Showing Up Without Social Media

Tara Reid: Hey, welcome to my presentation all about showing up without social media. We’re going to cover a lot. I’m going to be going a little quickly, so hopefully you’re able to re-watch this, or if you have the pass, you can re-watch it later. There is going to be a lot that I want to cover in a short period of time, but I also don’t want it to be overwhelming.

Just quickly, a little bit about me and basically why I wanted to do this presentation is because social media isn’t the be all and end all of marketing. There are so many ways to market and grow your business, connect with people, increase your visibility. I think a lot of times when we hear content or we hear marketing, we immediately think of social media. I just want this presentation to help you figure out if social media is working for you right now, if it’s right for you, and if it’s not, what you can maybe do instead.

For me personally, my name is Tara. I have been a multi-passionate entrepreneur for 17 years and I currently have over 50 different digital products, courses, group programs, and one-to-one coaching service-based offers in my business. I am also a huge introvert and showing up on social media has always drained my energy. I finally made the move to ditch it completely in 2022.

Let’s go into social media and how you’re using it right now. Just ask yourself, “Is it working for me right now?” When I say working, it’s not just about the instant gratification of getting people who like your posts or even leave comments or even send messages. Is social media, are your social media platforms actually getting you results?

When we think about results, we want to think about the results that matter. Are people actually visiting your website from social media? Are they actually signing up from your email list from social media? Are your customers or your clients actually coming from social media? Even if you think your audience is hanging out on a certain social media platform, and I hear this all the time is like, “I hate social media. I hate having to show up. It takes so much of my time and so much energy. I feel like I have no choice that I have to because my ideal audience is, for example, on Instagram.”

That may be the case. Your ideal audience may be on Instagram, but I can pretty much promise you that that isn’t the only platform or the only place that you can connect with them.

Here’s how I want you to think about marketing, especially if you’re watching this because you’re ready to let go of social media. Here is basically the three things that you need.

You need, first of all, some kind of attraction method. This is the way that you can attract new leads, new people who are not familiar with you at all. Then you need a method that is built to nurture those new leads. Then the third thing, you need some way that you can engage customers and students and continue to build a community, to deliver value. Basically, we want different platforms and different methods to do these three things and to work together in a way that is going to save us time, is going to make sense, and is not going to drain our energy. A lot of times, and I know this was the case for me when I was spending so much time on social media, I was using it as a way to, number one, attract. That was always my goal. I just wanted to grow my following. I wanted to reach more people. Social media maybe did that, but then I wasn’t able to nurture them because they never went anywhere else. Once I really looked at the numbers, social media really didn’t actually do much for me. Yes, it did build and attract people to me, but then they didn’t go anywhere.

Here are just a few marketing methods that can fill into some multiple categories. This is my example of what I do. The first method, my attraction methods, I attract new leads through SEO, so search engine optimization. My number one traffic source is Google. The second is Pinterest. The third method I use for attracting new people is blog content, also lead magnets, and then also collaborations, which are more of a quick win strategy. That could be speaking at a summit like this, that could be participating in a bundle, it could be doing a freebie swap. It could be showing up for a networking event. Basically, these are methods that get me in front of new people who are not familiar with me just yet.

The second step for nurture, I nurture my leads through sales funnels. I have a lot of offers, as I said at the beginning, so I have a lot of sales funnels that are running on evergreen, they’re automated, they’re converting, they’re working, they run in the background, beautiful, as an introvert.

Also email marketing, so regular emails, not just the funnels and the email sequences that are evergreen and automated, but also regularly emailing my list.

Then also I do have a podcast as well, which again, I’m not using to necessarily attract new people. I’m really using the podcast as a way to further connect with my audience, give value, and nurture the people who are already in my world.

The third stage of engaging people who are either new in my world or been in my world for a while, I engage with my students and my customers through a private community and also quite a few targeted email sequences. As you can see, email is my number one.

One thing I wanted to touch on, because I know I get this question a lot. Anytime I say I’ve now been off social media completely for two years, the first question I hear is, “Was it scary to leave?” or “Have you noticed a decrease in sales?” It was scary to leave. It was the best decision I ever made, but it was scary. Two, my sales, my visibility, my audience, everything has very much increased because I’m now focused on things that I actually enjoy and I show up in ways that actually feel good.

If you’re really scared about saying goodbye to social media completely, I don’t want you to think that you have to ditch it. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Just a few ways that you could maybe continue to show up on social media, but maybe scale back the amount of time and energy that you’re spending on it are, number one, maybe you just want to focus on a specific format of content, maybe just stories or maybe just reels. Maybe you create a new posting schedule. Maybe right now you’re posting five times a week because that has been what you’ve been taught to show up consistently. Maybe it’s that you need to go down to two times per week or once per week and maybe that is going to work better.

