Welcome to Episode 409, I’m stoked for this one because we’re gonna talk about habits. And this is really the foundational piece that I think stems actual results. Because consistency is where you’re going to see a return on your investment. But you also have to first invest the time, and that’s really where this habit stuff is. I’m gonna kind of break down why these habits are important, we’re gonna talk a little bit about how to establish these habits, and then we’re gonna talk about the most important habit for my money. And if you want to dig deeper, you can do that Backstage, because this is actually the topic of the training we had that I just released on July 1st for the Backstage community. So, jump in there, grab that in addition to all the other good stuff that is inside Hit the Mic Backstage.
I also wanted to remind you, if you love this show, which obviously you do, be sure to join us every Thursday at 2 PM Pacific Time over on Facebook. I do a Facebook Live. It’s called Hit the Mic TV Live, it’s really fun, I love engaging with you there. It’s really cool, because it’s essentially the live version of this show. I have covered such things as, relationships as an entrepreneur, working with your partner, outsourcing, content repurposing, and those are just some of the guests we’ve had since the show launched a couple of months ago in May. So it’s good times. Last week we talked about my seventh business birthday. We talked about seven lessons in seven years, and it was a lot of fun, we gave away a couple passes for Hit the Mic Backstage, it was a good time. It was a good time had by all.
I actually give stuff away on that show from time to time, which is something that’s different than this show. This is harder to do prizes, because you’re not here, live with me. It’s fun, though. So go check it out, Hit the Mic TV Live over on Facebook. And you can find a link to my Facebook page in the show notes, over at TheStaceyHarris.com/Episode409. That’s where you’ll find links to all the things I mentioned today. You ready to get started? Let’s get started.
I want to talk first about why the heck this matters.
Because oftentimes, we talk about habits, and we talk about routines, and we talk about structure. But we don’t talk about why it’s helpful, and specifically, when you’re talking about your marketing, it’s helpful to build these habits because consistent marketing is what gets you off of that rollercoaster of wee, I have money! Crap, I don’t. Wee, I have clients! Crap, I don’t. That change for me and for my clients has always stemmed from being really aware that the marketing they’re doing now are the clients they’ll have later. Very rarely do we have sort of an on off switch in our business where we just go and we press a button and clients and money falls out.
That would be awesome, but for those that do have the ability to send an email to their list, and with a promo and get new members in their training community, it’s because they’re consistently showing up. They’re consistently selling to their audience, they’re consistently providing value to their audience. Where I see a lot of frustration with marketing is, oh my email list doesn’t work because I sent an email and just everybody unsubscribed. Well awesome, how frequently do you send an email? I don’t know, I try to send them every month, but really it’s probably, like, some months I miss, and I probably sent like three in the last year. They don’t want to hear from me that much.
First of all, they do, or they wouldn’t have signed up, okay? Just squash that. Number two, they’re unsubscribing because they no longer remember subscribing to you, and now you just sold them something. The same thing is true with social. I posted a promo on Instagram, and nobody bought anything. Well, how often do you post on Instagram? Well, I haven’t posted in like six months. Well, what the heck did you expect? Nobody has seen you there, nobody has hung out with you there. You have to maintain a consistent level of visibility, and that can feel really uncomfortable. The best way to get through something that’s uncomfortable is having a habit around it.
I find that going to the gym is incredibly uncomfortable, it’s not something that I super love to do. When I’m really good about going and when I feel my best, I go without thinking, because it’s habitual. It’s just a routine, it’s part of my morning. And when I get out of that routine, I know the difference and the issue immediately, because I’m like, oh. Yeah. I forgot my habits. And then I get into the habit of not doing it, and then it gets harder and harder to start again. The same is true with your marketing. If the idea of being visible and showing up on stories of IGTV or … Facebook Lives, or tweets, or your blog, or your email. If any of that feels really uncomfortable, you’re gonna have to find a way to get past it.
