content | Beyond Your Side Hustle

What Can You Do to “Unplug” or Change What You See on Facebook?

This is based on an answer offered on Episode 12 of Hustleburg.

Question: With everything that’s going on recently, sometimes I need a little break from seeing the constant news cycle, especially about COVID-19, aka the coronavirus. What do you recommend for when you just want to unplug and think of happy or educational or fun things? I love using Facebook to promote my business, I just need a break. I feel bad, and like I’m not putting my business first by taking that break.

Take a Break

If you find that you need a break from social media’s onslaught of news and posts about COVID-19, the 2020 election, or whatever has you feeling this way, push back your laptop, close the platforms or the apps on your phone that you’re using. Take a literal break, by going for a walk around the block, calling to check in on your mom (she says you don’t do that enough anyway), playing or snuggling with your dog, cat, or whatever pet is in your home (they are also saying that you don’t do that enough).

Then, just turn off notifications on your phone and shut your laptop for a while. Only enable the ones that you absolutely must have on for the phone. If you’re an iPhone user, you can enable Bedtime, which is a feature in your settings to take a break in the clock app. Many Android phones have something called Zen mode, where you can’t do anything on the phone except to receive calls for a specified time so that you can disconnect. Use this “unplugged” opportunity to pick up that book or your Kindle to read for fun for an hour.

Focus on Something Else

Personally, I’ve taken to trying to meditate more, using an app on my phone to do so. By doing so, I get to relax while I ignore the world around me for 5, 10, or 20 minutes, by focusing inward, on happiness, or my relationships with other people.

You likely have some “extra” time right now due to a lack of commute, and you can use it for some self-care or to develop yourself. Think of that time as an opportunity, because no one is expecting that you’re going to be “on” all the time, that you’re going to be online all the time, and that it isn’t going to be something that does kind of drive you away.

Now that you’ve taken that break for yourself, I have some great news for you. When it comes to your online experience, you actually find what you seek online. The platform’s algorithms are designed to give you what they calculate that you want to see. If you interact with political posts, they’ll show you more politics. That also means that if you engage with stories about kindness, you’re going to see more kindness. Who couldn’t use seeing more about kindness and the good in the world?

The Good News – You’re in Control

I recently listened to an interview with the CEO of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, who designed the newsfeed for Facebook before moving over to Instagram. During that interview, he confirmed that they really try to tailor what you see online with the type of things that you engage with. So, the good news is that you truly hold the keys to design your own online experience.

Ready for the even better news?

Your most recent activity holds greater weight for the algorithms than your older activity. That means that the best time to change your online behavior, in an effort to change what you see, is NOW. Start engaging with the people, groups, and pages that bring you joy by making you the happiest. Disengage with those that are dragging you down by blocking them, unfollowing them, and just scrolling by. If you make your focus to comment on, click on, and like the posts that give you something of value, while disengaging with the people, pages, and groups that don’t, you’re going to see a huge change in what’s in your feed. By taking control over what you see online and who you interact with, you’re actually going to see a complete shift in what’s presented to you in your feed, no matter which social media platform that’s got you down.

Here’s How It Will Change

I remember a period of time when I worked in the non-profit political world, where everything in my feed was political stuff. Today, that’s really not the case, because I unfollowed many pages, I left a lot of groups, and I’m no longer connected with many of the people I was. I no longer interact with many of the same people that I did in that world, and it has completely changed the way social media is presented to me. It’s very rare that I see a political post that isn’t just the news of the day. There’s hardly ever political opinion within them, so I know from experience that you really can switch this on and off, almost like a light switch or a really fast dimmer.

If you are discouraged about what you’re seeing, whether it’s the upcoming 2020 elections, coronavirus, or whatever it is that just has you down, know that you can change what’s in your feed just by fine-tuning who you even allow to put things in your feed, and who you engage with among those that do have that permission.

I’m Stuck About Where to Start Creating Content for My Business

This was a response to a question in Episode 4 of Hustleburg, an episode devoted to answering your questions.

You should start creating content in two ways. The first place to find guidance will be from listening to your customers. Listen for what it is that they need. By listening for their needs first, you begin to understand how your business can meet those needs. This offers you a starting point for much of your content creation. You need to help them solve a problem.

When you examine the underlying issues of your customers, you’ll understand how to better craft your content to help them

As you listen, keep in mind that what they will likely not explicitly give you directions about what they need you to solve. Too often, we, both the customer and the business, focus on the obvious, external problem. That external problem is only a symptom of the underlying internal issue that drives their desire for change.

