If you’re a blogger, you know that we are mostly introverts. We don’t really like social media, except for Pinterest, but it’s more of a search engine.
I’ve tried Instagram, I’ve tried all the other things years ago, I’ve seen results, but I just didn’t feel good about it. It didn’t attract the kind of audience I wanted.
I don’t want to compete with others on these platforms. It’s about short form content there, which is not my thing. I want to share more value with you every time I show up, and it’s not where I want to spend my time online.
And because I don’t consume content on social media, I know there are others like me. So I create my episodes, blog posts and my courses for you.
So one of the most burning questions people have is how I promote a new offer without social media. The simple answer is that I use my other channels.
Some business coaches might be telling you it’s impossible to make sales or grow your income without social media. But I don’t believe that’s the case.
Why Social Media Isn’t for Everyone
I think social media is not for everyone and it can be overwhelming to be there if you don’t want to. At some point you might run out of things to say. You might post just for the sake of posting.
You might compare yourself to others. This is a pretty big deal on Instagram. You might spend too many hours creating graphics for there, for example, or sharing stories or connecting with other people.
But then what’s the result? Did at least one of those people sign up to your email list? Are they going to buy one of your courses? Do you actually have meaningful conversations about business or not? Because if not, it’s just like a free time activity for you to be there.
You can definitely keep doing it, but just don’t make it one of your main business activities. Don’t consider it an income generating activity.
Leave it for the after work hours. I knew Instagram was not for me, but while I was there in the beginning, I was enjoying it. There was a lot going on.
I was inspired to create new graphics. There was engagement. I was using it for promo during my launches and people were actually enrolling in my courses.
But eventually it started feeling icky. It wasn’t where I wanted to be even though I had a big following. I enjoyed connecting with some fellow business owners, but that was more for social reasons. Not actually for my business.
It was good for branding, for sure, but the people there, just I wasn’t feeling good about it. Here’s why I quit Instagram and what happened months after that.
My creative energy was restored. I felt like myself again. I wasn’t giving my energy or power away to others.
There also I started following the wrong trends, the wrong people, the wrong experts in the industry. I started chasing goals that weren’t meant for me.
Everyone is throwing their numbers around there and it’s easy to compare yourself to others and think you’re behind. But that’s usually not the case. You’re just playing different games.
So, if you know for sure that social media is not for you, know that there are many ways to promote things without it.
Channels to rely on other than socials
It still requires the basics though. That’s having an audience, creating a great product, nailing your messaging, having a great sales page and all the other elements, making sure the offer is a good fit for your people, and having at least one channel where you promote it actively.
The main platform you have can be a blog, a podcast or YouTube channel. I call these main because they are what you have control over, the website more than the others, of course.
It’s also where you can create long-form content, connect with people, build your brand, form relationships, where people can subscribe to your things, come week after week to see what’s new and so on.
Thanks to those relationships you form, they might eventually decide to work together with you and invest in your coaching or your products or whatever you’re offering.
Let me use Fearless Bloggers as an example.
Fearless Bloggers is my latest offer and something that I released just recently. It’s also my first ever membership.
It’s a totally new offer and I’m so excited about it. It’s for new, intermediate and advanced bloggers to get together, connect, level up, learn my best strategies, ask any questions they have related to the business of blogging and anything else.
It’s all happening in one place where they can feel safe to express themselves, share their wins or their failures, and we can analyze why that happened, where they get direct access to me all the time, and where I publish my most strategic and behind-the-scenes content.
If you’re interested in becoming a member, you can get the early bird price for just a few more days. It’s available till January 31st. Here’s the link.
Let me use it as an example to show you how I promote it without social media. The waitlist launch was last month, in December, and some people joined. Now more people are joining during the official launch. And any next month more and more people are going to join because I’m going to keep the doors open. In a bit, I’m going to tell you how I’m going to keep promoting the offer naturally.
The Sales Page
First, there is the sales page. It’s on Podia. That’s the course platform I’m using.
Every element on the sales page is well thought out. The copy speaks directly to my ideal customer and I really mean what I wrote there. That itself is marketing material. Of course, you have to get people to the sales page, but that itself is how you promote your offer.
Blog Posts
Then I publish blog posts about it.
The main one would be an announcement where I just share everything about the offer. Then I can include paragraphs and whole sections about it in any other piece of content where it makes sense. Then I can just briefly mention it – even if it’s in one sentence – in any article related to blogging that I have, and I have many of these.
Now I can literally go back to old content and update it so it can link to Fearless Bloggers.
Podcast Episodes
I also had a podcast episode about it two episodes ago where I announce it and I share all about it. So this way it also appears on many other platforms where people are listening to podcasts and the link is always in the show notes.
Then there were the emails for the launch, the sales emails. For that, of course, you must have an email list and subscribers on it, and to have been in business for some time so you can grow your list. But you can also start doing that now and when you release an offer, these are the channels you can use.
Website Banners
I also have a header notice on the site.
