiest of the nerds. I, husband has one okay. I'll just be geek out. I'm like nerdiest of the nerds, so I'd be like, oh, I don't need to leave the house ever. I can just 3d print a new house. There's printing 3d printer patterns on, was it the, something of things that, the thing of things the.

[00:06:48] What does go out on it's on the internet of things or something like that. And they have a bunch of patterns in there that you can get for different items. The print, I worked at a co-working space where this guy was, it was just his like side project. And he would just do, he would make like waste paper baskets and sell them and all kinds of things.

[00:07:06] And now they're 3d printing houses, literally in places to, to help with like housing. Shortages make affordable housing. It's crazy and super awesome. And and if you go out on Etsy, you can buy all kinds of 3d printed stuff and things. It's pretty awesome. Okay. Okay. So breaking news, are you ready?

[00:07:29] All right. So our friends over at near media are reporting that now 30, 36% of all people in the us are freelancers. So 36% of the workforce are now freelancers. I think that this is like good and bad. I have concerns about it because I think it means that. There are likely corporations out there that are going to underpay freelancers in outsourcing.

[00:07:58] So my hope [00:08:00] is that it will be a good thing and that I am wrong. And I also have some concerns about that. So 36% of people surveyed, and this was a McKinsey. A research project. They said that they were members of the gig economy. And that's up from 27% in 2016. So that means that, and it's really and it even says on here like on TikTok, they're really hitting this hard primarily among 18 to 34 year olds.

[00:08:30] This is the way to go. You wanna break free from, that idea of like corporate slavery, all of that kind of thing. Their words, not mine in terms of corporate slavery I will say that being a freelancer is harder than y'all think. But that's another that's for another time.

[00:08:44] And it's interesting to me that, this is, we're creeping up on 40%. That's a pretty significant number. Yeah. And it's also a significant number of people who aren't paying into social security for those people who are coming up on retirement right now. so it's not looking good for continuing to have social security for the rest of your life.

[00:09:05] So make sure you're putting away money into your 401k and profit sharing, whatever else that you have available to you. Toby was always self-employed from 1979 on, so he made very sure to put away. Money for his retirement, his own retirement. He was aware of that, that's coming up. But. The people who are putting money into social security now are paying the people who are on social security and are withdrawing it.

[00:09:29] It's going to run out it's gonna well, and certainly people in the 18 to 34 range, they tend to not be thinking about social security. They may be are thinking it's not even gonna be. Around by the time they retire. I know that not what, they're, what they're doing now. It's not I was just saying that, cuz that was something that when I was 18 to 34, they were saying it wouldn't exist anymore.

[00:09:52] So this is something that's going on. I would say that before I went out into the workforce and started my own [00:10:00] business I sat down with a financial person and we had a very Frank conversation around. What's good and bad about the financial situation, how long of a runway I have in terms of things like retirement.

[00:10:10] And so it's good to have those conversations you absolutely need. I can't remember what the name of the account is that I have an account that I can just put money in as. As a retirement plan. So you can have some sort of retirement, but you do need to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting.

[00:10:26] I it's maybe not tied to marketing, except that it's really big on TikTok. , having such a large percentage of the workforce that are freelancers it's new ground. Yeah, it's new ground. We don't know what kind of effect that could have on the future. And I think it's I think it's exciting and scary, and I just wish everyone, all the success in the world that's out there starting their businesses it's is so cool.

[00:10:50] And awesome. So that is the breaking news. That's right. And it's a creator economy thing. We have our. Section your creator economy. Exactly. If I'm out here saying no, don't do it like and I'm sitting here doing it. Like it seems really, yeah. It seems really, but do it with with foresight for your future.

[00:11:12] Make sure you're planning for your future at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. I said about that. yeah. So are we ready to talk about the future of no social media? That's that? Wasn't very spooky. that? Wasn't very spooky. Boo.