A, do the mindset workaround, why is this so uncomfortable? And B, figure out a way to make it happen. I have had clients in the past who, they created the content, the email, the social media posts. And then they sent it to their team. And their team was responsible for actually distributing it. Because the creating wasn’t what freaked them out, it was the distribution. Find a way that works for you, but you’ve got to do it. And building habits, so it’s just, I create content on Mondays, and on Tuesdays I do my Facebook live, and I show up on Instagram stories and I do it every morning. Whatever those habits are, build them. Now that I’ve totally brow beaten you into creating these habits,
Let’s talk a little bit about how.
I really want you to understand that creating these habits doesn’t have to be a five-minute thing. And it doesn’t have to be all the things, all at once. It’s really easy to think, okay, I’m gonna commit to this. Going back to our gym reference here, if I decide I’m gonna recommit to working out, and I’ll be transparent, this is top of mind because this is something that in my personal life, I’m dealing with right now. And so it’s like, okay, I’m going to recommit to going to the gym. I’m going to go to the gym five days a week, twice a day.
That’s asinine! Nobody would start with that! The same is true for building your marketing habits. It doesn’t mean, okay, so I’m gonna have a new podcast that goes out twice a week, and we’re gonna send my email every week, and we’re gonna have a Facebook live daily, and we’re gonna put new IGTV content out daily, and I’m gonna share a post on every single network every day. First of all, that is an asinine amount of content, and you’re gonna overwhelm your audience. So don’t think that’s the expectation. Number 2, no one is going to stick with that! You can’t go from 0 to 100 miles an hour and expect to maintain your sanity, first of all, much less 100 miles an hour and see results.
So start implementing this a little bit at a time. Start first by, what do I know works? Look at your numbers. Look at your email list. Look at your stats on social. Look at your Google analytics. What in the past has done really well? Start doing something there. Start doing, alright, I’m going to commit to one piece of content every month, and then I’m gonna really commit to promoting that piece of content. And if you’re currently not consistent with your content, start there. Once per month. And don’t worry about going more than once per month, until you can consistently show up once a month. This is exactly how I got consistent with content.
I have not missed an episode of this podcast in the entirety of 409 episodes now. I have not missed a Tuesday posting of this podcast, and for a long time, it was Tuesdays and Fridays. I think we’ve changed, I think it was Tuesdays and Thursdays for a while … twice a week, for a while. I’ve not missed a piece of content, posting content, to my website, in four years. And it started with this. I committed before the podcast started. I committed to producing one blog post per month. Every month I would do one blog post. And once I got that done, and I could do that consistently, I went to two blog posts a month. Then I went to weekly. When I went to weekly, I launched the show and I actually went to twice a week. But I incrementally worked towards that end goal.
I did not say, okay, I’m immediately going to do all the things. And the reason I want you to start with that one piece of content- because A, it’s doable. One Facebook Live that you repurpose into a video and put on your website. And I’ll talk about that in a second. One blog post. One podcast. Whatever that piece of content is for you. Because the amount of content going out to your website is less important than the amount of effort you’re putting into getting people to see that piece of content. And so I want you to worry about just one piece of content, and promoting that piece of content ten times.
Ten times. So, let’s say you’re going to do a blog post. So you’re gonna do a blog post, and you’re gonna promote that ten times over the course of the month. And realistically, I want you to be promoting it more than that, but this will give you a baseline that is, let’s say, two Instagram posts. Two Facebook posts. Two LinkedIn posts. And four tweets. You’ve now promoted it ten times. Now, again, I want you to work towards more than that, but do you see how crazy small I’m starting this? It’s not about doing all the things. It’s about executing consistently. Okay?
