Hello, and welcome to episode 171 of The Shine Show. Today, we are talking about social media and I'm going to share with you one thing that makes all the effort worthwhile

(00:18)
Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack. And I help online course creators launch grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you are ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster than tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is The Shine Show.

(00:52)
Hello, my fabulous, fantastic listener, my friend. I do feel like we're friends. I love it when you guys and gals send me emails telling me what you love about the podcast or what I said that really resonated with you. Or sometimes I get emails from people saying, "I've been thinking that, but I've never said it out loud, and now you've said it, and you've given me permission to do something or to not do something, whichever the case may be."

(01:33)
Today's episode is one of those where I'm going to give you permission to do something or give you permission to not do something. And that something is social media. It's a bit of a hot topic this one, because you know I'm the ads girl. So I have been spouting for a very long time that you do not need social media to build an audience. And the reason I say that so often is just because the psychological power that social media has over early online entrepreneurs, anyone who is still trying to figure out how to make money online.

(02:23)
And I remember the same thing. It took me three years to figure out how to make money online. And in those three years, pretty much all I did was social media. I did a lot of social media. And look, I'm going to be honest and tell you, I actually have so much fun when I do social media. So don't get me wrong. I'm not saying no one should do it. I'm not saying you should do it if you don't like it. I'm saying, take that load off your back. That load that makes it look like the only people that are successful are the extroverts building giant audiences on social media because that, my friend, is the burden I want to lift for you today. In this episode, I want to show you that it's possible and not just possible, but it's important for you to approach social media with a chilled out, relax, no pressure attitude.

(03:40)
Imagine if you approached dating, finding a husband or a wife or a partner or a parent for your children with the same amount of pressure you felt about social media, you'll be like, "Oh I got to be on everyday. I got to look pretty everyday. I got to be all polished everyday." Yeah. There goes the authentic relationship. But then also, if you don't show up ever, that person's not going to marry you. So while there are people who dominate the world of social media and who look like they're having a great time living their best life, hashtag blessed and everything they do, say, hear, touch, eat, not eat, pick up, put down, put in their mouths, not put in their mouths, ugh, buy or sell has to be posted on social media. And it's all super perfect. Well, you know what? It's not. And that's okay. That is just so, okay.

(04:50)
So let's stop pretending. Your grid doesn't have to be perfect. Your reels don't have to be polished, you don't need to go to the hairdresser before you take a selfie. I remember back in the days I would not record a video if I wasn't wearing fake eyelashes because I felt like I needed the look because a lot of the people I look up to have look. But I'll tell you, fake eyelashes are the bane of my existence. I can't stand them. If anybody has good fake eyelash advice for me, please send it my way. But it has to be better than what I can find on YouTube because the magnetic ones, no thank you, the gluey ones gets in my eye and I can't put it on strike, the little wispy ones, it's just too much.

(05:38)
So I gave up because I realized, nobody cares. Nobody cares if I have fake eyelashes on or not. Nobody cares if I'm wearing my brand colors, nobody cares if I have a cold and my nose is red, nobody cares. It's not why they're there. They're not there to judge me. They're there to love me and bond with me. All of that perfectionism doesn't align with the true purpose of social media for business anyway or social media for any reason.

(06:14)
I want to be clear that the focus of this episode is on social media for building your business. Not for having fun or sharing with your friends, but social media specifically for business. And yeah, I've said it before, but I'm going to say it again. I'm going to let this cat out of the bag one more time. Are you ready? I'm going to reveal to you the only thing you should be doing on social media. The only thing. The only thing social media is good for. What is it good for? Only this one thing. Here's the one thing. Social media, are you ready? Are you listening? Okay. Here it is. Social media is only there to build your list. What did she just say? Social media is only there to build your list.

(07:23)
Okay. I'm going to explain that and I can already hear you say, "But I can't make a call to action to download my lead magnet in every social media content I create." And that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying you have to keep pushing your lead magnet, your one lead magnet in every post. That's not what I'm saying. That's going to get old very quickly. What I am saying is, you build relationships with people on social media, by visually showing them that you understand their pain and you can help them achieve their desires or you have already achieved their desires.

(08:12)
Think for a second about how many visual posts you can create, because remember, social media's visual. How many visual posts can you create that personifies their pain, that pokes fun at their pain and by poke fun. I mean the collective fun. Like we're all in this together type of thing. Don't laugh at them. You can probably come up with at least 10. And then what visual communication can you use to show them that you understand the journey that they're on, towards getting to that thing and what visual communication can you use to show that you've already achieved what they have. Like there, I've just given you ideas for 30 posts, right?