[00:11:32] no social media. What if social media disappeared? What would you do then? How would, and this was a great question, cuz I've been thinking about it ever since I saw that's what you wrote. And I was like, oh, interesting. Because over the past two years, I know I have really come to rely on social media, taking over for all the in person, things that we gave up.

[00:11:54] Being trade shows and networking and all of that in person stuff went away. So we had to [00:12:00] really dive deep into more of the social media stuff. And now we have the option to go back out and meet people, but we're not doing it because we got used to this new normal right.

[00:12:12] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's a good thing to talk about for a few different reasons. An overreliance on social media can be a negative for your business. Like I remember , I dunno if you remember this back, it was almost maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago, Facebook and Instagram or down, like for an entire day.

[00:12:32] Yes. And then my entire inbox was flooded with people who were like, what did you do when Facebook was down? Yeah. And I remember yeah, I got all these emails and I remember going, oh, Facebook was down. Oh, why didn't even know that? Because even though I'm a marketer, I don't, that's not my primary place for getting clients social media.

[00:12:55] It's not, it's a place to build relationships, have conversations. And then at some point, if it goes in another direction, then it does. And we usually take that offline that said. It is a way for me, like here we are, we're on social media right now. And about what five or 10 platforms seems like we're just on blast and kinda depends on how do you define social media?

[00:13:16] Cuz YouTube is is it social media or is it's social media or is it a place to go and learn things? It's all three. Yeah. It's all of that. Any place that you can go and somebody's posting stuff and you can comment and share like it's social media. Yeah. In this case we're not necessarily.

[00:13:33] That's maybe not the main focus because it has such a social, an SEO component to it. But in terms of things like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok Twitter, Next door for some people, all of those kinds of platforms where people tend to sit all day and say, they're working when they're on social media.

[00:13:55] I don't see that among my clients as much with YouTube. [00:14:00] Although my husband does seem to spend quite a bit of time on YouTube, not his mind, but he's, but not when he is working. It's. He's watching educational stuff. Yeah. He's watching videos. He's learning how to handle finances and things like that.

[00:14:10] It's all really good stuff. It's not what my husband is doing. He's just learning about guitar and fishing. That's good too. Those are the things he's doing and it's, it's all off work. It has nothing to do with his work and he's doing it in the evening. Which in some ways I think is just better than watching TV anyway.

[00:14:26] So yeah. All of which to say. When you're thinking about your business and you're spending a lot of time. So the part of the reason we're talking about this are two things. One social media has become much more expensive and much more like pay to play, meaning you have to pay to get a lot of traction.

[00:14:45] If you're a small business and then. The other part, I lost my train of thought cuz we had a comment, without social media wouldn't know about current events, it's totally true. Yeah, totally true. Because she watches the news anymore. And when all of my shows for the last three weeks, all of the late night comedians have been off.

[00:15:02] So I've had to ask Toby what's going on in the world. Toby. Cause that's how I get my news from Colbert. I know. Oh, I remember now so it's increasingly pay to play and it's a productivity issue. If you're sitting on social media, commenting on stuff, all. And you're not tracking it, or you don't know that you're really getting a lot of return on investment on that.

[00:15:24] And I know that if my friend Bridget is watching right now, she's she hates saying marketing return on investment. But if you're investing a lot of time, it's something you need to be getting something back. Yeah. That needs to result in clients. And so one of the things that I tend to tell people is.

[00:15:40] That if you're just cuz you're sitting on social media doesn't mean that you're working like a lot of people think that it means you're working. So we're talking about social media disappearing through a couple of different lenses so that you can be more effective in your work. And so that you can have a more robust marketing strategy, [00:16:00] right?

[00:16:00] Like this needs, you can't put all of your eggs in the social media basket. The reason for that is there's a lot more things out there. oh, look at this. Yeah. Unplug and go camping. Absolutely. Absolutely. So much more fun. So can we talk for just a minute? About marketing strategy before we dive into some things.