Number three, maybe you’re trying to be everywhere. Maybe you’re on every single social media platform out there and you’re trying to be consistent with all of them and it’s just draining your energy and you’re not getting the results. You could limit that to maybe just focusing on one or two social media platforms, or the thing that I really love is focusing more on repurposing more of your content so that you’re not spending so much time on the actual content creation side of things.

All right, so now if you are ready to focus your time and energy on other methods, here are a few little action steps for each way that you can generate more leads. Again, if you nurture these new leads, it will turn into more sales and visibility for you.

The first one, I said this is my top traffic source. It has been forever. I’ve been studying SEO for over two decades. Since computers existed, I was like– I just found SEO fascinating. I don’t want to go too in depth in it here because there’s so much we could talk about with SEO, but I do have a free guide that you can grab for this. The reason why I wanted to talk about SEO and why this is such a good strategy is because the people who are searching and finding you in Google, those are people who are actually searching for what you do or for what your offer solves. These are not necessarily cold leads who just happen to come across one of your posts as they were scrolling social media and thinking, “That sounds maybe interesting. I’ll click on it and see a little bit more.” These are people who are actively typing in and searching for something that is going to bring them to your page. That is the power of SEO.

The really big thing to start with is doing keyword research and competitor research when it comes to search engine optimization, and then just starting small. Just start optimizing your pages, so start with– If email is going to be a really big focus for you, focus on optimizing your opt-in landing pages for your freebies, focus on your sales pages, and then you can always go back and do other pages or other content on your website.

Pinterest has always been my second method, which I really love because Pinterest– A lot of people put this into social media, but it’s not. Pinterest is a search engine, it is not social media. What that means is that it is a more long-term strategy, but that also means you’re going to get results that last a lot longer than the standard shelf life of a social media post. Pinterest is also a really great side platform to use if you are focused on SEO, if you are focused on creating strategic lead magnets to grow your email list and promoting those, or blogging, which we’re going to get into next. The return on the time that you’re going to spend on Pinterest can really outweigh the amount of time that you’ve been spending on social media. That is just because, again, that shelf life, it is such a better return on your time. It just takes longer to get to that point.

The third method is blogging, which does go hand in hand with an SEO strategy. I personally love blogging. I have always loved blogging. It’s my favorite long form content method. I love repurposing blog posts. It just makes the whole content creation process so much easier, especially now that we have AI to help us with that repurposing. Blogging, it really can help us attract, nurture, and it gives us a leg up because we now have blog content that we can share to our email list on Pinterest. I really love blogging just because it is a multi-use long form piece of content. Lead magnets. I did say at the beginning that email marketing has become my number one. SEO, blogging, Pinterest, they all get me traffic, and then I want to make the most of that traffic. I want people to, for the most part, download a freebie and get on my email list where they’re now in a funnel, they’re getting email sequences, I’m able to nurture, and deliver value, and build that trust. Lead magnets are also really important for me. If email is also going to become one of, if not the primary marketing channel that you choose instead of social media, which I put here, it should be because we own our email lists. It’s not owned by another platform like social media, which– That’s why they say the money is in the list.

The really big, powerful way to get the right people onto your email list is by creating strategic lead magnets that are going to be enticing and are going to naturally lead them to the next offer or digital product. Of course, those tripwire sales, when somebody opts in, if they can become a paying customer immediately, best case scenario.

Collaborations. This is the other one that I personally am using right now. I think there’s a lot of different ways that you can do collaborations. The reason why I wanted to really hammer in this point about collabs is because, when we’re talking about ditching social media and we’re talking about SEO, and blogging, and Pinterest, and email, these things all tend to be long-term strategies. They take time. If you were just to go all in on those and ditch social media, you’re probably going to get frustrated because you aren’t going to get that instant gratification that we get from, I shared something on Instagram and people liked it within seconds. I got some funny comments and had some back and forth with some people. They probably aren’t customers, won’t become customers, but we still get that instant gratification of that instant validation of our content.

Whereas with blogging, SEO, Pinterest, we don’t get that. It can be discouraging if you don’t add in a collaboration or a– I like to call it a quick win method. These are all things that you can do to increase visibility, borrow other people’s audiences, and grow your email list that are more of a quick strategy. Adding in something like this is definitely essential if you are going to ditch social media completely.