(09:07)
But every now and then, once they've related with you, you're going to tell them to sign up for a class or join a webinar or get your lead magnet or move your relationship along, get a free thing, any free thing, a free thing that's going to help them. And that's where the magic of social media lies. It lies in getting them on your list.

(09:34)
The other way you can do that is you use social media without making those call to actions and you retarget people on your social media accounts with ads. That gets them on your email list. And it just depends on what your journey is and what your budget is and how confident you are with ads. But still, your goal with social media is to get people on your email list.

(10:01)
And then once they're on your email list, now you're engaged. Now they have said, "Hello, how you doing?" And they have responded. I have said, "Yes, Joey, I will go to the movies with you." The real work starts. You get them to your large format content, your large format content is your blog or your podcast or your video blog or your lives. If you use Facebook Live or Instagram Live to create large format content, it's the content that's longer than two minutes and it doesn't have to be much longer. It can be five minutes. When I vlogged back in the day, my videos were about five minutes long and I would send out a video once a week and that's my large format content. And I added a lot of value in those five minutes.

(11:08)
So again, don't think you have to start a podcast because everybody else is doing it. Actually, I feel like blogging is coming back a little bit. YouTube is a very hot right now. Long form video is very hot. So whatever your creative format is that makes you feel most comfortable and most confident to deliver your messages. Some people like writing, some people like being on camera, some people like speaking without having their camera face on like what I'm doing right now. And it just depends. Whatever floats your boat. And once they're on your list, then you're going to start making offers to them. Because now we can ask them to marry us.

(12:00)
That's why it took me three years to figure out how to make money on social media. Because you don't make money on social media. It's not where you make money. You make money by taking the audiences from your social media and bringing them down the funnel and in human language, that means you connect with people on social media and then you create gates behind which you build a relationship. So first you invite them into your house, your living room, your email list. Then you sit down, have a cup of coffee with them. Woo them a little bit. That's your large format content. And only once you've put in the hard work, do you invite them anywhere else in your house?

(13:02)
I'm hearing some of you and it might be my social bunnies asking if I've got so many followers on social media and they really, really, really like me and they love my posts. They watch my videos, heck they even share my posts. Why do I want to bother them and ask them to do something to get on my email list? Do hear the flaw in that thinking? Why do we always think we're bothering our audiences? I hear this so often from students, "I don't want to send more emails because I don't want to bother them. I don't want to shove my lead magnet down their throats." People, let's create content that doesn't bother. I don't think I'm a bother. I try really hard not to bother you. The fact that you're listening tells me, I don't. If I do, you need to go find something else, right? We don't bother people. Stop thinking you bothering them. Come on, come on, come on.

(14:11)
Either put in more work, put in more creativity or we need to talk about your self-esteem. Don't bother your audience. You are never, ever, ever a bother to your audience. If you think you are, you need to either love them more or love yourself more. Wow. That was wise. I feel like RuPaul, "If you don't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else, right?"

(14:43)
I make my kids watch RuPaul. Well, I don't make them watch it. That sounds terrible. I love watching RuPaul, you already know that about me because I did a whole episode about RuPaul but now, Milam, my 11 year old, in the morning when I tell her she has to have a good day at school and be kind and be a good friend and make all your dreams come true. And then she looks at me and she goes, "And if you can't love yourself, how the hell are you going to love somebody else?" And I crack up laughing and then I go, "You're a good mother." When my kids are quoting RuPaul to me, I know I'm a good mother. It's my measure of motherhood.

(15:23)
Anyway, back to social media. So you're asking me if I have all these followers on social media, why would I want to ask them to join my list? Those of you who've been listening for a while will know that the simple answer is because you don't own your social media. You should have been around about, it was maybe two years ago. I feel like it happens every two years where either Facebook and Instagram gets hacked or they don't tell us what the real problem is. They just say there was a server down, but for about 24 hours, Facebook and Instagram disappears off the planet. And the collective panic always entertains me thoroughly.

(16:16)
The first people who freak out are the influencers because when their large accounts go away, their livelihood goes away, which is a really shitty business model if you ask me. So don't be an influencer or be an influencer by all means, but build your list, build your list. That's what you need to do. You can have 50,000 followers in a heartbeat on whatever platform you choose, right? Particularly if you go for one of the new ones where if you're an earlier adopter, you'll get a lot of followers pretty quickly. And it seems to me like there's a new platform that's here to stay coming out almost every two years now. A couple of years ago it was Clubhouse, and TikTok, have you been on TikTok lately. I spent an hour last night, scrolling on TikTok. It's addictive. So funny. So funny. I love the irreverence on there. It's just so funny. Anyway.