[00:16:24] Okay. so permission, granted permission. Granted, thank you. So your business needs to have a really strong foundation before you even start worrying about social media. There are literally so many things you could be doing and honestly should do before you get to social media. Social media works. When, more about your business, more about the people that, who your customers are and where they hang out.

[00:16:54] If you don't know those things and you haven't really practiced that yet, it's really hard to be effective on social media because people are confused. They don't know exactly what it is that you are doing. They don't understand who you're talking to. Like it might be me, it might not be me. And yet a lot of people start on social media.

[00:17:12] You don't need to have a website for it. You don't need to have an email list for it. And for some people, although admittedly not my clients tend to be social media, resistors , which is really funny to me. But, and I think it's because I tell them, you can do a lot of things before you get to social media in all honesty.

[00:17:28] And then they're like, oh, whew, okay. I like you. I don't have to be out there. But there's, there are a lot of reasons why social media becomes much more effective after you've taken care of a few. So the first thing you need to have is really a marketing strategy. You need to have some sort of marketing plan that will help you understand the different ways that you can attract people into your business.

[00:17:50] You need to have a budget. And even if that budget is zero, at least that's honest, but I will say that if your budget is zero, That doesn't mean you get [00:18:00] to spend all of your time on social media. it means you have to be doing other things like maybe you get MailerLite, which is free, and you use that and you start building your email list and you don't spend all of your time on social media because your time is money.

[00:18:17] It just is. So you wanna have a strategy and you wanna set up some goals around. How marketing is gonna help you, every marketing activity that you take needs to be directly related to a goal. If it's not, you're just flailing around and doing stuff. And then you're wondering why it doesn't work.

[00:18:35] So you have to think about your business goals and then how marketing is gonna support you making and reaching those goals. Are you still there? Yeah. Did you run away absorbing, just taking it all in, so after that, You think about all of that stuff. I still suggest you need some sort of platform that you own.

[00:18:56] That's you're not renting space from a social media company, like a website. You can get a website for $200 a year on Squarespace, and it's a great one, $300 on Ghost. WordPress starts to get more complicated and expensive. Shelley's really focused on content creation, so she has a great website platform.

[00:19:17] That's tied to her shows that she has that her and Toby have. So there's always a way of doing it, but have a space that you own that you can send people to so they can go and say and see what it is that you do. And that you've invested enough in your business to be available and seen online. And then after that, like marketing becomes a lot more open.

[00:19:39] You can email marketing is still the money is in the list. So you wanna be like, Getting people on your list, any way that you can, you wanna start building relationships in the community. If you're an online business, you wanna start building relationships in your online community. So you can start to get referrals and word of mouth.

[00:19:56] You need to start building those relationships. These are not [00:20:00] social media relationships necessarily. A lot of things happen offline. You wanna start having some photos and some videos of all the stuff that you're doing. You have to understand that people love behind the scenes content. You don't have to put that out on social media.

[00:20:14] it can be things that you send out in your email marketing. The other thing that you have to have is a place for your customer list. As people come in, you need a way that you're tracking them. Building those relationships, making sure that you're doing, follow-ups all of that kind of thing. That's typically handled in a, in what's called a CRM or a client relationship manager.

[00:20:36] You can get some really basic ones. In fact, one of the best ones is through square, which is a common way for people to take payments. So if you're already taking payments using square, you can use that there are some other good ones that are lower cost that you can be using to help you. Work with customers and all of that kind of stuff happens before you ever even get to social media.

[00:20:57] After you have all of that, all of your integrations, your email software, all of that can happen before you even get to social media. I think you need to have a few customers before you start really worrying about social media and that's the underlying or the high level strategy before you even get to social.

[00:21:19] Yes. She just remembered she's on the show. We forget the old school stuff, like phone calls and showing up in person and talking to people, your neighbors or people who live in the town that you live. And Jen grew her business a lot. Just doing that, just starting with the people around her, in growing from there.

