My Biggest Business Mistake as a Content Creator

Episode 67: My Biggest Business Mistake as a Content Creator

In this episode, Holly Hibbard - Social Media Consultant & emotional intelligence nerd - shares with you...

• why relying solely on social media to build your business is risky
• how building your email list from day one ensures long-term business growth and stability
• other ways - besides social media - to create a stable and direct line of communication with your audience

If you like what you've read so far, I’d love it if you’d SUBSCRIBE to the show, and TURN ON your notifications so you don’t miss a future episode.

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A GIFT FOR YOU //

• 30 Done-For-You Social Media Content Ideas - your go-to resource for ending your posting struggles and instead creating consistent, authentic content that connects with your audience and attracts clients fast!
• Download it instantly - CLICK HERE 

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE //

Check out Flodesk: CLICK HERE

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WORK WITH HOLLY IN NOVEMBER, 2024 //

• Ready to launch your social media brand quickly and finish your 2024 with elevated impact? Hire Holly as your social media strategist and coach! Book a quick call with me here: https://tidycal.com/thehollyhibbard/quick

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Transcript

Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to the Holly Hibbard Show.
I am your host, Holly.
Thank you so much for being here.
Whether you're new, whether you're returning, I appreciate you.
Today, I wanna talk with you about the biggest mistake I made when starting my business.
And I'm doing this episode as a reflective piece, yes, but also as a massive warning to any of you who are listening to the show because you want to grow your audience with your social media content or content creation in general.
You want to attract clients.
You want this to be something that's going to monetize for you at some point and convert.
And this big mistake that I made so so so many years ago, I kick myself for it all the time.
So let's rewind and I'll break down the story for you and along the way, I will tell you what that giant mistake was.
I made the commitment back in 2013, 2014 that I was going to get certified as a life coach.
And I went through the certification process.
In 2013, 2014, social media was definitely around, but not nearly to the extent that it is today.
Not nearly.
We're talking, you know, 10 years ago or more.
And when I was looking for clients, once I was certified as a life coach, I I, you know, I may have posted once or twice on social and had a couple people here and there take me up on it.
And then I had a lot of clients come from, connections that I was making in my courses that I was taking and things like that.
So not a lot of my business came from, social media at all.
And as the years went on, fast forward to 2014, 2015, we go to the story that I've shared on previous episodes about how I challenged myself to go live on Facebook and share a message because I had that limiting belief that kept kicking in that I didn't have anything valuable to say or to share.
And I knew this would be a way for me to get my message out there, but also this was the beginning of putting my brand out there.
Well, simultaneously that where I was starting to put this content, these live streams out on Facebook, I also created a Facebook group.
And in a previous episode, I also talked about how I built a thriving community on Facebook.
And one of the communities that I grew had about 6,000 women.
As the years went on, I grew it that large.
Now we are now in 2024, and I have over I mean, somewhere between 35,040 followers.
If you add up all of my followers between Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn.
Okay?
And that being said, the biggest mistake that I made when I started my business was not focusing on my email list from day 1.
I barely started an email list from day 1.
And once I got hooked into social media and doing the live streams, and then, oh, look, I'm gaining followers, which was so great.
I was creating engagement with the content and the audience.
I was asking them questions.
They were talking back.
It was really great.
That was very fun.
And then I had that Facebook group of 6,000 women who wanted to hear what I had to say, who were engaging with one another, that was also very powerful.
But you know what wasn't powerful?
They were not on my email list.
How come?
Because I didn't have one that I was putting in front of people consistently.
And for any of you who might be looking to create a side hustle or you want to take your business to the level or maybe you already have a great business and you have a customer resource manager, a CRM, a management tool to look at all the people that you have serviced through whatever it is that you provide.
My question for you is, do you have an email list?
If you do, do you utilize it?
Are you connecting with your people?
Are you talking to your customers, your clients, people who've shown interest?
If you are so focused on your social media presence, your business cannot and will not grow as quickly as if you had an email list.
So let me lay this out for you very simply.