(17:21)
So if anything happens to Facebook or Instagram or any of your other platforms and you do not have those people on your email list, they're gone, you have lost it. And this happens a lot more than you think. And it causes a lot of stress for those business owners. Who've put so much time and effort into their reals, their pointing and their dancing. It is very stressful when you have done that much pointing and dancing and it all goes away and they have to start from scratch. Or the other thing that happens is, they build these mega audiences on social media and then they run an ad that doesn't comply with the policy and Facebook not only shuts down their ad account, but they also shut down their Instagram account. I have seen it happen.

(18:20)
I actually saw it happen to someone who is an Instagram teacher. So that person teaches Instagram and it was Christmas Eve and they were on holiday in Morocco and they lost their entire Instagram account. Yeah. That was back in the day when I was still stepping in and saving clients on Christmas Eve, that's not happening anymore. There's some healthy boundary growth that occurred in my life since then.

(18:53)
But here's the thing, the reason you're focused on getting people's email addresses is because then you're in control. You own the list. You could take it to whichever mailing program you like, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Infusionsoft, whatever you want, but nobody will shut you down. You can back up your list. You can make a copy of it. Your email list becomes your biggest asset in your business for an online course creator or an online marketer.

(19:26)
And in case you're wondering, but how do I get them on my list in the first place? That is where your incredible, amazing free elite magnet come in. And it is just a small piece of content that your target audience will find valuable that will give them a quick win, something practical, something tactical, something that they don't have to go away and it takes hours to consume or they have to implement big things. Has to give them a quick, small win. Those are usually the best lead magnets. It might be a short lesson or a secret revealed or a template of some kind or a cheat sheet. You then set it up so that they can only access your super free thing. If they sign up to your list and then you start emailing them and you email them your podcast, or you go live on Facebook and you send that out every week, they get the freebie and you get their email when you start calling them out to invite them to download your freebie. That is how most course creators will build their lists.

(20:35)
There is another way though, you can use social media to drive traffic to your long form content. If you go on my Instagram account today, today is the 17th of August. You'll be listening to this probably around the 30th of August. But if you go on my Instagram today, you will see a lot of content driving people to this podcast. And I deliberately created it that way for a period, while I was focusing on other things in the business and using ads to build my list, I just wanted to keep my social media alive. So all I did was sent them to my long form content, nothing wrong with that. Just not building a lot of personal relationships on there, but I also did that on purpose to prove to you that you don't really need social media to build the business.

(21:35)
Then once your audience lands on that long copy, and of course they love it. And they're practically eating out of the problems of your hand. Then you add a call to action in that content, which you guess them, asks them to sign up for your list. It's a longer route, but a little bit more energy efficient because you create your podcast content once, your long form content, you take a little piece of that, you put it on your social media and it's much quicker to get it done and get it out. And those people who resonate with your long form content will resonate with it on social as well.

(22:13)
Of course, once you have people on your list, you have to keep nurturing them and you keep helping them with your expertise. Just like I am doing it here right now for you on The Shine Show. Everybody knows that every time they share their email address that at some point there will be something for them to buy. Everybody knows this. They then have a choice to buy or not to buy. I had to learn what it means to really accept fully that other people have agency. Other people can say, no, thank you at any point in time. And I had to learn to not make myself small because I assume that someone else is not going to have agency to say no if they don't want what I have, this is back in the days when I was selling my services as a sales coach, which is the most ironic thing that I became a sales coach and I couldn't sell my services as a sales coach because I felt it was salesy.

(23:30)
I feel like the universe played a wicked joke on me that time. It was a wicked joke that lasted for a year and cost me a lot of money. But that is a funny wicked joke that maybe it wasn't the universe. Maybe it was me just being not very smart and learning, of course, learning. People know that they can continue to consume your free content when they're not ready to buy. And they know that they can access your free content on social media or on your email list. And they have a choice to buy or not to buy. So don't ever hold yourself back from selling to people on your email list or inviting them to a webinar or a class or a workshop or a video series where you sell to them. They have a choice to be there or not be there and they can say yes or no.

(24:22)
What I see happen to many course creators is, they say they haven't made many sales. And then when we unpack it a little bit, either they didn't have enough people see their offer, which happens a lot, particularly if you have a high dollar offer like 997, or if you are new and your audience is small or they just haven't really made an offer, they've just thrown a line into the water to see if anything would bite and nothing bit. And then they threw another little line in the water to see if something would bite. And the funny thing is, every time they discount the course more and more and more, and the more they discounted the fewer people want it.