[00:21:40] A lot of people in our town know. Toby and I, and they're open to doing things with us, collaborating in some way, because we've been around for 10, 12 years and they know us. So we can just reach out and say, Hey, we're putting together, blah, blah, blah. Would you like to come? Yes. Or somebody else is having an event.

[00:21:58] Hey, could we come and set up a [00:22:00] little booth and teach people this? Oh, absolutely. Just. back and forth. Collaboration is a great place to start because the people who know you are the people who are most open to your offers in working with you. Yeah. If you haven't emailed all of your friends and let them know what you're doing especially when you start your business or you start a new business, so like the Strategic Marketing Membership we've started really doing some outreach for that among people that we already know to say, Hey, we're doing this new thing.

[00:22:27] If you hear about anybody, if you know anybody, if this is interesting to you here, think about this. Here's what you can do. Here's how you can help us people wanna be helpful. it doesn't all have to happen on social media. Increasingly people are turning off to social media because it's so fake.

[00:22:45] This is your, for most people, social media, Real. So doing that outreach is really important. Now I also, we've talked about this on previous shows, have a lot of relationships that have led to contracts and different opportunities that allow me to maybe not market my business in as many traditional ways.

[00:23:05] I don't have to focus on social media to constantly be offering things besides I mostly offer advice and expertise, which is really. Social media should be instead of a constant promotion. The best promotion that you can do is sharing your expertise and being valuable. That's your social media hot tip of the day.

[00:23:28] So as you go through and start developing your business, you're really developing relationships and you're going to events that and doing things that will help you build your business in ways that are not. On social media. So some of the things that Shelley talked about, like you were talking about like trade shows and have you started going back and doing those?

[00:23:50] Not yet. Wait, did we go to one recently? I can't remember we did. We went to the film and media day and we reconnected with some people. Here's an example, though. I [00:24:00] put out, I was a guest on a podcast this week called Personally Brandtastic. And I shared that on social media, of course, because the host gave me the the graphics to put up.

[00:24:10] So I put that all over social media, but what I also did was I shared it on my. By text with my friends and family. And those are the people who actually listen to it and comment to me, here's what I learned. And I didn't know you did this and people ask me for this kind of help all the time. I'm gonna send them your way.

[00:24:29] Okay. That perfect was not only easy. It was effective because they're my friends and they know me and now they know more about what I do so they can help you. Field those filter those people towards me when it's appropriate. Absolutely. And you'll also share it with your email list.

[00:24:47] So that's, looking at it through all of these different ways. So one of the thing that's, and that's one of the things that's on the list, Shelley was on a podcast. This is like PR in a way to be, you're also building relationships with podcasters telling them what you do. I've referred people.

[00:25:04] That from shows that I've been on, you can do speaking. You can do live speaking. You can speak on zoom, you can do networking events. They don't have to be in person anymore. Now that we have this experience over the last two years, there are so many different ways that you can market your business online.

[00:25:20] That really weren't there anymore. You can write for. Other people's websites, you can send press releases. I know this sounds strange, but those press releases. Everybody's oh, nobody reads the paper, but they're putting them online now, too. So it's a way to get everything out there. That's right. Yeah. And the thing of it is we used social media as a crutch because it's there and we begin to rely on it. So you do need to ask yourself every now and then what, if that was taken away? What would I do then? Because social media is only helpful. And then it's I need something better.

[00:25:59] [00:26:00] I need something more assured. And that's when you can start to dive into those things like networking or speaking online and it really pushes you to go, you know what? My my particular target audience is seniors. They go to senior centers. Why don't we speak at a senior center and teach in, that and, or score and teach there, there's these places that you start to think of and you start to say, what if I had a meetup group for seniors and, you start really reaching for things and in coming up with great ideas, because you're forced to, because you let's say social media wasn't there then. Yeah. And my thing is some of these things are way more fun than social media for me. Yeah. I have a lot more fun doing some of these other things. And in fact, if you don't like social media, you can be doing all of these things and it will really fortify what it is that you're doing.