For example, when you have a plumbing issue, it’s not so much that you need to have your toilet unclogged or sewer line snaked, while that is certainly the obvious and important issue to address. What you are really feeling is the internal problem of how you would feel about being unable to use your toilet, having to rid your waste in some other way. In 2020 America, we live in a society where anything other than indoor plumbing is pretty weird. You would probably feel very odd if you evacuated your wastes in an outhouse, had a Porta-Potty on the side of your house, or used your yard. All of these show that you are unable to operate by the norms of this society. THAT is the internal problem you’re actually solving with a plumber.

Add Value to Their Lives

While you listen, you also need to add value with anything you share online and your other marketing materials. You should share about the things you’ve observed how you can help them to help solve their issues in your areas of expertise. It’s not just a non-stop advertisement about what you do. You should be adding value to their life.

Connections Win

Sometimes, you’ll have areas of interest overlap with your customers, and it won’t be in your field. That’s not just okay. It’s preferred. You should always be presenting yourself as an expert in what it is that you do, but sometimes it’s those related areas or personal interests in another aspect of your life that you share that will forge a connection.

To give you an example, I’m more likely to do business with someone who is a Braves fan or is a fellow alum of the University of Georgia than someone who isn’t. When all other things are equal, that is something that will help me make the decision, because I have that connection or shared experience with someone. That’s only something I learn through interacting around that interest. That’s not to say that I exclude someone due to those factors, but I’ve found time and again that I am definitely more apt to do.

When they are able to connect with you over shared experience or interests, that’s going to be a win for your business. Use this knowledge to expand beyond a single focus for your content.

Five Topics for Your Content

The main thrust of your business
A related aspect to #1
Another related aspect to #1
Something that makes you a real person that interests you.
A second topic of interest that shows you’re real.

When you deploy these varied topics in your content, it shows your community that not only are you an expert in your field, you’re a real person. If you go back to my earlier plumbing example, people aren’t always looking for a plumber. They will, however, remember that person they connected with over a shared fandom or who grew up near them is one when the time comes. They aren’t looking to hire a plumber. They are looking to hire someone they connect with who understands their internal struggle when the toilet won’t flush.

Hustleburg Episode 8 – Answering Listener Questions 2-20-20

In this Q&A episode of the Hustleburg podcast, our host Brett Bittner primarily answers questions about the viability of an idea, business and marketing strategy, and how much content is “too much.”

How Do You Know If/When A Business Idea is Viable?

In response to this question, Brett shares his thoughts on how you know when something moves beyond just an idea into a viable business. As with most bootstrappers, going beyond your side hustle means easing yourself and what you create into the market while still having the stability and comfort of your day job. The most important thing to know about viability is the reaction of your community about what you’re creating, and to find that out you must create. Just do it. It’s not just an athletic shoe slogan.

Where Do You Start When Creating a Strategy?

When creating a larger-scale business, a business plan can offer many insights as the entrepreneur critically evaluates the idea, product, or service. For many side hustlers, a strategy map will suffice to get past the idea stage and into the market. From a marketing perspective, strategy is determined through identifying the struggle your ideal client faces and working backward to determine the best way to tell stories to show how you and what you do will help them to tackle that struggle.

How Much Is Too Much Content?

The short answer is that there is no such thing. With a diversity of platforms and channels, you will never overwhelm your community with content, because they don’t (and won’t) see everything that you put online. Not even your mom will get tired of seeing the content you create, because she won’t even follow you everywhere, and even if she did, the algorithms won’t show her absolutely everything. Read more about how there’s no such thing as too much content here. Finally, Brett touches on how it’s possible to create so much using a strategy like this from Gary Vaynerchuk through repurposing and sharing similar content through a variety of channels and using different contexts that are relevant to each platform.

Start Marketing Your Business Online With These Three Easy Steps

If you’re just getting started marketing your business online, Beyond Your Side Hustle offers a FREE Getting Started Guide.

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Are You Making Time To Listen and Respond?

“Yep”

“Uh huh”

“Wow. Really?”

You’ve said those things when you’re trapped in a conversation with someone who only talks about themselves and their interests, right? You never get a chance to offer a real response, adding the things above when they pause to breathe. You really are trapped in that conversation, but you aren’t sure if they would even notice if you left, no matter how rudely you made your exit.

Listening to What They Need

Remember when we talked about the guy who sold refrigerators at the party like a psycho? We discussed the need to listen in order not to be “that guy.” Real listening. Actual, active listening. Not what we do most of the time, which is to be so busy thinking about what we will say next that we don’t actually hear what was said to us.