(25:13)
I've been there, done that. No judgment. If that's you today, come talk to me. We can fix that. It's a bit like going to a restaurant and sitting at the table without a menu. You know that you want to eat, but you can't make a decision because you don't know anything about what's on offer. Well, how long do you sit there before you walk out or before you ask for a menu, if we want to sell, we have to make offers. And it makes total sense to make the offer to your email list rather than just on social media. Because the people on your list have already expressed an interest in what you're offering by sharing their email address. They've already given you consent. They are warmer audience than your social media people. That doesn't mean we don't run ads to our offers, it just means we don't start by running ads.

(26:06)
The final way that we can use social media is as a tool to taste new ideas and content. As entrepreneurs, it's natural for us to be full of ideas for new courses and new products. Particularly if your brain's a little hyperactive like mine, I could come up with 700 new ideas in a day. Finishing something that's harder for me than coming up with a new idea, but rather than diving straight in and spending hours and pouring in resources to bring this buddy new idea to life, you can gauge your target audience response to the new found concept or at least to the offer and what you're calling it or how you're presenting it to people. A lot of problems can be solved in the same way, but solved in different ways. I'm going to say that again, the problem can be solved in the same way, but solved in different ways.

(27:03)
So just because you solve a problem one way doesn't mean because it didn't sell one way that you have to redo the solution to the problem. Maybe you just have to redo the pitch of the solution to the problem. You can even directly ask questions on social media or set up a poll on your stories to get more specific feedback from your target audience and you'll know by how people respond on social media, whether they will respond when you use paid traffic or when you have paid to send traffic to a page and then that page converts or doesn't convert.

(27:47)
So remember, it's easy to fall into the trap of comparing yourself or feeling less than whenever you see what other people in your industry's doing on social media. It's not about the number of your followers and it's not about putting on any show for them to believe anything about you that is not exactly what is real in life. But I want to remind you that followers don't equal sales. Shining, perfectly placed grids don't equal sales. It's like fairy floss. It looks huge and impressive, but when you boil it down, it's a tiny teaspoon of sugar that's highly overpriced.

(28:39)
No one ever said, "Yeah, I bought her course because her hair was so freaking nice in that story she posted." They're there because you're helping them solve a problem they've been struggling with for the longest time. It doesn't matter what you're wearing. It doesn't matter if it's not perfect. In fact, people are drawn to the authenticity of not being perfect. Imperfections are relatable. You can spend hours and hours hustling hard on social media, getting new followers, but you will never own those followers. They can be ripped away from you overnight. It's far wiser investment of your time to use social media as a tool to grow your list and test your content. So have fun with it. Experiment with it, limit the amount of time you spend scrolling on it, because no, create before you consume is what the wise Marie Forleo taught me when I took B-School 700,000 years ago. That's about all I remember about B-School, create before you consume. So stay in your own lane and celebrate your progress on socials without comparing yourself to others.

(29:59)
Social media is meant to be fun, have fun, enjoy it, let it be easy. Let it be a creative process. Express your creativity in any way you want and let it be about the connection you create with people. And then put the systems in place that you can bring them onto your long form content and onto your email list.

(30:25)
That's all I have for you today my dear friend and listener. I want to remind you that my online business go-to-girl, Amy Porterfield, is hosting a free masterclass. It's called, How To Recession-Proof Your Business With ONE Digital Course: Five Strategies To Create and Launch a Profitable Digital Course From Scratch. And by recession-proof, that might sound a little bit heavy, but what Amy's really teaching during this free hour long class are the five must do items to add a digital course as an extra stream of revenue to your side gig or your business. You'll discover everything from what to teach in an online course to how to layout your course content to how to record your course. Even if tech is not your thing and even had to pre-sell your course so you have revenue to work with early on.

(31:29)
Amy will map out a proven path to create a digital course that allows you to take control of your future and your finances. And you know I'm all about you working and creating wealth in a way that works for you. So you can create stability for you and your people. No matter what the outside world is doing, no matter what the economy is doing.

(31:55)
Amy opens enrollment to this webinar on Tuesday morning, 7:00 AM Pacific. And this podcast episode drops on Tuesday morning, Aussie Time. So if you're in Australia and it's still Tuesday, you've got to wait until midnight, before you go to shineandsucceed.com/amy to grab your seat on this masterclass. But if you're in the US and it's Tuesday, then you can register right now for Amy's masterclass. I'll be there and I can't wait to see you there and share Amy with you and share this new masterclass with you because Amy, man, there is no one like Amy Porterfield. I just love that girl. All right. I will talk to you guys next week. Have a wonderful week, everybody. Bye.

(32:56)
Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.