So I want you to look at, I’m gonna do that ten times. Now we’re gonna need some supporting content. So I’m also gonna put on my calendar, for an hour a month, to schedule whatever I’m going to schedule that week for those ten promotion posts for my one piece of content that I wrote, my blog post that I wrote. But I want to have, let’s say, five pieces of content from other sources per month, and I want to have ten pieces of content per month, social content I’m talking about now. Social posts. That is general value or connection. So, a question to engage the audience, information about you, day in the life kind of stuff. Tips, tricks, tools. Those connection points. Conversation starters. Those kinds of things. And you write those out, and you schedule those each week.
So now we have 25 posts. Because we have our 10 posts promoting our blog post. We have our five posts from other people’s content. And we have our 10 posts that are engagement focused social content. So we have 25 posts now going out per month across our two primary networks. Let’s just start there, our two primary networks. That’s an incredible amount of content, that’s an almost daily post to your audience. That is completely doable. And it’s a great place to start building these habits. And we decide what those two networks are. What these content types are. We decide that based on the analytics numbers that we already have.
Now, your numbers right now are gonna be tough, because you haven’t been showing up consistently up until this point. So, test that for 30 days, and then review again. And that really takes us to this third point that I want to wrap up on.
The most important social media habit you can have is the review.
Because you’re building in this consistency, but you also need to make sure there is time on your calendar every single month to review your numbers. This is something we do with our BAM clients every month. This is something our agency staff does for our agency clients. Yep. They have actual reports they get every month, and they get a call with me where we go through.
Here’s what’s happening, here’s what we want to change. Here’s what we want to see. What goals do we have coming up, are we happy with what happened last month. Where we actually go through these numbers, and we, in some cases go, this is awesome! That went really well! And in some cases we go, all right, here’s where we missed the mark. And then in some cases it’s, this is going really well, how do we double down on this? Because we’re just sort of testing it, how do we really supercharge this, right? So have that time on your calendar every single month, and commit to it as if it were a client. This is the most important habit, because if you’re doing all the other stuff, and you’re putting out all this content, and you don’t take the time to review whether that’s working or not, you’re never gonna see an ROI.
And not even because it’s not there, but because you’re not aware of it. And so you will continue to tell yourself the story that this is a waste of time. And then, you will get out of the habit of doing it. All right. So that’s why it’s the most important habit. It’s that review. I want you to also look at this review and I want you to do a little audit of how you spent your social media time in the previous month. Be really honest. Did you scroll Instagram, or did you engage with other people? Did you post stories, or did you watch them? Did you share an IGTV Live, or did you consume others? Did you consume IGTV Lives or I’m sorry, IGTV, not IGTV Live. IGTV episodes with the intent to comment and engage, or did you just mindlessly scroll and consume. Be really honest. Because this is where you’re going to tweak those habits and go, okay. So I need to make sure I am engaging at this time because that’s when I’m really at my best.
Or, I need to make sure that I am scheduling this day of the week, because that’s really the day that I can commit to getting it done, without it running into, or being run over by other things. This one, yes, briefly do monthly. But really dig into quarterly. Really be honest with yourself, once a quarter, and audit how you’re spending your time marketing. Because you’re going to see your big changes there. You’re gonna see your sort of … you’ve got a longer scope to look at, and so you’re gonna see, okay, these are where my habits are just not delivering. And this is where I’m not showing up for my habits. That’s what you’ve got to look at. All right? So reviewing is that most important habit you’re gonna create.
With that, we’re done. All right. Do you feel good, does this make sense? If it doesn’t make sense, come on over to Facebook or Instagram and let me know, we can talk through it. Definitely check out the training inside of Hit the Mic Backstage. We’re digging into specifically to, your scheduling habits, and your outsourcing habits, if you’re not already outsourced yet, setting yourself up to outsource. And we’re gonna dig into that review habit, because again. It’s the most important one as far as I’m concerned. Okie Dokie? Okie Dokie. I will see you next week, again HittheMicBackstage.com to join us Backstage. And every Thursday we’re at Facebook for Hit the Mic TV Live. I will see you on Thursday.
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