If you do not have an email list and you are only thinking to grow your business through social media, through your content, through your digital marketing, then all those platforms, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etcetera, TikTok, it's like building your business on rented land.
Because what happens is if something happens to one of those platforms, for example, TikTok, we know for the last 2 years has been it's gonna be banned.
It's not gonna be banned.
It's gonna be bought.
It's gonna be and there are so many people, myself included, who make a good living because of TikTok.
And they were like, what are we going to do if TikTok goes away?
And some people said, oh, we'll flock to Instagram.
No.
Wrong answer.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with flocking from TikTok to Instagram.
But Instagram is the the same problem.
You're on just a different variation of the rented land.
You own your email list.
You own your email list.
Nobody can take it from you.
So one day, if all the social media, platforms disappear or they're down for a day, you have your email list.
I don't remember who I heard this from on their podcast, but they were talking about how there was I don't know.
Sometime in the last 4 years or so, 5 years, Facebook was completely off the grid.
I think Instagram too.
Like, everything just vanished.
It was down for, I don't remember, 12 hours, 24 hours?
And everybody was so panicked of, oh, my gosh.
What about my content, my followers, and whatever?
But that person says social media is down.
Everyone's bored.
I'm gonna now double down and email my email list multiple times in that time period, that 12 hour, 24 hour time period where all social was down, and they made a lot of sales because of it.
Because people were not paying attention to social, they but they were able to get to their email.
So your email list you own.
I cannot stress this enough.
Now, yes, in addition to saying have an email list.
Okay?
And I can go into some basics of how you would start one if you need it.
And I'll talk about in a minute how I started mine.
The second thing I'll say is, why weren't all those women in that Facebook group I made on my email list, for example?
And it was because I wasn't asking them to be.
And even currently, the new Facebook group that I just opened a couple weeks ago, social media success plan, which I believe the link is in the description if you wanna join it.
Free Facebook group, where I give you a content idea every single day to help you keep things fresh, and I give you examples of how to use those things.
But today in this Facebook group, part of being approved to join the group is your email address.
And I do that not to be a snob, not because I plan to spam anybody or do anything bad with the information, but because I learned the hard way that I created a massive engaged, excited following in that Facebook group I once had, and I never captured it.
I never had them on an email list, and I could've.
And by the time I realized how behind I was going and speaking to every single woman in the group, it just wasn't happening.
And it was it was so important.
I kicked myself all the time because I would be in a completely different place in my business, I would say, if I had captured all of my followers in email.
So I never got their emails because I didn't ask.
What is a way to ask?
A way to ask is by having something that you can offer a person in exchange for their email address.
So you may have heard of what's called a lead magnet.
This is also called an opt in page.
So it's a page where I'm sure you see ads for stuff like this all the time.
I just downloaded one today, from somebody that was, you know, a year's worth of content ideas or something like that, and I'm always looking for new things that I can teach to you all.
So, of course, I click on it.
It's free.
Fantastic.
I enter my name in my email.
I click send it to me, and I got it in my inbox.
And I already belong on this person's email list.
I have for a few years, but I love everything that she creates.
So I typically keep downloading and re opting in because her stuff is just that good.
So it's important to have something to offer people.
The latest thing that I created, and again, the link is in the description below, is 30 done for you content ideas that you can social media content ideas.
And I made this as a chart, a free PDF.
It's a chart that gives you a prompter, a question that you can answer in your content and make it, relevant to your industry, your business.
And then I give you an example of how a coach or a consultant or a service provider might use it.
And then I also give you a search engine optimized title ready to go.
So you don't even have to stress about what to call it.
So I created that for free that people can download instantly because I know it's going to help the people that I teach anyway.
And, yes, it does put them on my email list, which means that now we can talk, which means that now, for example, when I put out 2 podcasts a week, I can email it to them on Friday and say, here's the podcast recap in case you missed it.
And it's so important that you nurture that list.
That was another mistake that I made along the way is once I and this is something I still have to work on very diligently.
You can have an email list, but you've gotta talk to them.
And if you have an email list or you have a a customer base already with their contacts or email contacts and you've never nurtured them before or you don't know what to say, just start somewhere.
