What To Expect From This Book
Back in the day, building a business seemed pretty straight forward. You found a building, you got a loan, you opened up shop, and the people came to your store.
Except, that’s not exactly what happened?
People found office space, got the loan, opened up shop, and no one came. The savvy business owners would discover marketing tactics that would generate foot traffic. Tactics like direct mail, radio advertising, catalog advertising, classified ads, etc.
After some trial and error, they saw results.
Nowadays, the storefront is different.
People go online and build websites. No loan needed, just a monthly payment for hosting and an annual fee for your domain registration.
But many people have discovered that though it’s easier to “set up shop” now than a few decades ago, they run into the same problem: getting customers.
The savvy business owners will start looking at different online marketing tactics such as blogging, email marketing, SEO, and social media marketing.
“Build it and they will come” mentality crippled/cripples many businesses.
If you are reading this book, kudos to you for putting forth effort to “figuring it out”. It’s important to get as much knowledge as possible. But as Dale Carnegie infamously said, “knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.”
If you are not action oriented, then this book is definitely not for you. I’m sorry to tell you that this book is nothing but words filled with actions you must take if you want your business to have a chance in hell of survival.
Yes, I know, with a title like Social Leads: Your Social Media Playbook to Generating More Leads in The Next 90 Days, there should be some magic. There should be some snap-your-fingers-and-boom-it-works instructions. Sadly there is none of that in this book.
This book is for action-takers.
Implementers.
Persistent and determined individuals who will, by golly, make this business work; it’s this or bust. If that is you, then you’re in luck.
What’s on the pages that follow is action plan that will help you start attracting leads organically using social media.
Why are we focused on social media?
According to the statistics, the average person is on social media between 2 – 6 hours every single day.
Marketing 101 says “Go where the people are.” And the people are on social media. Chances are high, you will be able to sell your products and services on social media.
But…(there’s always a but isn’t there)…
Social media is always changing. The algorithms, the rules, and the available platforms all can change at the drop of a hat. It’s this constant change that makes social media marketing difficult for many to grasp and understand. In my ten plus years of using social media to generate traffic to websites in a variety of industries, I have seen it all.
And yet, despite the changes, I have managed to attract clients and money with less followers and fans than many of my competitors. (I made $500 my first 6 weeks on Instagram with a meager 40 followers. To date, I have made thousands of dollars on Instagram alone and I have under 300 followers.)
How is that possible?
You’ll discover all of that and more in this book. Turn the page and let’s get started.
Introduction
“It doesn’t work!” a woman, we’ll call her Julie, said as she approached my expo booth and scowled at my signage.
Thinking that I must have misheard her, I said, politely “I’m sorry?”
“It doesn’t work. This social media stuff. It doesn’t work. You’re all liars.”
“Well…I’m sorry that it’s been tough,” I said with a strained smile. I mean…what am I supposed to say to that? Yes, you’re right. Many people that do social media ARE liars. Many don’t know how to turn a profit, but they know how to get your some fake followers.
In a way, I truly
was sorry for her.
“I don’t want your sorry,” she grabbed a business card off the table and looked at my name. “Shay? Is that I how I pronounce your name” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t want your sorry
Shay. I want you to
fix it! Here’s my Facebook.” She handed me her phone with her Facebook business page open and ready for my analysis.
I don’t usually do impromptu social media analysis at live events, but it was early. Not too many people were there just yet so I let this interaction happen. Plus, this lady was not backing down. I could tell that she was not going to take no for an answer.
I grabbed her phone and scrolled down a bit. I immediately knew what was missing.
“Yea, I see what—” I began. She interrupted me before I could even finish the sentence. She was definitely trying my patience.
“Nuh huh,” she said, finger pointed up. “I need you to check my Pinterest too.”
She clicked on the Pinterest app, went to her profile and handed me the phone again. I scrolled through her Pinterest page and knew immediately what was missing and why she wasn’t getting results.
Have you ever heard the saying “How you do one thing is how you do everything?” Well it applied here as well. I knew that all of her social media pages were making the same mistake. But to appease her, I looked at all of them. Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
And then, I looked at her, sternly, and then gave her 3 actions to take right now to turn her social media pages around.
This book is an extension of that conversation with her.
Why The Majority Are Not Making Money
Did you know that 70% of small business owners who create online content make $0, as in zero, nada, zilch, $0 from social media, or from any content that they create online?
This is a good thing because that means 30% of small business owners
are making money. So if you can ignore the 70 and follow the 30, you will be okay.
I know those Instagram “influencers” want you to believe that it’s all easy. Just post a selfie and BOOM, watch that cash roll in baby!