[00:26:51] I'm not gonna advocate that you don't have to be on there at all. Although I will say that I, there are some really big names out there in certain. Certain areas that are no longer on social media, they've reached a point. Their search engine optimization is good enough. Their audience is big enough. They don't like social media.

[00:27:09] They never enjoyed engaging on it that. They're not there. It's true. So you don't have to have a business that's on social media at all. One of my favorite marketers is not, has never been and will never be on Facebook. like you don't have to do all of the things. And I think that's, what's really important here.

[00:27:27] So one of the things that I decided to do yesterday, this is very interesting. I've never done this before. Is Women Conquer Business is. We donated some money and we're sponsoring a local dance team. Oh, fun here. Yeah. And so the logo be on the shirts like it's, so fun and interesting. These are the types of opportunities that you can do.

[00:27:49] Now. My business is primarily online. I don't even have, it's not like everybody is here, but it is. Good promo. We're getting, we're gonna be on [00:28:00] shirts. We're gonna be promoted by the local dance team. Wherever they go and dance, they'll be wearing those shirts and they'll say, Women Conquer Business on the back.

[00:28:07] It's also an opportunity to be active in the community. One of the biggest things that you can be doing is finding opportunities like that. To really engage with people in your community, to make a big difference. You're making a difference in your community. It's an act of Goodwill and. oh, by the way, people are gonna see your brand around town.

[00:28:27] Like it's exciting. So you always have to be looking at that. There are other things that you can do that really, aren't a huge lift, like starting, claiming your Google account, getting your Google business profile, going, getting reviews. All of those reviews are searchable. People find you that way.

[00:28:47] These are things that should just be part of your workflow. Somebody's been my customer. They're really happy. I'm my next step is to send them to my Google business profile so that they can say, Jen's really cool. You should work with her. She did this, that, and the other thing. And it takes the next step.

[00:29:08] It's also important to be in all of these local directories. It's becoming maybe less important, but I had a client recently who changed locations. She's a local business here. She went from having one location to two locations. We needed to have her address updated quickly, getting it out there to as many people as possible.

[00:29:28] So we used a service called MOZ, which is typically known for search engine optimization, but they also have a product called MOZ Local and we pushed out all of that location information and also, oh, by the way, business descriptions, photographs, all kinds of things. And so now, if anybody is, they have a Tom they're on apple, apple maps, Google everywhere.

[00:29:50] Now this new update is out there that people can get to either location on either side of town and get as much information as they want [00:30:00] from all of these directories. So I think you're starting to hear that there are a lot of ways that you can infuse your business. and become seen that don't involve, selfies and videos and and social media posts.

[00:30:19] Wait, no videos. I won't see my pretty face and we've done all of that without even talking really about content. Content because content doesn't you don't have to share every, everything on social media, you could be creating a lot of content that's searchable. Yes. Without sharing it. Now you should share it.

[00:30:49] Yeah. I'm not saying that, but there are a lot of useful ways that you can be using your content, creating content. Make sure that it's something that people are searching for and that you're using the right words. It's a lot more difficult to get traction for your content without social media, but you can be creating content and that content can, in fact, help you attract potential clients.

[00:31:15] Yes. Then they know what it is all about. If they want more of that content. So Shelley, I know that you have a checklist. Do you wanna start talking about the 23 ways? Oh sure. I can. And now I created a checklist because this inspired me to this show inspired me today to say, okay, what are some ways that don't involve social media, that I could, promote my business and attract clients and that sort of thing.

[00:31:43] So I put together some free organic methods and some paid methods. Are not Facebook ads. now I do have YouTube ads on there because it's a search engine. So I gave me one exception there. But there's 23 different [00:32:00] suggestions on there and a lot of 'em, I'll have to be honest, or either email, phone call or speaking in person and all of the things that you can do when you're putting yourself out there.