Even if it's something like one email a week, it can be about appreciation.
It's very similar to content creation.
When people say, what do I say?
Use any of the prompts that I give you in that free PDF or in social media success plan in my Facebook group.
Use one of those.
The prompt that I answered today was, what is a common myth about your industry?
Absolutely.
You could use that, yes, to create a piece of content for your social media platform, but you also could answer that question as an email to your email list and say, hey.
You know, it's so funny.
There's a woman I know who owns a spray tanning business, and she does other things too.
She's phenomenal.
Her name is Holly too.
And, also but what I love about, she's great about making content.
And I was thinking with that prompt specifically, she absolutely could answer that question of what's a common myth about spray tan?
What's a common myth about how long it lasts or how to treat your skin or what are you supposed to do with it or how long does it take?
Things like that.
There are so many ways that you can take these prompts and make it fit you and use it to nurture your email list just to say hello and share something with them.
I promise you it goes very, very far.
So have an email list, nurture your email list, and have something to offer them in the interim.
The purpose too of an email list is people in the long run, when you do have something to offer, you are launching a new program or you're going to have a Black Friday special.
We're coming up here on Black Friday here in 2024.
That is the opportunity to tell people what you are selling, and it's more likely to get in front of their eyes than if you were to post it on social media.
Social media, unfortunately, even if they are your follower on social media, unless you are pay to play, meaning you are running ads specifically, the odds of somebody seeing your social media content, especially in the midst of something like a Black Friday offer, are a lot lower than what you may think.
But your email list is gonna stay in their inbox until they open it or delete it.
And for Black Friday season, a lot of people open it because they wanna see what kind of deals everybody is giving away.
So that's a great example of, how important your email list is.
Automatically, your email is going to have a higher likelihood of being seen, which means a higher likelihood that your client or people you want to be your client see your offer and can take you up on your offer.
So email list, everybody, I cannot stress enough how important it is.
There are free platforms that you can use.
Mailchimp is the first one that comes to mind that a lot of people will use for free, to get started.
And for me personally, my email, you know, in time I've learned I've used a lot of different email senders, and I have learned that I have to really like the platform itself, the website itself to show up to it and actually write and craft an email.
So not sponsored or anything, but I love Flodesk.
Flodesk is my bestie when it comes to email right now.
If you are on my email list and you see that there's design and colors and pictures and Giphys and fun things and it's because of Flodesk.
Because Flodesk gives me all the templates that I could possibly want.
It's very easy to type in what I want it to say.
It already looks beautiful.
I don't have to grab my own graphics, a whole bunch of graphics from all these places, and and the animation the animated Giphys and all that are already in there.
And I have fun when I design my emails in Flodesk.
So I am a fan of Flodesk currently.
So I'll put a link below if you wanna check out Flodesk just to see what it's about.
I I believe that they're starting, their starter package is relatively inexpensive compared to all of the other ones out there.
If you're looking for free, Mailchimp.
If you're looking for something paid, I love Flodesk.
And I love that it's also super easy in Flodesk to see how many people open my email, click on my email.
It gives me the numbers that I need without inundating me with so much data that I'm like, this is so boring.
So, lots of really good stuff there.
So email list, everybody.
If you want to create content, I love it.
I'm here for it.
I will help you with it.
I will guide you through it in whatever way that I can.
And at the end of the day, make sure you are somehow capturing people's emails.
I would love to know, is this a topic that you want me to do another episode on?
Because I'd be happy to share with you ideas for, your lead magnet or the thing that you wanna give away for free.
If you're not quite sure how to set up, a lead magnet so that, like, let's say you don't have a website yet and you're thinking, okay.
I made a thing.
I wanna give it away for free.
How do I hook it all up?
I can do kind of techy stuff here too.
Not too much because I know a lot of people are overwhelmed by the tech, which is why they listen to me because my job is to make it simple.
But if you want the basics of creating your lead magnet and getting it out there, I'm happy to do an episode on that.
There's a link where you can leave a comment or leave a comment on the show.
I'd be happy to do that, but I love your feedback.
I just love to hear from you, period.
So thank you so much for being here.
I love you.
I mean it, and until next time, I'll talk to you next time.