On social, that means consuming a lot of content by those in our community. It results in reading, listening, and watching what those who follow you, and your competitors, share. You have to know them, their likes, and their dislikes, to fully engage with them and include them in the community you build.

This consumption isn’t just of the posts they create though. You also need to read the comments and replies they make as well. There is even more truth about who they are and how they feel in the reactions they have to what others create.

Your effort can’t stop here though. You are posting to your accounts, reading/watching/listening to the people who matter to you and your brand, and then there’s the most important piece of advice for engaging your community.

Respond With Care and Thought

You have to respond to them thoughtfully. You have to comment, reply, or react to their content in a relevant way that shows that you’re listening and that you care. The easiest way to do this is to be grateful, both inside and out, about every interaction you have online. When you respond to every comment, even if it’s just with a simple “thank you,” you build your relationship with that person. When you go beyond that thanks with a heartfelt, honest reply, you are building a lifelong relationship, instead of a transactional one with that person.

Early in your digital marketing journey, it’s easy to broadcast what you want to say and say that you’re too busy for anything else. This is actually the best time to build the habit of listening actively and responding thoughtfully. When you make it part of your routine early on, it will remain a part of your routine throughout the rest of your digital life. It will follow you from platform to platform, no matter which one gets the attention you crave and allows you to interact best with the community you serve. Take advantage of the early days by making this a part of your activities online.

Straight to Marriage?

Take a moment to imagine that you just meet someone for the first time. Would you ask a girl (or a guy) to marry you right away? Without so much as a conversation? Or getting to know one another? That sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it?

Of course, it does!

First Meeting

When you first meet with the intent of seeking a relationship, you are focused on listening to have enough information to ask him or her to join you for coffee or drinks. At drinks, you get to know him or her better by listening to what he or she is comfortable sharing and learning about her. That date gives you an idea of whether or not you will move on to dinner, a concert, or a hike for a second date. The whole point of the first date is to figure out if there will be a second. You spend your time together on that second date learning and thinking about how compatible you might be.

Are you compatible? That second date might lead to a third and so on.

When you post content online that goes straight for a sale, without an introduction, getting to know your community, or building a relationship, you are basically doing the same thing as proposing at your first meeting. While the internet is an amazing thing, it can’t build trust or help solve the problems of your customers without creating a relationship. Without context or having done anything to foster a relationship, how can you be ready to ask already?

So much content online cuts out listening, learning, and context, zooming past a first conversation, let alone a first date, straight to marriage. If you attended a party where someone stood alone at a party, shouting, “Come buy a refrigerator from me!” over and over at the partygoers socializing and interacting like normal people, would you think about buying a fridge from him or her?

Here’s how to avoid being “that guy” at the party that is the internet:

Dating

First, you listen. You listen to the customers you want to “date.” They will tell you what they need and the problems they struggle with, giving you a glimpse at how you can guide them to the solution, even if it isn’t a solution you primarily offer.

They will also let you know if and how you can even help. If you can offer something in response that’s valuable due to your expertise, even if their needs and the problems they face aren’t primarily the ones you help solve, you can show your eagerness to help. If the problems they face or their needs they have don’t line up with your expertise yet, you know to wait for a better time, because they just aren’t ready for “the relationship” with you.

Listening is imperative early on, and you can’t do it if you’re too busy talking.

Next, when you can offer something of value, you need to respond in context to what they’ve told you they need. It does neither of you any good to respond to what they’ve said with something that doesn’t address their needs or the problems they face.

Responding to someone who needs something other than what you offer with repeated broadcasts of your generic message to buy from you does neither of you any good. They will simply walk away, and you’ve lost their attention because talking to you is like talking to a recording of what you want from them.

Finally, your conversation is about adding value to their lives. When you add value, you have their attention. You’re building your brand, and you need them committed for the long-term, not just some short-term sales goal. When you build for brand, you will be the culmination of the value you’ve added to their lives. When you chase the short-term, you’re only as good as the last time you hit your sales goal.

Marriage, Not a Hook-Up

By looking beyond the short-term at a single sale (that you weren’t likely to get anyway) and building a reputation of adding value to those you interact with, you’ll build a long-lasting relationship. That relationship will be centered on your reputation as someone helpful, and who adds value.

Doesn’t that sound like someone you’d like to buy from?

There’s No Such Thing As Too Much Content

Believe it or not, there is no such thing as too much content in an age where server space gets cheaper by the nanosecond. You simply CANNOT post too much.

Today, there are no longer only three TV networks, a handful of local radio stations, or hundreds of gatekeepers like talent agents and managers preventing you from being “overexposed.” Instead, there is a constant barrage of apps on our phones, on-demand video and audio streaming for every possible genre and niche, and a new advertising medium every minute vying for your attention.