[00:32:11] How do you follow up with people to create those leads? Yeah. So the list is full of those ideas and Even like online groups, like meetup groups or masterminds and other people's masterminds that you could speak at. And, and then just have that follow up to bring them along into your own email list.

[00:32:32] So then you can continue to nurture that list. Even blog posting, putting blogs up on your website for that additional. Hey, I'm here and this is what I do. A thing. Yeah. And if you have like sales pages, you can always improve the writing on your sales pages. Maybe you're not converting because the copy isn't as sharp as it needs to be.

[00:32:53] So have people look at your sales pages, make sure that it's urgent problems that you're solving that people need help with. Get another set of eyes on that. So there's a lot of work that you can be doing to get people going. How do you feel about events? Or events on your list. Yeah. So you said Meetups.

[00:33:12] So yeah, I do. I have in person and online events if you can get involved in events it's wonderful. A great place to start before you even have your own events is just to, if you attend events, conferences, and that sort of thing, and then do a whole lot of networking while you're there.

[00:33:31] To keep it going. So what event are you going to next? You can ask people. And what do you find is the best event that you've been to? You can ask people and then you can start to plan future events that you can attend. You can apply to be a speaker. And then eventually you can start your own events in, you can start off small online, or you can, if you have a large presence in your area, you can start something in person or you can do it as a collaboration [00:34:00] with other people who have the same type of audience that you do and all come together as speakers and create an event together.

[00:34:07] So there's a lot of options there. We have talked about like a tele summit. We have the capability. To do that. And we haven't put that together. We're modeling actually another way to build your business without social media. It's a joint venture. Yes. This show is a joint venture. We help each other.

[00:34:27] That's right. And that's part of what we're doing. We're collaborating on this product, this show, we each bring our audience in. They see what the other one's doing. Yeah. And we say, Hey, Shelley's cool, man. Yeah. And then she's, Jen is awesome. That's part of it. And that didn't involve social media.

[00:34:44] We met at a conference, we found some synergy. We created, we. Shelley said, why don't we bring the show back? I said, okay. And now we're starting to do it. None of that involves social media. In fact, the joint venture, and the fact that we talk about each other at different times is none of that is really on social media.

[00:35:02] And then, oh, by the way, we also do it on social media and support each other. But it's like that, that both, and that's another way think about the people that you're surrounded with. That you like to hang out with and how is there potential there to do more if there is any yeah. I'm thinking about them.

[00:35:22] You told me to think and I'm thinking , Shelley's who else can I talk to? Who else can I talk to? But I think, yeah I attend a mastermind that's monthly, except for during the summer, she takes a couple months off, but. It's monthly. And then a lot of the same people show up every month. So you can tell who's good to reach out to.

[00:35:42] I was in a zoom call yesterday, learning. Putting together a community it was a heartbeat zoom and oh, cool. Yeah. And they asked, what is your business about what is your group about? And then I could see there's three or four other people who are focused on senior citizens as a market, so I [00:36:00] was like, oh, I should talk with them. I should figure out a way to collaborate with them and put together something like a summit, why not. Why not? Cause you can that's right.

[00:36:09] I feel like we've talked a lot about what we can do. Are we good? Do we feel like. Does that have any questions out there? I see on hearing on our training, you say how to reach them. So if you're not able to reach people through social media, how do you reach them? There's email there's phone calls.

[00:36:26] What else is there anything else you can think of? We've talked about it. So there's PR there's events. So meeting people that way, there's podcast guesting. a lot of this is about finding out where your people are and being there. Yeah. And a lot of times we assume that social media is the place, but we don't know how often our people are on social media.

[00:36:47] We don't know if we're reaching them. We have to share things over and over again to get to everybody. How we reach out to them, needs to be done in dynamic and diverse ways. So all of the sum of all of these parts are ways that you can do it, whether it's personal outreach or whether it is, attending events and then making it, I'm an introvert.