It doesn’t quite work that way. Or, shall I say, it worked that way in the early days, but nothing lasts forever.
Nowadays, you better know what the hell you’re doing on social media or you can
1) waste a TON of time getting likes and engagement but getting NO dinero and
2) waste a TON of money on Facebook ads, influencer shout outs, or high-end e-courses that promise you’ll make 6 figures in 6 days. (it never works out like they promise, but you don’t realize that until AFTER the 30-day money back guarantee)
Let’s face it, consumers are smarter now. They are armed with information and they know when someone is trying to sell them. If you plan on using social media to market your business, you better bring your A game!
The Zero Profit Attorney
I did a discovery call with a well-known attorney in Dallas who wanted me to help her generate more leads from her social media pages. She and I met at a local networking event and exchanged cards. At the event she expressed that her social media person was gonna put her in the poor house if she didn’t get this thing turned around.
I was shocked she asked me to help her since, based on all the advertising I’d seen of her online and offline, I assumed she was doing quite well.
Turns out, she was breaking even. If she spent $20,000/month in ads online, she would bring in $20,000 worth of business.
That’s certainly not good because you want to be able to have a profit. I mean, that’s what a business is, right? Products and services sold in order to make a profit.
She was skeptical of working with me because she’d spent upwards of $15,000 already on e-courses and her current social media person. Both were not panning out like she’d hoped. I told her I don’t have an e-course that could fix her problem and honestly, an e-course wouldn’t do her any justice.
She was neck-deep in this social media ocean and it was not something she could navigate out of by herself.
What she needed was a full on 4-hour session with me, one on one.
And that is what we did. A 4-hour session where I showed her step by step how to tweak her Facebook advertising campaign (on her own), what to post, and how to select better targeting. As a result, she slashed her ad costs from $20,000/month to $5,000/month.
Without doing anything else differently, she was able to profit $15,000/month.
Doing the wrong thing on the right platform is costly. This is what the majority do. They follow an influencer or a marketing guru, they follow their “rules” and then they end up not getting the results that were promised.
The reason it doesn’t work is because the influencer or marketing guru has a different target market, spends more money on advertising, has a more established social media reputation, and has access to partners who will happily promote them.
Follow marketing gurus and influencers at your own risk.
Common Characteristics Of Social Media Posts That Make No Money
- Too many stock photos
- Perfectly shot photos of people on the beach with their laptop
- Generic questions asked in an attempt to “boost engagement”
- Lots of branded content
- No videos or photos of the person running the page
- Too many quotes
- Inconsistent posting
- No engagement with followers
- Too many topics covered
- Unclear business message
What I'm going to share with you in this book is stuff that I've used in my own business as well as what I've assisted other entrepreneurs and small business owners use in their business.
These strategies work online as well as offline. You will see some similarities, or things that you can take from social media and use offline or take from offline and apply it to social media.
Both work hand-in-hand.
The Difference Between A Social Media Strategist And A Social Media Manager
We need to address the elephant in the room.
I get asked this question all the time when I tell people what I do. People think I am in my office all day posting social media content for businesses.
That’s not an accurate description of what I do. So let’s break down the differences so you get a clear understanding.
A
Social Media Manager, by definition, manages your social media pages. They interact with your audience on your behalf. They comment on your followers’ posts. They are basically people who boost engagement.
A social media manager’s main job is to increase your followers organically and post the content you create. That’s it. They are acting on your behalf to save you time.
A
Social Media Strategist, by definition, shows you a strategy to achieve your business goals using social media. They do a ton of market research on your target audience and use that information to create a specific social media campaign for your business.
A social media strategist’s main job is to get you leads so you can boost your business. That’s it. They do not post the content, but they may create the content for you to save you time. Depends on the services that strategist offers.
If you already have content and just need someone to post it on your social media pages, or you don’t have the time to get on social media every day and you need someone to do it for you, then you need a Social Media
Manager.
If you need to know what to do on which platform in order to attract your ideal client using social media or you have a specific goal you would like to achieve using social media, then you need a Social Media
Strategist.
What’s Your Motivation?
Before we get into the actions you need to take, you might want to get out some pen and paper. We're going to do a quick little exercise, because I want to tap into your why.
What's your why? Why do you want a business? Why are you trying to make this business grow?
I always do this with my clients because this entrepreneurial journey is tough! I can speak firsthand to that. If you don't have a strong enough why, you will not move forward, you will give up, and you may give up too soon when you were super close to a win.
I don't want you to fall prey to that. Take a quick second and answer these questions:
Three months from now, I will earn ___________________.