It’s Not Too Much

When you’re really putting out content, an amount you think is way too much, your most passionate supporter (probably Mom) can’t keep up with everything happening in your business’s social media life. Your marketing efforts should be aimed to seek attention from those most likely to patron your business, by posting as much and as frequently as possible.

Here come the caveats!

You can’t post just anything to “create” content. Junk is still junk, and your audience, current and future, will leave if they aren’t finding value. With their departure goes their attention.
You can’t go too far “outside your lane.” Your community expects you to stick to areas you’re the expert in. That’s why you are sharing, and that’s why they are paying attention. When you spend too much time outside your expertise, there goes their attention.
You can’t be anyone else. You aren’t as funny as Ellen DeGeneres or Aziz Ansari, so don’t try to be a stand-up comedian. You don’t act as well as Meryl Streep or Bradley Cooper, so don’t act as if you are. Be you.

Your content needs to stay relevant to your brand, important to the community you serve, and authentically “you.” If it isn’t, the attention you crave for your brand will disappear.

Don’t Chase an Algorithm, Add Value

Don’t worry about the mythology of the algorithm controlling who sees what you post. You won’t figure out the algorithm of each platform you use, and if you do, it’ll change. You may have a good idea of which pieces of content will resonate with your community, but you will frequently be surprised by what does and doesn’t “go viral.”

Social media is the ultimate meritocracy. The platforms need traffic to keep advertisers happy and spending money on those ads. If your content is good, they will keep showing it to keep the attention on their app or their site. If your posts aren’t being seen, it’s because your content stinks.

Yeah, I said it. Your. Content. Stinks.

It stinks to the community-at-large, because they aren’t engaging with it. No matter what happens with the magic of the algorithm, good content continues to win. Good content keeps being shared. Good content keeps attention on that app or site.

Think about it. What happens when you go through your feed? If you aren’t getting content worth your time, you keep scrolling. If you continue not to get value, you’ll eventually go away. Thus, for their own survival, the platforms have to show the good stuff.

Now that you know that there is no such thing as “too much,” when are YOU going to start putting out all the content that will add value to your community?

Market Your Business The Way Jalen Hurts Plays

Sticking to your content and social media marketing strategy, even when you don’t see immediate results, leads you to build an authentic, caring, and long-lasting community.

Over the weekend, college football saw an awesome and unlikely comeback where the University of Oklahoma, led by Jalen Hurts at quarterback, overcame a 25-point deficit to defeat undefeated Baylor University, 34-31.

The outcome for the Oklahoma Sooners, on the road against a conference foe with something to prove, reminded me of how it feels when you embark on the challenge of marketing a new venture online. Their response to stay in the game, keep working their gameplan, and make the adjustments necessary to overcome a situation that would paralyze many other teams looks like what many side hustlers who use internet marketing to build their business face.

At the beginning of your internet marketing journey, you’re starting from scratch. You have no content and no community, the two things you need to be effective in marketing your business or venture. In addition to starting at zero, you see your industry peers, prolific marketers, and the latest internet-famous meme zooming ahead with their established brand and content. It can be discouraging to see them share their successes, their engagement online increase, and the results from their past efforts as you create the “starter” content in the pre-launch days and early in your marketing calendar.

Build Your Community

As you build your community and add to your initial content, you don’t feel glamorous because you don’t even get the satisfaction of seeing small wins or momentum. Like in Saturday’s game, the competition seems to be unstoppable and out of reach, going up by 25. Everything they do is golden, while you dwell in the inertia of the pre-launch activities.

Those early weeks and months feel like an eternity as you don’t see visible progress in the metrics of contacts added to your CRM, follower counts, or engagement online. Content and social media marketing isn’t something to expect an immediate gain from or to be an instant answer for your business. It should be a part of building the community that supports it, and communities take time and care to build to reach the sustainable and engaging direct access to what your customers think about you.

In business, we don’t play a finite game with a singular opponent, but our lives are filled with wins, losses, and the payoff of success. Sticking to your content and social media marketing strategy, even when you don’t see immediate results, leads you to build an authentic, caring, and long-lasting community. That community will be there to support you and to keep you in business long after you’ve hit “Enter.”

Hard Work and Resolve

As those who watched Saturday’s game witnessed, when hard work and resolve to stick to the plan meet, momentum builds. As it does, you see results in the “little things,” and eventually, you prevail.

Even when you feel like you’re down 28-3 as Oklahoma was early in the game, they persisted. As should you.