[00:37:09] So it's really hard for me then to go to an event and then. Let's talk like it's not necessarily a natural thing for me. I, yeah, I know. I present some very extra extroverted, but I don't know. And I wouldn't have reached out normally either cuz I'm an introvert, but it just happened to be that in your interview, you said.

[00:37:28] I am podfading and I don't want a podfade. And I was like, yeah. Oh, I can help with that. We can help with that. so I think that what I think that what we can do is find all of these ways that we can reach out to people. We look at all these opportunities as a way to build a relationship that is authentic and real and genuine.

[00:37:50] And might lead to something else. I'm that person who's oh, you need this. Oh, okay. I know this person and I know that person yeah. Connector a connector. Part of it is [00:38:00] that, we all need to be connectors and we all need to be reaching out to people and thinking about other people and.

[00:38:08] They do that too. And that's how business happens, they used to say that people go out on the golf course and meet, you need to find your golf course. Yeah. You gotta find your golf course. Yeah. And that's how you reach out to them. That's right. Absolutely. That's wonderful.

[00:38:24] And for those of you who are interested in more or seeing it written in front of you, I do have that client attraction checklist. You can see in the crawl if you're looking or if you're listening, it's at checklist.agkmedia.Studio. And you can get a free checklist of free and organic methods as well as a few paid methods for reaching out and attracting clients without using social media.

[00:38:54] Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. We have a question about this is hi, John. Question about, do you help with cold calling? I don't, that's more, I put that more in the sales lane and I'm more of a marketing. Person, but the, I will say that cold calling can work if you are, if you know who it is that you need to reach.

[00:39:16] And I would look, if you're going to do cold calling, look in your local community for somebody who can help with that.

[00:39:24] Do you have anything to add about cold calling that I'll like it

[00:39:31] so definitely make sure that you get the client attraction checklist. This will give you a lot of different ideas and strategies that you can use to that. Some of which we didn't talk about today, I looked at the list and I was like, holy cow. So checklist DOK, media. AJ a GK media.studio. Oh, chat. Yeah. Why did you put that in the chat?

[00:39:52] That was, there was a little bit of a struggle there. and I

[00:39:56] I also have the marketing self-assessment checklist [00:40:00] available. So you can review your online marketing, but the, I think the thing that you're gonna want today is really this client attraction checklist that gives you a lot of ideas. For how you can do some outreach to people that don't involve social media.

[00:40:16] There's the other marketing self assessment as well. Always good to think about your marketing and because that's what this is outreach. This is letting people know you exist and what you do. Great to have and go to that. There's the what? Social media dis beautiful landing page I put up in the last five minutes before the show.

[00:40:34] what if social media disappeared? How would you reach out and generate leads? Ah, that's right. See, and look at how calm this picture is. So I should have had in my scary one, be sure that you go get that. I think it'll really help with a lot of these ideas. it will help you with the idea generation around what you would do if social media disappeared.

[00:40:56] That's right. Okay. Are we. We ready for tweaks of the week tweaks. Jen's got tweaks okay. So the tweak of the week is software that we use or that we like that helps us. Today I wanted to talk about, so this is called shift and it is an organizer that can help you. It, you can put all of your email addresses in one place.

[00:41:25] That's what these three items are up here. It can also help you like, so I like the Harvard business review. I can log into that. There are Bonsai is my, how I invoice people. Grammarly is here. My notion is here. So there's all different ways that you can organize your apps. It keeps you out. If you have Google.

[00:41:50] As your email, you can end up with a Jillian tabs open and you're cycling through them. This is a way to focus your email and be in your email without [00:42:00] being in tabs. If that keeps you from doing your work. So this is a productivity tool. You can also hook into active campaign MailChimp, a lot of different apps.

[00:42:12] It connects to. I don't even know how many apps that you could connect to. Let's see if we add applications, you can see here that you can put in just about anything that you can think of your CRM would be in here. All of you could put your ads in here. You could connect to air table. There's just.