I don’t want anyone to ditch it and then get frustrated because things aren’t happening quick enough. A collab or a quick win strategy is definitely needed as well. This could be speaking at or even hosting your own virtual summit, could be participating in or hosting your own bundle, doing freebie swaps or other types of collabs with specific people and borrowing each other’s audiences. It could be setting up your own affiliate program and getting people to share your freebies and your offers using their affiliate links. It could be, if you’re a speaker, going on podcasts as a guest. It could be, if you prefer writing over speaking, writing guest blog posts, which– That one is also really good for SEO purposes, because typically, if you write a guest blog post or if you’re a podcast guest, you’re going to get a backlink to your website, which if SEO is also a strategy, that’s just one little leg up on why those two things might be a good option for you.

Again, the only three things that matter is audience growth, nurturing your audience, and making money. We are a business. We need to make money. If you really look at your analytics, look at your numbers, look at how much traffic and where your clients or customers are actually coming from. If you look at that data, it is going to validate. For me personally, I had to look at that and the numbers gave me permission to be like, “What I’m feeling is right. This is telling me the small percentage of people that are actually coming to social media and the amount of time I’m spending on it, it just doesn’t add up.”

That gave me that permission slip that I felt like I needed to actually say, “You know what? I can say goodbye. I’m not going to be here anymore.” You can go over to my Instagram, introvertcoach is my username, and you can see my last post was a goodbye post. I waited six months to actually put that post up. I had a lot of content ready to go, so I just let that continue to schedule out. Then I was like,

“Okay, let’s check my numbers again. Let’s check the analytics.” It just made perfect sense. Always check your numbers if you’re in that, “I don’t know if I want to leave. I don’t know if I should. I don’t know if it is making a difference.”

These are really the only three things that matter. If social media is not doing any of these things for you, if it’s not actually growing your audience in terms of your email list, if it’s not actually nurturing and building trust, and if it’s not making you money, those are three good things to signal to you that, “Maybe I can do something else with my time instead of social media.”

All right. I always want to give some action steps, so here we go. I have a few action steps for you if you’ve watched this presentation, if it’s resonated with you. The first one, I want you to think about what are your strengths? Are you a really good speaker? Maybe you should start a podcast or be a podcast guest and try to get in front of more audiences that way.

If your strength is writing, focus on blog content. If you really love strategy, go deeper into your funnel analytics and really start building out your evergreen systems and your sales funnels. It doesn’t matter what your strengths are, there is some way that you can take those strengths and what you love to do and turn it into a strategy and a marketing plan that is going to work for you. The second thing, we want to make a plan. Once you decide what you want to do, what your strengths are, and what that leans into, now we want to take those things and make a plan. If you decide, “I really love writing, so I want to focus on blogging, Pinterest, email marketing,” how can those chosen methods work together?

For me, every blog post I write, I repurpose into three different email newsletters. Every blog post that I write, I will create 10 brand new pin designs in order for me to schedule it out onto Pinterest. Any blog post that I write, I will optimize for SEO, I will do keyword research. It does take more time, but it is very strategic instead of just throwing things at the wall. It gives me a marketing process. Anytime I have a blog post ready to schedule, I know what my next steps are. My next steps are to create Pinterest pins and then schedule them out and to open ChatGPT and have it repurposed into email newsletters that I can use over the next couple months. Then the third thing I want you to take action for is to not give up. If you’ve decided, “Tara, I’m excited, I’m ready. I’m going to either ditch or I’m going to scale back social media and I’m going to go all in on blogging, SEO, Pinterest,” whatever you’ve decided, I don’t want you to give up. These are long-term strategies, but once they start working, your results will last a lot longer than a four hour lifespan for a social media post.

Just to put that into perspective, my top blog post that still gets– Oh, I should have pulled up the numbers. I think it’s 300 to 400 right now, people coming to this one blog post from Google search every single month. I wrote the blog post five years ago. That blog post has given me a lot of return on the time I spent to initially write it, and do keyword research, and format it, and update it. That has given me such a good shelf life.

Same with Pinterest. My top pin is still delivering, I think, about 150 to 200 brand new people to that blog post every single month. Even though these things take time, please stick with it and don’t give up. Slow, consistent, and steady growth is a lot better than having overnight success or something go viral, because just as quickly as something went viral, it can start declining. Whereas all of these methods are more slow and steady and last a lot longer.

All right. I hope this presentation was helpful and I can’t wait to see what you thought of it. I hope it got you thinking about different ways that you can market your business and maybe figure out–

I want you to make the most of your time. We only have so many hours, and I know as entrepreneurs, we’re always trying to do so many things. I’m a multi-passionate, I get it. I really want you to look at the time that you’re spending on certain things and then look at your data to really validate if it’s something that is moving the needle or is it not moving the needle and maybe there’s something else that you could spend your time on instead. All right. Let me know. I’d love to connect with you. Of course, I’m not on social media, but feel free to send me an email, or if you grab any of my freebies on my website, you will be on my email list. That’s where I’m sharing all of the good stuff and connecting and nurturing my audience every single week.