That means that when you go to Let’s Reach Success, on top of it you can see a banner saying that the membership is out and you can get the early bird price. If you don’t see it anymore, that means it’s already after January 31st and the early bird price is no longer available.
Aside from that, I added banners on the blog and they appear on every page with content, and I have like 2,000 posts and they’re doing well in search engines.
I’m bringing traffic from Pinterest, which I’ll tell you about in a bit, and every person that lands on my page, even if they weren’t planning to sign up for my list or read another article, can see one of those banners.
One is in the sidebar and the other one is at the bottom of the blog post. So only if they scroll to those sections, can they see it.
But if it’s the right offer for them, they can click. That’s how they land on the sales page and if what they read about it resonates with them, they can become a member.
The Products Page
I also added the membership to the Courses page on my site, which lists all my products.
It’s where you can see all my programs and I share a bit about them. That page is in the menu so anyone who lands on my site can also easily go to it.
Promoting your offers naturally
I can also release more podcast episodes mentioning it and the early bird price and the one you’re listening to right now is a pretty good example of it.
It’s such a natural way to promote the offer. I’m using it as an example because I love sharing how I do things in my business and then I have to mention the offer I’m talking about. And if you’re interested, if it sounds like your kind of thing, you can also visit the link. Then there’s Pinterest, which is not a social media channel.
Let’s be clear on that. It’s a search engine, a visual one, but it’s very popular with bloggers. In all my programs, I teach you how to use it to bring traffic to your blog. It’s working well for me and even if your blog is brand new, you can bring traffic to it.
It’s gonna take more time to do that with search engines, but Pinterest can bring you short-term traffic. Then those people can learn about your offer from the many places where you talk about it on your blog.
Features on other sites
Another way to get it in front of people, and which I do, is in interviews for other sites.
For you, that could also be guest posts or any other way you get featured on other platforms.
Whenever someone wants to interview me for their blog, and that’s usually in written form, they have a question about the things I’m working on, the programs I’ve released or anything else. Then I can literally list all my products, link to them and talk about them.
I’m still sharing my business journey. I’m turning the interview into a valuable piece of content, but I also link to my products.
How I plan to keep promoting the membership
As the membership will stay open, I’m naturally going to promote it from here on by sharing with my audience what I publish inside it, how it’s growing, how the members are doing and what topics we discuss inside.
That can be shared in blog posts and podcast episodes and in the newsletter. It’s what I do anyways. I share my business journey.
I talk about what’s going on behind the scenes. I’m learning by experimenting and then I help you get results. So as the membership will be one of my main projects this year, it makes sense to talk a lot about it.
I believe this is the most natural marketing method. So let’s analyze everything now.
To summarize
As you can see, I mainly use the platforms and channels I’ve already grown in my business.
The blog, the podcast, the email list and Pinterest. I know some of you have much less going on than that and it’s totally okay. One or two things can also be utilized well.
I also rely on SEO. You can optimize your blog posts, your podcast episodes, Pinterest images and even the sales page of your product. They can show up in the search results on the platform they are on for people interested in the topics you teach about.
Eventually, they can get to your product. That’s when all the other factors come into play such as:
- Is this the right person for the offer?
- Do they know exactly what is inside?
- Can they afford it?
- Are they ready to invest in this?
- Do they have some sales objections to overcome?
- How can you help them with that?
And so on. So thanks to SEO, I optimize many things, all my content, everywhere.
This way people find my content, subscribe to my list and learn about my product. And while they may not buy right away, as they don’t know me and trust me yet, that doesn’t mean they won’t join the membership sometime from now.
Your customers can come from anywhere.
In fact, one of the women who joined Fearless Bloggers has been on my email list for a whole year now.
She found me through one of my programs, which she got access to thanks to a course bundle she purchased. She then kept opening my emails for the whole year and now that I released a new kind of offer, which obviously resonated with her, she grabbed it.
One of the other people who joined is a student of Bold Business School, my program for course creators.
He just started the website and wants to learn more about growing it. And while blogging might not be a business model he is interested in, he can still learn a lot inside the membership.
What he is most interested in is getting access to me so he can ask all the questions he has about anything related to his website.
As you can see, there are many reasons why people can join, even reasons I didn’t plan for when releasing the offer.
Your job is to give potential customers many points of entry.
That means they can find you from a graphic on Pinterest. They can land on one of your blog posts from search engines, because you’re ranked on top of the search results for a keyword that they typed in Google.
They can also find one of your podcast episodes, one of your videos. They can hear about you from a guest post you published or an interview you did or in many other ways. All this is marketing, but social media is not really involved in this. And that’s how you can grow.
I’m curious what you think about this. If you’re not new in business, you probably already knew all that, but maybe you haven’t seen it from that perspective.
So if social media is only draining you, if you aren’t actually getting any customers directly from there, maybe you shouldn’t be spending so much time on it, whatever platform that is. Because at the end of the day, you have to feel good about your business and the places where you publish content. And you have to save your creative energy for the best things.
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