[00:42:33] Hundreds of apps in here. If it's a place where you could take the apps that you use on the daily and put those in the window and then it keeps you, or so they say, it keeps you from going out on social media and having a bunch of tabs open. What you can do. What you can do is have tabs open that are related to your email.

[00:42:57] Address. And that can be very helpful as well. And you can go from account to. And take a look at things. So this is an organizational tool. I will say. The thing about shift that's maybe interesting is this is a tool that really wore me down. With Facebook ads and I think LinkedIn ads. And then I finally did it.

[00:43:20] And I think if you're looking for a way to really. Streamline your processes get out of having 50 tabs open at the same time. This is something to look at another tool that you might be interested in looking at. If you want to organize your email, it's called Kiwi it's Kiwi for Gmail. And what they do is.

[00:43:41] Pretty much the same thing. I don't think it doesn't connect to as many apps. So if you're not really an app hound like me, I have so many apps. You can use Kiwi for Gmail. It does work with Google workspace. It's not just free Google accounts. Try shift or shift is a hundred dollars a year [00:44:00] and a Kiwi for Gmail.

[00:44:02] I believe. Around 30, somewhere around $30 a year. So these are apps that you can be using to help you streamline your Google. If you have a lot of Gmail email systems in place, this is something that you can use. I think it will help you focus , which is really what you need sometimes is something that will help you.

[00:44:25] And that is the tweak of the week. Let me get back to tweak of the week. That was awesome. Yeah. Are you ready for inspiration? I am. Okay. This came from Seneca and the daily stoic today, the stable person keeps their rational soul invincible for its precisely in the good times they prove their strength.

[00:44:49] Against adversity, where I have to ask ourselves, am I prepared for the bubble to burst? If I'm riding a high, what happens if suddenly something's taken away like social media, boom, it's gone. What do you do? Are you prepared for that? Are you, have you shored up your systems? We can't rely too heavily on what has been up to this point.

[00:45:10] Normal. We have witnessed over the last two years that everything can shut down overnight events and flights, cancel jobs, disappear, and family and friends can get sick and or die. What then can we rely upon our values and ideals? When we choose our goals based on our values, we will always discover another way to achieve a value based goal when we run into unexpected obstacles.

[00:45:34] So if it's an important value based goal, you're more likely to say, okay, I can do without social media, I can do without this, that, or the other thing, I still, I'm going to find a way to make this work because it's important and. What I need to do for me to be me, , it's part of my identity.

[00:45:52] Yeah. I'm gonna make it happen. Absolutely. And what I love about this is it brings up a point for me that I forgot, which is [00:46:00] by diversifying your marketing and not relying on social media, you become much more resilient. And resilience is important, resilient aspect. , especially with all of what you just said.

[00:46:13] Yeah. In terms of the bubble bursting, maybe the bubble won't burst. If you have a lot of reinforcements. The bubble, right? The bubble there's always gonna be obstacles. Even if your bubble doesn't burst, there's gonna be an obstacle that comes up even that could even be something unforeseen. What happened to me this year?

[00:46:27] My mom had a stroke and I needed to go back and be with her for a while. That's not something you can plan for. It is something that you can be shoring yourself up against. If something unforeseen comes up, will you have a plan in place to, to see you through. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Shelley.

[00:46:49] That was a great, I love that. Thank you. Yeah. Fit right in with our disappearing social media. So we are gonna be back again next week with another great topic and we do thank you for joining us today, and we'll hope to see you again. Next time. Have a good week. Everybody. Thank you for joining the Women Conquer Business podcast hosted by Shelley Carney and Jen McFarland, please subscribe and leave a comment or question regarding your most challenging content creation or business problem.

[00:47:19] Then share this podcast with family and friends so they can find the support they need to expand their brand and share their message with the. Check the show notes for links to valuable resources and come back again next week.