I will earn this amount because ____________________________________________________________________________.
I commit to ________________, ______________________, and ___________________ in order to achieve my goal income.
I want you to keep the answers above handy. Keep them around you, because, let me tell you, you will find obstacle. Well, actually, you won't find them, they will find you.
There will be several obstacles for you to overcome on your journey. And it's constant. It never stops. I don't care whatever success you're looking for, there are more obstacles on the other side of that. So keep these answers front and center so that you can stay focused when things get tough.
About Me
“I’m so thankful I had a childhood before technology took over.” -Unknown
I'm going to send you back,
waaay back in time when this grown woman was a little six-year-old girl in the first grade.
My first series of novels that I read were the Babysitters Club. The series was about these 4 best friends who started a babysitting business. And I was just so intrigued by that. I thought, oh my gosh, that is my calling. That is what I'm going to do. I am going to have a babysitting club business. But I’ve got to wait until I'm in the eighth grade. Right now, I'm six years old. What kind of business should I do now, I would ask myself.
I knew that a kid that lived down the street from me, delivered newspapers.
I remember asking my mom if I could deliver newspapers like the kid down the street. Without even a second to think, my mom said no because “that's a boy's job.” As a sidenote: there were also a few child kidnappings that had happened in my small town that made her leery too.
Through my search, I was able to find one business that my mom could not say no to: BeautiControl Consultant. If you know Avon or Mary Kay, you may know what BeautiControl is, because it's very similar.
They do make up, they do facial cleansers, and all that good stuff. I remember I gathered up my $100, which was my birthday money and part of my allowance. I scraped it all together to get a starter kit. My first customer was one of my aunts. She bought a moisturizer from me.
It was the first $12 I’d ever earned on my own.
I didn't do BeautiControl for very long, though. But I knew I was meant to be in business for myself because I was already looking for business opportunities at six years old! Now if we fast forward a little while, I have gone through high school, I've gone through college. I lived in South Korea for a year teaching English as a Second Language, and then I came back to Texas, and I was a teacher. So let’s just fast forward 20 or so years after earning that first $12 on my own.
It was around this time, in 2008, I was done with teaching. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. But I didn’t know what my next move would be. But I knew for sure, it was not teaching.
And so I started looking for business opportunities online. Three days into my search, I became intrigued by a young lady who said she was a business coach. I bought some of her online programs, I read her blog, I commented on her blog, I did some more online research, and then I joined her mastermind.
This business coach advised me that I could have an online business sharing my gifts and passion. (Vague, I know! But I was so eager to jump at the possibility that I didn’t let logic enter in my mind!)
She was like, "All you need is a blog! You already have a powerful voice, you can just write, and you'll make six figures."
And so I followed her instructions. I started my blog. I would work at my school from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and then I would go home and be in front of the computer from 6:00 PM to midnight.
I did this every single day for over a month. I was determined to make this business a success.
After about the first 40 days of doing this, I looked at the analytics. I’d been blogging like a mad woman for over a month and I wondered how many people have come to my website, because I haven't seen anything in my PayPal account.
I knew something was wrong because the equation was blog and BOOM, make six figures.
When I didn’t see anything in my PayPal account, I went to the analytics. I go to the analytics and I saw that only two people had come to my website. Do you know who those two people were? Me and my mama!
That was not okay because the two of us were not going to help me make the six figures that I wanted.
I quickly learned that this big-time guru/business coach I chose to follow was leaving some important elements out of this “blog and make six figures” equation.
There was more to making money online and I had to figure it out on my own. It took me a long while, a lot of trial and error, lots of money spent, lots of time wasted, but once I figured it out, I started making money.
It started off by getting organic traffic to my website and then getting that traffic to get on my email list. I did that by applying all the SEO tactics I’d learned while reading sites like Copyblogger and ProBlogger. Using the tactics I learned from those websites, I ended up making $50 a day.
This was all free traffic because it was all about using the right keywords and backlinking strategies. I then stumbled upon advertising through Google Adwords, Facebook ads, banner ads, mobile ads, in-app ads. As a result, I started making $100+ a day.
And then, 3 years later, I was able to quit my teaching job.
You can actually shorten your learning curve by just listening to what I'm telling you in this book. Unlike my first business coach, I won’t be holding anything back.
I know what that feels like when someone gives you only part of the plan and then looks at you like you’re crazy for not making money. This book is all about giving you the whole enchilada, so that way you can start getting leads and you can start making sales really quickly.
So without further adieu, let's get into the social media strategies that will get you more leads in the next ninety days.
